Brigands, Buccaneers, BT and Statutory Undertakers

There has been an impassioned plea in the media today by BT - begging the government to give them greater powers to dig up the streets. Or that's how the numpty media are reporting it. In reality the issues are more nuanced, and the public benefits far less tangible. As the Telegraph reports

One industry source said telecoms companies were hoping "to be afford the same rights of access that the energy and water companies have - to make it easier to dig up the roads to lay fibre". Often telecom companies are unable to lay fibre broadband if the landlord of a property is unresponsive.

Did you see what they did there?

You see it's not about rights to 'dig up the roads' at all - telecoms companies are already what's termed Statutory Undertakers and have exactly the same powers as energy and water companies. They can already run their cables under or alongside every public road and by-way in the Kingdom.

Some years ago in a remote area of south London my contractor was completing an upscale public realm job, high class stone paving over ruinously expensive Steintec cementitious bases. To site the stainless steel bollards, we diamond drilled 35cm deep - just beyond the depth of the formation, an existing footway, beneath. Mid afternoon BT vehicles started to arrive and by knocking-off time we had an entire fleet of emergency trucks, mobile workshops, satellite transceivers, generator trucks, mobile light towers, a flotilla of personnel carriers and about 100 blokes in BT vests there. My diamond driller had grazed - just grazed, mind you - a fibre optic bundle 450mm closer to the surface than it should ever have been. Their fault, not ours. But the reason for the panic was that we'd taken out the private high-speed feeds for both LHR T5 and Reuters. For which BT charges the big corporates an absolute arm and a leg.

BT is increasingly losing the consumer final connection to many competitors in a very competitive environment, so is relying more on providing private fibre to wealthy commercial bodies. For this, it does not have the legal rights to lay its private cables across your garden, digging a bloody great trench in your lawn to do so. That water and gas companies do have this right is reasonable given that they don't install private end-to-end gas mains for HSBC Towers, or an exclusive end-to-end water supply for the hanging gardens of Bloomberg. BT's plea is a con - they want the right to invade private property to lay wholly commercial, exclusive and private fibre optic feeds.

And the grasping bastards are trying to con us that national high-speed PUBLIC broadband depends on giving them free rein for private brigandage.  

The unbearable idiocy of the bien-pensant Left

A more perfect example of the purblind idiocy of the bien-pensant Left than Philip Collins' piece in the Times this morning cannot be found. He tries to support a view that the 'left behind' had been assisted by a paternalistic central State that was bleeding and trickling small amounts of cash to their communities (after officials from SW1 northwards had all taken their cut) but that a wicked Tory government stopped it all.  The New Deal for Communities, the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative. How much of GDP did these things represent? A tiny fraction of one percent, a tiny fraction of the 0.7% of GNI, the £14bn a year we give to African dictators to allow their wives to shop in Mayfair?

But the value of these cosmetic schemes is not the point. All governments will invent impressive sounding schemes with pitifully small budgets as part of the electioneering process. No, idiots such as Collins are utterly blind to the reasons that so many parts of the UK are 'left behind' in the first place - Globalism. To remind ourselves -

And of course Globalists such as Collins were the very same folk who were responsible for off-shoring manufacturing, facilitating the re-location of UK industry to cheap eastern European nations with substantial EU financial assistance (our own taxes, for God's sake), pauperising a whole generation of Britons whilst enriching the peoples of China, India and the less-developed nations. Their stupidity, cupidity and wilful dislike of their own nation has robbed us of not only a huge chunk, an astronomical value, of GDP and GNI, but also of the growth, innovation, infrastructure and advancement that national wealth supports and encourages.

Frankly, to pretend that it's enough trickling back an inadequate pourboire to the individuals, families and communities that Collins and his privileged metropolitan elite chums have pauperised, robbed and disempowered in the first place is not only insulting, it is an unbearable impost.

AEP skiing off-piste

I normally devour anything that AEP delivers through the pages of the Telegraph, but this morning's column, departing as it does from his safe territory of finance and economics, has him skiing off-piste. He tries to construct a close match between France's Macron and Boris - that Boris is closer to the little Emperor than he is to the Donald - but it doesn't really hold. Here's why.

• AEP is correct in labelling Macron a nationalist - and his adoption of the Cross of Lorraine confirms it. However, Boris is not. I've no doubt he is patriotic, but nationalistic, no. Boris is a sophisticated Internationalist - committed to Britain and her place in the world.

• Because Boris is an Internationalist, he is in complete opposition to Macron's Globalist agenda. But he's a pragmatist, and will sup with the global corporates if it suits him. Macron however is committed to what Supranational authority, global government and global corporatism can deliver to a France hungry for power

• Boris is at heart a small-State social liberal. Macron is at core a Big-Government central Statist and deeply socially conservative.

• Yes, they both have elitist backgrounds - Boris at Eton, Macron the énarque - but Boris has the common touch and genuinely little 'side' to him whilst Macron has donned the gilded mantle of French State pomposity with the hauteur of a little Emperor.

I can see the point that AEP is striving for. Let me help him. No, Boris is not a Trump facsimile. But it is because he is a European that he and Macron can understand eachother. There. I've said it. Let me repeat it; I'm also European, and proud of it. Europe is a continent of 740m peoples, only 460m of whom live in nations under the heel of the EU.

Sorry, Señor, no Pizza - Welsh rarebit?

I don't know where my righteous anger has gone these days. I'm so chilled that raising enough invective even for a blog post to maintain your interest is getting harder and harder. Only our failing to Leave by 1st November is now likely to restore my bile. Oh well.

