Before the Ever Given

The cost of one ship blocking the Suez Canal for a week, plus the resulting backlog is being estimated at some $1bn (£730m), according to Akshita Jain in the Independent.

It could have been worse. A lot worse. 

Imagine an event which blocked the canal for eight solid years. 

I shouldn't have to imagine, because this is an actual thing which happened in my lifetime. Until the canal came back in the news, I'd wholly forgotten that a second Suez crisis affected maritime traffic for far longer than the 1956 debacle. The canal was closed due to the Six Day war in 1967 and wouldn't re-open again until June 1975, after Israeli forces had withdrawn from the Sinai Peninsula and the Egyptians had cleared the canal of sunken ships and mines. 

Here's a nice summary of the long blockage, including the story of the ships which were navigating the canal when the Six Day War broke out and were trapped for eight years:

It's a historical event which gets comparatively little attention, which is a pity, because as a natural experiment into the effect of introducing trade barriers into places where trade previously flowed freely, this feels pretty damn relevant right now, especially here in Global Britain™.

Breaking news: Bus blocks major trading route! pic.twitter.com/K6xWDYSYIN

— MrProgressiveAlliance 🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪🇪🇺🌍 (@MrYesWeCan) April 1, 2021

While we're on the subject of historical blunders by wannabe global powers that turned out to no longer be quite as awesome as they thought, there's one other Suez-related tale that's worth re-telling. Namely, one of history's most bizarre tragicomedies, the hellish 18,000-mile (29,000 km) journey that Russia's Second Pacific Squadron took from the Baltic to the Tsushima Strait off Japan and one of the most consequential naval defeats in Twentieth Century history. The Russians could have had a much shorter voyage had they not upset the entity which really was "Global Britain" back in 1905 and which closed the Suez Canal to the hapless Russians. 

Here's a very good telling of the whole globe-spanning organisational and logistical nightmare:

And, for the sale of completeness, the final catastrophe that ended the epic voyage:

One of the participants in this naval omnishambles survives to this day as a floating museum in St Petersburg; the protected cruiser Aurora, which, more than a decade after taking part in the Battle of Tsushima, fired the shot which signalled the attack on the Winter Palace and the start of the Russian Revolution. 

"Because they're morons"

Mark Blyth's take on the Brexit vote is harsh, bleak and and it isn't new. But it's as true now as it ever was.

Of course, the use of the phrase "morons" will provoke the usual tedious accusations about Remainer elitists sneering at the views of ordinary people. But if you listen, this is a more nuanced explanation of what happened and the "morons" in question include the UK's political and media elite who incubated the stupidity.

As for Mark himself, he didn't get where he is today because he belongs to some privileged elite. In his own words:

I was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1967. I grew up in relative poverty, in a very real sense a “welfare kid”. Today I’m a professor at an Ivy League university in the USA. Probabilistically speaking, I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere.

Now check out the first three minutes or so of this video (if I've done this right, it should start playing about 49' 40" in):

Dan Dan the magic man*

"To practice black magic you have to violate every principle of science, decency, and intelligence. You must be obsessed with an insane idea of the importance of the petty object of your wretched and selfish desires."
Aleister Crowley

Apparently, Daniel Hannan, founder member of the secretive hard Brexit lobby group that's currently holding the UK government hostage, isn't just a master of the Dark Arts in a merely figurative sense:

Hannan, now a right-wing commentator and MEP, has been described as “the man who brought you Brexit” and is, by all accounts, a remarkable character. According to a fellow student at Oriel college, Oxford, his obsession with leaving the EU was matched only by his interest in magic, and in the occultist Aleister Crowley. One evening, we are told, he was convinced that he would win the election for president of the Conservative club, as he had cast all of the right spells. He returned to his room that night, baffled at having lost, only to discover that a key candle had gone out.

