The effect of Covid-19 on Boris's programme

Covid-19 has already had the effect of downgrading a few of the Prime Minister's early objectives. His list for stuff to do in his first 100 days since 12th December surely cannot have included "deal with deadly pandemic". So what's gone, what isn't and what's been watered down?

Brexit
No change. The crunch date is still June - when France needs to have withdrawn her silly demands in return for more money from the other 26. The only issue is keeping both teams disease free. And M Barnier, at 69, is at the age at which he should be staying in more.

BBC
There are signs of softening on both sides. I reckon the TV tax will be decriminalised, in effect a £200m fine for past naked bias, but longer term funding will be thrown into the long grass. Many just want the BBC to be  smaller, more efficient, cheaper and rid of its unacceptable bias. However, there are signs they still don't get it. Tony Hall is picking up on the 'diversity of thought' challenge, but the real challenge is that the BBC is a big, statist, centralist broadcaster that endogenously supports a big centralist State. Unless this changes, not much else will.

Whitehall
The Priti Patel row isn't about the Home Secretary at all. It's the attempted picking-off of a reformist big beast by the establishment that has captured the state. They will lose this battle, but the war is likely to be put on hold as the government will have genuine need of the command-and-control structures that Whitehall has in place permanently (instead of just temporarily for wars, plagues and pestilence). They're safe until Covid-19 reaches its conclusion.

Parliament
Frankly, the suggestion that Parliament should be suspended to preserve the lives of MPs and peers is ludicrous. Giving the government emergency powers that MPs return every 28 days to renew, dressed no doubt in full-body suits, masks and visors, is too risible to consider. If carrying on as usual with anticipated absence rates of 20%, as the population is expected to do, is good enough for health workers it's good enough for MPs. Sure, six or seven of them may die (and rather more peers, but they have the choice between their attendance allowance and a risk of infection) but MPs are expendable - they themselves are not valuable, just the party selection made by their constituents. They must face the same risks as the rest of us. So any closure will be an abject betrayal of the nation and should not be considered. The Commons sat through the Blitz - a bloody little Chinese bug is nothing.

05/03/20
EU/EEA and the UK	Cases	Deaths
Italy	3089	107
France	285	4
Germany	262	0
Spain	200	1
United Kingdom	85	0
Norway	56	0
Netherlands	38	0
Sweden	35	0
Austria	29	0
Iceland	26	0
Belgium	23	0
Greece	10	0
Denmark	10	0
Croatia	9	0
Czech Republic	8	0
Finland	7	0
Ireland	6	0
Portugal	5	0
Romania	4	0
Hungary	2	0
Estonia	2	0
Lithuania	1	0
Slovenia	1	0
Liechtenstein	1	0
Luxembourg	1	0
Poland	1	0
Latvia	1	0
Total	4197	112

ERT - Still there, still protectionist

Imagine the CBI writ large - a vocal, well-funded pro-remain lobby group for the global corporates, on a European rather on a national scale, and you have the ERT, the European Round Table. The ERT don't just have a lobby presence in Brussels, they're on the inside track. No directive is rubber stamped by the unelected officials unless it's had the nod from the ERT. And no, Brexit has made no difference to UK-HQ'd companies with rotating memberships. Right now, it's the turn of Centrica, Rolls-Royce, Rio Tinto, AstraZeneca, BP and Vodafone.

As I hinted at yesterday, there's a new EU Industrial Strategy due out on March 10th, and the ERT is like a Labrador that's just found a fresh cow pat. In December, the EU already agreed to put €3.2bn of taxpayers' money into an €8bn state-aided vehicle battery scheme, a 'Project of Common European Interest', and the eyes of the EU's defence companies are on stalks anticipating billions of state aid following budget agreement. The Industrial strategy promises not just oodles more state aid for the EU's 'champion' companies, which you bet have already been agreed behind closed doors, but a relaxation on regulation, particularly relating to mergers and acquisitions. No more silly fuss about Alstom and Siemens getting married, no more worry about Europe's consumers or the future of its SMEs.

