Conservation of Moggmentum

"Any [cartoon] body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation... At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over."

Cartoon physics doesn’t work so well in the real world, although this doesn't stop some people trying.

Now competing in the Wile E. Coyote Memorial 200m Thin Air Dash are Jacob "Not you, Jacob" Rees-Mogg and his fellow Brextremists.

Just trigger Article 50 as quickly as possible, keep running frantically towards the cliff edge and, whatever you do, DON'T LOOK DOWN!!!

If you believe hard enough, your surging Moggmentum will carry you across the yawning chasm of your total lack of foresight and preparation. Gravity can't touch you!

When it comes to having a plan, that really is all, folks!


Once again, this stunt should only performed by trained two-dimensional cartoon characters, so please don't try it at home. This blog shall not be liable for any loss of credibility or economic damage.

Ignorance is strength

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a clever person in possession of knowledge must be accused of elitism. On the other hand, talking like a monosyllabic ignoramus absolves even a billionaire oligarch of the charge of elitism.

These truths should be self-evident, now that we've realised that the best interpreters of the will of the people are clearly the rich, powerful and well-connected, but Salman Rushdie clearly didn't get the memo:

If you ask me what's an elite, I would think ... of the many, many billionaires sitting in the Trump administration. Here's a government with more super-rich people in it than has ever been in any American government. And that government calls college professors and journalists elites...

...the idea that we're the elite whereas that group of point one of the one per cent that considers itself in some way to be possessing the common touch, that just seems like an absurd comic inversion of reality.

Salman Rushdie - disrespecting powerful idiots since 1989.

Only the little people follow the rules

Have you been mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance? Maybe you should check your old loan, or mortgage, statements to be sure. If you don't have the paperwork, could you use a credit report to track down who lent you what, when? If you did have PPI, can you honestly remember whether, many years ago, you were told that the PPI was optional, or about the terms, conditions and exclusions? Can you even remember whether or not you had it at all?

Wouldn't it all be a lot simpler if the people who mis-sold the insurance just came right out and admitted they'd bent the rules, taken everybody for mugs and sold them a pup, because nobody could be bothered to stop them?

Have you been mis-sold a Brexit that's going to cost you a lot, but deliver nothing? In this case, it's way easier to work out that you were scammed, because the scammer's been boasting about how he outwitted the regulators in the national newspapers:

 ...“We were just cleverer than the regulators and the politicians. Of course we were.”

He [millionaire insurance salesman and Brexit Backer, Arron Banks] didn’t break the law, he says. He “pushed the boundary of everything, right to the edge. It was war.” And later: “You’re looking for a smoking gun but there’s a smoking gun on every table! And no one cares. No one cares!”

And the number of shits officially given about him subverting our democracy really does seem to be zero, even when "pushing the boundary" of the law crossed over into outright criminality:

Newsnight's evidence suggests that at least some of the political energy running up to Brexit appears to have been paid for unlawfully...

...about 20 car insurance salespeople employed by Mr Banks at Catbrain Lane, Bristol - the hub of his Eldon vehicle insurance empire - were paid to travel to Rochester, in Kent.

They then drove elderly UKIP voters to the polls, before staying the night at a Premier Inn and making the return journey the following day...

...[Mr Gavin Millar QC] said: "It was unlawful on the part of the third party who organised the concerted assistance; Mr Banks in this case.

"If they did it and incurred those costs without the authority of the agent, as it appears they may have done, that's called an illegal practice and it's a criminal offence."...

...It is very unlikely that any action will be taken against UKIP, Mr Reckless, his agent or Mr Banks because a criminal investigation must start within a year of any possible offence.

And what about all the cash Banks ploughed into Brexit? Nobody has definitively proved that any of it came from Russia but, then again, nobody really knows where any of it came from:

In September 2013, the man who bought Brexit – Arron Banks – was in trouble.

For the past two years, financial regulators in Gibraltar had been scrutinising his insurance under-writer, Southern Rock. They had discovered it was keeping reserves far below what was needed.

This was a serious problem. Banks claimed he had already provided £40 million to plug the hole. He also told the regulator he would step down as a director, but has since been required to find an eye-watering £60 million in extra funding.

A year later, these financial worries seem to have completely evaporated. Banks had begun buying diamond mines, investing millions into chemical companies and wealth management firms, setting up loss-making political consultancies, and most famous of all – funding the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

One question remains though. If Banks was in such a tight spot in September 2013, how did he manage to be so generous the following year?

Alastair Sloan and Iain Campbell looked at the publicly available records, but the source of the money behind Brexit remains secret. Maybe the ultimate source is some mystery donor(s)/investor(s) whose identity has been laundered into invisibility. Perhaps it's a house of cards built on theoretical  money which looks real, thanks to some feat of creative accounting or financial engineering.

At this stage I don't know, you don't know, nobody seems to know. All we do know is to take Arron Banks's word with an entire cellarful of salt, given that the insurance salesman (who's not currently permitted to run his own insurance company) has a distinctly Paul Nuttall-style approach to CV writing:

It is here the cracks in Banks’ biography start to appear. Banks has claimed he was promoted and rose to lead his own sales team at Norwich Union – now part of Aviva. However, Aviva say they have no record of Banks ever having worked for Norwich Union. He has also claimed to have worked for Warren Buffett around this point in his career. We asked Buffett about this. He replied. "I have no memory of ever hearing of the name Arron Fraser Andrew Banks. He certainly never worked for me." Further checks across the Berkshire Hathaway group, made by Buffett’s office, yielded no evidence he had ever worked for any of his subsidiaries. In a letter delivered by his lawyers, Banks declined to comment on either of these points.