Of course, Dan was much younger then, little more than a boy wizard. But it's hard to escape the impression that Brexit is still best understood in terms of magical incantation and propitiatory sacrifice ("a belief that you must leave a customs union with your overwhelmingly biggest trading partner so you can seek inferior trade agreements with other more distant countries", presumably because the sacrifice is pleasing to Aiwass, the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat, or something like that).

Given the advanced magic it would take to bewitch the UK's vastly more powerful negotiating partner into allowing the UK to leave the EU club with a bespoke deal that's just as good as membership, I guess DExEU's been stocking up on long-life black candles. If that doesn't work, they'll probably move on to drawing a pentagram on the floor in cat's blood.

If I were Larry, the 10 Downing Street cat, I'd keep my head down...




* Not to be confused with the children's entertainer and balloon modeller of the same name.

WTF, PFI?

When Carillon collapsed with a mighty clang, it prompted some people to have second thoughts about the wisdom of Private Finance Initiative contracts. Look at the original thinking behind PFI and you start to wonder why anybody ever had first thoughts about this way of doing things:

...why did we ever enter PFI contracts in the first place? The answer is provided on page 11 of the NAO report: PFI is off-balance sheet for national accounts purposes, which means it “results in lower recorded levels of government debt and public spending in the short term”.

The problem was that Serious People believed public spending and government debt in the UK were dangerously, unsustainably high.* They lay awake at night worrying about the terrible debts future generations would inherit, if we frittered their birthright away on fripperies like schools, roads and hospitals. What did they do about this alleged existential, intergenerational threat?

No worries - they had a cunning plan. Hide the up-front costs, so it looked as if they weren't spending the money they really were spending, then saddle future generations with the cost of running and maintaining this off-balance-sheet infrastructure, as well as handing over a massive wodge of public money in rent to a bunch of private companies who'll be billing our kids and their kids, long after the Serious People have moved on, their reputation for prudent management of the public finances intact.

So Serious People solved the perceived problem of handing whopping debts on to the next generation by making current spending seem to disappear, through the magic of creative accounting, then ... er ... handing whopping debts on to the next generation.

That's so mental, it's almost impressive.




*Plenty of people have argued convincingly that the idea of runaway public spending was wasn't true when the notion of PFI was first dreamed up and still isn't true.

Corbyn: "I'm king of the world!" (spoiler: iceberg ahead)

Imagine that it's close to midnight on 14 April 1912 and we're on the bridge of the RMS Titanic. Watchers in the crows' nest have just spotted an iceberg ahead. What should we do?

There are two schools of thought.* Mister Barlow thinks that our top priority is to do everything possible to change course and speed, during our short remaining window of time, so that the ship can either avoid the berg, or try to hit slowly, at a speed and angle which gives us some chance of not sinking.

Mister Jones objects that while everybody's obsessing about the iceberg, conditions aboard the Titanic are unacceptable; the working poor are crammed into cramped, airless quarters in steerage, while the rich and powerful lounge about in their sumptuous staterooms, being waited on hand and foot, when not stuffing their faces with turtle soup and lobster at the Captain's table. Mister Jones is a fan of First Mate Corbyn's vision of something better, a Titanic that works for everyone.

Now I don't think Mister Jones is wrong. The massive levels of unfairness and inequality are wrong, bad and need fixing. But - forgive me if I'm being be a single-issue iceberg bore here - the iceberg is dead ahead, the time left for avoiding action is short, and if we hit and sink, who do you think will be first in the queue for the limited number of lifeboats (hint; it's probably not going to be the poor devils in steerage)? For the moment, I think that the pressing problem of iceberg avoidance deserves to occupy the top left quadrant of the Eisenhower decision grid.

That was my take on the "What - if anything - should progressives do about Brexit" debate, as argued by Owen Jones and Nick Barlow.

Credit to Boris Johnson for first suggesting the Titanic analogy.

*Of course, there are other courses of action, although the one being urged on Captain May by her senior officers ("Shut your eyes, full steam ahead and just keep on saying that we're definitely going to win the Blue Riband"), doesn't really involve enough neurological activity to qualify as a school of thought.

