Net zero tokenism

The UK, as grumpy has written before, seeks to be seen as a global leader in reducing carbon emissions. This is fine, as long as everyone clearly understands that it’s merely an exercise in showing that a relatively small country can do this.

However, the fact is that any action by the UK will have no material effect on climate change. Zero. Zip. None. So to that end, other than the ‘feel good’ demonstrator element, the exercise as things stand in the world, is utterly pointless.

According to EU figures, the UK didn’t produce 98.98% of world emissions in 2017. Yes, the UK’s contribution was 1.02% globally. If the UK produced 0% tomorrow it would have absolutely no material effect whatsoever on the climate change process. It’s best contribution would be, with others, to persuade the top 10 carbon produces to head to net zero. Diplomacy, not heat pumps, is what is required now.

Just four countries produce 55% of emissions, and none of them will be anywhere near net zero by 2040. The USA, no longer a member of the Paris Accord, has in fact been removing regulations which limit emissions for the past 4 years. Even with a new administration, could one imagine that the USA could, for example, introduce a ban on new gasoline powered cars and vans b y 2030 – or even 10 years later? Fantasy.

The issue here for plans for a ‘Green Economy’ is that they are very unlikely to result in lower costs for the average household – in fact, it is likely that house costs, heating bills, electricity costs, and transport costs will all rise significantly. Since all current political parties are committed to this path, the eventual outcome must be rising taxes, wage inflation and hence reactive price inflation. We’ve been here before. The wish to be ‘world leading’ in climate actions will in fact detract from our competitiveness globally.

Grumpy believes the UK has a promising future outside the EU. But there is a hangover in the DNA of the UK from our colonial past of ruling a quarter of the world’s land area, which shows in the inevitable political references to ‘world beating’ this and ‘world class’ that. The wish to be a nuclear power, and (announced by Boris) the largest military in Europe all shows this throwback mentality embedded in the political classes and probably in the Civil Service.

The UK does have world level assets in key areas, particularly research and innovation (although not in the exploitation of same). Having no natural resources to speak of, and too high labour costs to be in low tech manufacturing, the future has to be in services based on distinctive competences, coupled with high tech manufacturing associated with those.

Green fantasy

The government has just (November 2020) released a 10 point green plan for a move towards an ultimate net zero carbon goal for the UK. Its ambitious goals are clearly meant to contribute to slowing the onset of the worst effects of climate change.

Sadly many of the points in the plan compete in credibility and spin with Rudi Giuliani’s analysis of Venezuelan designed software in US election voting machines switching votes to Trump.

There are many fanciful ideas such as replacing fossil fuel boilers in 15 years or so, and having sufficient power and charging points for electric vehicles driven by the ban on new conventional cars in 10 years time. More opaque are the plans for Nuclear power; for example that small local reactors might be installed in factories – something no other country is contemplating given the attraction to terrorists of a handy source of fissile material in an insecure (compared with a normal nuclear plant) location.

Confidence in the government in this area and in British technology capabilities is somewhat eroded by the fact that the UK has had to contract the French and Chinese states to build the latest nuclear station, Hinckley Point C. GIven the steam arising from the use of Chinese technology in infrastructure projects, it’s slightly odd that one would involve then in the country’s largest nuclear power plant.

The government agreed to pay EDF (the French state organisation and main contractor) £92.50 MW/hour at 2012 prices for electricity. As Grumpy sits here, the web indicates that the current market wholesale price is about £50 per MW/hour – about half as much. Consumers will have to top that up on their bills to the tune of some £50 billion over the contract term, but no offers on the odds for that not to rise.

The 10 point plan follows this general line; vast numbers of new jobs; many rather opaque benefits in a rush to net zero; better health from all the enforced cycling and walking, etc. The sums are vague, but the plans will cost at least £90 billion of ‘investment’ given the numbers in the plan.

The simple fact is that governments have no money (they are loaded with debt). If companies invest, they do so because it will generate a return – they don’t ‘pay’ for anything. There is only one source of funds to meet these expenditures and it is consumers/ taxpayers – the ‘other peoples money’ Margaret Thatcher spoke of. What long experience teaches us all is that any government project costs vastly more than the lowball figures to get parliament approval (check CrossRail).

Grumpy undertakes to subject himself to the ultimate humiliation of posting a picture of his geriatric and wrinkled nude body on this site if Hinckley C gets built for £21 billion and is completed by 2024.

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.

