Capturing the benefits of the AI revolution

Our people and our economy face a triple whammy over the next ten years or so. Firstly are the effects of globalisation we are already experiencing - the 'elephant' mentioned in the comments to the post below, and the uncorrected distortions from the 2008 crash that have left large cohorts of our people worse off but highly taxed. Secondly will be the whirlwind of the coming downturn, for which the banks are better prepared than a decade ago but the British people are not, now carrying record levels of personal indebtedness. As QE is winding down, China slowing, bond market manipulation reaching its peak and the Eurozone intensely vulnerable to shocks it all seems to be coming together for next year. However, if we are to have another 1931, remember it wasn't all bad news; the boom in domestic demand for electrical goods and motor vehicles helped shift British manufacturing from steam and rivets to the industrial infrastructure needed for a war economy a few years later.

The third blow of the whammy will come from the effects of AI. I recommend a report from pwc that takes a middle course between the low and high estimates of AI impact on UK jobs - which range from  10% to 47%. Pwc guess that 30% of UK jobs will go in the next 15 years, and the report does a fair job of rationalising the losses. However, it's what the report doesn't say that's important.  

Unequal impact
AI will hit those with lower levels of education and skills disproportionately - 47% of the low skilled losing their jobs in the analysis above compared to 10% of graduates. The C1,C2,D&E cohorts have already been hard hit by globalisation effects, and are coping with a purchasing power significantly reduced in the last decade. AI changes will kick these cohorts when they are already down. In addition to making the worst-hit even worse-off, AI will increase inequality between the flexible, mobile, literate metropolitan elites dominating the media, politics and public administration and the disadvantaged - with the elite groups potentially being able to take substantial economic advantage of AI.

Tax and wealth impacts
AI isn't coming because of some sort of historical inevitability, but because it offers economic advantages in increasing productivity. Pwc and others assume blandly that the benefits of increased productivity can be captured by taxation and increased GDP, the wealthy global graduate metropolitan elites buying ever more advanced iPhones, or eating ever more diversely-sourced curries. However, no consideration is given as to WHERE these benefits are captured - and if globalisation is left unchecked, it is quite feasible that AI will be the Elephant Mark II.

The great challenge for UK governments of the next two decades will be to ringfence changes to the UK by balancing a 30% job reduction with a concomitant increase in UK GDP and UK tax-take - for this compelling need alone we must be free from EU restrictions and governance, and free to set our own tax and tariffs. Without action we will drift into a game-plan run by the global corporates for their own advantage - with the job losses and their costs borne by the UK, but the benefits, GDP and tax takes enjoyed elsewhere. The only domestic beneficiaries from ungoverned change will be the same establishment elites that have already done well from globalisation, at the expense of their fellow Britons. 

New models of social benefit 
I've yet to write a third in this mini-snapshot series to cover Localism, democracy and governance and don't want to trespass on next week's thoughts. But It's already clear that AI impacts to the economy will need fundamental reform to the way in which we tax and spend. I'll leave it to the Pwc report to introduce the options ..

(Social safety nets could be enhanced) by extending existing social security benefits, but more radical solutions include the idea of a universal basic income (UBI). This is an old idea, but it has gained traction in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in recent years as a potential way to maintain the incomes of those who lose out from automation and (to be hard headed about it) whose consumption is important to keep the economy going. The problem with UBI schemes, however, is that they involve paying a lot of public money to many people who do not need it, as well as those that do. As such the danger is that such schemes are either unaffordable or destroy incentives to work and generate wealth, or they need to be set too low to provide an effective safety net.

Nonetheless, we are now seeing practical trials of UBI schemes in a number of countries around the world including Finland, the Netherlands, some US and Canadian states, India and Brazil. The details of these schemes vary considerably, and it is beyond the scope of this report to review them in depth, but it seems likely that more pilot schemes of this kind will emerge around the world and that they will come on to the policy agenda in countries such as the UK as well. While UBI in its pure form may not be politically or economically attractive, some variants on it might be if they involve a greater degree of conditionality (e.g. requiring some form of paid or voluntary work, education and training, family caring responsibilities or similar activities to qualify for payments). Some aspects of the idea, such as providing a universal lifelong learning fund for each person that they could draw down when they needed it, might also be worth considering further even if a full UBI scheme is rejected.