I've written before that Ireland essentially manufactures a huge part of the Cheddar consumed in the UK - some 81,000 tonnes a year. Now I'm stunned to find that the UK manufactures, as the Telegraph tells us, "mozzarella for approximately half of all pizzas eaten in Europe" - and actually that's just one UK mozzarella manufacturer, Glanbia in Wales. 

We face the prospect, with 40% cheese tariffs, that Europe will run out of pizza and Britain will run out of Cheddar. In place of mozzarella, they'll be flooded with EU-made cheddar, and we with Welsh-made mozzarella to grate on our baked spuds. 

Of course none of this will happen because people and firms aren't quite as stupid as politicians and newspapers. Whatever happens from November 1st, Europe will get its pizzas. 

'Welsh schoolgirl wins contest to create Welsh Pizza' - Wales Online

Saint Greta: We should all travel by J-class yacht

Older readers may recall the last of the J-class yachts of past years; enormous, ocean-going yachts that could accommodate a pair of chesterfield sofas in the saloon, the world's most exclusive rich persons toys, built of solid Honduran Mahogany (now virtually extinct) Teak (under threat) and brass.

The parents of Saint Greta are planning a US tour for her to help establish the global Saint Greta brand and monetise ascetic environmentalism. The problem is, Saint Greta doesn't fly. And a Cunard liner sends the wrong message - all that dirty marine oil. So she's setting the perfect example - we must all in future do as she will do, and cross the pond in a J-class.

Saint Greta will undergo the privations of a primitive luxury yacht

J-class vessels are being built anew, from steel and aluminium, both of which cost a paltry 2 tonnes of CO2 per tonne to make, or GRP, the unsustainable unrecyclable blight of a thousand boatyards where old hulls have been dumped.

With a ten day passage time to New York, the new J-class yachts that will need to be built to carry the current 3m passengers a year who currently fly from LHR to JFK will give business to Europe's shipyards for years ahead. Suggestions that this is all just money-grabbing virtue signalling by Saint Greta's parents were strongly denied.

EU Zealots determined to unleash crippling pain on EU27

The Prime Minister has been clear. We were open to a deal, we wanted a deal - a deal that was a mutually agreed amicable parting from the terms of a customs union by advanced democracies. Instead the draft Selmayr-Robbins Treaty was no better than Versailles or Brest-Litovsk, a humiliating subjugation of a beaten enemy. No wonder our MPs, normally undiscerningly coprophagic, would not go into history on record as the Parliament which agreed to this humiliation.

Yet still the EU zealots and their moronic dags pretend even now this poisonous refuse is the agreement reached between the EU and the UK. It is not. Oliver Robbins was a second-tier bureaucrat, a servant of the State - he did not have the power to agree anything. Perhaps the EU officials simply do not understand the non-power of bureaucrats in a functioning democracy. Their paper is as empty, as vacuous and as bereft of merit as that waved by Herr Chamberlain with Mr Hitler's squiggle upon it.

The EU officials will not change their stance. With their six-figure incomes, their lives of remote luxury, their fleet of Zils to shield them from the populace, their personal immunity from the effects on trade and business, they don't care. Their 'principles' cost them nothing. It is the farmers of the Auvergne, the auto workers of Bayern, the vignerons of the Sud who will pay for their zealotry.

The EU have forced no-deal upon us. It's not something we wanted, but the only choice they're prepared to give is to swallow their humiliating surrender document or leave on bad terms. So bad terms it is. We will turn to the anglophone world, to the nations of the Commonwealth, across the oceans rather than across the channel, to the sea routes and lands to which we turned in the time of the eighth Henry, the last time we were excommunicated by a European Union. Oh yes, they've done it before. Last time they caused the nascent founding of the British Empire at the dawn of the 17th century. 

So the government is to launch a £100m advertising campaign to prepare the nation for no deal. We must all work to minimise the effects on this nation of the EU's intransigent zealotry. Yes, they're trying to wound us - but will wound themselves more deeply. As a nation and a union, we're agile enough, resourceful enough and have enough friends around the world to minimise their vindictiveness. Unfortunately for the EU27, the EU cannot say the same.

Britain's stinking corrupt honours system - Barwell to be Lord

Cameron may have knighted his hairdresser, but May will make her failed-MP chum Gavin Barwell a Lord, it's reported. Barwell, who assisted in blocking Brexit for three years, who frustrated the democratic will of the British people, who supported May in trying to inflict the deeply injurious Selmayr-Robbins treaty on the UK, is undeserving of anything more than a swift kick up the arse. The man who looks like a demented hamster - how anyone who looks so unmistakeably murine could ever be elected by anyone is beyond me - is to don ermine.

In doing so he will join the biggest collection of crooked thieves, spivs, mendacious self-lovers, those who have enriched themselves at public expense and political failures in Europe - the House of Lords.

Not only is our honours system befouled and corrupted by the stench of political corruption, our second chamber is filled with the feculent rotting zombie-corpses of the political class, men and women so loathsome, so unemployable, so unendurable that they are barred forever from decent human society.

Politicians befoul and beshit our second chamber and our honours system. It's high time we sent in the bulldozers to clear the putrescent enobled political filth from this gilded place - the Rennards, the Kinnocks, the globalist dags, all those who would deny the democratic will of the British people. Barwell will only be joining the antidemocrats in the Lords who worked with him so diligently to destroy Brexit whilst the dismally inept May was nominally in office.

'Lord' Rennard - google 'Rennard' and 'groping' for the story