The accidental Green

Without ever having made any effort to be 'green' I find, somewhat to my chagrin, that I actually have an ecological footprint substantially smaller than Saint Greta's. It emerges that not only is her trans-Atlantic yacht made of carbon fibre, which costs ten tonnes of CO2 per tonne of yacht, and is wholly un-recyclable, but that in place of her single airfare, the boat's five crew will all fly home from the US. In addition, we can expect the BBC to fly out a full crew with a tonne of equipment to report on her arrival, and doubtless the same goes for many other mainstream networks. So all-in-all, Saint Greta's trip is incredibly CO2 heavy. I digress.

For a start, I like old buildings and old cars, prefer to repair and reuse than buy new, eschew air-conditioning, use wholly sustainable bulk local wood for heating and cooking and our electricity here is 84% renewable (a lot of hydro in there). My night-time house is a comfortable 18deg and in Winter only the kitchen and principal living room are over 20deg. For anything other than short local journeys I prefer to use the train, which allows me to do a host of interesting things other than stare at the road and twitch nervously at the stupidities of other road users. And in a couple of years all the oldie discounts will kick in.

For forty years, I've almost exclusively bought only good quality wool, leather, cotton, linen and in minute quantities (pocket squares and ties) silk clothing. It lasts a long time and I can wear it year after year. My shoes are all from good Northampton shoemakers and can be resoled - my oldest pair of Veldtshoen are now thirty years old, and my shoe repairer* told me sadly that they were on their last soles and heels - the welts would not take another stitching. So no microfibres or plastics, no Chinese shoes stuck together with glue that last only three months. Any phobias I had about the sewing box were dispelled long ago when I worked with an incrediby heterosexual ex-RN CPO who spent his lunch hours knitting golf-club covers.

I have long made my own pickles and bottled my own jam (the perfect Piccalilli has taken some years to master - the secret lies in not underdoing the salt in de-watering the raw veg overnight) have never bought what they call 'highly processed foods' which I always suspected were as bad for one as margarine and have long made use of whatever local, seasonal produce is in store. I've always made a point of buying nether Kenyan french beans nor the Spanish strawberries that arrive in the shops here when the snow still caps the landscape.

However, you're not looking at Saint Radders. Though LED lighting is fine for the barn and workshop, I won't have it in the house. And I'm told my internet use is also a carbon-heavy activity. But most of all, I've never, ever, actually tried to be green - it's all thoroughly accidental.

Sock-darning mushroom, turned in the workshop from a scrap of Beech firewood

*Original Cobblers, near Sidcup. Highly recommended. They also maintain the Household Cavalry's boots.

The future after Brexit

It is really time that the EU realised that we are leaving, and not on the terms of their Satrap 'treaty' that would enchain us and castrate our sovereignty. They have attempted to humiliate a proud and capable nation, and have failed. There has been absolutely nothing in the EU's conduct over the past three years that now deserves the hand of friendship. Boris' nuanced verbal description of them as our 'friends' carries exactly the right balance of contempt and malice.

However, the nations of Europe now have it in their hands to prevent Britain turning its face from the mainland. The crazed and unstable fanatics of the EU are personally cushioned against the disruption they will cause by refusing to negotiate. The EU will drain the last Euro of wealth from France, Italy, Spain and Denmark to preserve the power and privileges of the Berlaymont énarques. But the disruption of not concluding a win-win deal with the UK will go far beyond trade.

The last of the BAOR are now headed back for Tidworth, and our NATO training and deployment is now directed largely at the old eastern nations - the Balts, Poland, Hungary, Czecho. A bad-tempered Brexit will turn Britain, as it did the last time we were excommunicated by the European Empire, over the oceans and across the equator. Our face will turn Westwards - maybe for fifty years, some say. This will be as much Europe's loss as it was the last time. 

The EU has tried to enchain us in an anti-American, inefficient, third-rate little Empire. We have refused to be so enchained. That doesn't mean we want to be enchained instead as a satrap of an America getting used to the loss of Unipolar status. Most Brits I think would be happy as an Independent country with clout, a nation that punches above its weight, bridging the world between America and Europe, a locus of anglophone alliance, and as the coin says Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations. It's up to the nations of Europe now to disown the EU's destructive folly and take the proffered hand of friendship.