The Causes of Revolution

With a few Brexit gaps in the run up to Christmas, I'd like to look at some of the drivers behind the current hunger for political change and reform. This all started way before the 2008 financial crisis, but it's what has happened since 2008 that has been most telling. The appetite for reform has a number of roots, including but not exclusively

• Increasing inequality
• Living standards down
• People excluded from decision making
• Decline of working class power
• Globalism / AI causing disempowerment
• Cultural loss - damage to cultural identity

A couple of graphs from a recent ONS report -

Take a look at the clusters for the C1,C2,D&E cohorts - APT&C and downwards. You can see a bar at about £30k - £570 a week - and perhaps a little surprisingly, two key cohorts for working-class advancement, skilled trades and factory workers, trapped between the £20k and £30k bands. Neither is the Professional category to which I belong doing so well - in terms of pay at least. Those most at risk of displacement or redundancy by AI are not obvious; robots can carry out knee surgery, but can't cook a curry. Just as many Professional jobs are at risk as factory jobs. 

Now look at what's happened to the Median Wage adjusted for inflation since 2008 - the median wage is just on about £30k / £570 a week in 2018, but worth quite a bit less than the median wage in 2008.

I haven't got the US equivalents, but I suspect they follow the same lines. 

And what have the trillions in QE thrown into the battle since 2008 achieved for the greater part of our people? Nothing. Instead we have seen strong growth in GDP, in asset values, stocks and the most hurtful news to hit the headlines - the wealth of the top 1%. The mass of our people on £570 a week before tax - with tax levels at over 34% of GDP being at their highest in 40 years - simply cannot comprehend the boss of Persimmon 'deserving' a bonus of £75m for the year. It's not even as if he's built that many houses, or even built them to an acceptable standard. 

I really can't blame anyone for feeling angry, frustrated, used or abused. And our political class had better turn their attention to the people who make up the 'median' - and that doesn't mean more vacuous insincere platitudes from the privileged metropolitan elites.

Another Brexit disappointment

Hugely disappointing result tonight.

It confirms that none of the tensions between a largely Remain parliamentary party and a largely Leave party membership are being resolved. This will not go away; Conservative MPs have kicked the can just a few metres down the road, and their spineless self-interest will return to haunt them.

Brexit has been two and a half years of disappointments and losses since the vote. Tonight is no different. 

Peckers up. New battle tomorrow.

On Tenterhooks ...

Well, we're underway.

By 10pm UK time we'll know if we're lumbered with a time-expired failure of a PM to further drag the nation into chaos, despair and division, or whether my Party's MPs are giving the nation a fair chance of coming out of this with something salvaged. 

The ERG will settle on a single candidate. One Brexiteer MUST be on the ballot that will come to we members over Christmas - and I hope to God the Party uses an e-voting option rather than relying on the Christmas post. 

I hope and pray the Lord guides the conduct of our MPs today for the good of our nation and people.

What medication is she on?

It's almost unbelievable. The woman has become the laughing stock of Europe and beyond. And she has the front to pile mendacity upon mendacity without blinking a bovine eyelash. Either her self-delusion is so overwhelming, so all-consuming, that she actually believes the incredible piffle she spouts or she knows she is lying through her arse.

What will it take to drag the bloody woman out of Downing Street? She's already won the accolade of Britain's worst postwar PM, beating even the dire 'a big boy did it and ran away' Brown. 

William Hague breaks from his naked oil-wrestling in the Parliament gym to plead in the Telegraph "The Tories are on the edge of their greatest crisis in modern times - MPs must rally together", an even more incredible plea for members to abandon their consciences, their sense of justice and right, their patriotism and their honour in order to put Party before country and save this disaster of a PM. You're away with the fairies, William. 

And for what? To delay for a few days the inevitable rejection by Parliament of the Robbins Treaty? 

Every day her stubborn stupidity degrades our nation, destroys international confidence in our democratic competence. The Conservative Party, including the oily Hague, must come to its senses and rid itself of this Prime Minister.

Don't worry - we're winning

For me, it was 2007, when the smoking ban came into effect. That was the point at which I decided I was wholly opposed to all the overbearing bastards who legislated, regulated, spied, pried and prodnosed against me. The centre, the central State and its compliant agents in local government just couldn't help themselves grasping more and more power. That power had to come from somewhere; it came from us, the middle and working classes of Britain; we saw less and less control over our lives, our communities, our economies. 2016 was the first chance we had to fight back - and boy, we took it. 

