Masks

Just a footnote on masks. New requirements to wear them on public transport and in other social situations in which it is not possible to maintain a 2m distance will be a new experience for many Britons. And the columns in the papers make quite clear that our journos know bugger all about them. I offer a few notes not as an expert but certainly better informed than the press. Masks are not homogeneous and do different things -

Home made mouth and nose coverings
These range from the pointless (home knitted or crocheted) to the improvised (scarves, shemaghs, bandanas and balaclavas) to self-sewn pleated masks make of paper or fabric. These are intended to protect other people from you in case you are infectious but not showing symptoms. They need to lower the level of the vapour in your breath and droplets from speaking, coughing or sneezing that reaches other people. It's this vapour and tiny droplets that carry the virus particles. If they work, they will get damp and soggy from use as they trap vapour. Will need frequent washing at 60deg or more if not disposable (detergents such as soap and washing powder 'melt' the outer coating of the virus, but the conditions may also encourage moulds and bacterial growth in unwashed coverings)

'Surgical' masks
These will be by far the most commonly available. Disposable and made of pleated layers of paper with a polymer outer coating to give limited protection from inhaling direct droplets. Intended to protect others rather than you. Again, if these are working properly they will get damp and soggy and need frequent changing if worn for prolonged periods. Can be cheap - bundles of 50 sell for about €37 here.

Filtering Face Piece masks - disposable
The most common masks worn by health and care workers in aerosol-generating environments. They have an airtight fit over mouth and nose and are valved - you breath in air filtered through the fabric and exhale through a one-way valve. Primarily to protect you rather than others. FFP2 and FFP3 masks filter respectively a minimum of 94% and 99% of particles including vapour down to 0.3 microns. They will not filter out airborne virus particles (which are between about 0.05 to 0.2 microns), but SARS CoV 2 is not an airborne virus - it is carried in vapour and droplets. I've got a box of FFP2 masks in the workshop bought from Screwfix a year ago for about £1.50 each

Filtering face Piece masks - rechargeable
These are the ones that look like WW2 gasmasks without the eye protection. I've got three or four in the workshop with replaceable FFP3 cartridges - great for cutting masonry with a diamond blade, which creates huge clouds of fine dust indoors. Also excellent protection from SARS CoV 2.

Facial recognition cameras
There's one upside - facemasks, particularly when work with eye protection or reflective visors, completely bugger the new facial recognition cameras installed everywhere in London, as ZDnet reports.

Note - I neither recommend, endorse or condemn the use of facemasks. These are just a few notes on the differences for anyone interested. 

Great European Journeys

The trick in politics is to see what's coming before it gets here, and thus have time to control and establish the narrative. Ever ready to keep our telescope trained on the horizon here at Schloss Radders, we bring you news of the Italian Orange Jackets, as reported by Politico EU.

Led by a nice looking old boy who looks like he's raided Michael Portillo's wardrobe, the movement represents the virus sceptics and the views evinced here by many of you; that the Wuhan virus is just a bad flu, lockdown was the worse error, the fake news media are complicit and the elite are still refusing to cede power to the voters. Reasonable and mainstream views - which may, or may not, turn out to be the case, once the evidence is in. So far the first two are not proven, but there's a case to answer, as they say. Oh, and buried deep in the P.EU piece is a throwaway line that the old boy wants to take Italy out of the EU and ditch the Euro. Not really important at all.

Of course Politico.EU is quick to lump in anti-vaxxers and the 5G tinfoil hats with Pappalardo's movement - part of establishing the opposing narrative - and the other side, the communists, socialists, establishment and authoritarians, some of whom would like to see nations locked down under police control for ever, are already grunting about making 'Virus denial' a crime. They couldn't find any Italian fascists amongst the crowd in this report, but give them time. And if there aren't any, well, the media are inventive enough to dress a few tattooed skinheads in orange HiVis vests for the shots.

A minor event, a few hundred people, but like the ripples that precede the wave, it's there on the horizon. Lines and narratives are being drawn. I'll park it there.

Portillo with a socially-distancing Ipswich yottie

Time for Boris to be bold

Everyone it seems is agreed. The PM must move quickly to deal with the most egregious failures of the central State exposed by the Wuhan virus. Public Health England, so obsessed with fashionable caprices that it neglected the nation's fundamental disease control measures; NHS procurement, so focused on gobbledegook management consultant speak that it became incapable of buying PPE, and a government reliance on disease modelling and projection so amateurish, bungling and confused that the code management would not have been tolerated in an Indian app factory.