The ERT's agenda is published here and I won't quote it. Given Michael O'Leary's foul-mouthed whining to the press in recent days, bemoaning the €1.3bn state aid that's already gone to Alitalia, the German state aid that has favoured Lufthansa and the EU approach to competition. It's the sort of grouch one hears at the end of an unsuccessful pitch from the losers. I'm betting Ryan Air is just a tiddler not even worthy of the ERT and EU's consideration for state aid billions. You may note that the Irish company has current orders for 210 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. The prospect of picking up some of FlyBe's slots may this morning have tempered the profanities, but with Covid-19 grounding passengers, perhaps not. Oh. And the Labrador-coating O'Leary was predicting for the outcome of the Brexit talks? That, I'm guessing, is aimed at nervous investors. My advice - book BA.

04/03/20
Country	Cases	Deaths
Italy	2502	80
France	212	4
Germany	196	0
Spain	151	0
United Kingdom	51	0
Switzerland	37	0
Norway	33	0
Netherlands	28	0
Sweden	24	0
Austria	24	0
Iceland	16	0
Belgium	13	0
San Marino	10	1
Croatia	9	0
Denmark	8	0
Greece	7	0
Finland	7	0
Czech Republic	5	0
Portugal	4	0
Romania	4	0
Ireland	2	0
Estonia	2	0
Latvia	1	0
Andorra	1	0
Poland	1	0
Luxembourg	1	0
Monaco	1	0
Lithuania	1	0
Total	3351	85

EU shoots itself in the foot. Again.

Pushed off the front pages by Covid-19, the EU trade deal talks have ramped up the threat and bluster from across the Channel. The first exclusion to note is that the UK has removed any discussion of defence and security co-operation from a possible agreement. Police and justice matters are included, as is a commitment to co-operation in tackling terrorist threats, but what's missing are the plums the EU wanted.

Even more than an EU army, they want an EU defence industry to rival the big US arms firms. What they have been trying to do is to handicap the UK's ability to use state aid to boost our domestic arms industry by shackling us to EU rules whilst quietly agreeing to drive a bulldozer through state aid rules themselves by sponsoring EU 'champions' in fields including defence development. You can be sure they have already picked half a dozen big EU27 firms for 'boosting'. They wanted our money and expertise, but after their behaviour on Galileo the government have told them to go whistle.

Both military and diplomatic co-operation agreements are out. The UK's position is that we are members of NATO, that EU members should pay their 2% rather than buggering around playing toy soldiers, and that the UK will co-operate on an ad-hoc basis outside of NATO on military and diplomatic matters as and when it suits us. With no silly 'dynamic' agreement governed by the Berlaymont waved in our faces.

The EU's overly risk-averse approach to anything new means that the world's Artificial Intelligence, big data and Biotech investors aren't going to put their post-Covid money into the EU27. Without a single university in the world's top 20 (the UK has 4) there are few centres of research excellence anyway in the EU, and the bloc's restraints and development caution will throw a heavy blanket over innovation and drive the cleverest innovators out of Europe. Some hope of any world-beating defence development coming out of the EU27.

Well, they had their chance. They took advantage of the UK's political weakness under the abysmal Cameron and even more abysmal May and now they must face the consequences.

EU/EEA, the UK, San Marino, Monaco, Switzerland, Andorra 3/3/20
	Cases	Deaths
Italy	1835	52
France	178	3
Germany	157	0
Spain	114	0
United Kingdom	40	0
Switzerland	30	0
Norway	25	0
Netherlands	18	0
Austria	18	0
Sweden	15	0
San Marino	8	1
Belgium	8	0
Croatia	8	0
Greece	7	0
Iceland	6	0
Finland	6	0
Czech Republic	5	0
Denmark	5	0
Romania	3	0
Portugal	2	0
Andorra	1	0
Lithuania	1	0
Monaco	1	0
Latvia	1	0
Ireland	1	0
Estonia	1	0
Luxembourg	1	0
Total	2495	56

Britain -v- France? Not really.