And yes, it was the EU that precipitated it all. Everything about the EU was contrary to 1500 years of British history, a history of a permissive society in which the law only intervened to prevent specific harms. European law, formed by an authoritarian papacy, a tyrant Napoleon and a dictatorial tradition culminating in power being taken by the EU, is restrictive. You are only allowed to do that which the State permits you to do. And they've covered all options - a serious offence here is 'Resisting State authority' - covering everything from running away from the police to refusing to dib your mates in. 

Of course, our domestic elite - politicians, journalists, broadcasters, local government officials and civil servants, quangocrats, the new fat, bloated cardinals of academia, the vice-chancellors of the learning scam, and the fake charities and their fakenews 'reports' - loved the displacement of British Liberalism by EU authoritarianism. It gave them the opportunity to smother us with a sodden pillow of joyless, dreary regulation. Our pubs and working mens clubs were closed and the sites sold off to Housing Associations, the billions of new money printed since 2008 have all gone to boost the asset values of the wealthy elites whilst our own incomes have stagnated and our opportunities are mired; our children, burdened for a lifetime with a mountain of debt before they start living, now have less chance of owning a home than a Victorian sweep.   

What drives our elites so hard to 'Remain' isn't that they love the EU, but that they've come to enjoy the undemocratic power that the EU brings them, and are fearful of losing it to a more democratic and independent Britain.  

But don't despair. Win or lose this round of Brexit, we're winning. Britain WILL leave the EU, and we will rebalance power in our nation. 2016 let the genie out of the bottle, and strive as they might they cannot stuff it back inside. Right now, we've paralysed Parliament and virtually destroyed two established Parties, to be reborn in our own image. We've created a gap for a third party (sorry, Gerard, it isn't you) and even a fourth to keep them in discomfort. And we're demanding to be heard. 

As Eamonn Butler, the ASI's Director, wrote in 'Abusing the People'

'(populists) see themselves as ignored and exploited by those who are supposed to represent them. And faced with all this, the British public are doing what the British public have always done: poking fun at their leaders and making life as uncomfortable for them as they can. As long as they do not miscalculate and elect someone like Jeremy Corbyn, many of us think that this is actually no bad thing'

Politicians must either be Globalists or democratic representatives

Those who imagine a tax strike is the most effective way to combat a government in thrall to the CBI, the FTSE100 and the industrialists of the ERT haven't thought things through. Politicians haven't sold their souls so that soldiers and sailors might be paid, warships fuelled and repaired or motorway bridges built. They couldn't care less about a tax strike - because their benefits come from their close relationship with global business, facilitated through a corrupt network of government officials across Europe. The PM's own husband represents a multi-billion dollar global hedge fund, and globalist dags such as that creature Blair are mired in faecal lucre from the parasitic firms that dominate the planet. 

Any effective action to persuade politicians to forgo material self-interest by aligning themselves with the globalists must therefore be prompted by the actions of millions of consumers against globalist 'Remainer' firms - the members of the CBI. ERT and so on. Given that many of them have established themselves as Oligopolies or even Monopolies this is not easy - but either we break them now, or they break us forever, serfs sans a national or cultural identity, without a congruent morality, subject to a supernational unelected tyranny. 

Both Labour and Conservative parties have benefited from an over-close support of the globalists. For the unions, a fat wedge and decent conditions for members working in the public sector or for large multinational corporations is an utterly selfish strategy; they don't fight for the millions on zero-hours contracts, striving within SMEs or fighting against unemployment. We have a two-tier labour market, and the unions represent the fat, privileged beneficiaries of global corporations; they support big government, over-regulation that throttles SMEs and innovation, not British working people, not jobless youths in the rust-belt. And the Conservative party is just as culpable - under Cameron the Party actually imagined that donations from the global firms could replace real members - that the Party could do away with a troublesome membership and just stitch things up with old school chums on the boards of their sponsors. 