Post-geography, or just Poe?

Apparently, somebody didn't get an atlas for Christmas. I genuinely can't decide whether this is as stupid as it looks, or whether we're being trolled, maybe in order to generate headlines about anything except the actually existing mess this project's in.

Whatever you're up to, Liam, you just gave a whole new meaning to the familiar phrase "Fox geography howler."

While we're on the topic of Poe's Law, here's something to contemplate the next time somebody accuses Lefties of being humourless, politically-correct killjoys. It's the definition of Poe's Law, according to those whacky funsters at Conservapedia:

"Poe’s Law is an Internet adage that inappropriately compares God's mighty handiwork during the Creation to an insipid genre of satire."*

I guess that if you want to believe in things like trickle down, austerity and Fox News headlines, and still keep a straight face, a total sense of humour bypass must be pretty much your only option.




*No link from me - if you really want to rot your brain, you know where to go and you can dive in at your own risk.

Won't you remember the poor and needy at Christmas?

Is it just me, or is this a bit tone deaf?

"Michel Barnier is 'Scrooge' to rule out bespoke Brexit deal, City bosses say"

"Square Mile lobby group TheCityUK branded Mr Barnier a “Scrooge” for ruling out a bespoke agreement for cross-border frictionless trade between banks and other financial firms" it says here.

Frankly, I'm struggling to imagine the global megabanks of the Square Mile in the role of the warm-hearted but poor and put-upon Cratchits, being oppressed by money-obsessed, flinty-hearted moneybags, Ebenezer Scrooge.

Conservative home and away

Daniel Hannan raised a few eyebrows this week when he used a Consevative Home article to vent about his fellow Brexiteer, Arron Banks. According to Hannan, it was the official campaign, Vote Leave, wot won it. In contrast, Hannan called the Arron Banks-funded Leave.EU campaign a "hapless and hopeless" "wrecking operation" which did nothing to help the Leavers win, but only functioned "as a vehicle to promote himself [Arron Banks] and Nigel Farage."

There's a perfectly rational reason for Hannan's attack. The media are delving into where Banks got the money that propped up Ukip and, along with the Electoral Commission, are looking at allegations  that officially separate pro-Brexit campaign groups illicitly colluded to share money and resources in order to breach campaign funding limits. The main reason for the article is to distance Hannan and his fellow Vote Leave Tory Brexiteers from the dodgy-looking geezers of Ukip and Leave.EU.

"There have been technical investigations into both Leave and Remain on compliance issues. But it’s Banks who is attracting the most fevered speculation about where his money came from. No proof of wrongdoing has been found, but the lurid nature of the accusation is being used to suggest that Leave won improperly.

To repeat, Banks’s outfit was not Vote Leave, or even an ally of Vote Leave...

...As far as the Electoral Commission’s investigation goes, Banks is as entitled as anyone else to the presumption of innocence. Being a boastful, belligerent man-child doesn’t make you a Russian agent."

In other words:

"You can't prove he did anything (we hope), but even if you find out that he did do something, he's got nothing to do with us. Move along, nothing to see here." 

So far, so Mandy Rice-Davis.

But the string of insults about the "hapless and hopeless" campaigning of the "boastful, belligerent man-child" reminds us that this is deeply personal, too. It's also the latest round in a long and bitter feud of easily-bruised egos taking place in the exclusive bubble inhabited by millionaire political donors and the politicians who court them. It's been going on at least since Banks stopped giving money to the Conservatives and started funding Ukip, but really came to a head when William Hague said that he'd "never heard" of the former Tory donor, causing Banks to increase his donation to Ukip from £100,00 to £1 million out of spite, or wounded self-importance.  For the careerists in the Conservative family, the political is personal.