Wherever Banks's Brexit funding came from, the level of official incuriosity over how our politics is paid for is staggering. Far from being a "popular revolution", the Brexit coup looks increasingly like another game played by wealthy members of a political elite who know that they're born to rule and to flout the rules that govern the lives of lesser people like you and me. There are a couple of details from that New Statesman interview with Banks that now seem prophetic, both of Banks's entitled sense that he could break rules the little people live by with impunity, and of his conviction that it was perfectly OK for people like him to con people into acting against their own interests:

At 13 he was sent to a “third-rate” boarding school, Crookham Court in Berkshire ... getting expelled for an “accumulation of offences” that included selling lead filched from the roofs of school buildings. He accepts that his expulsion was entirely justified. It would have happened much earlier, he says, except that the struggling institution needed his fees...

...His “lack of educational attainment” ruled out university, so he returned to Basingstoke, where he sold paintings, then vacuum cleaners, then houses. “I was quite good at persuading people to buy things they didn’t want to buy,” he says.

We were warned, nobody with any official clout cared, and now he's screwed the whole country.

Northern office gets up itself

Back in the day, the North of England took pride in its no-nonsense, down-to-earth culture. So what's up with these new offices in Manchester boasting about being "peerlessly refined"? The daft buggers.

What have the migrants ever done for us?

More on the lasting culinary damage caused by the scourge of unchecked migration™:

The doner kebab is believed to have been invented by Kadir Nurman, a Turkish immigrant living in Germany, in 1972. Mr Nurman, who died in 2013, said he got the idea after noticing that German workers had little time to sit down for lunch.

Several other Turkish immigrants in Germany have disputed this, claiming they were selling versions of the doner earlier than Mr Nurman.

However, the national original of the dish is not in doubt. “The doner is German,” Tarkan Tasumruk, chairman of the Association of Turkish Doner Producers in Europe, told the berlin.de website...

...while fish and chips has become known as a traditional British dish, many people claim it was actually introduced to the UK by Jewish immigrants from other European countries.

Fried fish was brought to Britain by Jewish refugees from Portugal and Spain, and the first combined fish and chip shop is said to have been opened by Joseph Malin, a Jewish immigrant in the East End, in the 1860s.

And don't even get me started on chicken tikka masala.*

Clearly it's not enough to just create a hostile environment for people coming here from abroad. If we really want to make everybody hate us, and truly embrace a future of miserable, self-inflicted isolation, we should also send back  all the foreign muck they forced us to eat and return to an honest British diet of boiled turnips.

Nobody ever said it would be easy,** but I'm sure that whatever the hell it was the UK thought it was voting for will be worth the pain.





*Does it really belong here, or is it just another foreign interloper which should be sent back home as soon as the UK has taken back control of its glorious borders?

**Terms and conditions apply. Contents may differ from those illustrated. We reserve the right to change, amend, modify, suspend, continue or terminate all or any part of the plan at any time without notice. We will not be responsible for any loss or damage.

Diagnosing Donald

On the whole, I don't think that speculating about what psychological disorders Donald Trump may or may not be suffering from is that useful, or informative.

For one thing, I'd prefer to see his opponents win by having better policies, rather than by just repeating "You have to vote for us next time, because the other guy's a maniac."

Also, I'm not convinced that applying psychological labels is always objective, or helpful. There have been alleged conditions, from "drapetomania", to "hysteria" and "opposition defiant disorder", which probably said more about the disorders of the societies which invented them than they do about the state of the alleged sufferers. Not only do such imprecise labels stigmatise the innocent, but they can let the guilty off the hook, too. If we think of Harvey Weinstein as an influential grown man who should know better than to go around raping and molesting women, then he just sounds like a scumbag. Which is why he wants us to think that he's suffering from "sex addiction." Because if he has a medical diagnosis, that means it's not his fault. Yeah, right.

However, not all judgements about a person's mental state are subjective and socially constructed. Sadly, organic mental deterioration, especially in older people, is all too real. Drapetomania, hysteria and ODD might be made-up afflictions, but conditions like Alzheimer's and vascular dementia definitely aren't.

I feel like a bit of a hypocrite at this point, having previously poured scorn on both armchair diagnoses and YouTube videos as sources of reliable information, but I've just seen a YouTube video which makes me wonder whether Trump is suffering from dementia. Still, I'm going to cite Sturgeon's Law as a partial defence and plunge in anyway.

I'm going to put the video towards the bottom of this post. Most of the material isn't particularly astonishing. There are the familiar clips of Trump babbling nonsense, which don't prove anything in themselves, other than that he's better at using a storm of short words from his limited vocabulary to push peoples' hot buttons than he is at constructing a coherent argument.

There are also clips of him wandering about at various public appearances, looking lost. He looks a bit like an elderly, confused person but this, too, is inconclusive. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens to a lot of top politicians. Many otherwise alert people, if jetted off to unfamiliar locations, or overloaded by crowds of busy people competing for their attention (staff trying to brief them on multiple issues, reporters asking questions, security people trying to shepherd them this way and that), while trying to remember the speech they're supposed to give, before being whisked off to the next, probably unrelated, appointment in their schedule, would probably get disoriented occasionally and be caught on film momentarily forgetting where the podium was, or something of the sort.

But there is one segment of the video that seems genuinely significant. It starts at 2' 30", with a clip of Donald Trump in 1980, talking about investing in inner city real estate. And it sounds perfectly normal, like an interview with somebody who's in control of his emotions, knows what he's talking about and can stay on topic without wandering off into rambling digressions, angry outbursts, bizarre non sequiturs and complete gibberish.

