Legal jackals, vultures and carrion eaters gather ...

Pity the employer trying to get their staff back to work, particularly in London and in densely populated urban areas. Lawyers are gathering like vultures on a branch anticipating litigating Employment Rights actions. As a silk from Cloisters Chambers advises already -

By s.44(1)(d) and s.100(1)(d) ERA, employees have the right not to be subjected to any detriment by any act, or any deliberate failure to act by their employer and the right not to be dismissed on the ground that "in circumstances of danger which the employee reasonably believed to be serious and imminent and which he could not reasonably have been expected to avert, he left (or proposed to leave) or (while the danger persisted) refused to return to his place of work or any dangerous part of his place of work". Similarly, s.44(1)(e) and s.100(1)(e) provide some protection for employees where, "in circumstances of danger which the employee reasonably believed to be serious and imminent, he took (or proposed to take) appropriate steps to protect himself or other persons from the danger."

Even asking staff to travel to work could raise in their hearts a "reasonable belief" that they would be exposed to "serious and imminent danger" - which would allow them to stay at home, and make unlawful their dismissal for not coming in. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Matthew Lynn continues the theme in the Telegraph this morning

There is a problem, however, and one that is going to become increasingly urgent as we lift lockdown. We have created a lawyer-dominated health and safety obsessed culture that may turn into our biggest enemy as we recover from Covid-19. Just think about some of the problems.

What if a restaurant hasn’t put the tables far enough apart to stop the disease spreading? Are they going to get a writ from anyone who gets ill? What if staff desks are not arranged the right way to protect people from infectious sneezes? Will the employer get hauled before a tribunal? What about those masks you finally managed to order, with great difficulty, and at huge expense? Do they really work, and are you liable if not? What if you ship a product to a customer, and then it turns out it contained traces of the virus? Is that your liability? The list could go on and on.

In fact the very last person I'd want to be right now is a City of London financial services provider with an office and trading terminals and staff. Staff who can't drive because there's nowhere to park, can't walk because they all live more than four miles away and can't even cycle because there's nowhere to put all the bloody bikes and a hot summer with a floor full of beefy traders sweating cobs in their lycra would probably also constitute some sort of H&S infringement. With only six people allowed in each tube carriage it would likely be 11.30 before they struggle in by public transport, anxious at having been breathed on by a Big Issue vendor.

Well there's a short term and a long term solution. The short term solution may be something like the one Matthew suggests in his Telegraph piece

We could fix that. Here’s how. First, we could ring-fence liability. If a worker or customer is diagnosed with Covid-19, a company should not be held liable for that unless it has been completely reckless (and even then, liability should be capped at £10,000 or 1pc of turnover, whichever is the lower).

Next, how about we ban no-win no-fee lawyers from trying to drum up business by exploiting Covid-19 cases. Law firms shouldn’t be allowed to tout for coronavirus business, and they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to start organising (potentially lucrative) class actions.

However, getting such legislation through Parliament will be painful, and you can be sure that Starmer will use every lawyerly and slithering trick to obstruct and sabotage it. He'll be in his element as a human rights lawyer.

The long term solution is to stop employing people, or stop employing so many of them anyway in dense city-centre urban environments. The third tier of AI may come a decade early, and PwC are already predicting high rates of replacement of financial services jobs such as asset managers, as AI will allow not only replacement of existing jobs but will, for example, "have made it possible to develop customised investment solutions for mass market consumers in ways that would, until recently, only have been available to high net worth (HNW) clients." says PwC. And presuming that anyone has anything left to invest at all after this, or that there is anything left worth investing in.

And then there are all those offices in the City and Isle of Dogs. I wouldn't like to own the freehold on a Canary Wharf tower right now; the longer term solution may involve mass redundancies and human flight from our packed cities, as workers become more aware of the risks of biohazards. The SARS-CoV-2 virule may be a relatively harmless little bugger, but the entire world is now rethinking bio risk in a packed and mobile world.

Muzzling the lawyers won't work. It will just be a short-term fix. And the internet and AI will play an unprecedented role in a quantum change in the way we live and work. This is going to be fascinating. 