Hammond - Bercow - Juncker - Barnier Axis exposed

Nick Drake had it right

Take a look you may see me coming through
For I am the parasite who travels two by two

Yes, what we all suspected all along is now being confirmed. Allied troops are inside the conquered bunker and finding all the evidence - in this case of a malign and disloyal Axis of sabotage, an Axis in which Hammond, Bercow, Grieve and others conspired with the EU actors who seek to impose on Britain a treaty every bit as humiliating as Versailles or Brest-Litovsk. Bercow, Hammond and their destructive cadre want nothing more than to place their nation under the jackboot heel of an increasingly authoritarian and repressive EU empire. They are true Quislings.

Allister Heath has it in the Telegraph - still the only national newspaper not in the pockets of the Brussels Stasi

(The parasites) are being led by the increasingly ludicrous Philip Hammond, who as chancellor blocked no-deal preparations, vetoed crucial Brexit spending plans and was more responsible than anybody else for Theresa May’s catastrophic treaty. The new team at No  10 keeps uncovering fresh, shocking evidence of his handiwork. His strategy, shared with John Bercow and Dominic Grieve, appears to be to signal to Brussels not to compromise: the rebels will neuter the Government, so the Eurocrats should stick to their guns.

It's all now to play for. The global downturn is here at last and just starting to bite - and the EU is holed so close to the waterline that just a marginal increase in draught or a tiny list will flood the hold. Brexit as soon as possible is the only possible measure to decontaminate the UK from the coming EU implosion; contrary to Hammond's betrayals, Brexit will save our economy and nation from the coming continental turmoil. We are an International nation, whose hands reach in friendship around the world, but our need to protect ourselves from bigger, malign enemies has ever been clear -

This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands

Fasten the harness, all, we're off!

People Vs Parliament - Bring it on!

A poll that has got lost in the noise of the past few days is critically telling. It revealed a massive divide between what MPs think their responsibility is and what those who elect them think it is. Voters, quite naturally, expect MPs to represent the interests of the constituency. MPs, on the contrary, think their job, once elected, is to represent just their own opinions.

I have long supported a General Power of Recall, with the bar set high enough to prevent vexatious use, triggered by a simple motion that 'The electors of Blankshire no longer have confidence that Max Musterman MP can represent their interests in Parliament'. The problem of long-sitting MPs appointed by Party central offices is the deep sense of entitlement and the high degree of pomposity, self-regard and self-love that it engenders. The only one of the demands of the 19th century Chartists not realised by the 21st is that of annual Parliaments - designed specifically to prevent the sort of rogue parliament we've seen for the past three years. Don't let the buggers get settled, the thinking went; their arses will get stuck to the green leather, and they'll forget they're just ordinary people.

Well, it's all now coming to a head. It's now People vs Parliament. Oh, we'll get Brexit, one way or another; if they scupper Boris, we've got Nigel waiting in the wings. They're fighting like cornered rats, but they can't win - we'll pitch them out of their cosy complacency, puncture their egos and throw them on the rubbish heap of history. The People will win.

And the longer they prolong the outcome, the deeper we will cut to root them out from every nook and cranny of public life. For too long have they lorded it over the people of Britain; their day has come. Bring it on!

Update
=====
Survation poll 14/8, polling 9th - 11th August
Preferred outcome of the Brexit process
Leave with or without a deal - 53%
Remain - 47%

Don't knows 9%

Poll - Public trust Boris more than Parliament

Another Humdinger of a poll today - Comres for the Telegraph, with the paper's write-up here. However, here are my highlights -

Parliament is out of touch with the British public
Agree - 88%
Disagree - 12%

Don't knows were 12%

On Brexit, most MPs seem to ignore the wishes of voters and push their own agendas
Agree - 90%
Disagree - 10%

Don't knows 12%

Parliament is more in tune than Boris with the British public 
Agree - 38%
Disagree - 62%

And that's the tone of the poll; we don't wholly trust Boris, we don't think he can unite the country and the jury's out on his competence but by God he's miles better than this shoddy, anti-democratic Parliament, the country is saying. And that helps to understand the Telegraph headline from Q7

Boris needs to deliver Brexit by any means, including suspending parliament if necessary, in order to prevent MPs from stopping it
Agree - 54%
Disagree - 46%

It confirms the growing support from the last Opinium poll for 'Brexit now - deal or no deal'. And confirms my recent point that in any people vs parliament election if they force a vote of no confidence next month, they'll get slaughtered - rarely have I seen a parliament held in such contempt by the British people.