Macron is fighting for his political life at the moment, and is setting-up his fellow EU26 colleagues for a sub. The Brexit talks in which France has set impossible targets for M Barnier are really not at all about Brexit, as is becoming clear. Barely £2.6bn of the EU's trade surplus of £66bn is France's, so unlike Germany and Spain she has little to lose. He knows he has no chance of the UK giving up our fishing rights, or of becoming a rule-taker, and even less chance of our subjecting ourselves to the ECJ. So why give M Barnier such unachievable objectives?

France has the biggest State in Europe, with tax at the EU's highest rate of 48.4% of GDP. Her farmers and fishers are heavily subsidised by Europe's taxpayers and by raiding UK waters. These advantages are set to be challenged post-Brexit, and you can be sure that the EU budget process for the next seven year cycle will not have decided anything by June, the crunch date for the Brexit talks. Macron will obstruct and clog up EU deliberations, using his veto as required, until it is clear Barnier is unable to achieve his brief.

Macron's plan is that at this point the remaining EU26 will agree to bung even more wodge in France's direction to enable Macron to pay-off his farmers and fishers and soften pension reform. Add to this even more money that he wants for France now being the EU's only credible military member, for the 26 to buy into his seat at the UN and his Force de frappe. Then he'll agree an EU-UK trade deal.

However, if this much is apparent to us, you can bet it's also crystal clear to the Frugal Five (Austria, Denmark Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden) and particularly to Germany - whose taxpayers will have to pay for France's relaxed lifestyle. Will Macron win? Who knows. Now it's getting interesting.

EU/EEA, the UK, San Marino, Monaco and Switzerland 2/3/20
	Cases	Deaths
Italy	1689	35
France	130	2
Germany	129	0
Spain	83	0
United Kingdom	36	0
Switzerland	24	0
Norway	19	0
Austria	14	0
Sweden	14	0
Netherlands	13	0
San Marino	8	1
Croatia	7	0
Greece	7	0
Finland	6	0
Denmark	4	0
Romania	3	0
Czech Republic	3	0
Iceland	3	0
Belgium	2	0
Ireland	1	0
Luxembourg	1	0
Estonia	1	0
Lithuania	1	0
Monaco	1	0
Total	2199	38

PM right to reject EU Trojan Horses

The EU are desperate to retain some measure of control over the UK. In this they are ably assisted by a fifth-column of public service officials in the UK who will lobby fervently for the continuance of democratic anomalies such as the European Arrest Warrant and of membership of such bodies as Europol.

The Telegraph reports today that the PM has rejected a move by Health officials to maintain membership of the EU Early Warning and Response System (EWRS). They were attempting to use Covid-19 as leverage to continue some measure of EU management and control of the UK's health response capacity. We are quite right to reject such Trojan Horse attempts.

Inevitably, such subserviences are unnecessary. We don't need Europol because we're members of Interpol. Interpol allows co-operation in criminal investigation and enforcement between sovereign nations; Europol is the federal police agency of the EU. Big difference.

As with the EWRS. We continue to be part of the health 'Interpol', the WHO, which co-ordinates information sharing, warning dissemination and international funding and assistance. WHO also publishes the international daily case tally for Covid-19. If you want a European perspective, you can look at the EU's ECDPC site. They're not so stupid to publish only the WHO's figures for EU nations or to exclude the UK from lists of emergency contacts and laboratory resources - a virus knows no borders, and European doctors and medical authorities are also quite capable of co-operating with each other without the controlling hand of the EU.

Here is the daily update for 1st March - excluding the 13 new cases yesterday for the UK

EU/EEA, the UK, San Marino, Monaco and Switzerland
	Cases	Deaths
Italy	1128	29
Germany	111	0
France	100	2
Spain	66	0
United Kingdom	23	0
Switzerland	18	0
Norway	15	0
Sweden	13	0
Austria	10	0
Netherlands	7	0
Greece	7	0
Croatia	5	0
Romania	3	0
Denmark	3	0
Finland	3	0
Estonia	1	0
Monaco	1	0
Iceland	1	0
Luxembourg	1	0
Ireland	1	0
Belgium	1	0
San Marino	1	0
Lithuania	1	0
Total	1520	31

Graduates still good for the economy shock

When I looked at the evidence back in the 1990s, the value of the 'graduate premium', the average lifetime earnings advantage that graduates have over non-graduates, was about £250,000. The supposition since Blair expanded the HE sector has been that this is now about zero, but a new study by the IFS apparently shows it's still there - though shrunken to £130,000 for men and £100,000 for women. This is good news for a number of reasons.