The world turned upside down

It is actually in the UK's interest to support M Macron and the southern EU states against Germany. Their efforts to force the Bundesbank to shit gold and ensure the future of the EU at least in the short term coincide with British interests. Oh sure, I dislike intensely all supranational bodies and the EU in particular and would love nothing more than to see its disintegration but as St Augustine prayed "..... not yet". The dual impacts of the Wuhan virus and Brexit shock means we need at least for a year or two a stable and functioning EU on our borders. We simply can't afford or accomplish the level of support we would be called upon to provide in the event of an imminent EU break-up.

We don't care if Germany loses her place in the world GDP league as a result of shared fiscal responsibility. In fact it suits us - Macron's plans would in effect castrate a powerful Germany on France's borders long before our Teuton cousins get any new ideas. It will all be money down the drain, of course, and the problem is the Germans know that. And if push comes to shove, I'd guess they'll put Germany before the EU. But we don't want a powerful independent Germany and a resurgent Deutsch mark. We really don't.

So many things will be turned on their heads during this crisis, supporting the French will not be the most extraordinary of them. The car lease market is approaching collapse, car dealerships are in crisis, car manufacturers close to bankruptcy. VW is burning through its €27bn cash reserve at the rate of €2bn a week. Some 13,000 passenger aircraft are now grounded, and after this crisis there may not be room for both Boeing and Airbus in the market without a massive state subsidy fight between the US and EU. The cruise ship industry is finished - our pensioners could just about take the 50/50 risk of Norovirus and spending the cruise voiding through the eye of a needle, but two weeks in a floating Wuhan disease incubator will be too much. Despite the Prozac-bright optimism of some in the markets - "Three months crisis, three months recovery then three months growth" - chirped one chap on the radio this morning - things will never go back to where they were in December 2019.

And as I predicted last Thursday, the public backlash against the police has already begun. I wrote "the longer and deeper the restrictions on our freedoms, the stronger and wider the public backlash, and the bigger the Big Bang demolition of the Central State to come". Well, we haven't even started yet.

Keep well, all.

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

Minor earthquake in SW1

There's really only one story this weekend and it's not about politicians but about the British people. The latest Opinum poll for the Observer gives the following;

The paper reports that Electoral Calculus estimate that this vote in a GE would give TBP 306 seats - short of an overall majority - and the Conservatives 26. This Thursday's bye-election in Peterborough may give Farage his first MP and send shock waves throughout Europe. Without detracting from Nigel's accomplishments - which are momentous - these figures are less about Farage than about the British people, and the direction in which the country is headed. Politicians are either acutely sensitive and adjust their policies to the path the voters are following, or they are history.

And here I have a message for my Parliamentary Party. Sweeties, you're away with the fairies. You're buggering about playing games with the Leadership contest, with Florence of Belgravia and every other hopeless idiot using it as an aid to self-love and a marker for aspiration to future ministerial preferment. You're all on the verge of being swept away by a Teal tsunami. I hope you've got other careers on which to fall back (Florence can walk back to Afghanistan for all I care). 

Meanwhile dear Mr Trump is worth listening to; if you have a sensitive ear you will have detected a minor shift in tone. When speaking ad hoc and off piste, Donald is increasingly channelling his senior White House advisors. What we are hearing are the headlines lodged in his memory from secret Presidential briefings. Despite SW1 still trying desperately to pretend Nigel Farage doesn't exist and everything's still the same, the possibility that he may be the UK's next PM but one is clearly one of the US government's planned scenarios.

The Post-globalist Capitalist revolution is coming

Back in 1910, I'm quite sure, the equivalent of the political adviser was penning essays on the ways in which London could deal with the disposal of horse-dung; no doubt special rail sidings, dung-trains and dung-mountains beyond the suburbs were involved in options to clear the stables and streets of horseapples, designed so that by 1940 London would remain clear of millions of tons of equine product. So mired were they in a world of exponentially increasing horse-traffic in London they became deaf to the noise of the motor-car, blind to the cinema and the early aircraft in the skies. 