Put this old clip next to one of Trump's recent TV appearances and it does make you think that there's been a massive decline, both in his mental sharpness, and in his awareness of what is appropriate behaviour in a given situation. See what you think:
Even this isn't conclusive. Maybe the difference between young Trump talking real estate and old Trump trying to do presidential stuff has nothing to do with mental decline over time. Maybe the difference is that he knew and cared about the family real estate business, but has never known or cared about other facts, like the difference between two adjacent Middle Eastern countries where he doesn't even own any golf courses. And you'd have to sit through a lot of old Trump videos and a lot of new ones to be quite certain you that weren't comparing the best of the old with the worst of the new.

But it at least seems relatively plausible that the president could be suffering from some form of dementia.

If so, does it matter? Well, it's probably not the first time and we survived that. Anyway, a lot of what modern presidents (of both parties) do seems to be fronting for the interest groups and lobbyists whose cash and influence have given Americans the best democracy that money can buy, so maybe the capacities and personal qualities of an individual president don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things:

As a character, Zaphod is hedonistic and irresponsible, narcissistic* almost to the point of solipsism, and often extremely insensitive to the feelings of those around him. In the books and radio series, he is nevertheless quite charismatic which causes many characters to ignore his other flaws...

...He was briefly the President of the Galaxy (a role that involves no power whatsoever, and merely requires the incumbent to attract attention so no one wonders who's really in charge, a role for which Zaphod was perfectly suited).

From Wikipedia's description of another, fictional, president.

So there's probably nothing to worry about. Apart from the small matter of ultimate responsibility for launching a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons resting in the hands of a senior citizen who may no longer be in possession of his mental faculties.

You know you've reached a certain age when you find that you've walked into a room only to forget what you came in for, and why you seem to have absent-mindedly incinerated several million people in a massive nuclear conflagration...

Over to you, General Kelly and Secretary Mattis.




*I still take a dim view of medicalising personality traits like narcissism - I view it as a social flaw, like rudeness, rather than as a diagnosable medical condition.

Such poor leadership ability by low-energy Henry. Sad!

As I wrote yesterday, Nigel Farage's "journalistic" assignation with Julian Assange might look suspicious, but in the absence of a smoking gun, I still imagine that, like the journalist in Humbert Wolfe's poem, he didn't need any external inducement to behave horribly:

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.

But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.

But right now, there's a bigger question hanging over Nigel. Namely, how is he still a thing? He's just another relatively new ex-party leader, yet he still makes more headlines than David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Tim Farron put together.

One answer is that, like Trump, he's an able performer and a relentless self-publicist who's really taken the "no publicity is bad publicity" ball and run with it. And he's still being talked about because the people who've succeeded to the Ukip crown just can't follow his act.

Not all of this is down to the personal failings of his successors. It was always going to be a tough gig to lead a single-issue party once that single issue had been won, was being delivered by somebody else and had turned out to be a lot more problematic than you'd been telling everybody. The same issues would have still been problems for Farage if he'd stayed on, rather than letting the poisoned chalice pass to Paul Nuttall, then to that other bloke.

But there's also blame aplenty. Farage was a plausible enough bullshitter to fool some of the people most of the time, but Paul Nuttall's easily disproved attempts to fool people about being a former professional footballer with a PhD who'd lost a host of imaginary friends in the Hillsborough disaster just made him look like a joke.

And as for the present guy, Henry Whatsisname... Well, he looks and sounds sort of professional-ish, almost respectable. Certainly less extreme and batty than some of his rivals for the leadership, like the fanatical anti-Islam crusader, Anne Marie Waters, or the "gay donkey raped my horse" bloke, or the guy who promised asteroid mining, flying aircraft carriers and interstellar colony ships. But if your brand is all about being edgy, anti-establishment and courting offence, along with the free publicity that comes with it, then "respectable" probably won't cut it. Farage likes to be known as one of the bad boys of Brexit. Henry Thingy is more like The Boring Bugger of Brexit.

Not that he hasn't tried, bless him. Because I'd not noticed him generating any headlines recently, I just googled Henry to see what he'd been up to. And, to be fair, he has been gamely trying to get that 'ol 'kipper mojo back with a classically bizarre boast about being able to kill a badger with his bare hands. But the thing is, I had to search for it. In Ukip's glory days, this would have been at the top of everybody's news feed. So far, even The Daily Mash can't be bothered to take the piss.* Nobody seems to care.

There's a vanishingly small intersection in the Ukip / Oscar Wilde Venn diagram, populated mostly by the phrase "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." And everybody seems to have more interesting things to talk about than Henry.

Poor Henry.

Trying to put on a brave face.

*Correct at the time of writing, (three days after the Badgergate story broke without trace).

Let the British lion roar! And the Russian bear (allegedly)...

Speaking of conspiracy theories:

Nigel Farage Goes Ballistic At Caller Who Accuses Him Of Colluding With Putin

...the caller alleged that Nigel had secret ties with Moscow.

The accusation almost sent Nigel purple with rage, as he demanded Rodney came up with some substantive evidence to back up the outlandish claim.

“How dare you come on the radio and accuse me of that if you’ve got no evidence to back it up, how dare you,” Nigel roared. 

LBC 

Because if there's one thing we've all learned to love about Nigel, it's his scrupulous regard for evidence and facts.

Of course, the fact that Nige regularly makes stuff up isn't in itself proof that he's on Team Vlad. Neither is the fact that Farage and Putin share a common desire to get the UK out of Europe  and a hostility to the European Union in general. It's all circumstantial. But I've got three pieces of advice for Nigel Farage if he wants to quash this sort of speculation:

1. I can't judge from the quality of LBC's vid exactly how purple you went, Nige (it could just be a healthy natural glow from the liquid lunches you're said to enjoy), but bellowing two "how dare you"s in one sentence sounds less convincing than one calm, matter-of-fact denial.

