The future of air travel

I can predict that 2020 will bring many news stories about air travel. This week we have the saga of Flybe, and the paradox that rail travel is tax subsidised by £29bn a year, road travel by £15bn a year but that passengers of airlines competing with these modes of travel within the UK must pay through the ticket price to build their own airports, buy and operate their own aircraft without subsidy and allow the operators to collect additional taxes from passengers to boot in the form of APD. Despite the predictable whines from the rest of the industry, the government has agreed to give Flybe a pause by postponing tax due.

Then there's saving the planet. St Greta avoided air travel by crossing the Atlantic in a large private yacht, but that's not an option available to many. The wealthy and virtuous have the option of booking passenger cabins on merchant vessels - these have been a little known secret for many years but are hardly a substitute for business travellers. I suppose we could tax air travel back to the ticket prices of the 1960s to discourage use, but this would need to be a global initiative.

Then there's airport expansion and nuisance. Heathrow rows haven't even seriously started yet, and not a single elderly home counties lady has yet chained herself to the bulldozers. And we've yet to see the egregious Meghan Markle flying back first class long haul to LHR and forcing her limos through hordes of climate change and anti-runway demonstrators to attend a conference on saving the planet.

That's the problem with air travel - we all use it, many of us even depend on it, but few of us like it in the way we like trains, for example. We hate the budget airlines and their cash scams, for which Flybe are one of the worst offenders, but continue to book their seats.

Just what is the future of air travel?

Update 08.43
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Matt nails it -

Manchester still has one newspaper worthy of the name

Manchester once had a brave and crusading newspaper edited by CP Scott. The Manchester Guardian was libertarian, reformist, anti-establishment in stance and valued journalistic integrity. If it were published today, it would probably be my go-to newspaper, but sadly it exists no longer. A shadow of its former self, it moved to London, became The Guardian, and disavowed its libertarian and reformist stance to become a platform for bigots and cranks and a tool of the new establishment takeover of the UK's state institutions.

During its incubation in Manchester, the Guardian has a sister publication, the Manchester Evening News, founded in 1868, and owned by Guardian Media Group until the sale of the title to Trinity Mirror, now Reach plc, in 2010. It is the MEN that has inherited the crusading honesty of its former press-partner, while the Guardian has become complicit in the lies, cover-ups, distortions, misrepresentation and obfuscation of one of the foulest scandals of this millennium.

The Manchester child sexual abuse scandal is the just the latest in a tsunami of child abuse scandals in the UK that became institutionally embedded as acceptable amongst police, social workers and local politicians. It is the most egregious tale of police and official malfeasance, maladministration and misconduct in public office, and heads must roll and persons must do jail time for the wrongs they did. The bromides of the guilty establishment - "we empathise with the pain you must feel" and "lessons have been learned" - don't work any more. We want prosecutions.

We owe a debt to the Manchester Evening News and the city's mayor Andy Burnham for this story being fully investigated. 

I was in two minds whether to write this piece, as I know the assortment of deeply bigoted comments it is likely to attract. So let me make things clear. This is primarily a story about public officials, the police, the media, local government and many senior figures in government wilfully covering up the most shocking and disgraceful abuse of the most vulnerable in our society. The crimes were carried out by paedophiles, nonces, who also belong in jail. Those officials were covering-up paedophilia.

And this piece is a piece in praise of the upright and the righteous who abandoned their establishment comfort-zone to expose the wrongs. It is not an opportunity to vent vile and disgusting discrimination against the adherents of the Muslim faith or the nationals of a single nation. Or a deluded opportunity to aver that the harassment and victimisation by a convicted street-thug of this minority under the pretence of exposing wrong has any equivalence to the actions of the MEN, Andy Burnham and Maggie Oliver. It does not. So although I'm not closing comments, please be very careful.

Marking our exit from the EU

There will not I think be any evening of television hosted by Jools Holland, with streamers, fizz and jazz bands, on the 31st January to mark our departure from the EU. There will, though, I strongly suspect, be lots of firework displays, which will pose the police with an interesting problem.

The current firework laws allow fireworks only until 11pm other than on Guy Fawkes night, Diwali, Chinese New Year and Christian new year. One of the quirks of the WA is that it specifies midnight on the 31st CET as the exact moment of the UK's departure - 11pm UK time. Technically, fireworks ignited before the hour are quite legal, those exploded after could earn a visit from Plod.

I don't think this will be an issue anywhere outside the most remainery parts of London, in which the victims of Brexit Derangement Syndrome will deluge the Met with phone calls, tweets and emails  complaining about the fireworks. Brexiteers will take a delight I suspect in guerrilla celebrating - sneaking into closed parks and onto open spaces to set off half a dozen rockets after 11pm, then flee. One can understand and sympathise with such actions, and  we could see the skies of the whole of Britain (even Scotland had a substantial Leave minority) lit up in a coruscating display of sound and light.

What we will not hear, it appears, are the bongs of Big Ben. This, I think, is probably right. TPTB have invented a theoretical cost of half a million to ring the bells and that's enough to kill the idea. It is not a good look for any official bodies to appear triumphalist about leaving; our national and state institutions belong just as much to remainers as they do to leavers, and it really wouldn't be right to use them to crow. The fireworks and private celebrations will be quite enough.

Electoral housekeeping

There were many rumours last week of the government bringing forward in the very near future a Bill to tackle some much overdue electoral housekeeping. Two potential changes were outlined in the manifesto - the roll out of voter ID at polling stations, and the ending of the 15 year limit on the entitlement of overseas voters to participate. Two further changes were not mentioned but will be of much greater interest to many people.