A fight against the globalists is therefore a fight that unites left and right in a democratic alliance against the antidemocratic tyranny of globalism. Our Parliamentary system of allowing personal and financial interests that could dominate a member's judgement also needs re-appraisal; here are the holdings of one wealthy Remainer, whose devotion to the EU and the globalists is doubtless from unsullied personal conviction and has nothing at all to do with the value of his portfolio:-

The following shareholdings are held jointly with my wife, and were controlled by a blind management trust whilst I was a member of the government:
LVMH
Air Liquide
Royal Dutch Shell
Rio Tinto
Rolls Royce
RPC group
Babcock
Experian
Diageo
Smith and Nephew
Reckitt Benckiser Group
Burberry
Astra Zeneca
Smith and Nephew
Until 6 April 2018, Glaxo Smith Kline (Updated 08 May 2018)
RELX Group plc (formerly Reed Elsevier)
Schroders
United Technologies
Anglo American Platinum Ltd
BHP Billiton
Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing NPV
(Registered 06 October 2014)

Pfizer Inc. (Registered 05 July 2016)

Primary Health Properties (Registered 05 July 2016)

Dr Pepper Snapple Group (Registered 05 July 2016)

General Accident (Registered 20 February 2017)

RSA Insurance Group plc (Registered 20 February 2017)

Aberdeen Asian Smaller Co Inv Trust (Registered 20 February 2017)

Until 6 April 2018, F and C Global Smaller Cos. (Registered 20 February 2017; updated 08 May 2018)

Until 6 April 2018, Pearson plc. (Registered 20 February 2017; updated 08 May 2018)

Until 6 April 2018, Standard Chartered (Registered 20 February 2017; updated 08 May 2018)

Schroder Asian (Registered 20 February 2017)

From 6 April 2018, Land Securities Group (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, Croda International (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, Biotech Growth Trust (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, Worldwide Healthcare Trust (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, Henderson Far East Income Ltd (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, HG Capital Trusts plc (Registered 08 May 2018)

Corporate globalists aren't capitalists - they're parasites and predators, growing and expanding by mergers and takeovers, with tangled webs of their DNA inserted into the very nucleii of other global corporates and uniting them in a dark web of greed and corruption. They are our enemy. 

Well, what a week!

It's been quite a week, and I haven't yet caught up on all the comment and analysis out there - and even when I do, I doubt I'll know any more than this; that Mrs May will lose her vote on Tuesday. My own view is that she'll be obliged to resign, thus opening up a high speed Leadership contest, remaining in post whilst this takes place. After that? No-one knows.

We enter the weekend perhaps a little calmer than we started the week, with Brexit paradoxically occupying less of the front page the nearer we get to next week's crisis. Clearly 'Brexit fatigue' is already a thing, but I'm waiting for this to become a bona-fide medical diagnosis like Brexit Anxiety Disorder, for which middle class social workers, teachers and police workers can be signed-off sick. 

Meanwhile across the Channel, today looks like being a crunch day for the most destructive of the French rioters. I'll be tuning in live again this afternoon - the benison of live-streaming means that none of us is ever dependent on a TV news editor to see what's happening, the downside means you need to watch three or four streams to get a representative picture. 

As for Vienna, hardly anyone is aware there's a Brexit crisis but security is tight, as everywhere in Europe. I'm now sated with oysters (Naschmarkt), warmed with a decent British Indian curry (Taste of India - really!) and with my Chrimbo food shopping done. 

And we've some big hitters to look forward to in the Sundays and on the box, and more saturation Brexit ... so back soon. 

Apols - away from keyboard

Apols away from keyboard and I can't type on this bloody thing. Back soon.

Brexit inquiry evidence now being catalogued

We haven't even managed yet to leave the EU - and may not do so at all - but Whitehall is quietly preparing for the inevitable inquiry into how it all became an almighty cockup. The government have screwed up from Day One - from May's throwing away the announcement of the start of Art 50 for a minor personal political advantage, to her refusal even at this stage to allow contingency arrangements for leaving without an agreement. Plus giving away all the significant advantages before talks even started, falling into trap after trap, allowing the EU to hold the UK to ransom over our territorial borders, and the deception and mendacity around May's parallel treaty, the Robbins Treaty, which, it is suspected, the EU saw before May's own cabinet. The entire process has been one of gross incompetence, crass maladministration and indictable misconduct.

Once the documents are sequestered, long interviews under caution completed and statements collected from all the third-tier actors down (and it's always the telling, detailed evidence from these people that sinks the big fish) the senior mandarins and May and her cabinet members will face their public grilling in the witness box.

This, I'm quite sure, is the motivation behind Oliver Robbins' leaked letter. Why write to the PM to tell her that the treaty was fatally flawed when both of them know that too well already? Robbins is getting his retaliation in first - in an effort to ensure May doesn't pass the blame to him.