2. Maybe coming out to GQ magazine as a Putin fanboy wasn't the best way to distance you from his regime and, on reflection, appearing as a regular pundit on Russia Today might have created an unfortunate impression. Perhaps if RT offers you your own show again, it might look better if you just said "no."

3. I remember when you met Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in March, it was allegedly for “journalistic reasons, not political reasons.” Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall seeing any subsequent headlines under your byline about "That time I interviewed Julian Assange." Perhaps if we could see some evidence of the journalism you were supposed to be working on, people wouldn't get the impression you'd been caught doing something dodgy.

Has Nigel Farage colluded with Russia to destabilise the UK? Probably not.

Has Nigel Farage proved himself to be a shifty bullshitter who you shouldn't trust to tell you the time of day? Guilty as charged, IMO.

Acoustic device rumours turned up to 11

That mysterious sonic attack on US diplomats in Cuba was definitely real and completely not made up, believers continue to insist.

So how were the attacks carried out? My personal theory is that Operation Earache was a false flag operation, masterminded by Brian Blessed, who was living a double life as Fidel Castro until he faked his own death in 2016, acting on orders from the Freemasons, or possibly the Illuminati, who were in turn contolled by those humanoid reptilians from the Alpha Draconis system who secretly control all the conspiracies on planet Earth. And, to prove it, beyond any reasonable doubt, there's a YouTube video:
You can't argue with evidence like that. Bite me, sonic attack sceptics!

I, for one, welcome our shouty overlord.

We hold these truths to be self-evident...

...until we don't:

Throughout history and across continents, economies have played the game using different rules: No one can own the land. All land belongs to kings and aristocrats. Property is entailed and cannot be sold by the owners or heirs. All property should be held in common. Property should be private. Labor belongs to kings and aristocrats and must be supplied on demand. A man’s labor is his own. Women belong to men. Women are independent economic actors. Children are a great source of cheap labor. Child labor is a violation of human rights. Humans can be the property of other humans. No human can be enslaved by another.

Tim O’Reilly, reminding us that most (all?) supposedly unalterable facts about political economy are nothing of the sort.

It's a thought that's hopeful and terrifying in equal measure, but at least it liberates us from the silly, narrow-minded, dogmatic hubris of "There is no alternative."

There are always alternatives. Countless alternatives. Choosing the best (ot the least worst) is the really hard bit.

Experts agree: no-deal Brexit catastrophe now completely impossible/inevitable

Depending on who you believe, the British government has now reached the cliff edge and either stepped back, or  maybe carried on walking into thin air.

The uncertainty's a tad worrying. Good job nothing important rests on the outcome...

When I said "enemy" I meant "friends", obvs

For Christ's sake,  Philip, it's Boris who's in charge of the diplomacy! Just remember that and everything will be fine...

Despotic diagnosis disorder

I learnt a new word today - "drapetomania."*

Drapetomania was a psychological disorder invented by the American physician Samuel A Cartwright, to account for the fact that some slaves tried to escape from their owners. Cartwright speculated that these unaccountable symptoms must have been triggered by slave owners who "made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals" and prescribed the remedy of "whipping the devil out of them" (the slaves, not the over-familiar slave owners).

It's an extreme example of medicalising behaviour which challenges existing power relations. Other examples which spring to mind are the abuse of psychiatry to silence dissent in the Soviet Union (a practice which now seems to be enjoying a revival under Putin and his fellow authoritarian leaders in different parts of the former USSR) and the made-up diagnosis of "hysteria" as a catch-all term to pathologise women who were uppity, unhappy, or otherwise failing to comply with male expectations.

There are less dramatic, but still sinister, pathologies being invented in the our own age. In 2012, Bruce Levine warned about children being given a new diagnosis - "opposition defiant disorder", complete with the auto-stigmatising acronym "ODD."
Of course, a stroppy kid who fails to comply with the requests of even a reasonable authority figure might just be a little brat, but that's not really a medical diagnosis. There are cases when adult authority figures are anything but reasonable and throwing a major strop would be a completely reasonable response from a sane child.

This is how authoritarian whims are camouflaged as objective judgements. Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Donald J Trump. Most of the outrageous antics coming from the Trump White House seem designed to distract from more important things (for example policies which are either failing to happen, or which would be unpopular if people stopped thinking about the latest 3am Tweet for long enough to think about what the guy's actually doing). However, some of his outbursts do also shine a light on the sort of power relations behind labels like drapetomania, hysteria and ODD

The authoritarian mindset is all about enforcing certain norms of behaviour and swiftly punishing transgressors - in Trump's mind it's perfectly OK to try and get NFL players who take a knee to protest against police brutality, fired. But Trump himself is all about flouting norms, being more outrageous, offensive and abusive than all you other losers, because he can. His behaviour here is a useful reminder of the hypocrisy at the heart of most** authoritarianism - the less powerful are punished for putting a toe out of line, while unreasonable authority figures get to stomp all over the rules at will.

In the Trump clown show, the hypocrisy is out there. If you want to disguise and embed such blatant double standards in a whole society, it helps to have a science-y sounding diagnosis to explain why the powerless must be mad if they expect to get away with half the stuff their "betters" do as a matter of course. I'd diagnose this ailment as form of social perversion, and I'm calling it Despotic Diagnosis Disorder until somebody comes up with a better name.

*Hat tip

**Not all - I guess there have been, and are, ascetic authoritarians who practice self-discipline whilst also disciplining others - Savonarola, warrior monks, abusive Christian Brothers and nuns in Catholic institutions, presumably living frugal lives of self-denial, while battering the living bejesus out of the unfortunate children in their care...