Academic and journalistic Harlots

COVID-19 has underlined that with any set of complex social or political problems there will be a range of views – often diametrically opposed in nature – about how to resolve them. Broadly speaking, COVID has seen a triumvirate of parties claiming they are the best equipped, most knowledgeable and objective to address the challenges, namely politicians, academics and journalists. There are some sideline players with less of a voice; the general populace, who generally express their view by doing whatever suits them anyway, and big business, which tends to work behind the scenes and in the Pall Mall clubs. This is further compounded in that the three groupings all tend to be divided anyway, without any consensus even in the members of their set.

They can’t all be right, so who should drive the bus? In Grumpy’s opinion, there is only one rational answer, although it does not inspire confidence; it has to be the elected party in the Executive. Of course the ruling party should take input from all sides, but It was interesting to note two opposing headlines in the Daily Mail this week in which Boris was accused of ‘giving in to the scientific advisers’ and simultaneously ‘not following the science’. Not much consensus there, then.

The key essential, for Grumpy, is that when decisions of such magnitude are taken, it is essential that they are made in full knowledge that bad decisions – failure – will be subject to sanctions. It focuses the mind if an error means the gallows, so to speak. The problem listening to – or worse, adopting the solutions of – academics or journalists is that if they get it wrong they just shrug and carry on with their research (academics) or swear they never proposed it (journalists). Just like the harlots cited by Stanley Baldwin in 1931 (but selling brains rather than body) they are free from responsibility for any actions taken at the behest of their proposals.

The ideas of business can largely be disregarded as their criteria is solely about finance; merely looking back at the history of cigarette and drug industries shows that general social well being isn’t at the top of the list.

Professor Carl Heneghan, a perfectly respectable academic issued a lengthy document saying the government’s approach was wrong (in common with many others) and that he knew better. Grumpy view was that many of the proposals proposed were demonstrably not possible in any time frame needed for a solution. Grumpy also noted that all “men with answers” can’t resist veering off topic and picking on some favourite axe to grind at the same time (women’s rights / education / the NHS / TfL / BAME etc). In Heneghan’s case he repeated again the old trope about waiting a century for men and women to be paid equally. He is knowledgeable enough to know that for 50 years since the Equal Pay Act of 1970 and the subsequent Equality Act of 2010 it has been illegal to pay women differently for the same job. He thus wilfully deliberately conflates this with the gender pay gap (an entirely different issue) , which is pure and deliberate sophistry; this rather detracts from paying serious attention to any of the other points he made.

Sarah Whine

Grumpy scans the Daily Mail to catch up on vital news the paper is so focussed on (what the Kardashians are doing ?) and speed reads Sarah Vine’s column therein from time to time. In spite of having chosen to marry Michael Grove, Sarah Vine is presumably a rational and educated individual.

Grumpy’s irritation at her article on 11.10.20 has catalysed to him to comment thereupon. Given the nature of her job, filling a page with something as mundane as facts or rational analysis would be too dry; thus she (albeit in common with other commentators) needs to seek to dress content up with misguided opinions, hyperbole, barbs and lavish criticism of more or less anybody.

The piece in question is a carping, whining narrative about fundamental freedoms being violated by procedures introduced to contain COVID. Amongst a list of illogical examples she exhibited particular faux outrage at being asked for contact details when entering a cafe, followed by a bizarre extension to pose a rhetorical question on whether permission would be required to urinate in future. (Unlikely, Sarah).

VIne has presumably heard of and understands what a “notifiable disease” is. COVID-19 is on the statutory list of same, along with smallpox, plague, rabies and TB. It is there for a reason, as a highly contagious and lethal virus contracted by (at the time of writing) 590,844 UK citizens, of which 9.7% have died. Mortality is highly skewed by age, and 200 times more of those infected of Grumpy’s age die than the drunks ignoring the law so prominently routinely depicted in the Daily Mail.

Sarah Whine is arguing for the ‘freedom’ to kill vulnerable people she comes into contact with should she be be COVID positive. Stupid, lightweight, bigoted and self-obsessed don’t even start to describe the woman.

Why whinge now ? For over 130 years there has been legislation and mechanisms in place for the notification of incidences of such diseases and procedures (such as contact tracing and even forced detention) for their containment. VIne is presumably aware of this and her comments are simply trying to be ‘clever’ in a supercilious manner rather than to contribute any intellectual input to the challenges that face the country. It is writers like her that encourage the less well informed to pack bars and ignore the legal restrictions set out to protect them, and more importantly, their elders who they will infect and possibly kill.

There is a twofold irony here. Firstly, in 2001 hubby Michael Gove contracted H1N1 (responsible for the 1918 pandemic), possibly from some idiot journalist sitting next to him in a cafe.

Secondly, maybe she should speak to her husband about these procedures – he is the Government Minister in charge of what …. COVID Operations.

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.