We need to wait for the inquiry, of course, and it will be little satisfaction to those who have warned of May's malfeasance, incompetence and unsuitability for this critical role from the start. We all want the best outcome for our nation much more than we want to see Theresa May broken, humiliated and spurned. But this will come. I cannot see how she can escape formal national excoriation and dismissal to obscurity without honours. But again, let the inquiry do its job.  

More than quiddities from a lawyer's skull

In other circumstances I would be sympathetic to the government's argument that legal advice it receives is privileged. In most cases, neither the press nor public would be aware that the cabinet had sought or obtained such advice. But Brexit is different. This government, in concert with the EU, is asking the British people and British Parliament to sign up to a solemn international treaty whose terms cut to the heart of the solidity of our Union. For this there must be full disclosure, full transparency and absolute candidness. 

Poor Geoffrey Cox is in an invidious position. He faces being locked up in the clock tower for contempt if he refuses to publish the advice, and faces the wrath of Mrs May if he does. Personally, I'd take the clock tower. The cabinet as always is as leaky as a sieve; the Times already has a leaked extract (it's said that actual numbered copies of the advice document were handed out at cabinet and collected up again afterwards) and today there's a leak of a letter from Robbins in regard to his own treaty that expresses doubt over the backstop. 

On the latter point, I'd forget the lies coming out of Downing Street altogether. Please read Martin Howe QC on the Lawyers for Britain site - his view is not only in line with the leak published in the Sunday Times yesterday, but has also been subject to a half-arsed rebuttal from May's dags - which Mr Howe competently demolishes. 

On top of this, from the wings Bill Cash, himself a former shadow AG, opines that May's deal is unlawful on other grounds - that the Robbins Treaty is incompatible with existing law. Cash writes

Had the Prime Minister sought legal advice she must have been told that this mere treaty cannot override the repeal of the 1972 Act. This is a ‘manifest violation’ of our fundamental constitutional arrangements because Acts of Parliament take precedence over treaty-making prerogative.

So today, which should be 'money' day on May's grid, is actually Secrets and Lies day II. 

And no, don't even ask what Govey is up to because I can't even guess. The last time they hosed out his colon at the Mayr clinic, I guess they flushed away a part of his cerebellum by accident. He surely can't hope to come out of this well, can he?

'No Brexit' becomes a choice

At the G20 Mrs May lined up with the various unelected Presidents of the EU behind their comfortable agreement, no doubt much to the satisfaction of the globalist establishment, as they continued their offensive against the People and Parliament of Britain. Yesterday was supposed to have been about international trade, and I was looking forward to someone explaining why remaining chained to the world's most protectionist trade block, which has sclerotic growth, a doomed currency union, and is being outperformed by thrusting, vibrant and free economies across the oceans, would be a good thing for the United Kingdom. It didn't happen, of course.

What did happen was a co-ordinated response between May's team and her EU allies.

First came Liam Fox on Sky, who urged voters to write to ther MPs saying they did not want to see either 'no deal' or 'no Brexit'. Whoaaa there! Where did that come from? Clearly it was not a mistake, for a little later Donald Tusk, an unelected official serving as one of the EU's several Presidents, said MPs will be faced with leaving the European Union without a deal or cancelling Brexit altogether if they reject Theresa May's deal. There it is again. Brexit will be cancelled unless we do as we're told.

So in the past week the Axis forces of May's government and her EU allies have agreed a new attack option. If they don't get their way, they'll cancel the largest and most significant vote ever held in the United Kingdom. 

Breaking
========
I've just caught the tail of a news report that Gove has today echoed (in a column in the Remainer rag the Mail) the above - saying if MPs don't accept May's deal, Brexit could be 'called off'. Clearly this now has legs.

The implication is that May is threatening that if she and the EU lose their Commons vote on the 11th, they'll impose another referendum on the UK - and one with 3 options, that splits the Leave vote and is designed to reverse Brexit.

Operation Hysteria - Day 2

Operation Hysteria continued yesterday with a pathetically weak and dithery interview on 'Today' by Ben Wallace, before he left to open the International Handcuff Exhibition. Wallace is a minister who struggles to make his presence felt; he must have endured a multitude of social events with his interlocutor's gaze fixed over his shoulder seeking someone more interesting with whom to talk. 