Hell's kitchen, UK

After Pete North's autarky-based dystopia, here's another Pol Potty scheme to seize Brexit Year Zero as an opportunity to forcibly re-educate the UK's unworthy citizens. This time it's Gordon sodding Ramsay. The obnoxious, potty-mouthed reality star would like to see our idle, uppity UK workers redeemed by low-paid scullion labour after the Brexit revolution:*

“That level of influx of multinational workers in this country has sort of confirmed how lazy as a nation we are - when individuals from across the seas are prepared to come and work twice as hard for less money,” he said.

“If anything, it’s a big kick up the a--- for the industry, and it’s going to get back to the modern-day apprenticeship. So not only do I welcome that kind of change, but I think it’s going to put a lot more emphasis on homegrown talent, which I think we need to do.”

Two things:

1. What a joy to hear lofty Brexiteers talking down to us lazy Brits and pontificating about industries that just need a kick up the bum. Almost as good as Pete North sneering about "the left bleating about austerity", a generation of "spoiled and self-indulgent" people and "tedious hipsters drinking energy drinks in pop-up cereal bar book shops or whatever it is they do these days." Sarcasm aside, here's the thing, guys. You lot have spent so long blubbering like spoiled kids about how anybody who says mean things about your pet project is a horrid, condescending metropolitan elitist that you've become a national joke. So - and I can't emphasise this strongly enough -  you don't get to talk down to anybody else until you've learned to stop wallowing in your self-pitying victim narrative and start taking argument and criticism on the chin like grown-ups.
2. To be fair, there is the germ of a reasonable idea buried in Ramsay's recipe for Brexit baloney. It would help the UK to have more, and better, apprenticeships. But well-designed, effective schemes take planning and funding, two things in almost non-exisitent supply now that the nation's government has been paralysed by the logistical and financial challenges of trying to dismantle the UK's existing access to frictionless trade and free movement across the borders of its largest and closest trading partners, for no good reason. Yes, apprenticeships are good. And there really is no reason why you need to leave the European Union to have more, and better, apprenticeships. Is there, Germany?

*And it would be low-paid, by UK standards. Migrants don't "work twice as hard for less money." They work twice as hard because what they earn here is the equivalent of a good wage back home. Or at least it was, until the UK voted to push its currency off a cliff.

Flagellation for the nation

If you are of a nervous disposition, look away now. If you're still with me, prepare to stare into the abyss.

I used to think that most of the probable outcomes of Brexit ranged from bad to very bad, but I was holding on to one consoling thought. I thought that at least most of the people behind Brexit shared some political values that I could recognise.

I might disagree with Leave voters about means, but I kind of assumed that we were all working towards the same ends. I thought that the general goal of political change was to let as many people as possible thrive, prosper and enjoy more opportunities than they had under the status quo. Proponents of any change should at least believe that the change will make things better than they were before. That, I thought, was a bare minimum requirement.

I didn't believe that leaving the EU would make things better, which is why I voted Remain. Other people voted Leave. I disagreed with them, but I thought that at least that they sincerely believed that leaving would make things better and that nobody would stick with the idea if they started to think that leaving would actually make things worse.

How wrong I was. There are people who apparently believe that the effects of leaving will be catastrophic,  but that we still need to go ahead, because prosperity has made us spoiled and weak. Leavers who are actually looking forward to a ten year recession because it will make the UK population less "frivolous. "

I'm not sure what you'd call a philosophy of disciplining the population by deliberately engineering hardship and struggle - no merely political label covers it half so well as the word "horrific. " This long excerpt is probably as much as most people can stomach, but the brave, or masochistic, can read the whole thing here:

In the first year or so we are going to lose a lot of manufacturing. Virtually all JIT export manufacturing will fold inside a year. Initially we will see food prices plummet but this won't last. Domestic agriculture won't be able to compete and we'll see a gradual decline of UK production. UK meats will be premium produce and no longer affordable to most.

Once food importers have crushed all UK competition they will gradually raise their prices, simply because they can. Meanwhile wages will stay depressed and because of the collapse of disposable income and availability of staff, we can probably expect the service sector to take a big hit thus eliminating all the jobs that might provide a supplementary income.

Across the board we will see prices rising. There will be some serendipitous benefits but nothing that offsets the mass job losses. We will see a lot of foreign investment dry up and banking services will move to the EU. Dublin and Frankfurt. I expect that house prices will start to fall, but that's not going to do anyone any favours in the short to mid term.

Since a lot of freight will no longer be able to go through Calais we can expect a lot more use of the port at Hull so we may see an expansion in distribution centres in the North.

All in all we are looking at serious austerity as it will take a few years at least to rebuild our trade relations with third countries. If we go down the path of unilateral trade liberalisation then we will probably find it hard to strike new deals.

Meanwhile, since tax receipts will be way down we can expect major cuts to the forces and a number of Army redundancies. I expect to see RAF capability cut by a third. Soon enough it will become apparent that cuts to defence cannot go further so we can expect another round of cuts to council services. They will probably raise council tax to cope with it.

After years of the left bleating about austerity they are about to find out what it actually means. Britain is about to become a much more expensive pace to live. It will cause a spike in crime...

...Eventually things will settle down and we will get used to the new order of things. My gut instinct tells me that culturally it will be a vast improvement on the status quo. There will be more reasons to cooperate and more need to congregate. I expect to see a cultural revolution where young people actually start doing surprising and reckless things again rather than becoming tedious hipsters drinking energy drinks in pop-up cereal bar book shops or whatever it is they do these days. We'll be back to the days when students had to be frugal and from their resourcefulness manage to produce interesting things and events...

...Effectively we are looking at a ten year recession. Nothing ever experienced by those under 50. Admittedly this is not the Brexit I was gunning for. I wanted a negotiated settlement to maintain the single market so that we did not have to be substantially poorer, but, in a lot of ways I actually prefer this to the prospect of maintaining the 2015 status quo with ever degraded politics with increasingly less connection to each other.