I was reminded of these early dung-managers when reading a piece on Conservative Home by Nick Hargrave, former Number 10 SPAD who made policy for both David Cameron and Theresa May. More State, more Spending, more Spin and more Tax are Hargrave's recommendations - thus exhibiting an almost wilful blindness to the reality of the world today, taking refuge in the comfortable horse-dung of an imagination limited to the past. Hargrave is unaware that without radical change there will be by 2040 neither a Welfare State nor an NHS in the UK.

From 1971 onwards, when the effects of Bretton Woods in managing national competitive advantage by regulating national capital flows were removed, globalism in place of international trade became possible. During the past twenty years globalism has been in the ascendant, as Daly wrote in 1999

The classical economists like Ricardo, were nationalists, and that is why they were so devoted to comparative advantage. We are presumably beyond that now. We are cosmopolitan individualists on a global scale, interested in maximizing global product. Comparative advantage, because of its premised constraint on capital mobility, does not maximize global product. But absolute advantage, by relaxing that constraint, does. We are simply not interested in the national distribution of gains and losses from global trade.

That neglect of the distributional effects has given us the Elephant - global gainers including the people of India, Vietnam and particularly China, and global losers including a vast mass of middle and working class citizens in the developed world, who have lost income, status and job security in a period of rapid change in which the balance towards fairness and social cohesion built by a century or more of painfully-wrought agreements on the relationship between Labour and Capital have been junked, skipped and disregarded. The real gainers are the global 1%, whose wealth and income has increased exponentially.

The biggest myth is perhaps that global markets are free markets. They are not. The global corporates use market power, intellectual property and trademark rights, data power and the de facto granting of 'knowledge' monopolies by state actors. Supranational authority that imposes systems of regulation and over-regulation that favour the oligopolistic globals - whether the EU or the UN - at the expense of non-global competition is an ally of globalistic advantage.

The harmonisation of standards through bodies such as the EU and UN is also paradoxically of national disbenefit to the developed world, as Daly explains

When different national markets with different rules for the internalization of external costs merge into a single market, then the different rules of cost accounting present a big problem. Under globalization the market left to itself will resolve the difficulty by standards-lowering competition -- the way of counting costs that results in the cheapest product will prevail......

Under the traditional comparative advantage (internationalist as opposed to globalist) regime, each country could indeed adopt its own separate rules of cost-accounting, reflecting its own values and traditions, and not worry about harmonization. As long as capital must stay at home countries are not forced into a standards-lowering competition to attract and keep capital. Goods and services can be produced and freely traded according to comparative advantage even when trading partners have totally different ways of measuring costs.

I don't want to get mired in theory about globalism. The reality is that if we have not as yet reached Peak Globalism then we are fast approaching it; Trump, Brexit, the Gilets jaunes, Italy and the fast-approaching Eurozone recession are already with us. The reactions and anticipation of outcomes will increasingly define political alignments - I can detect a coalescing of opinion around several divergent standards

Progressives 
Those looking to help design the successor to globalism; Internationalists, Localists, committed to democratic outcomes and social equity. Radical reform of tax and welfare systems, renewal of political identities, utilising capitalism to generate wealth but in control of its effects, recognition of the deep and fundamental changes that AI and technology will bring, committed to achieving a Durkheimian social integrity and coherence in contrast to a globalist anomie

Primitives
Those committed to global government, a world-wide constitution and harmonisation of everything, open borders, unrestricted global economic activity, worldwide legal, judicial and justice systems, abrogation of personal freedoms to a class of benign appointed experts who will act in the general good, the growth of the 'citizen of everywhere', the rule of benign technocracy over 'old fashioned' democracy, the supremacy of supranational State authority.

Philistines 
Those of all political colours in denial that massive change is underway; the managers of horse-dung, political nostalgics, the patrician elite and the dags of globalism, neo-liberals, the political class and the old fourth estate, all those threatened by what they term 'populism', the 1% and the winners from globalism who just want everything to stay the same. Plus the naive zealots - those who believe that anthropogenicmorphic global warming / Moslem immigrants / 12 foot alien lizards / secret Zionist conspiracies / American hegemony and suchlike are actually responsible for what's happening.