The first is postal voting. Formerly restricted to expats and members of HM Forces overseas, and to the housebound sick and disabled, the numbers involved were negligible. Then came Blair's pollution of our democratic institutions. In December the volume reached 38% of all votes cast - of 31.8m votes cast, 12m were postal votes. Objections are twofold. Primarily is the extent to which postal votes can be abused by vote harvesting, personation, coercion or diversion. No reliable figures are available on the extent of this, but then, if abuses were successful, they would not easily be discovered. The introduction of photo ID at polling stations without having restricted postal votes will of course only vastly increase the numbers of postal votes, and we must ask ourselves whether we want an electoral process in which 75% of ballots are cast in a way that evades all the scrutiny, security and transparency of polling stations, votes and boxes. The second and more minor objection is that the act of physically voting - the polling station, poll card, interactions with polling officials and fellow electors, recognition that those voting with you may be voting for another candidate and so on - is in itself a powerful reinforcer of local democratic identity, one of the parade drills of the Little Platoons.

The second change is to initiate a fresh boundary review, but this time based on the existing 650 parliamentary seats rather than the somewhat aged review on Cameron's instructions that sought to reduce the number of seats to 600. The registers of electors on which the Cameron reviews were based are now even further distant, and were Cameron's review to be recast on the 2019 registers it may produce different boundaries. However, fundamentally I object deeply to Cameron's attempts to reduce the numbers of MPs by 50.

In 1922, the first election carried out within our current national borders, we had 615 seats for a population of around 44m. We now have a population of some 66m. In addition, the centralisation of the State since the Great War has meant that MPs now have very much more on which to legislate. Before that time, water, power, gas, health, hospitals, almshouses, welfare, roads, lighting, transport, planning, public health, licencing, education and policing were funded, designed, managed and delivered locally by democratically accountable members and bodies. Whilst I will campaign for parliament to divest itself of many of the powers accreted over a century, we still need 650 MPs - if only for the great reforms that the Prime Minister must introduce to get our nation and people back upon an even keel.

Tarquin's and Jemima's Euro-freebies

You'll have noticed that petulance yesterday hit 9 on the Coogan Scale at the Commons rejection of an amendment that linked the Erasmus scheme to the WA Bill. Soyboys and snowflakes across the land swooned in grief as the great middle-class freebie was left at the future discretion of the government. Let's take a quick look.

The following table was published by the EU back in November -

Erasmus has a budget of about €16.45bn for the 2014-2020 programme period, of which the UK currently pays around 11% or €1.81bn. From the EU's table above, we get just 3% of Erasmus awards, worth around €0.49bn. We're therefore currently paying around €1.32bn to give the children of other nations a nice freebie - and it's clear that both France and Germany are the nations that benefit most.

Erasmus is the sort of scheme that most benefits kids from ABC1 homes, university top-streamers, those with comfortable parental incomes, kids who can easily master a second European language, with parents with the time and inclination to drop their offspring and their huge rucks at airports, collect them again as required and fill their accounts with spending money. Gap year kids. The privileged offspring of our privileged metropolitan elites.

You might consider this to be both criminal waste and squander and a not very fair use uf UK tax resources. Certainly we should encourage and assist our young people to travel and learn in Europe. We should also ensure we give UK taxpayers value, and we should ensure that young people from all backgrounds, including apprentices and those at tech and vocational schools as well as universities, can fairly and equitably access any grants.

So I'd encourage the government to steel itself to resist the sharp elbows of the middle classes, the petulant whining at the red end of the Coogan Scale and to introduce proposals for participation on fair terms.

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The real news today isn't about a vacuous B-list actress

Sajid Javid will have his work cut out at the Treasury if he is to use government economic intervention to 'even up' the UK. Believe me, I've done my fair share of Treasury funded regeneration schemes; every significant regeneration scheme needs one not only to jump through microeconomic hoops but to provide stuff unheard of in private investment analysis. No Treasury case is complete without adjusting for Optimism Bias in the prescribed fashion and backing one's construction cost estimates with a Monte Carlo analysis of likely contractor bid values. It's all about additionality - sustainable improvements to the UK economy as a whole, and not just Keynsian helicopter money stimulating temporary demand in the economy. So here's what they'll be looking at

Deadweight
This is what would happen anyway, without government intervention. Not as easy to quantify as it appears because it is dynamic; Brexit will release a wave of pent up foreign direct investment, the certainty of a government with a majority will increase business confidence and even the government's policy strategy to intervene to even-up will affect regional investment. Brexit will also catalyse disinvestment decisions from the global corporates, the world's business gypsies, who even now are eying up Serbia for their next plant. Without having a good grasp of the baseline position - the deadweight - you cannot estimate the additionality that economic intervention creates.

Displacement
Up until now wisdom has been that public money is wasted if it just moves the same economic activity from one place to another. What, for example, are the additional economic benefits to the UK of the BBC moving operations from London to Salford? Here is a typical case of a business move motivated by lower factor costs - land, labour, housing and contractors are all cheaper in Manchester than in London, producing real gains for the BBC. If you can get the taxpayer to pay for the new factory, offices, studios or warehouses and enjoy the commercial benefits, brill. Except for the taxpayer, obv, who gains nothing. Sometimes called pork-barrel intervention; building a new plant in Joe Potato's constituency means a plant closing elsewhere.

This will be a critical consideration at the Treasury. Creating growth in the NE, NW, SW and elsewhere that just moves economic activity out of London and the SE is not evening-up but evening-down. And comes perilously close to gerrymandering.

Substitution
Sort of like displacement but within regions, localities or sectors. It's about exchanging economic factor inputs with no additional economic effects. Buying rice rather than potatoes from your local Sainsbury's alters your dinner menu but leaves your carbohydrate consumption unchanged. Employing unemployed workers who come with a government grant only to release an equivalent number of existing staff through redundancy / early retirement may refresh the firm's workforce (or lose scores of years of accumulated experience, depending how you look at it) but creates no additional economic activity. 