It's a bit like watching members of a highly dysfunctional family plotting and squabbling over which one of them is going to inherit the family house. Only they're all so intent on making sure that no other sibling gets the house that none have noticed that the house itself is on fire. From the perspective of an observer on the other side of the pond, the flames engulfing the family mansion are only too obvious:

"The world recently commemorated the centennial of the Russian Revolution, which resulted from the flagrant incompetence of that country’s ruling class in confronting a moment of overwhelming national crisis. The barricades are not yet out in the streets of modern-day London, but a certain sense of déjà vu is appropriate. At the least, we are likely witnessing the slow-motion suicide of the Conservative Party, and, conceivably, of British conservatism more broadly defined.

In the British case, the crisis involves the nation’s referendum vote in June 2016 to withdraw from the European Union. Opinions may differ about the virtues of Brexit as an idea—I opposed it—but once it was decided, most everyone agreed that the process of extraction had to be implemented with great care and single-minded dedication. The actual response of the Conservative government has been deplorable to the point of unforgivable—inept, slipshod, insouciant, and ignorant of even the basic realities of law and process."

Philip Jenkins, writing for The American Conservative, was just getting into his stride there. Just wait until he gets down to the nitty-gritty of the "victory" Vote Leave and Leave.EU are both claiming credit for:

"After the referendum, Theresa May emerged as prime minister with a firm commitment to the principle “Brexit means Brexit.” Accordingly, she chose leading Brexit campaigners for key positions, including Boris Johnson as foreign secretary and David Davis as head of the new department in charge of exiting the European Union (DExEU) and chief negotiator of withdrawal. Liam Fox carries responsibility for international trade, which includes negotiating new agreements outside the old EU framework.

Painfully early, it became apparent that none of this Gang of Four had a clue of what they talking about in relation to Europe, nor did they understand the basic principles by which the EU worked. It is not so much that they approached the key issues wrongly—they did not even perceive them as issues. Throughout the referendum campaign, Brexiteers had trivialized the question of future relationships with the EU, suggesting that these would easily be decided in high-level summits within weeks rather than years. There was therefore not the slightest need to prepare detailed negotiating principles. As Johnson explicitly stated, the new British relationship with Europe would be exactly what it was at present, although omitting some of the features he found unpalatable, such as unrestricted EU immigration.

When Britain invoked Article 50, no government figure grasped the implications. Until quite recently, Johnson and Davis mocked the notion that Britain might have to pay a penny for the divorce bill. (The British government is now admitting a liability of some tens of billions, a sum that will definitely increase.) When the reborn Irish Question finally surfaced in their minds, Davis presented a vision of an invisible border made possible by as-yet undeveloped high technology, a prospect that has been commonly derided as magical thinking. Oh, and remember those vast new trading empires outside Europe, with all those lucrative deals being signed almost immediately? There’s no sign of any movement in that direction."

Come to think of it, my analogy of a dysfunctional family squabbling over the inheritance was altogether too kind. Vote Leave and Leave.EU arguing about who won the referendum are more like a pair of arsonists both wanting all the credit for burning down the house. "It would never have happened without me!", boasts box of matches guy. "But he was hapless and hopeless!" counters can of paraffin guy, "I was the one who did all the heavy lifting!" While all around, law-abiding folk shake their heads and wonder how anybody can be so thoughtlessly delinquent as to claim credit for replacing a perfectly good house with a useless pile of blackened, smouldering timbers.

Weirdly, not a Daily Mash headline

" Estate agent says London's millennials should stop buying sandwiches, holidays and splashing cash on nights out in order to afford a house"

Top trolling from some gleefully callous sociopath at estate agents Strutt and Parker. Bonus points for mocking the victims of the Great British Housing Rip-Off with a virtuoso display of finger-wagging condescension.

I'm sure that millennials will just love being on the receiving end of an improving sermon from the bloodsucking  cheerleaders of the UK's dismally unproductive rentier economy:

According to the Resolution Foundation, homeowners born in the 1940s and 1950s gained an unearned windfall of £80,000 between 1993 and 2014 alone. In the early 2000s, house price growth was so great that 17% of working-age adults earned more from their house than from their job...