Change is coming. We need people of vision and ability, not managers of yesterdays horse dung.

All change!

For an inspired series of graphics of the Brexit alignments and realignments in Parliament, visit the Guardian - one of the captures below.

Like an amoeba undergoing mitosis, our Parliament is resolving into four distinct factions. Brexit has split both Labour and Conservative parties, and the papers are just beginning to pick up on the fallout.

The Guardian reports on talks to form a new Lab/Con centrist party, a sort of Son of Blair I suppose whilst the Telegraph reports on 25 Remainer MPs including Dominic Grieve who face deselection by the end of March. Further 'Party Split' pieces by John Longworth and Tobias Ellwood, for the sake of balance I guess, feature in the Telegraph, whilst the Express gives us a 'JRM for new ERG Party' piece.

None of which is at all surprising for a system that has a Leave party led by a Remainer pretending to believe in Leave and a Remain party led by a Leaver pretending to believe in Remain.

All of which makes me cheerful. I loathe the privileged complacency and sense of entitlement of our politics more than anything - it's time to give the bag a shake.

Conservative Leadership contest

Oh Dear. It looks like those 48 letters to Graham Brady, Chair of the '22, have already been written. But hang on, chaps, I'm not ready; I re-joined the party (after an absence of about 36 years) in mid August - which means I must wait until mid November to vote. I wonder if the qualifying date is the date the contest is announced, or the date the party membership actually votes? I think we should be told. 

David Davis would do very nicely as the Leader to get us through Brexit. Council estate, grammar school, SAS TA, then business for two decades until Parliament. Keen supporter of civil liberty and a man of proven principles. If the rest of the party won't accept Boris, David, then. Which brings me on to my fantasy cabinet.

Gove as Chancellor. Chancellors don't need to be popular, just clever. Keep Hunt at Health, and Sajid at the Home Office. Move Liam Fox to the FCO and give International Trade to Penny Mordaunt. And a revival of the Prescott / Clegg role for Boris as Deputy Prime Minister. 

Hammond of course must go, as must  Gauke, Clark, and Lidington. Brandon Lewis can become Minister for Plastics without a cabinet seat, with a remit to find ways of stopping the bloody Chinese, Asians, Africans and Indians fom throwing all their waste into the great rivers. 

And of course suitable postings must be found for our dedicated public servants Oliver Robbins and Sly Sedwill, neither of whom I think will wish to remain in Whitehall. 

Politics in turmoil - conditions favour the extremists

WE have had an unequivocal assurance from Mrs May in the past few days that there will not be a second Brexit referendum. Of course, that means nothing. Mrs May's past assurances on the Customs Union, free movement and ECJ jurisdiction have been over-ruled by the elite establishment, and today no assurance from her on a second referendum means anything unless confirmed by Oliver Robbins. 

The BBC is giving much airtime to anyone calling for a second referendum at this time because the polls have been swinging towards 'Remain'. However, the polls are close and erratic, and could easily shift back. The most recent, from 14th July by Deltapoll, shows 50/50 but this could be a rogue. 

 Yougov however cautions against relying on polls re-asking the referendum question;

However, just because people think Brexit is the wrong decision, it doesn’t necessarily mean they think it should be reversed. They do not. When we ask what people think the government should do about leaving the EU, just over half (53%) think that it should go ahead with Brexit, mostly on its current course (42%) though 11% would prefer a softer Brexit. A fifth (21%) think that the government should call a fresh referendum instead, while 13% would prefer them just to halt Brexit altogether.

Neither is there much support for other means by which the decision to leave the EU could be reversed. By 50% to 29% people think it would be illegitimate for MPs in the House of Commons to vote against Brexit going ahead, and by 45% to 37% people oppose the idea of another referendum once the terms of the withdrawal negotiations are known.

With confirmation that Vince Cable has been in talks about a new Limehouse Declaration to save the rapidly dying LibDems, offering a broad leftist Remainer umbrella, there is also a poll suggestion that a new pro-Brexit party could get 38% of the vote and rumours that Nigel Farage is in funding discussions to form such a party to attract both Conservatives and the lighter mauve UKIPpers.