Right. Next .... the Lords.

Who will be the Petain of their Government of National Surrender?

Remainiacs were scrambling over the weekend to place themselves as candidates to head a new Government of National Surrender to follow the imagined defeat of our government in September. Caroline Lucas was first out of the traps, volunteering to head an all-female LBGTQB (including trans) government of yellow-greens with a bit of pink. Chukka Ummummumma was not far behind, and Dominic Grieve has been hanging around outside the studios to lig more air time. @RoryWanksOn has turned around and is heading back to Westminster and even Anna Soubry is considering which outfits would do best against the background of a big glossy black door.

They are all, of course, living in a fantasy world, away in a bunker. Any such moves would see them slaughtered in an election pitched as 'people vs. parliament' - I can tell you the result now. People will win big. I can only imagine the heat had addled their brains; one doesn't have to dig far to discover the deep contempt in which Petain, Laval and Darlan are still held in France.

Saturday's Opinium poll may also just start to sink in -

Opinium - Fieldwork 8th/9th August

Opinion is shifting week by week behind a clean Brexit. The big issue that remains unresolved for the Autumn election is any pact between my party and The Brexit Party; don't believe the early denials. If that's what it takes to secure a thumping Leave majority in the House, it will happen.

Politics is cruel. Several papers print the eyespymp snap of Philip Hammond sans armoured jag and armed bodyguards with his bags on a tube at Piccadilly station. He's just a backbench MP now, and may not even be that by Christmas.

Did they have to show him how to use an Oyster card?

BBC Lies, Distortion and fear mongering

A better example of BBC lies and distortion than the '45,000 cows to be culled because of Brexit' I have yet to find. 'Newsnight' put the story out as part of an ongoing and now quite open bias that has seen almost all BBC news output propagating silly 'Project Fear' stories. Even the ex-minister Robert Goodwill in the clip rubbished the story. The first 3 or 4 minutes of this lying rubbish are sufficient.



The simple facts are these. A third of Northern Ireland's milk currently goes to the Republic for processing, largely into cheese. The Republic then exports some 80,000 tonnes of cheddar a year made in part with this milk back into the UK*. After Brexit, there will be a 40% tariff on the milk going south and a 40% tariff on the Cheddar coming into the UK. Of course it won't continue.

The solution of course is very simple - if the EU remain obdurate and refuse to see sense, in no short time some enterprising individual will throw up a cheese factory in the province, making 80,000 tonnes a year of cheddar from UK milk for UK consumption. Result? Jobs, wealth, GDP and taxes for the UK - gainers - and job losses, benefit costs, tax shortfalls and falling GDP for the Republic - losers.

Whilst the new Ulster cheese factories are under construction, the government could buy the milk and give it away to schools, hospitals, food banks, the elderly and so on.

Do the people of Ireland really want us to come to this? Isn't it about time ordinary Irish voters told Varadkar to stop posing and get back to his Kylie fan club posters?

* It takes 10 litres of milk to make 1kg of cheddar, so the 700m - 800m litres of milk exported from North to South each year makes 70,000 - 80,000 tonnes of cheese - almost exactly equivalent to the UK's Cheddar imports from Ireland.

EU nations divided by visceral self-interest

Here's a paradox. You want to ship a 20' container of tools from Shanghai to Munich. You'd think the best route, after Suez, would be a port as close as possible to Munich, wouldn't you? Somewhere in the north Adriatic? Suez to Koper is about 1,750nm and 7 days at sea. From Koper, the Adriatic's largest container port, to Munich is also only 500km by road. Well, the freight rate Shanghai to Koper is around $1,750. However, if, after Suez, your container turns west and makes passage to Gibraltar, the entire length of the Med,  then north through the straits of Dover, and the North Sea, then finally east to Hamburg (4,250 nm, 18 days at sea) the freight cost will be, erm, around $1,350. $400 cheaper for an extra 11 days steaming. Road distance to Munich is about 800km.