The Treasury do recognise that outcomes may be social and environmental as well as primarily economic, but when it comes down to demonstrating additionality, the costs and benefits must always be quantified economically. This is now what Andy Burnham and his colleagues elsewhere in the regions must now set their minds to do; the political rhetoric of the election is over, the hard graft now begins.

And that is the real news, not the vacuous posturing of a publicity obsessed B-movie actress that seems to dominate the press today.

Bangs for our transport bucks

With a £10bn budget this year, Transport for London is a big transport player. In fact the entire budget of the Department of Transport, covering the whole of the UK, is just £25bn. OK, half of TfL's budget is from fare income, but TfL is big. I've seen it go from joining up London buses and underground to an integrated transport service co with state of the art smart ticketing, and a network that includes road, rail, light rail, underground and river services and responsibility for much of the associated infrastructure and road charging. It's actually done pretty well. Most recently, TfL's competence in running the East London Line overground has drummed up a chorus of public calls for the organisation to take over the running of all of London's suburban commuter rail services. The oystercard, and better trains, staffing and stations than the franchised operators mean commuters as far out as Dartford or Gravesend want to be part of the TfL network.

I did quite well personally from London's superb public transport network; expansion (i.e. better travel time distances to central London) put £50k+ on my house, just as Crossrail will do for homeowners along its entire 73 mile length. Businesses of course also benefit greatly; not only from enhanced customer access, but more importantly from enhanced access to staff, who can use multi-mode transport for their work journey. It works. OK, so TfL is good. So what?

Well, if you're reading this from Manchester, or Nottingham, or Peterborough, you'd have got the point already. This is from a Commons library report, now a little old

If you add London and the South-East together, this bit of our geography gets 38% of the national spend on transport. No wonder it's quite good.

It does also call into question as to who will benefit if HS2 goes ahead. Will these improved north - south travel time distances benefit folk in Birmingham as much as they do folk in London? And what of those who want to travel east-west outside of London? From Liverpool to Leeds, say?

With interest rates close to zero, there is no better time for government infrastructure investment. The problem is in ensuring it's the right investment.

Labour leadership - the gift that keeps on giving

Back in 2015, before I rejoined the Conservative Party I should add, I paid £3 as a 'registered supporter' to vote for Jeremy Corbyn as the new Labour leader. It was probably the best £3 I have ever spent; I helped to make Labour unelectable, helped them lose three elections in a row and helped to destroy a party that posed the biggest challenge to Brexit. Job done.

My loathing for the Blair-Brown cabal and the damage they had caused to our democracy overshadowed any concerns I had about Corbyn. We are only now in a position to unwind some of Blair's damage and to start repairing the place. I will not be paying £25 this time around to play with Labour again; it is pointless.

Two-thirds of the public have never heard of any of the Labour candidates; a has-been depressive with a face as long as a snake's arse, a purse-mouthed mekon, the fat lady, the cleaning woman, the plank. Not one of them with the charisma to lead a darts team. Behind them a pool of fools more interested in viciously fighting eachother for power than championing the British people; Lansman, Seamus Milne, the little Owen boy, Cohen, the militants, Trots, Fabians and prosecco classes.

One of these lefty rags published over the weekend the sort of throwback article of the sort favoured by Socialist Worker; Tory cuts, Tory destruction of the workers,Tory hatred of the North. It was illustrated by this photograph, captioned 'Ten years of Tory cuts';

With thanks to my new-found picture searching skills, I identified it as of Alfreton Road in Nottingham, a solid Labour council for generations. BTL comments from Nottingham residents had much criticism of the Labour city council's mismanagement of the commercial centre, lack of support for business and innovation, and suffocating municipal socialism. In other words of Labour cuts, Labour destruction of the workers, Labour hatred of the North. They should have captioned it 'Ten years of Labour neglect'.

We've destroyed Labour in parliament. Now we should remove their scourge from the town halls, and truly liberate the British people; those shops should be hipster start-ups, pop up restaurants, print-makers' galleries or the scores of other businesses that bloom and flourish under good local economic management. The waste of good buildings with life left in them is criminal - and Labour are the criminals. Let's turf them out altogether.

Crane-hangers and Head-choppers. Again.

The events of the Falklands war are now exactly equidistant between the present and the second world war. For many of you, as for me, for whom the Sun's front pages, the news of the sinking of Sheffield announced by Ian McDonald in sombre tones, the taking of Stanley, are as fresh as yesterday's breakfast, that will come as a shock. Sir Henry Leach, our Falklands First Sea Lord, actually saw active service in WWII. The current FSL, Tony Radakin, wasn't even commissioned until 1990, eight years after the Falklands.

I throw that in to demonstrate how rapidly the civilian experience of war passes; the jingoism, flag waving, anxious dedication to news output, simple emotions and sense of loss at every setback, shared grief for our inevitable losses. Somehow the 2003 Gulf war didn't count- perhaps it was too easy, or over too quickly, or had too little public support or absent innate rightness to count. So we have whole generations now on social media who not only missed the Falklands experience but who would be hard pushed to point to Iran on a map first-try. It's not much consolation that our domestic ignorance is likely a little less than the ignorance of Americans in this respect; No, that's Colombia. That's Nigeria. Whoa, now not even the right hemisphere. My generation will not only be largely able to stick a finger on the land of the crane-hangers first time but to name the seven nations it borders, or at least four of them.