...As house prices have continued to increase and the gap between house prices and earnings has grown larger, the cost of homeownership has become increasingly prohibitive. Whereas in the mid-1990s low and middle income households could afford a first time buyer deposit after saving for around 3 years, today it takes the same households 20 years to save for a deposit. Many have increasingly found themselves with little choice but to rent privately. For those stuck in the private rental market, the proportion of income spent on housing costs has risen from around 10% in 1980 to 36% today. Unlike homeowners, there is no asset wealth to draw on to fund new cars or holidays.

Laurie Macfarlane

John Redwood sells out - tells investors "Don't invest in UK."

This is what Brexiteer John Redwood says in public:

'We'll be fine!' John Redwood issues fiery riposte to Brexit 'no-deal' doom-mongers

This is his private advice to anybody thinking of investing in the UK:

Redwood’s advice to investors is to flee the UK before the credit crunch bites:

I sold out of the general share ETFs in the UK after their great performance for the year from early July 2016 when I saw the last Budget and heard the BoE’s credit warnings. The money could be better put to work in places where the authorities are allowing credit to expand a bit, to permit faster growth.

Sounds sensible, doesn’t it?

No. It is an absolute disgrace for this man to give such advice.

You see, the Rt. Hon. John Redwood MP – to give him his full title – is a lawmaker. He is an elected member of the House of Commons. And not just any lawmaker. He is a senior member of the Conservative Party, which is currently in government and making a total hash of the Brexit negotiations. He is also a former Cabinet Minister and a member of the Privy Council.

This senior lawmaker is advising investors to stop investing in his country.

Frances Coppola

Words fail me.

Update - although words apparently don't fail John Redwood. He actually said this:

"'All they ever do is run the UK down' Tory SLAMS Labour attempts to release Brexit pappers [sic]"

What a piece of work.

Blue planet in crisis

Doubts around Theresa May’s leadership trigger sharp falls in Sterling: sea turtles "concerned."

Probably just another headline/image pairing mismatch by Google News's algorithm, although I wouldn't be entirely surprised to hear that even marine reptiles in the far-off Pacific are shaking their scaly heads in disbelief at the sheer magnitude of the British government's omnishambolic implosion.

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.

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...

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

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.

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Netflix does murder sleep”

"At Netflix, we are competing for our customers' time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc."

Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, as quoted in this six minute talk on the attention economy:


Fantastic though the quote is, I don't think Netflix is the worst offender here. After all, it's an entertainment company, so it's an open secret that its products only exist to pleasurably divert your attention.

It's far worse to have your attention stolen by relentless advertisers and marketers yammering ceaselessly, and far less entertainingly, for ever bigger slices of your bandwidth. Worse still are the infotainment and social media industries, which dangle the promise of a meaningful connection with the significant humans in your life, or an informed take on what's happening in the world in general, but too often fill the headspace that should be available for worthwhile interaction and understanding with a distorted, abbreviated, decontextualised blizzard of trivia and sensation.

You can forewarn and forearm yourself against the siren voices of distraction but, as the Odyssey warned, you should take extreme precautions if you want to play with temptation without being lured onto the rocks.

This guy won't pay to hear the Sirens. You won't believe what happens next!

"Exceptional performance" Leviticus-style

I partly agree with universities minister Jo Johnson that there's something deeply wrong with a higher education system that combines massive payouts for superstar vice-Chancellors with massive lifetime debts for students. But, under current circumstances, I can't help thinking that the Jo Johnson's chosen metric for assessing a vice-Chancellor's worth is a bit topsy-turvy. When you turn his value metric upside down, by slightly re-writing this Telegraph article, the comparison seems fairer:

The Government faces fines if it fails to justify paying the Prime Minister more than university vice-Chancellors

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) will unveil plans today that will see the Government forced to demonstrate that a prime ministerial salary of over £150,000 represents value for money.

