Makeup routines of the rich and famous

Over in the Graun's fashion section, there's an article entitled:

Over the rainbow – your colour corrector problems resolved
Thanks to Instagram, this much maligned makeup routine is back. Here’s how you nail it.

This sort of thing would usually be wasted on me. But once you see the potential results of a makeup regime malfunction, you realise how important this stuff can be:

What one famous celebrity would look like without makeup. The results will totally shock you.

Emergency room - we need fake tan, orange, lots of it, now!

Making plans for Nigel

What could be more embarrassing for a party leader than hosting a major summit to discuss offshore tax havens when everybody knows that your own family fortunes have been stashed away in an offshore tax haven?

Probably nothing, but being a party leader who tried to stash some of the family cash in an offshore tax haven, but apparently failed to make any money with this cunning plan, must come a close second. Poor Nigel Farage - not just another out-of-touch member of the Westminster elite, although not for want of trying.

Spanking some BOTs

Post-Panama Papers, people seem to be waking up to the novel idea that the British government might conceivably be able to exert some influence over what goes on in British Overseas Territories, rather than shrugging and muttering "Nothing to do with us, guv":

Corbyn argued that the government should tell administrations in places like the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands: “Hang on, you are a government of a British dependent territory, a crown territory, you must obey UK tax law, you must not become a harbour for tax avoidance and tax evasion.”

So sez Jez.

I'd just like to take the opportunity of reminding anybody who cares* that I was into this before it was cool:

I still wonder whether the precedent of what Britain did to the Chagos Islands opens up another possibility. If the UK government has the power to deport the entire population of one of its overseas territories and send every single man, woman and child into exile for 45-odd years, maybe for ever, why can't it decide, in the national interest, to shut down the tax havens operating in some of the other ones?

Me, last February**. Good to have you on board, Jez.


*i.e. nobody, probably.

** Well, linked back to last Feb - I started wondering why HM govt couldn't do anything about this back in 2013.

Banana monarchy

We may no longer be a world-beating steel producer but, by jingo, modern Britain can show Johnny Foreigner a thing or to about running a global tax-dodging and money laundering industry:

Looking at the documents leaked from Mossack Fonseca and one thing is clear: Britain's network is once again at the core. More than half of the companies listed in the documents are registered in the UK or its Overseas Territories, and Hong Kong plays a huge role.

Of course, this shouldn't be surprising. Britain has for a while now been thought to be the global capital for money laundering. And it's no shock that nothing has been done about it. In 2010, two years after they crashed the global economy, the City paid for more than half of the Conservative party's election campaign, helping (along with the aforementioned Lord Ashcroft) them limp over the line, with a Lib Dem shaped crutch. Though, of course, Labour did little to regulate in the previous 13 years.

If we want to understand modern Britain, first we need to realise that our primary economic function in the world is probably our network of tax havens. After all, around $21tn is estimated to sit in offshore accounts, of which Britain's territories are said to make up by far the biggest part. Our own GDP is only around $3tn.

openDemocracy

Yep, we're still the top banana at something. Makes you proud to be British.

Keywords

[Mossack Fonseca] is also keen to keep its reputation in order. Another internal mail contained a copy of an agreement being negotiated with Mercatrade SA for online reputation management (ORM). Here, Mercatrade commits to removing negative entries that can affect MF’s reputation on the main Google search results page. “Negative entries appear for 13 keywords and a corrective strategy is needed,” the draft agreement states. Among the keywords, five were in English: money laundering, tax evasion, tax fraud, dirty money and scandal.

Obedient little soldiers

An interesting perspective on the history of education from Matt Ridley:

The economic historian Stephen Davies dates the modern form of the school to 1806, the year when Napoleon defeated Prussia. Stung by its humiliation, the Prussian state took the advice of its leading intellectual, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and devised a programme of compulsory and rigorous education, the purpose of which was to produce obedient soldiers who would not run away in battle. It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punctuated by the ringing of bells. There was a predetermined syllabus, rather than open ended learning. There was the habit of doing several subjects a day, rather than sticking to one subject.

I can see how you might want to retain some of this stuff - especially in the early years, there's a lot to be said for a predetermined syllabus. You'd think, though, by 2016, everybody would at least be on board with the idea that schools should be in the business of turning out rounded citizens, not obedient cannon fodder, although I'm by no means convinced that we've got rid of the people who see education as a species of drill, rather than the way we pass thinking skills on to the next generation.

Creating a sense of grievance

According to an anonymous Ukip politician, some strands of the party aren't actually that fussed about its stated aim of getting Britain out of the EU - "They're not particularly interested in winning the referendum and they'd rather replicate the SNP scenario which is lose the primary objective of the party but create such a sense of grievance you win in the polls and do rather well."

Take these sort of off-the-record anonymous revelations with more than a pinch of salt, of course, but the idea of Ukip as a mechanism for stoking and mobilising a generalised sense of grievance doesn't sound at all far fetched to me.