Not only are we civilians as a whole less capable of expertise and of balanced judgement, more ignorant of geography and of geopolitics, but everyone now feels utterly entitled to call themselves an expert; the Tik Tok (I bet you haven't even heard of it) generation, who are also convinced the planet has caught fire and will burn up by next Thursday, have now convinced themselves that WW3 is here*, and war will destroy us all before climate change. By Wednesday, say. There is nothing that can be said to them to convince them otherwise.

Well, the proxy war between the crane-hangers and the head-choppers in which we and the US have been caught in the middle has taken a new turn; the Donald may actually now succeed in pulling US forces out of Iraq and Syria, assisted by the Iraqi parliament, allowing them to assault eachother directly. Let them get on with it. Saudi oil is less important for the US; as soon as it reaches $60bbl the US frackers come on stream.

So no great pronouncements from me today. Let's watch this one. Calmly, as we do.

*As does the Daily Express - which I always imagined anyway was written for teenagers.

Planning for the impact of AI

If you searched the manifestos of the parties in the election just gone for their AI policies, you will have been disappointed. Apart from Brexit, the news issues were little different from those in 1997 or even in 1979. But AI was there - as a trap for the unwary.

John McDonnell stepped on a mine when his September conference pledge to reduce the working week to 4 days came back to haunt him; I suspect this started as an option for dealing with the effects of AI in some sectors as an alternative to redundancy for 20% of the workforce, but of course it became a source of ridicule. Combined with a pledge to increase public sector pay by 5% immediately, social media filled with memes from delighted NHS workers, train drivers, prison officers and judges at the largesse of the Messiah. Labour tried to counter by saying the 4-day week would not apply to the NHS, only to immediately create hostility amongst half a million Labour voters. Then they did the sensible thing and disowned it, pointing out that it was not a manifesto pledge.

McDonnell is of course a fool. He assumed that the UK would naturally capture the benefits of the changes brought by AI as well as the costs in lost jobs and GDP. Additional wealth and profitability, in McDonnell's imagination, could afford to pay the same wage bill for 20% fewer hours. This is not a safe assumption. Globalism may ensure that the 1% do well out of such changes, but it's also meant that economic benefits have not been wider, and have actually disadvantaged many of the traditional Labour voting areas that wisely chose not to trust McDonnell's economic illiteracy. The risk now is that the benefits of the AI revolution will go to the same nations that have benefited so greatly from Globalism - China, India, Brazil. Managing AI changes must be at the very forefront of our national strategy, and Brexit will ensure that we, as a nation, are agile enough to develop a policy free of the drogue of a sclerotic EU riddled with the self-interests of 27 players.

If the PM is to keep his pledge to all those ex-labour voters, we must drive AI with a determination.

Hence, for those of you who read the full-fat version of this blog with its sidebar, you will have seen a new blog entry from Dominic Cummings pop up yesterday evening in the blogroll. It's all over the papers this morning in a way that a government job advert from a sad HR department would never be - and hasn't cost taxpayers a single penny for half-page display ads in the Guardian or whatever. It demonstrates beyond doubt that despite the almost universal absence of AI from the election manifestos, it's right at the top of the government's agenda. And that is very reassuring indeed.

Cummings' dog training classes

The Telegraph reports on a planned reform of the higher levels of the civil service. We don't know what working relationship has developed between the PM, Dominic Cummings and Mark Sedwill over the past four months or so, but the fact that he still retains the triple crown of National Security Adviser, Head of the Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary clearly indicates that there is some sort of accommodation. Sedwill's role will be crucial in determining whether civil service reform is just changing the curtains or whether it will materially alter a service that was developed to meet the needs of the first industrial revolution, codified in 1870 by the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, and has remained essentially the same since.

The story attributes to Dominic Cummings that 

He has already made it clear in private that he will no longer stand for a culture in which it is seen as acceptable for senior officials to go on holiday the day before the announcement of a policy they have been working on for six months. 

Well, I have some considerable experience of that behaviour. They also go on leave (they won't call it holiday) immediately prior to any important decision being taken, any project key date or any critical deadline. Dubai is one of their favourite destinations - just far enough away to prevent vexatious recall, but just cheap enough to not raise questions about their wealth. In fact I'd be astonished if they haven't already developed some sort of civil service club there. It is quite deliberate, and they think it's quite clever. As soon as they know a key date in the project cycle, they book their tickets and get their leave signed-off.

My own attitude to civil service reform is neither vindictive nor self-defeating. I have a cousin who cannot control his dog; he holds a senior post, is a qualified lawyer, a good husband and decent father but the dog is in charge, to the extent that it has had to be fitted with a muzzle. It can never be let off the lead and is unsocialised with anyone outside the family. I see the civil service as like a dominant dog - capable of great affection, with the potential of great loyalty and selfless service and duty, but which will be fulfilled only when it recognises that it is not the master, but the dog. For dogs, it is only having a master that brings true happiness.

I wish Mr Cummings every success.  

A final roll of schadenfreude for 2019

If I have a new year resolution it is to heed the PM's plea to put the bitter Leave / Remain divides behind us and to consign the word Brexit to history. In one month we will leave the EU, and that act will kick-start the healing and reconciliation. However, for now, for this last day of the troublesome teens, let's look back with schadenfreude -

Tony Blair
A man who did his utmost to frustrate Brexit, making visits to the UK's EU adversaries and encouraging them to block and frustrate his own nation's diplomatic efforts. Fortunately, so hated is Blair by all sides of the political spectrum, the Remain side ignored all his pleas to deny Boris an election.