I say apparently because the study is not, at time of writing, on the IFS website, and I must rely on newspaper reports of their advance copies. 

The research I did for my Masters back in the '90s looked at the lifetime earnings of a non-graduate occupation, a second fix joiner, with a level 3 - 5 BTEC. Hanging solid-core doors of 30kg - 35kg each, on piecework, from age 18, our chippie would progress from 4 or fewer doors a day to an average of 8, peaking at times at 10, and would maintain a level of about 6-8 until his early 50s, when the number would start to decline, at age 60 to the same level as the new entrant. Peak piecework earnings in their 20s and 30s could fund an extravagant lifestyle and consumerist consumption, but would decline rapidly as physical strength and stamina decreased.

Graduates on the other hand, from 1990s data, suffered low earnings in their teens and 20s but enjoyed sharply increasing incomes from their 30s onwards which did not plateau but continued to increase incrementally until well into their sixties, then tail off only slowly, unlike the sharp drop-off for manual occupations. The shape of the graphs seems to have stayed the same, with some useful additional refinements.

The new study shows differences between the sexes. Women's earnings grow more slowly than men's in their 30s and tend to plateau, whilst male earnings continue to climb. This is almost certainly due to childbirth and childcare effects - again, as I have reported previously, this also accounts for much of the 18% average overall earnings gap in the economy, only around 4% of which is attributable to taste discrimination.

The study also points out the benefits to the economy of the graduate premium -

Overall, the IFS found the government benefited from extra tax revenue and national insurance contributions of £110,000 per man and £30,000 per woman, over and above the costs of study to the government.

And importantly, whilst the top 10% of male graduates enjoy a lifetime premium of £500,000 or more, the bottom 20% can actually lose money, their lifetime graduate premium being lower than the cost of their university maintenance and tuition costs.

This is all very bad news for Labour leadership candidate Kier Starmer standing right now on a platform of abolishing tuition fees - at a annual cost to the economy of £7.2bn - which would just make the rich richer, and even the incapable and mediocre in the bottom 20% come out evens. It would discriminate hugely against manual and non-graduate occupations, Labour's traditional voting base, and favour Labour's metropolitan elites of arts and media graduates. It is a suggestion that would fill the 'B' arks with graphic designers and telephone marketeers. And lose the next two elections.

Covid Update
==========
Whilst there is a sort of mild hysteria in the media (metropolitan based and therefore liable to contract the virus themselves) about government unpreparedness and lack of special measures to protect journalists and BBC staffers, in Germany there is a sort of despair at the dreadful state of their own health readiness - and, as Der Spiegel writes

 Enjoy!

Sajid Javid's uninspired whine

Sajid Javid is not a man who can craft words well. His sad little litany of complaint in the Commons yesterday demonstrated not only his unpolished am-dram rhetoric, but more importantly his utter lack of understanding of the central task of this government. It really is just as well he's no longer in office.

The clue is in Allister Heath's piece in the 'graph today -

Brexit isn’t enough: politicians need to take back control, to renew our democratic culture, reintroduce accountability and improve the quality of the state. They need to be forced to take responsibility even when they don’t want it. They must become their own masters, working on behalf of their electorate, not spokespersons for out-of-control departments. They need to relearn to be managers, moulding the system to their commands. They should hire their own people, not inherit hostile teams.

If politicians cannot make their minds up on an issue, they ought to call referenda, not abdicate decision-making to mandarins or judges. Our system of government is no longer fit for purpose: the old Yes, Minister civil service and its jobs for life and gongs for failure has run out of time; but so has the more recent technocratic and juristocratic experiment.

Javid's exhibition was not so much that of an extinct Ovine as that of a newly castrated goat realising he's missing something but not quite realising what. Ministers who gain their stature from a powerful and unelected undemocratic nomenklatura propelling them into cabinet should not be surprised that their bass has turned to treble, their rumble to a pitiable whine, when their civil service bollocks have been lopped off.