I'm of the view that in recent years people have become increasingly spoiled and self-indulgent, inventing psychological problems for themselves in the absence of any real challenges or imperatives to grow as people. I have always primarily thought Brexit would be a reboot on British politics and culture. In a lot of ways it will bring back much of what is missing. A little austerity might very well make us less frivolous.

My emphasis.  I'm pretty sure that a lot of people in the UK didn’t have a very clear idea what they were voting for last June. But I'm damn sure it wasn't for this.

Oh, and by the way, screw you, Pete North and screw your "cultural revolution" and screw your "new order of things", you ideologically-addled maniac.

Via

Statesman, neologist, towel cannon

I think that the style of appearing "presidential" is probably overrated, in relation to the substance of actually getting stuff done. Which is just as well, now that the bar for "presidential" has been set so low that only an earthworm could get under it:

President Trump thinks he came up with the word “fake"...
 
...“I think one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is ‘fake,’” he told Huckabee.

“I guess other people have used it, perhaps, over the years, but I’ve never noticed it...”

...In his Huckabee interview, Trump once again reignited his feud with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz while talking up his much-mocked appearance in Puerto Rico last week.

While saying Cruz did “a very poor job” responding to Hurricane Maria, he spoke lovingly of the paper towel rolls he tossed to a crowd in a San Juan church in one of the most notorious moments from his day trip.

“They had these beautiful, soft towels. Very good towels,” Trump said.

“I came in and there was a crowd of a lot of people. And they were screaming and they were loving everything. I was having fun, they were having fun. They said, ‘Throw ‘em to me! Throw ‘em to me, Mr. President!

I, for one, welcome our annelid overlord.

Sarcasm aside, I sometimes wonder who's stupider - Wormy McWormface, or the rest of us for letting him dominate our attention economy with his endless supply of freakish idiocy.

Afterthought on the Labour Party and golf

A week or so ago, Marc Goldberg at Harry's Place cited a post in favour of banning golf by some obscure member of a Labour Facebook group as yet more proof of the creeping Stalinism of the left.

The idea that this was sinister, or any more than somebody letting off steam sounded a bit silly to me (the obvious possibility, that this suggestion was tongue-in-cheek, rather than sinister, didn't seem to have occurred to Marc). At this point, I thought it'd be interesting to quote the de facto patron saint of Harry's Place, George Orwell, on golf:

Since it [cricket] needs about 25 people to make up a game it necessarily leads to a lot of social mixing. The inherently snobbish game is golf, which causes whole stretches of country-side to be turned into carefully-guarded class preserves.

From a review of Cricket Country by Edmund Blunden in the Manchester Evening News, 20th April 1944.

That old quote about the Battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton may be apocryphal, but the idea that the ruling class fights its class war from the clubhouse and fairway is as plausible now as it was in 1944.

Calmer chameleon

"Sterling bounces as PM May says will provide 'calm leadership'" it says here.

So I guess the Tories will just keep calm and carry on doing what they've been doing. Denouncing the idea of an energy price cap as madness from a Marxist universe, before promising us an energy price cap, claiming to be too busy with the serious business of delivering Brexit to do anything irresponsible like calling a snap election, then calling one, then telling everybody they were "not prepared" for the snap election they'd cunningly tried to surprise their opponents with, pledging to withdraw from the European Court of Justice, then saying we're staying in for the duration of the next parliament, saying they'll let student tuition fees increase in 2016, then promising to freeze them in 2017, overseeing a massive slump in social housing, then promising a new generation of council houses, trying to make older people use their property to fund their social care, then dropping the policy, then claiming that nothing had changed...

As calm as a chameleon trying to colour match a flashing disco floor...

Santa Claus 2: This time it's Easter

So archaeologists may have found the last resting place of Saint Nicholas. Cue the inevitable headlines:

Santa Claus's tomb may have been uncovered beneath Turkish church 

Of course, the original Saint Nick had nothing to do with all that sleigh bells in the snow stuff. There is, however, another Saint Nicholas who would have looked far more at home in a winter wonderland, not to mention a winter palace, namely the sanctified Nicholas II, former Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias. I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know they'd canonised the old bugger until today, when I came across a mention of his sainthood in this article.* But sure enough, they did:

The canonization of the Romanovs was the elevation to sainthood of the last Imperial Family of Russia – Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei – by the Russian Orthodox Church. The family was killed by the Bolsheviks on 17 July 1918 at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg; the site of their execution is now beneath the altar of the Church on Blood. They are variously designated as new martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and as passion bearers by the church inside Russia.

The family was canonized on 1 November 1981 as new martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Their servants, who had been killed along with them, were also canonized.

Coming from a land of snow, ice and reindeer, Saint Nick II fits in rather better with the contemporary Santa mythos than his Turkish namesake, but the fit isn't exact. There really should be something about sacks of presents in there, too, but though the Romanovs were into extravagant gifting, it's a tough sell to make Easter eggs sound Christmassy, however much festive bling they're encrusted with.



*Or maybe I did know, but just forgot. Age-related memory loss, here I come!

UK's future now as strong and stable as Theresa May

Ahem. While you were cringing in sympathy / laughing your socks off at the Conservatives' conference malfunction, this was happening:

The Trump administration has joined a group of countries objecting to a deal between the UK and EU to divide valuable agricultural import quotas, in a sign of how the US and others plan to use Brexit to force the UK to further open its sensitive market for farm products.

President Donald Trump has been one of the most prominent international backers of Brexit and has vowed to quickly negotiate a “beautiful trade deal” with the UK after it leaves the EU. But his administration’s objection to a preliminary plan, agreed to by Brussels and London over how to split the EU’s existing “tariff rate quotas” under World Trade Organisation rules after the UK, assumes its own WTO obligations following Brexit illustrates how Washington is likely to drive a hard bargain.