Andrew Adonis & AC Grayling
Both were early victims of Brexit Derangement Syndrome, each starting the Brexit process with an intact and valuable public reputation but ending the decade with their lifetime's reputational achievements in ashes, as mocked and derided figures of ridicule whom absolutely no-one will take seriously in the future

John Bercow
Stripped of his power, the victims of bullying, long suffering Commons staff and all who were subject to his gross unpleasantness will be breathing a sigh of relief at Bercow's fall. While noting he really didn't have that great a height from which to tumble. Bercow is now reduced to Italian game shows and entertaining shoppers on the Clapham omnibus. Ld Lisvane, who suffered little Bercow's bullying as Clerk of the Commons until 2014, cannot be looking forward to the sanctimonious dwarf's seemingly inevitable elevation to the Lords.

Grieve, Gaulk, Soubry et al 
Purged from the Party, humiliated at the ballot box, the miracle is that these narcissistic idiots imagined that people voted for them personally in the first place, rather than for the party for which they purported to stand. How anyone can so delude themselves as to the extent of a non-existent personal popularity defeats me - or perhaps they were willing to undergo this public humiliation, indeed expected it, for the sake of the higher pay-off due from the Commons to defeated MPs than that paid to resigning MPs?

The BBC
Though it has been long building, the BBC's support of every anti-Brexit position, almost in anticipation of the reversal of the 2016 vote, has now condemned it. Polls are now emerging, and will continue to appear, that demonstrate that the BBC has lost the public's trust. Criminalisation of non-payment of the BBC TV tax is now unsustainable, and we will see further major changes before the Charter is due for renewal in 2027.

The Dags - Mark Carney, Barack Obama, the CBI et al
Most dags are now engaged in pretending they never opposed Brexit or never supported Remain at all. Just like all the ordinary members of the NSDAP vanished in 1945, or members of the GDR Communist Party became invisible after 1989. The CBI in particular, having devoted four years fighting Brexit on behalf of the global corps, is now declaring it is 100% behind Boris and always has been.

You'll note I've included none of the capos in Brussels. That, if it comes, will be for this date next year.

In a spirit of non-sectarianism, I have ready both Jamesons and Black Bush, both Catholic and Protestant whisky, in addition to my now favourite Monkey Shoulder blended malt Scotch. I will raise a dram for us all - may we, and may the United Kingdom, have a magnificent 2020!

Localism doesn't mean just devolving rationing

A somewhat boring post title for a subject that will become increasingly important. The centre is under pressure; after having hoarded power for a century, jealously guarding it and snapping-up any developing shoots of Localism, the central State and its bureaucrats cannot now hold it. The dam about to burst, not just in the UK but across Europe, is social care.

When IDS, the architect of the UC scheme, unveiled his proposals, I wrote that he was creating an unworkable behemoth. Far better to devolve welfare down to as local a level as possible, almost back to the principles of the first Elizabethan poor laws if necessary, to anchor both the costs (tax) and spend right down to the communities in which help is needed. This is anathema to a central State whose reason for being is to act as a substitute parent to citizens from whom it has taken our intermediate institutions. You've all read my excerpts from Robert Nisbet's writings on the subject and in 2020 I'll bring them back, along with de Tocqueville and others.

The first stage reaction of central States to the pressures has been to devolve just the rationing decision - saying in effect "Here's the cake. There's no more. Now you ration it out". The roles of local government and the NHS are being merged, children's social work is now merged with education. The government is carefully hypothecating increased NHS spend into hospitals and nurses knowing health service managers will still use whatever opportunities they have to divert clinical care money into social care services - care homes, home helps and home nursing of the elderly. The Telegraph carries a story this morning that is surely the tip of the iceberg, of NHS managers charging relatives £300 a day to 'assist' their care applications. The Express carries another - this time the EU devolving the rationing decision on food bank support.

IDS is a fine chap with the highest ideals and best intentions, but he was not the Dominic Cummings that welfare reform needs. With UC he has given us an unintentional monster that needs an unacceptable level of central State tax take to function adequately. It is unsustainable.

I believe it will only work when local communities are given the power to make 'time or tax' decisions themselves - whether to resource the needs of the elderly, sick and disabled in those communities by sharing the care duties or paying tax to employ others to do it, and to decide the balance, for there will always be one, between time and tax. That needs a Localism big bang the pressure for which will continue building during the roaring twenties. Hold on to your hats.

Economic Dream Team and national dishonour

Why has the Netherlands been so successful? A large part of the place is below sea level, built on reclaimed land, it has no natural resources or mineral wealth, no source of energy, no great natural agricultural advantage and they speak a language that sounds like hawking phlegm. Yet their per capita GDP places them amongst the wealthiest in the world, and in terms of economic freedom they're at the top of the index, along with Switzerland, the UK, Ireland and Iceland. Their courts are un-corrupt, they have a monarchy and a proud history of plucky adventuring, once even sending a fleet of ships up the Thames to destroy the English fleet.

The answer of course is trade, commerce, secondary processes that add value, shipping and above all wide horizons that allow the Dutch to punch above their weight. Chemicals, petroleum refining, electrical engineering, banking and a scientifically productive horticulture and intensive agriculture sector all make the best of the Netherlands' greatest asset - the Dutch. They even enlisted cannabis and prostitutes into the tax economy.

The fact that the Netherlands seem firmly fixed within the EU is our loss and the EU's gain.

In response to the EU's veiled threats to block UK financial services from operating in the EU post-Brexit, a suggestion has resurfaced to form an FinAlliance between the UK, Switzerland, Singapore and HK. It's perfectly feasible, and it must worry at least 26 of the 27. But imagine what such an alliance would be if it included the Netherlands.

Dishonours
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Again, the reward of the deserving has been fouled and besmirched by the awards of honours to the undeserving, those deficient of either exceptional merit or great worth to the nation. Sally Davies, chief health fascist, Alison Saunders, failed and vindictive prosecutor and Melanie Dawes, Jonathan Jones and John Manzoni are either failures or unknown mediocrities and none of them has a place in our national pantheon. The system stinks. Until we clear this meretricious trash from our honours system, the truly deserving will be devalued and befouled by association. 