The insanity of receiving substantially more freight from China through Rotterdam, Bremerhaven and Hamburg rather than through EU ports closest to Suez has escaped the attention of neither the Chinese nor the Italians. And just as Germany has shown two fingers to the EU in a deal with Putin to deliver Nordstream II, Italy has done likewise by signing up to China's BRI in a deal that would prioritize development of five key ports in the north Adriatic as a primary point of entry for Chinese goods into Europe. Even Saint Greta couldn't complain at the Eco-sense of it. However, the Dutch and Germans will be very cross.

Meanwhile, the US is seriously considering starting to move its 50,000 troops and defence personnel from Germany, which fails to pay for NATO, to Poland, which pays its full 2% of GDP. Given that the German armed forces under vdL were reportedly down to just one working helicopter at one time, the famed Leopard tanks are rusted and immobile and the army trains with broomsticks, America's departure would leave Germany militarily helpless but again paradoxically make many Germans, who like all true EUphiles loath the USA, very happy.

And so as the Italian government fragments, a blanket of choking tear-gas smothers Paris, German industry disintegrates and the Eurozone shudders just like Mrs Merkel on a hot day, the fiction of an EU united in purpose becomes every day more apparent.

Ignore the doomsters and gloomsters. We're actually going to be in a good place if we Brexit on Hallow'een.

O'Shaughnessy and Tanner - Trashed by their own spin

I do love our informed public. This is the story. Either the think-tank 'Onward' or the website 'Politico' commissioned a large poll from Hanbury polling, one presumes to support an opinion they wanted to promote. The poll didn't quite produce the results they wanted. The two blokes behind 'Onward' are soft remainian ex-SPADs, so they weren't going to let that stop them. They penned a piece for the Telegraph - poorly written, semi-coherent. It barely lasted 12 hours online, uninamously rubbished by every single one of the BTL comments, before the paper decently buried it. In addition, at around 4pm, ten hours after our own piece below, the guido fawkes site trashed the whole thing

James O’Shaughnessy and Will Tanner must be feeling like a right pair of dickheads today. The BTL comments on guido are, as you would expect, considerably more vicious than those that the Telegraph has now buried. I was wise yesterday to refrain from commenting on the pair's spin until I had sight of the polling data. It really doesn't support the narrative they want to promote.

A poll of 5,000 respondents, even conducted wholly by smartphone, is expensive. Who paid for it? O'Shaughnessy and Tanner claim it was them -

But Hanbury Polling say it was Politico

Overnight the polling data - what we'd all been waiting for - appeared on the Hanbury website. It's good, a rich source of evidence for many posts ahead. But not posts that will support the hapless pair's agenda.

Are we raising a generation of fascists?

Some years ago I assisted in arranging a garden party for those mainly of the younger generation. We had awnings, food, booze and a string band - all, we imagined, that was needed for these bright young things to become effervescent. As I watched, they had splintered into many small pairs or trios that knew eachother, and worryingly many lone figures not interacting. A septuagenarian Chelsea Arts Club member stood with me and advised firmly "You've forgotten what it's like to be that age. They want to be organised, told what to do. Go on!" So we organised games, encouraged non-sexual physical contact and interaction but most successfully got them dancing English folk dances that were designed for just this purpose. Don't laugh. If you've never Stripped the Willow or circled the Draper's Maggot* you haven't lived. We were blessed with a skilled and enthusiastic string band who for little more than money and beer exceeded their contractual sets and it became a roaring success.

I share that anecdote by way of introduction to a report and poll that, at time of writing, are not available online but clearly will emerge soon from their embargo as the Telegraph's Camilla Tominey has penned a teaser piece. "A third of millennials want martial law and 66 per cent prefer strong leader over parliament, poll finds" reads the strapline. It will I am sure be more nuanced than that, but the spin is the thing for the originators.

'Onward' is a Cameronian soft sort of dilettante centre right remainian think tank based on the premise that what young people want is, erm, a soft Cameronian centre-right remainian politics. However, they have produced one decent report - Generation Why? -  that is worth reading. I will wait for both the Onward report and supporting Hanbury Strategy poll before commenting on the pre-release spin.

I have commented before on other research that suggests strongly that the young are far less keenly committed to democratic forms than my own generation. Of course, they've never lived through the Lord Chamberlain's censorship, the battles that TW3, the Pythons, Oz, Private Eye and the whole counterculture movement fought in the '60s and '70s. Or the Cold War, when the nation's wealth went on guns rather than butter. We didn't drink Mateus Rose because we had no taste but because the economy had little room to support frivolities such as wine.