In this period of transition, in winning back the organs of the State for democracy from the unaccountable establishment that has captured them, the powers exercised by Number 10 are a necessary discomfort for ministers. And an opportunity to learn to grow a pair of their own. As Miss Patel is so competently demonstrating.

The corruption at the heart of Europe's courts

I'll post on the Trade Agreement negotiating positions when we publish the UK's position paper, but for now, a little nugget for you all. It's hugely satisfying when some independent academic evidence comes along to validate a point one has been making for many years - in this case, the inherent corruption and mal-judice embodied in both the ECR and ECHR. The European Centre for Law and Justice, normally a body that campaigns on social justice issues, has just issued a research study.

The study has found that, out of the 100 judges who have served on the bench of the European Court of Human Rights in the period 2009-2019, nearly a quarter (22) have strong links to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation or to NGOs like Amnesty International and others which are funded by it. Human Rights Watch, for instance, has received $100 million from the Open Society Foundation since 2010.

Some of the NGOs receive so much of their budget from Soros that they are in effect wholly owned subsidiaries of his foundation.

The links between the judges and the NGOs are substantial. They include working for years as members of the board of directors or executive council of these NGOs; having teaching posts at institutes funded by them; being a salaried director of programs for the Open Society Foundation or associated NGOs; and undertaking other forms of paid work for them. The full list of these links can be found on pages seven and eight of the report.

And that from a decent piece from RT. 

Covid-19: Living with the threat

Up here in my high Alpine valley the sound of helicopters is not unusual. Air ambulances here ferry skiers with broken legs and fallen climbers rather than the UK's stabbing victims, and the power company Kelag use them constantly for checking the web of power cables. Helicopters at night, however are something else, but last night at about 9pm came the throb and bass beat. The origin and direction of the Bundesheer's Bell Hueys was in no doubt - from the Gebirgsjäger base over the Villacher Alpe to the Italian border crossings. Hey ho, I thought, they're closing the borders. Last Summer they ran an extensive exercise to airlift troops to the Alpine passes in the event of another migrant surge, so the sound and path of the helos was quite familiar. In reality this time, it's a Chinese virus rather than Iraqi economic migrants that they're tasked with stopping.

In the event the borders haven't yet been closed. There is intense pressure from the EU - backed up with a generous dispensing of millions in cash - to keep the EU economy going at all costs. In Brussels, the security of their federation may outweigh the fate of 1% of the EU's 460m subject peoples in the minds of the apparatchiks.

The Mayor of Villach is concerned about the legal brothel at Hohenthurn. Up to 120 prostitutes, mostly from eastern Europe, work there and at weekends floods of Italians - 400 to 500 every weekend - cross the border to buy their favours, reports ORF. He tells the press he is powerless to close the brothel, and the Italians are unlikely to restrain themselves.

I suspect the authorities, including our own government, now accept that Covid-19 cannot be contained, as I wrote a week ago, on Monday 17th. It's all moving very quickly now. The actions by the Italian authorities are likely to be a mix of panic-reduction measures and blame avoidance. Realistically, they have no chance of halting the pandemic.

Shutters start to come down on internet freedoms

We are now, as an advanced culture, moving into a phase of the most pernicious and regressive restrictions on free speech since we fought battles in the 1960s and 1970s to establish those freedoms. Oh I know that's been the cry ever since when, mostly from those with extremes of views that no-one missed very much. 'Spiked', which hides under our spoof Guardian offers, has long advocated a pure freedom that would allow anyone from kiddie fiddlers to murderous Islamists to post anything, but most of us want some restrictions. And that's the problem. First, we're a European nation but there's no homogeneity in the law - 

In most of Europe, defamation is a criminal offence, and in the dark-red nations it's an offence for which citizens can be imprisoned. The UK, Ireland and Norway (in the fringe blue nations defamation tends to be dealt with by a midnight visit from men with guns) are alone in upholding the freedom to risk only one's wealth from defaming someone. However, as we've seen, the Online Harms (how loathsome is that title!) White Paper proposes making a number of non-criminal statements into statements to be censored, under the pretence of protecting children but clearly aimed at protecting politicians and wealthy figures in public life.