Last post for Christmas

Change came to the valley this year. Since the days of King Francis' kataster, or land register, made at around the time of the battle of Waterloo, we have got by with a house number and the name of one of three cadastral communities that comprise the postcode. My house was number 40, the next three houses, on the other side of the old mineshaft, were numbers 162, 163 and 164 (they were built in the 1920s) , and the next house, on the old unmetalled track, was number 3, the house of the Deplorables. Every house built since 1815 was given the next available sequential number, irrespective of location. And our cadastral village is three miles long and a mile wide.

The system never caused the slightest problem locally, as everyone knows where everyone else lives anyway, and the postman's job is a lifetime sinecure, held for three generations by the same family. It was the internet that killed it. Rumour has it that an Amazon delivery driver from Graz, a decent man called Kemal who just wanted to finish his round and return home to the warmth of his family, was found sobbing in his vehicle at 11pm, having spent seven hours trying to locate number 67. Ah, they nodded when he had shown them his clipboard. The Huber house. It's down an unmarked forest track.

So we now have some sixty street names each with a geographically sequential run of numbers, and this being Austria the change went smoothly if somewhat unorthodoxly. It's still not quite fair, many feel, on the city boys who drive the internet vans; they have a fear of the high valleys, and not just in a Deliverance banjo-twanging way. The little GPS satellite high in the sky guiding them to their destination is often unreliable in the forest. And we actually do have well-established populations of bears, wolves and lynx - a cause of pride to us, but a source of fear to a city boy navigating an unsurfaced mountain road at 6kph with the Spruce boughs brushing the sides of their van.

The official figures have just been published like a sort of tierwelt league table; bears have taken 35 sheep this year, wolves only 4. The Land employs an expert called Roman, the Wolfsbeauftragter, with a helpline number, whom one calls to take DNA samples from any scraps of your sheep that remain uneaten. The State hunters' association must by law pay compensation for livestock killed by bears, lynx or wolves, even though the species are protected and cannot be shot by the hunters. It's a very Austrian thing. Before DNA testing many farmers were reputed to messily kill their own sick and worthless sheep and blame it on the local bear in order to pocket the generous (80€ per ewe) compensation. Our local bear has already destroyed several hives and taken a sheep from a small herd of Suffolk blackfaces (they really are - what are the chances of that?) at the bottom of the valley, so our sheepholding neighbours here are paying students home for the holidays to guard their stock.

Back to house numbers. I had, I thought, let everyone back in the UK know that my address had changed, but of course several Christmas cards have arrived with the old address. No problem. The postman will operate both systems until he retires, and he's still a comparatively young man. Frau Fuchs regrets slightly that number 3, our oldest house, now has a more anonymous number, but it's of little consequence to its occupants, our own Deplorables.

The house itself is an old farmhouse built of massive larch timbers and dating back to the 1600s. In the UK it would be as desirable as a Georgian parsonage, but here, where the old is scorned, and old houses are unwanted (hence me buying my own gorgeous 17th century mine-owners house for a song) it has been converted into three apartments, that are let cheaply to three single men, all white-beards, whom I have come to call the Deplorables.

They live together quite amicably, and once or twice a week one of them takes it in turn to take the local drunk-taxi, the Gomobil, down to the Spar to restock with beer. The rear of the van is loaded with crates of empties (one gets money back on crates and bottles - shops have automatic machines into the base of which one pushes a crate of empties which disgorges a little credit ticket to be redeemed at the till) and it waits outside the shop while the elderly delegate wobbles a trolley stacked with full crates out of the door. The rough track to the church runs through the farm, as of yore, and the old boys keep some chickens and goats in shanty sheds on one side with the house on the other. They have an elderly and somewhat toothless dog who barks but is afraid to approach closer than about six feet. I suppose he frightens some people - delivery drivers, probably. I like them. They are always beaming, always ready to exchange words or a cheery wave, and they annoy the more puritanical local OCD obsessives who disparage the drinking, the untidiness of the little stables and the animal turds, a rebelliousness which I perhaps admire most of all. They have perhaps achieved that wisdom of years which focuses on what is really important in life.

It wasn't until yesterday, sitting in quiet companionship over a beer down at the pub, chuckling at comments thrown out with the expert comic timing that develops amongst drinking buddies, that it occurred to me. In a real-world mirror of the crib outside the church, we had the elements of the nativity amongst us; in the sky above, the twinkling GPS satellite guiding the way, on the hills shepherds were watching the sheep, and the three wise men, between beers, felt the warm breath of the goats in their byre. All we lack is a pregnant virgin. But this is Austria, and I have come to be surprised by nothing, and we have two days to go.

With all my sincere best wishes to every one of you, I'm signing off now for a few days. Have a wonderful Christmas, all!

Radders  

The pushback against anti-democracy

With apologies for intruding on our warm glow of satisfaction at the election result (for many of us,if not all), today I have a reminder that it will take another ten years to unwind the damage that Theresa May caused at the Home Office. Her survival strategy when Home Secretary was to hide, disguise, obfuscate and frustrate, to obstruct scrutiny as far as was possible, and when the blame was getting too close, to throw underlings under the bus. 

It was Theresa May, you will recall, who was responsible for importing into Britain 35-year old 'child' refugees complete with beards and middle aged crows feet. I submitted a request under FOI for a copy of the guidance issued by the Home Office to immigration officers in identifying these child migrants. The usual delays and requests for clarification spun out their overdue response to a year before the Information Commissioner took up the case; the Home Office then ignored the Information Commissioner's ruling, and instruction to provide the information. I was just about booking the flight to London to give evidence in the High Court in a case to be brought by the ICO when the Home Office gave way, and provided a glossy DTP'd booklet. The only problem was, it bore a publication date after the date of my FOI request, and after all those adult 'children' had already been admitted. I gave up.