Allister Heath in the Telegraph this morning is spot-on. The PM must act boldly, take the initiative, not be put on the back foot by an effective opposition and a rejoiner establishment. And above I will add he must not yield to the Whitehall establishment's siren calls that the answer to everything is greater centralisation, much as for Brussels the answer to every crisis is more Europe.

And whilst he's at it, he should scrap the Electoral Commission and replace it with a genuinely fair, neutral and unbiased body. The EC's actions over Brexit have been nothing short of disgraceful, partisan, partial and ultimately corrupt. And while scrapping HS2 would play well in the country, at a time when we will need government created economic activity to keep the economy alive it unfortunately fits the bill.

Above all, I would like to see devolution. Devolve everything to the lowest level at which it functions both effectively and efficiently. And it's the SMEs and small vigorous domestic firms that will burst forth from the coming economic carnage and drive growth and employment; abandon the global corporate behemoths crying for special privileges and billions. Keep BA as a national carrier - it's fat with QE cash and doesn't need tax aid yet - and maintain strategic industrial activities, but don't waste time or money trying to preserve 2019. Let it go.

Boris of all PMs should realise that the challenge he faces is also an opportunity, and he has a green light for bold moves, a restructuring of the central State and an unblinking focus on the future.     

The cost of public vanity

I've seen a lot of really rubbish architecture in my time, but the biggest waste of space must be the South Bank centre in London. Millions of tourists coming into London over Hungerford bridge must wonder why we chose to build a vast 1970s concrete car park so close to the centre of London, and most Londoners seem to regard it as a free public toilet with carpets and burgers. A very few will realise that there are two resident orchestras buried within a concert hall with the most appalling acoustics in Europe, and squatting on the top like a Halfords roof box is one of the most unsatisfactory art galleries I have ever seen, which surely must have been planned by one who hated visual art with a vengeance.

The whole nasty, tacky, amateurish bodginess of the South Bank was epitomised for me by the Nelson Mandela bust. A big bronze head about six times scale squatted on a pedestal on the outside walkway visible from the train track. Like much of the haranguing by the liberal elite it was meant as a punishment and a rebuke as much as a tribute to the great man. So they put the poor chap not nobly gazing over the Thames but around the side, looking at the scruffy, blackened and spray painted railway arches so as to inflict him on millions of tired commuters, whom they presumably held responsible for the entire apartheid regime in South Africa. Well, one day a frustrated commuter took a hammer to the thing. It was so monolithic, even a 20oz hammer would have left no more a few slight dings, but to everyone's astonishment it knocked a huge chunk through Nelson's breastbone. Turned out it wasn't made of bronze at all but fibreglass.

Well, this was back in the day when the Standard was a newspaper and had journalists and stories and everything. The patrons said they thought they'd paid for bronze, so extortionately expensive was the thing. No, no, said the artist, I never said bronze. I said bronze finish, see? And if that bloke hadn't put a hammer through it, you'd never have noticed. As it turned out, the fake bronze bust was a perfect embellishment to the fake concert centre and the fake art gallery to which it was attached. It was all just a huge con on the public purse.

Anyway, all that was to point you in the direction of a Speccie piece by Norman Lebrecht, who loathes the place as much as I do. His solution is much kinder by far than mine. I would turn the entire place over to an upscale toilet and street food centre, which sometimes seem to be the only two visitor attractions that London gets right.

What happened to the Mandela bust? Oh it was repaired. A few times. Then someone realised that fibreglass is flammable, and burned the thing to pieces. Eventually, we paid up for a copy in real bronze set out of hammer-reach, thus perpetuating the practice of not only paying over the odds but twice for something of questionable merit.

The attractive Shell building obscured by a luvvie monolith

Public order and disorder

Forget the silly copycat virtue signalling on the streets of London - I think this was merely our exuberant minority having a post-lockdown knees-up - but the riots in the US really do point to an endogenous problem in American policing. A comment to the post below reminded us that the opposite to love is not hate but indifference. It was indifference that gave us Bergen-Belsen and the casual murderous brutality of the Nazis; they simply didn't care enough even to feed or keep alive their victims. The worst crime in the eyes of these beasts was not to be Jewish or Communist but to be inconvenient. This I think is also the problem at the heart of US police violence - indifference.

Many aspects of the US are counter-intuitive. I love this map -

It shows the predominant ethnic origin of each county and the most common is ... German. Apart from Utah and the old states of the NE coast, the English are nowhere. So prevalent was German culture in the US that on the eve of the Great War, the country was ambivalent as to which side to support. This has nothing to do with the seats of the riots, the major conflagrations in LA, NY, Chicago, Atlanta and of course Minneapolis, but I throw it out as an explainer of a cultural difference between the UK and US that we sometimes cannot quite understand.

