Tag Archives: Brexit

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.

The May Tests

Is the end in sight ?

Theresa May has been receiving pressure because of her failure to implement Brexit properly . People should wait and judge her against her own words from Lancaster House; if she delivers an agreement which meets her own stated criteria, it will be a success, and she can take a bow. We’ll see – tick or cross these off when the final deal is announced.

” take back control of our laws and bring an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain.” (This is a yes or no – it’s done or not)

“empowering the UK as an open, trading nation to strike the best trade deals around the world” (This means we are not in some form of customs union)

“protecting the common resources of our islands” (We can determine our own fishing policy and exclude the French if we so choose)

“What I am proposing cannot mean membership of the Single Market” (This is a yes or no)

“free to establish our own tariff schedules at the World Trade Organisation” (A simple test here)

“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” (This means any backstop has to be time limited)

“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)

Brexit lies get more extreme

The Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply ( www.cips.org ), a supposedly global body upholding high standards of excellence, issued a press statement on 26/09/2018 which stated

“One in ten UK businesses believe they would likely go bankrupt if goods were delayed by just 10 – 30 minutes at customs as a result of Brexit, according to new research from the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS)”

This statement exemplifies the extreme lengths to which pro-remain organisations will go to promulgate information which is at best grossly misleading, or (likely in this case) to publish deliberate untruths aka lies. For clarity, CIPS made no qualification to the ‘UK businesses’ set, i.e. the reader is to assume ALL UK businesses.

What are we to make of the ‘headline here?’ There are 3.93m companies in the Companies House database. The estimates of those which are dormant vary, but even a conservative estimate would indicate that there are 1.8m incorporated businesses and some 420k partnerships actively trading.

The failure of 1 in 10 businesses would be at least 180k failures in trading incorporated entities. But wait, 76% of all businesses have a single owner operator, and so that 1.8m headline figure needs to be drastically re-cast.

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (DBIS) points out that 99% of all SME’s employ less than 50 people, and only 7,000 of all businesses have more than 250 employees.

What CIPS would have the reader believer is that 180,000 business are not only critically dependent on their business with the EU, but that they have supply chains which are so sophisticated and systemically dependent on the supply chain that even a 10 minute customs delay might bankrupt them. Given that the vast majority of those businesses statistically employ less than 50 people (or probably just one person) this is simply not credible.

The rest of the press release descends into statistical idiocy. 500,000 businesses will stockpile goods, and 900,000 will find it difficult to find supplies and skills. Given the percentage of businesses which DBIS state have a single owner, this is patently nonsense.

The CIPS figures, even with cursory examination, don’t add up, and at best they fail at all levels of statistical presentation.

Either (a) the figures for ‘UK businesses’ as a whole have been extrapolated from a sample set of 1310 organisations surveyed, in which case the survey has been subject to extreme ‘selection bias’ from a non-representative sample OR (b) the actual set of businesses referred to should have been properly qualified to state that it was restricted to companies with supply chain managers with materially critical import / export processes, and the extrapolation was for similarly structured organisations.
If (a) is true, then the press release is simply patent nonsense on every measure.
If the extrapolation was done on the basis of (b), the failure to qualify the description of ‘UK businesses’ is a serious and juvenile error.

It’s hard to not conclude that CIPS has deliberately provided unqualified figures to make a pro-remain point. Grumpy (who cares not if he is in or out of the EU) does object to distorted data being presented to grab a headline and contribute to the ‘fake news’ surrounding Brexit.

Chairman Tim Richardson should be embarrassed by such tosh, and the writer demoted to some position where s/he has no public voice.

News round up July 2018

May fails the vacuum cleaner test big time : Grumpy posed the question [ See http://grumpy.eastover.org.uk/eu-vacuum-test/ ]as to whether after an exit agreement with the EU it would be possible to make a vacuum cleaner in the UK with a 1 kw motor complying with US regulations and export it to the US. The answer seems to be a resounding ‘no’, since EU regulation will apply to goods.It is little short of pitiful to see Johnson, Gove, and others on TV trying to convince the UK populace that black is white, up is down, and that 2+2=5. It’s the sheer arrogance of these failed politicians after they have been humbled and humiliated by May, that they cannot admit to having had their wimpish butts comprehensively kicked at Chequers.

Period fantasy – put a sock in it: MP Danielle Rowley announced to the House of Commons that she was having a period and had spent £25 that week on sanitary products. Now, if these were Tampons, the supermarket cost is about £2 for 20, so that would imply using 2.2 every waking hour. As a male, Grumpy is ignorant on these usage rates, but simple observation would dictate that either she needs to see a doctor or that she was using hyperbole. Why? She was publicising the latest feminine band wagon of ‘period poverty’, pushing (at its extreme) to free universal sanitary product provision. Without analysing the merits or otherwise of this movement, the element that has baffled grumpy is the picture painted of women going to school and work with socks in their panties (as claimed by this movement) because they can’t afford a 10p tampon. Where do they get all these socks from, given that they (if like Ms Rowley) they would have to use 36 per day ? Or do they traipse home from work on the tube with 25 soiled socks in a bag awaiting washing for the next day ? A mystery.

4D boobs : The Daily Mail reported that a new “4D augmented reality” system had been developed to allow women to see what they might look like after cosmetic breast surgery. The accompanying photo showed a woman looking at a representation of herself on a flat 2D screen. This is the sort of drivel written by junior members of staff who did a course in Media Studies at a small town Technical College. Setting aside the fact that only a 2D system was shown, we humans can only spatially experience three dimensions, and there is no physical humanly detectable manifestation of four dimensions – pure fantasy marketing hype. [For simplicity, I’m ignoring the relativistic notion of Minkowski Space with time as the 4th dimension, which we are all part of, or the 11 dimensions of Calabi-Yau structures of string theory.]

Female quota harridans again : Feminist activists have been apoplectic that the Bank of England chose the only man on a shortlist of 5 as a new members of the monetary policy committee. This was presumably either because (a) a woman should have been chosen regardless of merit – the quota argument – or (b) that the selection board was biased against women. Setting aside the first as being morally dubious, the second is an outrageous slur on the selection board. In fact, the Chair was Clare Lombardelli and the female majority on the board was completed by a previous MPC member, Kate Barker; both have impeccable credentials and experience, and they presumably chose the best candidate. MP Rachel Reeves said this was “truly staggering”, and so she gets the Grumpy Harridan of the Week Award.

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.