'Today' managed to tease from him that Brexit would end the EU wide security agreement under which we exchanged information. But surely we do this already under a number of bi-lateral agreements that would continue? Well, yes. And there will be nothing stopping a security official from the UK picking up the phone to his opposite number to warn of a threat? Well, No. And neither we or our security counterparts in Europe will stand idle and keep silent about a terrorist or security situation? Well, No. So there will be little difference? 

It is simply not credible that the UK will leave either itself or other European nations more vulnerable to terrorism by cutting links and co-operation. Brexit or no Brexit, we will share and security and law enforcement professionals in Europe will share with us (except perhaps Germany, which protects herself against the EU by not only having a law that prohibits the export of wealth but also the export of intelligence). What we will escape is the EU laying claim to our formidable strengths in SIS, MI5 and GCHQ, and with a satellite network of our own (the cost of a single year's EU membership) we will stand as a bridge between the US and Five Eyes and the EU. Let us not forget that since the US was enumerated amongst the EU's potential future enemies, we need a fusible link, a filter, that can start to restrict the flow of sensitive defence intel to the EU. 

Meanwhile, the markets have shrugged-off the economic hysteria just as our C@W friends said that they would. It also emerged that Carney's Halloween figures were 'scenarios' rather than 'projections'. The difference is as follows. Projections are an honest assessment of the economic effects of various Brexit options, given the likely behaviours of the parties and alternatives available. The Bank's scenarios are based upon there being no alternative goods, services, trade routes, sources, contracts, deals and markets other than those lost through no longer being part of the single market, upon the UK not having one single entrepreneur who will be flexible enough to react, nor a single business that innovates, invents or substitutes and nary a government but one that continues to be hidebound with pettifogging EU rules. In other words it's not worth the paper it was printed on.    

May & Others - vs - British People & British Parliament

We have moved into an extraordinary position. Mrs May and her cabinet, with the CBI, the FTSE100 and the industrialists of the European Round Table, the EU Commission and all of the UK and Europe's career officials, bureaucrats and unelected functionaries on one side, and facing them in battle the people and Parliament of Britain. We are resisting the most enormous forces pitched into an offensive against us - they have power, wealth, resources and a tame media. What they don't have is democracy, and a Parliament currently showing a bit of spirit. Now she is throwing absolutely everything she's got into a final Blitzkrieg, one last gamble launched in the depths of winter, driving her forces toward Brussels. 

And despite the distortions and falsifications by that grubby little rag the Daily Mail of Survation polling, a Clean Brexit on WTO terms is more popular with the public than the Robbins Treaty by 41% to 35%. Lord Ashcroft will also be carrying out his own polling nearer to the 11th. 

Thanks to a leak, Guido has May's order of battle, and we will be posting rebuttals here of each attack on the truth by Operation Hysteria on the day following - thus today for Economic Hysteria, tomorrow for Security Hysteria and so on ....

November 28: Economy
November 29: Security
November 30: International trade
December 1: Digital
December 2: The Brexit deal
December 3: Money
December 4: Immigration
December 5: Transport
December 6: Industrial strategy
December 7: Brexit for the whole U.K.
December 8: Consumers
December 9: May vs Corbyn Debate
December 10: Agriculture and fish

ECONOMIC HYSTERIA

Phil Hammond was the first of May's dags off the block yesterday - together with a quivering whine in support from the Bank. However, they shot their bolt with the lies and distortions of Project Fear at the time of the Referendum and now there are few credulous enough to give their silly projections much credence. One hint at the wider co-operation within May's forces came with the Bank's use of the term 'disorderly exit'. It is a phrase not commonly used in English about Brexit, you may think. And you would be right. It is the direct English translation from the German term* for a Clean Brexit and has been lifted straight from a Bundesbank document, according to one commentator yesterday. 

For a rebuttal of the Hammond hysteria, it would be redundant to repeat some of the most cogent stuff about on the web. I'd recommend giving our friends over at C@W a look for a telling post and knowledgeable comments on this. 

* 'ungeordneter Brexit'

May unlikely to survive Commons defeat

The Prime Minister's appearance in parliament yesterday confirmed as nothing else could that the Robbins Treaty will not get through a Commons vote on 11th December. From every side of the house, in refined parliamentary voices, our MPs said "Pish! We don't believe you" as Mrs May struggled to repeat in slightly different ways the same six lies on which she's depended since giving up on "No deal is better than a bad deal". This itself has gone the same way as "Strong and Stable" and others of Theresa's trite little maxims. She is set to tour the country for the next two weeks repeating those same six lies ad nauseum to anyone holding a microphone, and her supporters and Brandon Lewis' office have been sent off to conquer social media. I suspect they've all been instructed to publish six tweets in support of their doomed leader, but judging by their output, their hearts are not in it. 