We have of course no equivalent of the National Guard either. The ease with which the US has used these armed citizens in the past decades, including for those who recall it the shooting dead of 13 students at Kent State University in 1970, is also utterly alien to British culture.

Our own most recent riots in 2011 proved the efficacy of the country's mass surveillance systems. Some 1,292 persons were jailed for a total of 1,800 years. This at least must prove some sort of disincentive to the anarchic inciters, even if it also poses civil liberties concerns for the rest of us.

David Lammy may be happy to be seen trying to start this disorder in the UK, but we really are very different nations. 

No-deal seems like a done deal

As the claims, accusations and counter claims bounce back and forth across the Channel this week between David Frost and M Barnier in advance of what is likely to be the final round of talks, at least in advance of an intervention by the Prime Minister with VDL, take comfort in considering that it is all just window dressing and that no-deal is now pretty much inevitable. As John Keiger writes in the Speccie

After Britain’s chief negotiator’s broadside of a letter a few weeks ago on the need for the EU negotiators to get real, David Frost added a further nail to the negotiation's coffin. On 27 May, he announced that a fishing deal with the EU would be ‘very difficult’. But in reality, each Brexit negotiator is merely going through the motions. The pointilliste dots of individual decisions made elsewhere clearly paint a no-deal Brexit picture.

Keiger lists the manifold factors that predicate against a deal. Liability for the EU €750bn bailout, markets so distorted by state-aid that the EU playing field now has the slope and contours of a Welsh village rugby pitch and the fact that business has already decided that a no-deal outcome is the one for which to plan. Not only is Nissan deserting Spain for the UK but the company may close their Renault plant in France also, and bring Micra production back to the UK. Macron, having just bunged Renault €5bn, is not happy.

Over the weekend we have had the opening salvos, summarised effectively by the Daily Express. First an 'ultimatum' from M Barnier that he will walk away from talks if the UK doesn't back down on our red lines, then our chaps saying the EU was being unrealistic. This public bombast will continue. In the past we've allowed the French to do all the histrionic shouting, considering somehow that it was beneath us, but a new age under Boris has brought a touch of the Twickenham bleachers to our approach, and we now shout back. If Keiger is right, it's actually about establishing in advance who is to blame. Not us.

Four weeks to go. The pressure of the global corporates and foreign interests on the UK press and media will continue. They're not helped by the tsunami of QE that is artificially inflating asset prices like the skin of  a Peking duck; once the air has been let out, there is actually very little flesh on those sparse bones, but today it's hard to argue that it's the prospect of a no-deal that is depressing share prices.

There remains a flash of amusement in the pro-globalist publicity offensive. In the Telegraph, which has bled readers as the Barclay Brothers have abandoned their pro-Brexit stance, it's Jeremy Warner who is today the prophet of gloom and despondency. I'm eagerly anticipating AEP's first ever bouncy and optimistic take on our economic prospects.

Their freedom - and ours

For any libertarian, the Chinese gangster regime is an anathema. Micro control of citizens, the extinguishing of democracy, suffocation of freedoms of thought, movement and expression, mass executions, organ harvesting, state-tolerated piracy, officially sponsored cyber crime, corruption, injustice and the endemic mendacity of one-party propaganda. And I can write that without a scintilla of hyperbole - we have actually grown to accept this monolithic behemoth and its manifold and hateful repression of the human spirit as normal.

Hong Kong is the possibly the first time in modern history that pro-democracy protesters have waved the Union flag not as a symbol of colonial oppression but as a symbol of hope and liberation, the symbol of every freedom that is hateful to the gangster regime in Beijing. There are some 300,000 BNO passport holders in HK and we must welcome the moves by the FCO to extend their rights to live and work in the UK from six months to a year, and to unlock for them an easy path to full citizenship and permanent residence. The success they have made of HK betokens their economic vitality, agility, tenacity and appetite for hard work and application. Our universities should be filled not with the products of the PRC and the financial control that has enslaved several Oxford colleges and Russell group institutions to Huawei, but with the children of the free entrepreneurs of HK. They would add immeasurably to the common wealth of our nation, strengthen the reach and status of the City of London and add dynamism, innovation and thrusting growth to our economy, in exactly the way as did the Ugandans expelled by Idi Amin.

Already Brexit is allowing us to return our view back to a perspective we had almost lost, to the Anglosphere. The joint UK / US / NZ and Australian approach to China's moves in HK is absolutely crucial - in effect the Five Eyes nations confirming their solidarity. Boris's thrown-out notion of a D10 - a group of ten democracies - formed of the G7 plus India, South Korea and Australia to challenge China on specifically 5G to start with but potentially much more, is a clever move to not only re-orient UK foreign policy away from Europe but to give Germany, France and Italy a thump to the head to divert their own focus away from their collective navels and out towards the world.