A new far-right authoritarian anti-Islamic party could, frighteningly, attract 24% of voters from deep purple Kippers and those with a ' British National Party, National Front, British Freedom Party, British People's Party, English Defence League, Britain First or the UK First Party' background - currently 'banned' from UKIP. Cough cough.  

And with confirmation expected today that Labour will officially go anti-semitic and all the little lefty Nazi Corbynistas can trample the Star of David, the old parties are hardly helping to preserve political stability. 

'Turmoil' I think is the word. 

Could Germany's next problem be an Austrian?

The young fella above is, at 30, Austria's foreign minister, the new leader of the ÖVP and mooted as the country's next chancellor after October's snap election. Sebastian Kurz could also face down his German opposite number - whether Merkel or Martin Schulz - after Germany's September federal elections. The architect of blocking the Balkans migrant route by ignoring the EU and Germany and stitching up a deal with Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, Kurz is also a fierce critic of Merkel's migrant policies.

The ÖVP is the traditional centre-right party in which farmers, burghers and family / craft business owners found a home. Since the war it has a long history of governing in coalition with a Blairite, soft left SPÖ - but as elsewhere in Europe, the two are in trouble. The hard right  FPÖ, home to horny handed beer drinkers and drivers of overweight SUVs who resent change and migration, came within a whisker of putting their man Herr Hofer in the presidential palace. Right now they're polling high, and expected to do well in October. That the next Austrian government could be an FPÖ / ÖVP coalition is a distinct possibility; Kurz, the cute face, out in front but Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ's boss, as the iron fist. 

A Kurz government would bolster the Vizegrad 4. Hungary's Orban is already a Kurz fan. His success would leave Europe with an ideological block stretching from the Baltic almost to the Adriatic that opposes the policies of the Franco-German pact; Christian, orthodox in belief, small c conservative, with congruent cultural traditions and populations largely intact from cultural enrichment, the old MittelEurope nations could be Germany's worst headache. 

Germans oppose squandering their wealth for indolent Mediterranean folk to sleep in the Sun their wine-quieted eyes. The Eastern bloc in contrast grafts hard and multiplies investment. Austria is stuck between Italian idleness and Polish zeal - accustomed to high tax socialist languor but with a northern European work ethos and guilt complex. The coming election may be a leap northwards.

French Toast

As will be apparent, France's electoral system is geared at preventing shock change and powerful leaders. Remember that the French bourgeois virtues include médiocrité, which means something a little different there to our jibe of mediocrity. And having soundly rejected the 'constitutional' parties of right and left for the Presidential election, French voters may not have the same choice for the two-stage Assembly elections on the 11th and 18th of June. Well-oiled local Republican and Socialist party machines may cement support, leaving Macron a lame duck President with no support in the Assembly.

And yes, short of some earthquake shock, Macron will be France's next president. 

Marine Le Pen is not finished - France and Britain will both go to the polls again in 2022, and in political terms that's an eon away. As for what this all means for Brexit, I'll guess little change. The Kermits still hate us and want us to suffer because we're so much more successful than they are, yet we need to co-operate even more closely militarily as the only two armed nations in Europe. It's all French toast - brittle with burnt crumbs. Hey ho.

Yes, Richmond matters - but it's not what they think

The minor frisson of joy that swept through the butthurt remoaners at the Richmond result has been poorly interpreted by the political class in the MSM. It is not the start of a Brexit fightback, it is not the rollback of leaving the EU. It does, however, mark the start of our voting for MPs based not on party but on whether they are Brexiteers or Remoaners. 

David Lammy, a politician who usually wears a mask of crassness and stupidity, knows this. His London constituency is solid remoaner, and the value of his declaring that he will vote against Article 50 before the debate has even been tabled, let alone the arguments heard, is high. He has already started cementing his place for 2020. 

If the parliamentary obstructions, the acts of sabotage, are too great or progress too delayed, then 2020 will cause the greatest upheaval in Parliament for a century, with a strong Brexiteer government facing a sparse remoaner opposition across the house.