Forgive me if once again I stress the utterly fundamental importance of free political association, universal suffrage and the secret ballot. If the anti-democrats who are so determined to erode these fundamental guarantors of freedom are making headway with the Millennials, I am worried.

*Both of which, for maximum enjoyment, should be danced slightly drunk by people who get the moves wrong

Police - Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

John Sutherland writing yesterday in the Telegraph is an ex-copper. A few years ago it would certainly have been ex- writing as serving plods were simply not permitted to voice personal opinions in the columns of newspapers - today one has to find the fact hidden in the article. Anyway, cutting the waffle, what John really wants more than anything is for our democratic society to stop telling coppers what to do - so like Judge Dredd they can get on with dispensing justice free of all constraints. I'm not kidding.

..we need to re-establish operational policing independence from political control, starting with the abolition of Police and Crime Commissioners.

I'd guess John was off sick the day they did 'The history of the police force' at copper school. Policing has never, ever, in any remote way been free from democratic control - and rightly so. Before the 1964 Police Act local forces were governed by Watch Committees, made up of both local elected burgesses and local magistrates. The fight between SW1 and local communities for control of the police has been a long one; the 1964 Act was a victory for the Home Office, and centralised control of much of the authority previously exercised by the Watch Committees. The Watch Committees were abolished. Crime Commissioners are nothing but an ineffective sop to Localism by a Home Office under pressure for their power-hoarding.

John of course is not alone in his anti-democratic and extremist opinions. They are held by most senior police officers, who want nothing more than a national police force controlled by no-one but themselves. To this end they have created numerous bodies - funded by our own taxes - to promote this outcome, and lobby for anti-democratic powers at every opportunity. They are part of the anti-democratic nexus that in the words of Betz and Smith has captured the democratic State -

What we appear to be witnessing is the corrupt mutation of the notion of the representation of the people in parliament, into the substitution of the will of the people by the interests of the political class. We are entering the realms, no less, of state capture. What happens when sectional interests capture the political institutions of the state? This is a question we will get to, but first it is worth reiterating that in many senses this has been a long time coming, and to emphasise, in the British case has little or nothing intrinsically to do with Brexit.

In our fight against extremism - of the Left, Right and Islamist - we must never forget that those who seek to destroy democratic control over the institutions of the State are also extremists. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Someone also needs to tell John that it's not the job of the police to dispense justice - we have courts for that. I can't help feeling that we've been recruiting the wrong sort of people to the police.

It's time we had a fundamental review of the role and structure of the police, similar to the Royal Commission that reported in 1962, but this time not rigged by the Home Office. Remember - 98% of police work is call-outs to disturbances and policing non-indictable offences. I can see no reason why such work cannot be undertaken by local, accountable forces of coppers skilled in the basics. Organised crime, terrorism, specialist investigations and serious indictable offences can be undertaken by regional or national squads or bodies under democratic oversight. Why not?

Harland and Wolff

The final demise of the shipyard that built the Titanic will be largely un-mourned. Only around 100 workers are left, engaged on maintenance activities, including having kept one of the yard's two great cranes, Samson and Goliath, in working order. For many Catholics, denied work at the yard until the 1960s, the erasure of the place from Ulster's landscape will be welcome.

It all started, in a surprisingly modern way, with a smoking ban. Imposed in 1854 by the nascent yard's didactic new manager, the 23 year old Edward Harland. In addition to the ban on smoking, Harland cut wages as he reckoned the work was sub-standard.

It was never a pleasant or progressive place in which to work. The employment system was tyrannical and nepotistic. Bullying and victimisation by the brutal cadre of foremen was the norm rather than the exception. Unskilled labourers, employed casually, were treated like scum, barely better than Catholics.

And the foregoing three paragraphs tell you all we know about the fourth industrial revolution; until now, shipyards, factories, mines have all been seen as formed by the men and women who built them and spent their lives working in them. We discuss them in terms of their workforce. In fact, the yard need not be redundant - though the workforce is history. A shipyard located where slipways fall into deep, sheltered water, where there is an abundance of power, where there are transport links, rail, ports and above all 5G comms, could well become a resurgent industry later this century. CNC steel cutting and shaping, robotic movers and welders, AI build supervisors and driverless cranes could see shipbuilding return to Belfast - but not employment. New jobs will be in a comfortable, climate conditioned computer control and monitoring suite, or servicing the CNC machines and robotic welders.