The next one I won't give up. The new select committee chairs will shortly be announced and I will be following closely any calls for evidence by the Home Affairs Select Committee with interest. This time it's the strategy Mrs May developed with regard to the National Crime Agency. The NCA has spent a considerable amount of our tax money in producing glossy, advertorial 'annual reports' describing how brilliant it is, what a huge threat the general public poses to the State, and how they need even more power. The problem is, some of the information given in last year's NCA wankfest was misleading - seemingly deliberately so. I submitted an FOI request to the Home Office, the NCA's parent. No can do, came the response. The NCA enjoys a total exemption from FOI requests on security grounds. Fine, I said, it's not about operational policing matters, it's about inaccuracies and misleading presentation of statistics already in the public domain in the annual report. Who answers for this publication? No-one. Not the Home Office and not the NCA. They could spend a million of tax money issuing glossy brochures telling us that women with unibrows should be subject to surveillance and not one member of the public, not one journalist, not one taxpayer can challenge it. It stinks. And it's got Theresa May's smug inept fingerprints all over it. Hide. Disguise. Obfuscate. Frustrate.

While the EU has not been responsible for Mrs May's dreadful tenure of the Home Office, it has I think been responsible for encouraging our unelected government officials in this impertinence against public scrutiny. They've learned bad ways from Brussels. The abolition of the LCD by the federast Blair and the creation of a Euro-style Ministry of Justice was surely just a first step towards a national police force under the command of the Justice Minister, and the complete disassociation from democratic and local control of our citizen constables.

Charles Moore writes a good piece in the Telegraph today, covering also the intrusion by the courts into matters that are democratic. Sometimes precipitated by well-funded saboteurs of the democratic process such as Gina Miller, sometimes by the dangers of compliance with 'dynamic' frameworks of law under which judges - and not even domestic ones - instead of Parliament continually modify and update the extent and effect of our statutes. Lord Sumption, in this year's Reith lectures, although himself a Remainer, deprecated this growth of 'lawfare' and the intrusion of unelected authority into the democratic process. Moore has a straightforward remedy - to row-back on Blair's pollution of our well-developed state institutions.

The obvious safeguard for reform – this is me speaking, not Professor Ekins – would be to restore in full the rights of the Lord Chancellor, which Tony Blair, in a careless piece of sofa government one weekend, threw away.

By a very British paradox, the age when, through the Lord Chancellor, the government theoretically had complete power over appointing judges was also the age in which there was least politicising of those appointments. Judges judged, and politicians did politics. Now we can get back to that.

Update - 50p coins
==============
On my post of 18th December I hoped that we would see the re-issue of the Brexit 50p coins. The government were ahead of me. The coins were approved by the Queen in Council on the 17th and millions will be released into circulation at the end of next month. Well Done! Carry on.  

A typhoon is blowing through government

In the latter part of the 19th century, our legislators realised that government was seriously lagging the monumental changes to the Britain outside SW1. Britain had revolutionised but government was stuck in the past. Actually it was originally, from 1858, just SW. That postal coding in itself was one of the tsunami of reforms, legislative clearing-out, organising and administrative innovations that brought Whitehall into line with a world of trains, post, telegraphs, new towns and cities and the popular press. It all meant that the cobwebs of governance that had accumulated through centuries had to be swept away. The Palace of Westminster itself was rebuilt, and a rank of grand new Portland stone facades hubristic with Imperial pride thrust their chests out onto Whitehall. That's the scale of change it felt like yesterday - no wonder Corbyn looked so glum! Momentum is now definitely owned by the Conservatives (sorry, Owen) and when the great flywheel of state reaches speed, inertial forces will take the nation forward with stunning power. This session of Parliament may last little more than a year - by the Spring of 2021 the government aims to have enacted

• European Union Withdrawal Bill
• Agriculture Bill
• Fisheries Bill
• Trade Bill
• Immigration Bill
• NHS Funding Bill and NHS Long Term Plan
• Medicines and Medical Devices Bill
• Health Service Safety Investigations Bill
• Social Care Reform
• Education reform
• Broadband legislation
• Air Traffic Management and Unmanned Aircraft Bill
• Airline insolvency legislation
• Railways minimum service legislation
• Rail reform and High Speed Rail 2 (West Midlands - Crewe) Bill
• National Security and Investment Bill
• Science, space and research framework
• English devolution
• Employment Bill
• Housing and renters legislation
• Building and fire safety legislation
• Crackdown on terrorists
• Sentencing reform
• Serious violence measures
• Online Harms Bill
• Police powers
• Helen’s law
• Domestic abuse and divorce reform
• Extradition, foreign offenders and espionage legislation
• Victims’ law and Royal Commission
• Environment and animal welfare bill
• Climate change Bill
• Constitutional reform
• Armed forces maintenance

That's quite some programme.

Only one face looked less than ecstatic on the government benches - JRM. He looked in fact as though he'd been given advance warning that he was unlikely to survive on the Treasury bench beyond the February big Cabinet reshuffle. Or perhaps he was merely confused by all the novel regional voices behind him, some of which he could not perhaps quite understand.

Bigoted thugs? No thanks.

The Conservative party is a broad church, and I am happy with the socially liberal membership policies of the party which are backed by an unequivocal set of membership rules that exclude any manifestation of racism, bigotry or discrimination based on class, caste, colour or sexuality. It does mean there are certain folk with whom I would not feel comfortable having in the party. Members and supporters of the 'Britain First' fascist movement  are among those for whom our party should offer no shelter from the collapse of the far-right. There is, to be frank, no place in our party for any of these thugs - and suggestions in the Indescribablyawful that BF members have been encouraged to infiltrate the party must be taken seriously. You're not wanted.