In France, the release of a video made by M Macron's chum Benjamin Griveaux of an act of masturbation has angered the énarque elites; it should be the right of all French politicians to send Onanistic videos to vulnerable young women. Or maybe to their grandmothers. What has annoyed them in particular is the extent of internet anonymity that allowed the spread of the material; they want to include measures to identify wanking-video re-posters in a proposed raft of anti hate-speech legislation currently going through parliament. However, as Politico EU has reported, the draft French legislation is already in trouble with the EU, who consider it incompatible with EU law.

In Germany, legislators are set to pass laws requiring internet companies to report offending posts to the police. As the FT reports

Under the planned new law, which is the toughest of its kind in the world, social media platforms will not only have to delete certain kinds of hate speech but also flag the content to the Office of the Federal Criminal Police (BKA). Posts that companies will be required to report include those indicating preparations for a terrorist attack and the “formation of criminal and terrorist groups”, as well as those featuring instances of racial incitement and the distribution of child pornography. The networks would also have to give the BKA “the last IP address and port number most recently assigned to the user profile”.

However, given that defamation is also an imprisonable offence in German law, it is easy to imagine a tweak or two to include insults aimed at politicians and public officials - the law stands as

However, one major issue remains. The national location of servers on which the offending material is posted. Facebook, Google and Twitter are already rolling out systems architectures that avoid a physical EU data presence. The effects of GDPR and swingeing fines to date have already made them cautious.

If US servers (and, less likely, UK servers - our civil servants love the German defamation laws) are immune to the new rafts of Euro Censorship legislation, what option does that leave for French and German governments except to restrict access to social media in the same way that China does? Are Euro versions of Weibo, WeChat and YouKu the future?

Dimbleby no better than a thief

Throughout Africa, the delusion of corrupt rulers and their apparatchiks that underpins and pervades their thefts is that the organs and instruments of the State somehow belong to them because they exercise power. If you're the Nigerian Minister of Petroleum, they reckon, surely that means you're entitled to more than everyone else's share of the black gold? Why, stealing those millions must be practically legal.

And so with Dimbleby and the hereditary BBC establishment. They think they own it. They don't. Dimbleby's claim to speak for the BBC is no more and no less than mine or yours, no greater or lesser than any British citizen who has paid for every VT editing machine, every redhead light, every executive conference suite, every sound mixer and every HD camera. We all own an equal share, and we all have an equal right to an opinion about the future of the BBC.

The petulance and fury exhibited by Dimbleby and his dags is because of their grossly distorted sense of entitlement and displays a contempt for the rest of us. You don't own the BBC, Mr Dimbleby, and to pretend that you do is theft.

The turning of a page

I suppose there must have been other ages in our history in which we saw such rapid change, and many momentous changes that creep almost unnoticed until they are absorbed into our lives almost without fuss. But sometimes it's the little things that so forcefully strike one with a heavy blow. Oh, I'm not some Luddite railing against change - change is a necessary part of our social and national progression. But just sometimes what's gone aches like a lost limb.

Today it's the ban on coal and undried wood. I was, in the jargon, triggered. And suddenly I remembered one perfect evening many years ago, at my little flint rubble cottage in Needham Market one windy Autumn night. I'd made supper, which just needed reheating in the oven, and Jennie drove us over in her battered old Mini to a seventeenth century pub some three miles away. There we sat companionably by the huge double-room inglenook in which an entire Elm root crackled and glowed, sharing a packet of fags under the crooked black oak beams and nicotine cream plaster. We drank no more than about three pints each and drove back home for supper.

Jennie is no more, taken by cancer. Her car would no longer be allowed on the road - one simply doesn't see old cars like that any more. And now that pub fire, which has warmed whole generations of villagers, will be cold for ever more. Of course the pub was closed eight years ago, after the smoking ban, and because no one would risk driving after a pint. The pub was lit by low wattage incandescent lamps, which would have been replaced anyway by harsh plastic-white LED lighting, and the black tar coating on the inglenook would be condemned by the Health for its phenol content. 