If the site is so suited, we must make efforts to secure it from being lost to woke hipster housing, leisure centres or MUGA cages paid for with the billions of the supply and confidence arrangements.We must recognise that locations that can be used for AI replacement industry are key assets - and protect them now.

Set the Finance Spivs on German savers

Many years ago I had an endowment mortgage for a few years - five, to be exact. It was a time at which the economy was booming, the FTSE was growing like a Texas steer on hormones, the nation was becoming measurably wealthier. All that is except for me. For some reason, year after year, my regular monthly investments did not grow by even one per cent; if the whole lot had been invested in FTSE100 companies, I would have made 50%. So what went wrong? The answer of course was that I, and millions like me, were being robbed blind by the endowment mortgage spivs.

So what happened to the finance spivs when we all wised up and ditched our endowment mortgages? Or sadly only most of us did. Some poor souls who believed the lies that if they only gave it a full 25 years it would all come right lost their homes, their wealth pissed away in Balls Brothers and the champagne and lap dancing clubs. After the endowment scam I guess they split 50/50 - half of them went into selling double glazing, the other half into running pension funds.

The ones running pension funds quickly dropped back into their old endowment mortgage ways; prudent savers and small-time investors are always easy prey for the finance spivs. Well, they may have to look for alternative rip-offs; Frank Field's Work and Pensions select committee, in a final and welcome parting shot for both Frank, whom I have long held in some regard, and for the current parliament, is seeking to force the finance spivs to be honest with their customers.

Reporting the moves, the Telegraph feels a little proud of itself.

The Telegraph ran a two-year campaign to secure action to lower fees, having exposed how hidden pension charges cut savers’ retirement funds by as much as half over a working career. It led to charges on auto-enrolled pensions being capped at 0.75 per cent a year from 2015. However the MPs’ new report has suggested the charge cap needs to be reviewed by the Department for Work and Pensions in 2020 after failing to have the predicted impact.

Now, with an inevitable Brexit looming, the finance spivs will be looking for another outlet for their talents, another well to drain to meet their insatiable demand for cheap sparkling wine, flash cars and fast women. Well, lads, I'd recommend you learn German. And invent a new offshore, EU-external, tax efficient savings product for the thrifty Germans who are sitting on billions that would do far better invested in the UK - less your skim, of course.

Glück Auf!

The Politics of Woke

There is a faint survival of civilisation on BBC Radio 4 - but only a trace, and I suspect that before long it will be gone for ever. Bells on Sunday has been a quirky snippet early on Sunday morning for as far as I can remember. It is a short two-minute snippet of English church bells. This morning was Merton College's eight bells, cast in 1680 we are told, the tenor bell tuned to E♭

What follows is pure BBC Woke broadcasting - 'Four Thought' - a trite and banal waste of airspace in which various snowflakes, illiberals, intolerants, narcissists, self-obsessives, entitlists and asocial egoists are indulged. This morning we had a self-described "Poet/ theatre maker/ dramaturg/ producer", of whom not one of you will have heard, describing how she attempted to bully some people off their train seats after she had failed to reserve a seat of her own. She describes herself as a 'Sensitive' and claims she comes from a long line of similarly characterised women, including seventeenth century witches. We are all now supposed to defer to the needs of 'sensitives' it seems.

Broadcasting, artistic or creative merit? The programme has none. It is neither a philosophical catalyst, moral vanitas or religious nudge. It is pure self-indulgent woke claptrap. And that's the politics of Woke - it is entirely inward focused. We must all be sensitive to their individual needs whilst allowing them to be utterly insensitive to the nation, the society, the community in which they live.

It will not be long before there will be no more Bells on Sunday - they will have been silenced,the bell-ropes removed, the clappers stilled, in order to appease all those offended by their joyous sound, the 'sensitives'. Listen while you can.

Brigands, Buccaneers, BT and Statutory Undertakers

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

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

Did you see what they did there?

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

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

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

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

The unbearable idiocy of the bien-pensant Left

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

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

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

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

AEP skiing off-piste

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry, Señor, no Pizza - Welsh rarebit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saint Greta will undergo the privations of a primitive luxury yacht

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

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

EU Zealots determined to unleash crippling pain on EU27

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

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

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

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

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