Conservative MPs have a finely tuned sense of survival, and by last night they had begun to realise that the game was up. Mrs May is unlikely to survive her coming Commons defeat on 11th December, and her supporters know it. Brandon Lewis, who will fall with Mrs May, has nothing to lose, but others including I suspect James Cleverly, just last week the most prominent of Mrs May's social media warriors, has suddenly gone very quiet. Other MPs have practised for eating-up their Christmas sprouts; some who can't quite bring themselves to repeat Mrs May's six lies have just done their homework by re-tweeting those that can. "What he said". Then running away with proof for the Whips. 

Before that 'meaningful vote' on 11th December we have five days of Commons debate on the Robbins Treaty. The Lords have no vote, but the Commons will consider their views on the 12th. Then those protracted and complex amendments from earlier in the year kick in.  As the Commons Library advises

a Minister of the Crown would be obliged to make a statement under s. 13(4) European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 no later than 21 calendar days thereafter. The Government then has seven sitting days within which to move motions in both Houses on the statement.

The House is due to rise for Christmas on the 20th, returning on 7th January. The Chief Whip already has his timetable sketched out; 

After Christmas things are equally tight. As the guide advises;

If, on 21 January 2019, no political agreement has been reached regarding the Withdrawal Agreement and/or the framework on the future relationship, a Minister of the Crown must make a written statement within five calendar days, as per s. 13(11) European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.

This means a written statement as to the Government’s intentions must be made by Saturday 26 January at the very latest.

The motion must then be moved within a further five sitting days, meaning Parliament would be asked to debate the Government’s intended course of action no later than Monday 4 February.

Now two matters which are being trailled in the press. The first is the extent of the government's defeat, punted by those who believe that it is possible to be a little bit pregnant. If the majority against May is not over 100, they say, it's an invitation for her to ask the House to vote a second time, after she's made a purely cosmetic visit to Brussels to record some encouraging noises, but no actual changes to the WA, from the Commission. 

The second is what is being billed as the TARP option; between the first and second votes, Hammond and Carney will co-ordinate a crash in Sterling and UK stocks, thus scaring MPs into agreeing the Robbins Treaty in the same way that US Congressmen were frightened into passing TARP on the second go. 

I think both are unlikely. I think by the 12th, the Conservative Party will be looking for a new Leader - the May government will effectively have fallen. The question is whom will Her Majesty invite to form the next government - for Ministers are needed to get those key Brexit actions through.

Thoughts? 

Your fish belong us

The EU's strategy in humiliating and beating down the United Kingdom is becoming clear. Aided by a deluded Mrs May, the first stage is to bind, enchain and tangle the UK in a withdrawal treaty that will leave us unable to escape the jurisdiction of the EU and ECJ unilaterally - a treaty that divides mainland Britain from the province, and allows the EU to keep us dangling waiting for a trade agreement.

The second stage is to make that trade agreement conditional on the UK giving up its international rights to exploit, manage and conserve the resources of our 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone. 

Unless MPs reject the poisonous treaty on December 12th, our nation will be crippled by political uncertainty, corrosive in-fighting, bitterness and resentment within the realm that will continue for at least two years, as like a drowning man we flail desperately to stay alive as a nation while 27 hands are holding our head under the water. 

Our nation. Our waters. Our rights. 

God bless you, Gibraltar

I cannot express too warmly my admiration for the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo's reaction to May's docile surrender to the hysterical Spaniards. The Spanish government, with an election in the offing, resorted to crude overwrought rabble-rousing, demanding rights over Gibraltar. May of course was happy to give way to them; after all, having surrendered Northern Ireland to the EU, giving Gibraltar away would be peanuts. Luckily, the Withdrawal Agreement was 'locked', so no legally binding changes could be made. She changed instead the waffle-document, 26 pages of supine abasement by the United Kingdom to the EU.   

The reaction of the Gibraltarians could have been angry, disappointed, frustrated, or filled with bitter recrimination against May's signal incompetence. It was none of these. It is instead a reminder of the dignity and magnitude of the Rock; geographically it is small, but in the grace and decency of her official response, she towers above the moral pygmies of the EU. God bless you, Gibraltar.