The announcement comes amid growing concern about the largesse of Parliament where a lame-duck Prime Minister now enjoys substantial remuneration with a grace and favour London home, travel perks and a gold plated pension.

In a speech at Westminster, IPSA Chair, Professor Sir Ian Kennedy, will say that he aims to curb the “spiralling" growth of prime ministerial pay packets and that “exceptional pay can only be justified by exceptional performance.”

This means that the Prime Minister will have to demonstrate that she is providing the UK with a high quality of leadership and a plausible chance of good economic prospects, as opposed to merely holding office in order to divert blame for a series of catastrophic errors away from her ambitious colleagues, who are currently preparing to sacrifice her just as soon as she has served her purpose as collective blame-magnet.

Professor Kennedy is currently working on an updated pay scale for Powerless Sacrificial Victim In-Chief, based on the closest industry equivalent, a goat. This would equate to a prime ministerial allowance of around one to two kilos of hay per day, minus whatever she might forage in fields of wheat. 

There, fixed it for you, Jo.

"Look at my economist over here"

Remember this, from last year?

Donald Trump sought to tout his support among African-Americans on Friday by pointing out a black man in the crowd and calling him "my African-American.""Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him," Trump said. "Are you the greatest?"

These were, of course, the words of a known con-artist bigging up an almost non-existent group of supporters (in the subsequent elections just 8% "his" voters were black - 88% of African-Americans who voted came out for his opponent).

Times haven't changed much, as the British media, and in particular the BBC, proved when they looked at  an unimpressive array of practically bugger-all economists with a good word to say about Brexit, then pointed and shouted "Look over there" when a single rogue economist popped up with a shaky claim about a hard Brexit promising a "£135bn annual boost" to the UK economy.

Well, that headline lie has been round the world before the truth had got its boots on. The misleading headlines have been duly generated and the damage done but, for all that, it's still worth quoting Ben Chu in the Independent, at length, to get a sense of just how massively misleading this distraction was and how shamefully complicit the BBC has been in spreading the lie:

Imagine if a group of obscure scientists produced a piece of research which claimed to debunk the consensus of the profession.

Imagine if rather than making that research publicly available the group cobbled together a press release with some eye-catching headline figures, showing none of their methodology or data.

Imagine if that group of scientists had produced similar work in the past which had been shown to be deeply flawed by other scientists on multiple levels.

Now imagine if that press release was picked up by the national broadcaster of the country and presented to the public as an exciting and interesting new piece of research – with none of the above context mentioned.

Would you think that the broadcaster was doing a good job, fulfilling its mission to “educate and inform” the public?

Or would you wonder what they hell it was playing at?

This week, the BBC website “splashed” with the news that a group known as Economists for Free Trade had done some work suggesting that the UK economy could be £135bn larger if we forced through a hard Brexit. The next day the report’s author Patrick Minford was invited on to the BBC’s flagship morning radio programme, Today, to talk about his findings.

The programme did invite another economist on to contradict Minford’s views. But the non-specialist listener would have been left with the false impression that the economics profession was split on the issue, that the impact of Brexit is merely a matter of opinion. Leaving the EU’s single market might be good for trade, or it might be bad: the experts just can’t agree.

In fact, most experts are agreed - Minford is an outlier and an unreliable-sounding one at that:

He may not have released his methodology, but we can reliably guess how Minford generated his latest figures because he has in the past used a grossly unreliable economic model to show startlingly large gains from what has been termed “unilateral free trade” for the UK.

The principal and catastrophic flaw in this model is that it assumes that distance is no barrier to the international trade in goods – when all the empirical evidence of decades is that distance matters enormously, as countries do more trade with those who are geographically closer to them. Another fatal error is the assumption that price, rather than quality, is all that matters to consumers.

Numerous other reasons by other, more competent, trade economists have been identified as reasons to disbelieve Minford’s figures, not least the fact that his definition of hard Brexit, bizarrely, seems to assume closer regulatory harmonisation between Britain and the EU than exists at the moment within the single market. 

Isn't he the greatest?