It struck me in a moment that in a year or two, not one element of that simple evening would any longer be possible. That's change.

The fire at the Dunwich Ship - another great pub fire I have known

Flood

There's something wrong with our water management. It's all something of a mess, muddling along with the best of intentions but a woeful lack of holistic understanding. There is no simple answer, no pabulum. It's complex and it needs strategic direction. Here are some of the elements

Building on flood plains - reducing absorption
I've never known  a mediaeval church to flood, however heavy the rain. The land on which they are built may only be a metre higher than the surrounds, and barely noticeable, but it's enough. The land on either side of the rivers on which there were no houses, grazed in the drier Summer months, held the winter rainstorms. Culverting the rivers to allow development, building on flood plains and paving surfaces in impervious materials on which to park cars mean floods.

Dredging
The Somerset levels, newly dredged as a result of Owen Paterson's intervention, have not featured in the disaster news this year. Having said that, dredging is not a universal panacea, and many of the areas flooded from the recent heavy rain would be just as flooded if a regular regime of dredging had been in place. Despite the clear view of the Daily Mail that dredging is the universal panacea, it isn't.  However, their story does highlight the regulatory difficulties, see below.

I used to take joy in exploring the little creeks, old wharves and bywaterways of the South East in my tough little Land Rover of a boat - one of which was Faversham. There's a speciality business there repairing, maintaining and restoring Thames barges that is clinging on by its fingertips, choked by a silted waterway. There's an upper tidal basin that used to have a swing bridge, now covered in reeds. It used to serve the adjacent Shepherd Neame brewery, with small coasters able to load beer direct from the cool stores. For twenty years a local group have been trying to dredge the creek and safeguard the economic and employment uses and the sustainability of a centuries-old human development here. Their most recent applications are salutary. They need to get ticks from Kent County Council, Faversham Town Council, Swale District Council, Medway Ports, The Environment Agency and the Marine Management Organisation. Last time I visited, they still hadn't managed to dredge the upper basin.

Faversham Creek

Rewilding
There are sensible measures that can be taken to undo our past misunderstandings of the best ways to handle water. Restoring upland peat bogs which act as natural sponges to hold water is good. Selective planting and land management in ways that hold water in the soil, in fields and hedges is good. Taking rivers out of narrow concrete culverts and putting them back in meanders in flood-able land is good - and all will have benefits for wildlife and for the environment. But we shouldn't be driven by the interests of the biosphere in crowding out human use from parts of the country that have been cultivated and managed for centuries. Again, rewilding measures are not a panacea.

One good example is the work on the River Quaggy in SE London. In Victorian times and in the 1960s it was forced into a concrete culvert and became little more than a storm drain. Today it once again behaves like a river, and the fish and the proverbial Kingfishers are back, as it meanders through the urban parks and green spaces on its course to the Thames.

The Quaggy today

Mis-Regulation
The Daily Mail is quite clear - it's all the fault of the EU Water Framework Directive and Tony Blair, but in reality it's a little more nuanced than that. Ross Clark in the Speccie makes some interesting points, including

Flooding policy changed sharply in 1996 when the old National Rivers Authority was subsumed into the new Environment Agency. I don’t recall it being led by a single engineer in 24 years; its current chief executive is a social anthropologist.

It's not just the EA. Though their eclectic interpretation of the WFD has given us 'Clearing the Waters: a compliance assessment methodology for marine dredging and disposal' - an exemplar of bureaucratic overkill it's hard to better. But it gets worse. In addition to the EA we have the MMO - the Marine Management Organisation, who tell us their mission is "(to) license, regulate and plan marine activities in the seas around England so that they're carried out in a sustainable way". So if your waterway is tidal, as Faversham Creek is, both the EA (freshwater and rainwater disposal) and the MMO (dredging of sea and briny waters) must be satisfied. Ross Clark has found the EA to be run by a social anthropologist; the two quangocrats at the top of the MMO are

Chair - Hilary Florek - Hilary is a strategic communications and marketing specialist with extensive experience in both the public and private sectors.   

CEO - Tom McCormack - Tom has more than 25 years in public service, including senior positions across the Department of Work and Pensions. Tom is passionate about improving colleague engagement and leadership capability at all levels.