It also undermines efforts by the May government in London this week to portray the WTO deal with the EU as a significant win, something made doubly painful by Mr Trump’s past backing of Brexit. 

Looking on the bright side, at least I can now just keep on recycling the same old meme for ever and ever and it'll never be out of date...

This is also fine.

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

In my unofficial contest for the most hilarious response to Theresa May's epic disaster of a party conference speech, the winner is ... Alex Deane's piece for City A.M:

A calm conference ends with Teflon Theresa 

As the 2017 party conference season draws to a close, the left will think that it won the battle of the summits.

Labour’s conference on the coast was larger, rallyish, and more upbeat that the Conservative meeting this year – although it was more of a carnival celebrating the central figure of the feast than a conventional political meeting.

But the Tory conference passed off well enough, with all of the much-puffed possibilities for upsets which occupied so much press time in the run-up to it evaporating on first contact with reality.

In terms of the biggest issue of our time, the party in the country at large is far more united on supporting Brexit and getting on with it than the outbursts from some among the parliamentary membership might imply.

Opportunities to make this point crystal clear were certainly not missed by the grassroots at drinks parties and in fringe meetings.

This is useful spine-stiffening stuff. Our media talks as if Brexit is tomorrow. We have time. David Davis’ calm and measured discussion of the negotiations, alongside Liam Fox’s optimism on the trade front, were the key Brexit takeaways in a process that still has years to run.

As far as leadership muttering goes, every party endures “noises off”, and nothing in the Tory environment rivals even for a moment the Labour vendettas of the Blair-Brown years.

The Tory consensus in Manchester was that Theresa May will see us through Brexit and beyond, and indeed the Prime Minister’s tenacity can only be admired.

She battled through her speech with a challenging cough, her perseverance and humanity being the antithesis of the “maybot” she is said to be – something that the public will see is to her credit. Teflon Theresa marches on.

I'd be even more impressed if Alex managed to keep a straight face while writing that. If that was me, I'd have ended up involuntarily spraying coffee out of my nose all over the keyboard.

Alex Deane is a way better satirist than the joker who handed May a P45 mid-speech.  Respect.

Boris and Theresa in Tory love triangle

Boris Johnson’s “roaring lion” speech at this years’ Conservative Party conference was a bit like an early Christmas present. Not like a Christmas present you’d actually want to get, but more like a gift from somebody inspired by one of the madder verses of The Twelve Days of Christmas. Not that the whole song's bonkers - you could imagine somebody being happy to receive, say, five gold rings, or even three French hens (either dead, if the recipient was a non-vegetarian, or alive, if gifted to somebody with enough land to keep them on, who enjoyed fresh eggs and the sound of contented chickens scratching about in the dirt). But Johnson's offering was more like “You’ll never guess what he went and got me. Ten bloody lords a-leaping. What was he thinking?”

In this spirit, Johnson gave us all one lion a-roaring. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but it’s not exactly the most practical gift. After a couple of days’ roaring, the neighbours will be wanting to kill me and, anyway, exactly where am I supposed to keep a ruddy great lion? And even if I can afford to keep it in bloody hunks of red meat, how, exactly, am I supposed to feed it and clear up all the lion poo without getting my head bitten off?

OK, I know it’s not a real lion, just a figure of speech, but a metaphorical lion’s still not much of a gift to me, or to anybody else.

The intention was presumably to make the audience feel good, but the metaphor’s getting pretty tired. When it comes to the personification of the nation, I reckon we hit peak lion in the high noon of Empire, somewhere between the mid Nineteenth Century and the outbreak of the First World War. When I was a lad of seventeen or so, our history text books frequently illustrated the history of Empire and great power rivalry with unfunny Punch cartoons from that period, depicting the mighty British lion, usually lording it over the inferior symbolic beasts of lesser nations (the Gallic cockerel, the Russian bear, or – after 1871 - the German eagle). In the cartoons, colonised, or non-European people generally didn’t warrant a heraldic national symbol of their own, in which case the British lion was shown menacing a racist caricature of a villainous Fu Manchu-style Chinaman, or a wide-eyed, cringing African.

You can see how this sort of stuff might appeal to a man at the centre of the British establishment who still thinks it’s fine to dismiss black people as "piccaninnies" with an "ancestral dislike of the British Empire" and fancies himself in the role of tousle-maned British lion in a “l'état, c'est moi” sort of way. But you’d have to be a century or so behind the zeitgeist* for this sort of dusty rhetoric to really set your pulse racing and your spirit soaring.

Which brings me to the intended audience – presumably elderly, reactionary nationalists, more interested in the vague symbolism of roaring lions and taking back poorly-defined forms of control than in the boring nitty-gritty of actual policy. Compare and contrast with the sort of stuff coming from the hapless Team May since the election. At least there was a belated decision to promise to do something about stuff like house building, council housing and student debt, because it’s just occurred to them that young people loaded down with debt, but without a hope in hell of buying, or even affordably renting a place of their own won’t be the next generation of Tory voters. It might not have been well delivered, colourful, or convincing, but in terms of content, May's conference speech was still streets ahead of Johnson's empty bluster.

What we’re looking at here is triangulation – nicking some of your political opponents’ most popular policies for tactical advantage, or, in crusty old Tory huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ language, “Shooting the other chap’s fox.” It’s a tactic which has worked in the past, but now it’s running into trouble. This is the problem. Since the glory days when Cameron and Osborne controlled the political narrative, the Tories have triangulated not once, but twice. First, they tried to outflank Ukip by stealing their nationalist clothes, as Boris the Lion King is still trying to do. Then, after Labour turned from unelectable no-hopers into a clear and present electoral danger, they decided to triangulate against Labour with a new offer for the youth.