Fascist thugs - Not wanted in the Conservative Party

This was a problem that faced Nigel when he set up BrexitCorp™, and one of the reasons he structured it as he did, with no members to embarrass him as they had done in UKIP, just contributors and supporters who could be easily disowned if exposed in the media. Largely it has worked, and he's managed to keep the entryist fascists at arms length.

One or two try to creep in under the wire. In Scotland ex-UKIP MEP David Coburn tried to sneak into the Conservative Party using the online application - but was quickly rumbled, and his membership rapidly invalidated by Scottish leader Jackson Carlaw. They've heard enough nasty remarks from this chap in the past under his UKIP coat.

Ooot - David Coburn

Labour made the mistake of making the fascists welcome in their party. Didn't turn out well.

Update 19.30
==========
BF capo Paul Golding, jailed twice in the last 5 years for religiously aggravated harassment, also applied for party membership, and has also been rejected. The ES has the story.

BF Thug Golding - also ooot.

The return of Internationalism?

Reading the newspapers this week has been not unlike Christmas day as a small child - not quite knowing which present to open next, whether to succumb to the intoxicating interest of the one just opened or move to unwrapping another. It's almost as though all those childhood Christmasses were just training for the utter, pervading exhilaration of this election victory. 

Among this cornucopia of bliss, dear readers, I bring you just one snippet this morning. That Boris has instructed his ministers to stay away from Davos this year. Davos, the home of globalism, of the world's supranationalists, the world government and world finance oligarchs, at whose feet pygmies such as Blair and Mandelson grovel in obeisance, a Soros-fest for the 1%. I'm convinced half the British public still confuse it with Davros, leader of the Daleks, the enemy of human civilisation.

The Telegraph quotes Boris from 2016

"It is in a sense a struggle between people who want to take back control, and a small group of people who do very well out of the current system and who know Christine Lagarde and can go “mwah mwah” with her at Davos, or whatever it happens to be. Of course they’re going to be in favour of the system."

Does that mark a return for Britain to Internationalism, to free trade, commerce, mutual prosperity but national independence for the UK? Brexit doesn't mean less interaction with the rest of the world - it means more. It means extending our friendships and sending out our commercial gents across the globe - and I'm sure we will shortly see the re-issue of that 50p piece and its heartening message

 Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations

No Davros this year for Conservatives

The joy of Engineering

One of my friends here is an engineering graduate of the prestigious TU Wien - the technical university. It markets itself as the European centre of technical excellence. Academic standards and demands on students there really are extremely high. It's a joy to talk in the language of Newtons - or Pascals, as they both quantify the same 9.81 - with someone whose face doesn't cloud over in blank incomprehension. But there's a gulf between us. A month or so ago in my workshop, in answer to a question, I said "about three eighths". Being British of a certain age I have no problem seamlessly moving between metric and imperial. He reached for his mobile phone calculator and tried to recall the complex equation he'd been taught for such conversions. "Twenty five point four divided by eight times three" I threw out. "No!" he was genuinely upset "You're ... mixing them! You can't mix them!". "Sorry" I apologised "I learned my engineering in Doncaster, not Wien". This is the same friend who answered, when I asked what the German was for 'over-engineered', and after he had solemnly consulted google, that there was no such term in the German language.

It confirmed what I'd long known - that I'd learned my engineering from the finest teachers in the world, the mechanical and electrical engineers who had been nurtured themselves by the National Coal Board from apprentices to graduates and post-graduates to Chartered Engineers. They had spent their time underground amidst the heat and piss and muck as well as their time in the lecture rooms. Neither did we soft would-be young quarry engineers pose them any challenge. "My name is Gerald Alass" announced one mech. eng. lecturer  on his first day "Some call me all-arse. I don't mind that. It takes a big 'ammer to drive a big nail."  I pray today please, please, let these people still exist - we need them now more than ever.

William Hague in the Telegraph - whom I think it's now safe to read again,if he's been purged of his Remainerism by Boris' victory, writes today

Alongside investing capital in infrastructure, we need the growth of human capital. Your problem, if you’re sitting in Rotherham, is not just that you can’t travel quickly to an international business based in Manchester. It is also that you probably don’t have the right expertise when you get there.

Universities have done much to bring more dynamism to many northern cities, but we all know by now that we are not short of graduates. British industry complains continually of shortages of technical and digital skills. And if we are going to build so much infrastructure, tens of thousand of additional people with construction skills will be needed. A decisive change in our woeful record of promoting vocational skills, both for young people and adults who need retraining, is the vital ingredient for rescuing millions of people from being left behind by technological change.

This is where ministers need to be more ambitious than their manifesto. Many laudable commitments were in there – 20 institutes of technology, a new National Skills Fund, and a requirement to use UK apprentices on infrastructure projects. But in the forthcoming reorganisation of government departments, and any reshuffle of ministers, this ought to be a prime focus. The country needs a revolution in the esteem accorded to technical studies, the ease with which anyone can move between skills training and higher education, and the ability of current workers to use the same system.

A voice on the radio yesterday whose name I can't recall suggested we need also a prestigious and world-class institution of our own of the sort that TU-Wien aspires to be - an MIT, a Manchester Institute of Technology. I fully support that. We already have either 4 or 5 universities in the global top 20 - whilst the entire EU27 has exactly none. While the US has both the original MIT and CalTech in the global top 10, our contenders are Oxford and Cambridge - institutions that may produce competent civil servants, but won't win the UK the international tech race.

And at the risk of sounding Northist, this human capital formation will best take place north of a line drawn from Bristol to the Wash. Sorry, but it just will.