So no engineers at the top of the MMO, either.

The waters of, erm, water management in the UK are brown and murky. The whole thing is not simple, and desperately needs a razor-sharp intelligence to re-order it all, a Michael Gove. The problem is that there are simply too few Michael Goves in government, and too many establishment messes such as this.

Is the EU serious about a deal? And does M Barnier even have a mandate?

As the EU is discovering this week, a trade agreement will need not only the agreement of the unelected Commission and token Parliament, but the explicit consent of the 27, and that means of Belgium's regions. The EU's Canada trade deal, CETA, was concluded in 2014 but because it cannot secure support from first Wallonia and now the Netherlands*, it cannot be concluded. Six years on and it's not yet in force, and looks today unlikely ever to be so. CETA is subject to the fads, whims and grandstanding of every tiny little EU statelet.

So when we consider whether we want a Canada trade deal, we must consider whether we want to conclude a trade deal with the unelected officials in 2020 only to see it still not ratified in 2026. One needs a certain trust in one's negotiating partners that they actually have a remit to negotiate on behalf of their principals, and it's not at all certain that M Barnier enjoys that trust.

So far, Greece has threatened not to ratify the trade deal unless the British Museum given them the Elgin marbles. And France has threatened to end the return of asylum seekers under the Dublin convention. And Sinn Fein is seeking a referendum on Northern Ireland's future.

The first is a risible playground taunt. For the second, we return some 6k migrants under the Dublin agreement and take in 2k (mostly for family reunification) so the EU is threatening us with 4k migrants a year when we have 3.5m EU citizens living here already? Please.

As for Northern Ireland, yes, if the people of the province want a referendum on their future we must grant it, and we must abide by their decision. However, it's far from sure whether either the citizens of the province or the Republic of Ireland would be keen. First, finance. Northern Ireland costs the UK about £10bn more each year than it raises in tax - not far short of the £13bn we paid each year to the EU. If Ireland is to keep the same levels of welfare and public services there as now, it will be a painful cost. Ireland currently has a GDP of around £75bn and taxes are just under 24% of GDP. Irish taxes would have to rise to 37% of GDP to pay for the North. I suspect that's why NI polls show that just 25% favour unification with the Republic with 52% opposing.The levels of austerity they would need to endure would be destructive.

Ireland's low tax rate is significant. The EU is asking its members to tax their people more to both make up for Brexit and pay for other aspirations - but the effects of tax increases to pay for the Berlaymont's trillion Euro goggle eyes (we've just punched a €94m hole in that) impact the people of Europe very differently. Ireland has an overall tax rate of 23.5% of GNI, France 48.4%.
  

		% of GNI subvented by EU
	Tax rate	1.00%	1.10%	1.20%	1.30%
Ireland	23.5	4.3%	4.7%	5.1%	5.5%
Romania	25.8	3.9%	4.3%	4.7%	5.0%
Spain	34.5	2.9%	3.2%	3.5%	3.8%
Netherlands	39.2	2.6%	2.8%	3.1%	3.3%
Germany	40.5	2.5%	2.7%	3.0%	3.2%
Italy	42.4	2.4%	2.6%	2.8%	3.1%
Austria	42.4	2.4%	2.6%	2.8%	3.1%
Sweden	44.9	2.2%	2.4%	2.7%	2.9%
Denmark	46.5	2.2%	2.4%	2.6%	2.8%
Belgium	47.3	2.1%	2.3%	2.5%	2.7%
France	48.4	2.1%	2.3%	2.5%	2.7%

Increasing the EU's annual charge to its members from 1.0% of GNI to 1.3% of GNI doesn't sound much - but for an Irishman it means the proportion of his tax going to Brussels rises by 1.2%, whilst a Frenchman can shrug off a 0.6% increase.

Hey ho.

*CETA passed the Dutch lower chamber yesterday, but is due to go to the Tweede Kamer next month, where it is likely to fall. Incidentally, the best hashish in A'dam could be bought from a tiny place for locals, very non tourist, called Der Tweede Kamer on the Spui. In my youth I spent many happy hours there, and it's still there today.