The trouble is, when you triangulate not with one, but with two, opposing groups, with mutually incompatible outlooks and interests, what you end up with isn’t triangulation, but a love triangle. Just like that old serial love rat, Boris, the Tory party is wooing two partners at once. One is Eurosceptic and old, often with a property-owning stake in the baby boomer settlement and a lingering suspicion of diversity and free movement. The other is young, cosmopolitan and socially liberal, but insecure, debt-ridden and with no experience of the housing ladder, except when they’re being ripped off by private landlords. Neither partner is going to take kindly to the Tories running off with the other, but there’s no way the Tories can keep them both happy at once.  These people are playing a zero sum game that can only end in tears.

Of course, this isn’t just a Conservative problem. The Labour party, too, is trying to hold together a coalition of youthful Europhiles and older Europhobes, but for now, they seem to be making a better job of it, the two other sides of the love triangle each apparently loving Jeremy to bits and believing, against all reason, that he’ll exclusively love only their side back in return. It must be making Boris, that floppy-haired old Don Juan, green with envy to see how a man who looks like a mild-mannered geography teacher can apparently keep the other two parties in his own love triangle in adoring thrall, rather than being involved in the bitter psychodrama the Tories are going through as they try to sweet-talk both Ukippers and da yoof. Of course, it can’t last – eventually, even dream-boat Jeremy will have to do something disappoint one or other of his two sets of admirers. But he’s not in power yet, so he doesn’t actually have to do anything which would really upset either one of his two constituencies at the moment.

The Tories, who are (sort of) in power, don’t have any such luxury. They actually have to do stuff, whilst trying to placate each suspicious group by telling it what it thinks it wants to hear. Unfortunately both messages, reactionary nationalism and a re-discovery of the pre-Thatcherite social democratic consensus, are quite different from the globalist free-marketing There Is No Alternative swagger the Tories were rocking just a couple of years back, so both messages sound desperate and  insincere, as well as inconsistent, to their intended audiences.

I don’t know how this will all end, although “badly” seems to cover most of the possibilities.









*Even if the Labour Party really were stuck in the 1970s, as the Tories love to claim, that would still put them a comfortable hundred years or so ahead of Empire Boy, the Conservatives' current Great White Hope.

Red Ted

Philip Hammond claims that "hard-left extremist infiltrators" in the Labour Party are trying to drag the UK back to the 1970s, which would be a Bad Thing:

"Since 1979, when Britain turned its back on the policies of Corbyn and McDonnell revival show this week, living standards in this country have doubled ... It’s an argument between nostalgic idealism on Corbyn’s part and pragmatism on our part … Every country except North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Zimbabwe has adopted that system. What he’s offering them is an illusion, a pretence."

Two things:

1. Trend growth in living standards continued at roughly the same rate before and after 1979 (the only noticeable slump was after the 2008 global financial crisis)
2. Nobody in the 1970s was agitating for renationalisation, or for a tax hike like the one in the 2017 Labour manifesto (45% tax on earnings above £80,000 and then 50p for each pound earned over £123,000), because in 1971, under Conservative prime minister Ted Heath, the railways, coal industry and energy supply companies were already in public ownership and the top rate of tax on earned income was already 75% (a surcharge of 15% on investment income kept the top rate on that income at 90%).

A hard-left extremist from the 1970s

If you really think that a political economy that's slightly to the right of Ted Heath's UK would be dangerously radical, maybe you should consider the possibility that it's you who's the ideological extremist here.

The answer is "no" in both cases

Marc Goldberg at Harry's Place has a question:

Will Labour Ban Golf?

It’s both got comedy value and also scares the crap out of me. Just what would a Labour government be capable of doing to Great Britain?

It's this post on a Facebook group that apparently frightens Marc:

Simon Warwick Beresford wrote "Should a Labour Government ban Golf? [his caps] Only rich people can afford to play it. It's boring to watch. It takes up a lot of space that could be used for housing or woodland. And apparently golf course maintenance uses up a lot of fresh water."

Don't get me wrong, there are things that concern me about Labour:

• Will Labour betray the overwhelming majority its supporters (particularly the younger ones, who have the most to lose) by continuing to back Brexit?
• Whether or not Labour backs away from Brexit, will the Conservatives manage to pin the blame for their own mess on Labour, just as they succeeded in convincing the country that the last recession was nothing to do with the massive global financial crisis of 2007-08 and everything to do with Labour "maxxing out the national credit card" in some imaginary demented orgy of spending on sure start centres, libraries and disability benefits?
• Will Labour really crack down on anti-semitism (which is nowhere near as big a problem as it is for the right but still isn't down to an acceptable level - i.e. zero - in an otherwise mostly socially progressive party)?
• Will Labour be diverted into solving non-problems like peoples' "very real concerns" over immigration, rather than pressing ahead with fundamental reforms that would materially help the less well off, like introducing a Land Value Tax, and effective rent controls?

But am I going to lose a moment's sleep because somebody I've never heard of on a Labour Facebook group is mouthing off about banning golf? If I'm going to worry, I might as well worry about a slightly more plausible scenario, like the mysterious planet Nibiru wiping us all out on its re-scheduled date with destiny, October 15th.

Fortunately, I believe that a tinfoil hat can protect me from the worst effects of a strangely invisible rogue planet hitting the Earth, so I'm off to start making mine right now. In the unlikely event of Nibiru not wiping us all out in a couple of weeks, my shiny hat will also come in handy for shielding my brainwaves from the Corbynite thought police when they come sweeping the area for dissident underground golfers.*



*I've never played golf and have no interest in it, but I do have a couple of unfortunate jumpers that might be mistaken for golf attire by the over-zealous cadres of the Junior Anti-Golf League.