Above all we must rapidly re-engineer the economy to supplement or replace reliance on China for anything. Diversification. At a time when we will have, in six months, the capacity to allow British Internationalism to blossom - including our unilateral ability to impose sanctions, form treaties and alliances and so on, our place as the world's fifth largest economy will not be insubstantial. In diplomatic terms we already box above our weight, and that ability will grow and mature as the FCO learns for the first time in forty years to think for itself.

China's actions over HK could well blow-back at the gangster regime in more ways than one - and could be the dawn of a new era for a Britain free from the EU.

Number 10 gets one back at Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon has been an online participant in the government's behind the scenes health briefings since the crisis gelled. As public health is a devolved issue, it is down to the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales to make their own announcements about changes in government policy. Sturgeon however has consistently infuriated Downing Street by stealing the PM's thunder - making her announcement in Scotland before the issue has been promulgated in London.

Yesterday, I think, Boris got his own back. The co-ordinated steering group had agreed early yesterday that  BBQs were on - limited public gatherings were to be permitted. Then the details got a bit hazy. Nicola rushed onto the airwaves to announce the policy she imagined Boris would announce later in the day, as she has done consistently. As Edinburgh Today reports, she set out Scotland's lockdown rules; "The First Minister also stressed that households must remain outside at all times and refrain from entering anyone's house" it reports. She also insisted that BBQ guests must bring their own food, though it can be grilled on a shared barbecue.

When Boris announced the English BBQ rules they were subtly different. While Scots in need of the toilet must stay in the open and use the garden, it's fine for the English to nip indoors for a sit-down. "Chief medical officer Chris Whitty confirmed that people can go to the toilet in other people's houses if they come to visit" reports the Mail. Additionally, English guests don't have to bring their own food, a move that will disappoint many parsimonious English hosts.

So as we move into the weekend, spare a thought for those elderly aunts in Scots gardens squatting behind the rhododendron with their bloomers around their ankles, clutching a pair of raw lamb cutlets, a loo roll and a bottle of Heavy, whilst their English counterparts take their comfort indoors. Hey ho.

Practising for a Scots BBQ

Rejoiner petulance hits 11 on the Coogan scale

The sound of Maitlis's foot stomping was audible in Luton as she received her bollocking from her BBC bosses, and in a major fit of petulance refused to go on stage last night. Her bollocking, of course, was for the biased, partisan and untrue editorial she had used the Newsnight show to deliver. She cannot have expected such a swift public put-down from her own bosses; even with a flood of complaints, BBC internal processes usually last several weeks, with the findings sneaked out on a Rizla pushed under the door. This time there was panic at Reith Towers; Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, is just biding his time to announce the decriminalisation of the licence fee. The only variable is the timing of the effective date, though many TV tax payers will stop paying as soon as the announcement is made.

Rejoiner petulance isn't confined to the BBC. Though today only the Guardian, Mirror and the i paper have Cummings on the front pages, Sky news and the BBC's 'Today' are gamely trying to brace the story's collapsing legs. This collapse has, if anything, infuriated even further the hysterical blow-hard rejoiners in the media. They're used to getting their own way, and like infants in a tantrum find it very hard to accept that this time they're not.

The events of the past few days do raise a very serious national security question. We all know the media are in a dire financial position due to the effects of the Wuhan virus. Would a foreign state or group of states facing defeat and humiliation in existential international trade talks be prepared to throw a few hundred millions at key players in their opponent's mass media to game the playing field? The sudden and co-ordinated assault by the MSM, including the Telegraph, in an effort to destroy the team at Number 10 over what is in effect a triviality hint that factors beyond innate newsworthiness could have been at play. The good guys in the security services - and there must be some loyal to the democratically elected government - should do some discreet digging.

Of course most of the reptiles would have used their organs to try to sabotage the final stage of Brexit in any event. But as even Private Eye, which used to keep an eye on the rest of the reptiles, has now joined the establishment vivarium, we have no popular watchdog. As they say

Thank God one cannot bribe or twist
the honest British journalist
But seeing what the man will do
unbribed there is no reason to

Anti-Brexit coup fizzles on

The anti- Brexit coup has started to crack this morning. The Mail and the Express have had enough and realised that this wasn't going anywhere, but the #ScumMedia ratpack, who studiously avoid making any mention of the growing hostility toward them on social media, are still doing what they can to sabotage the UK's final exit from the EU by forcing a two-year extension to the transition period.

I must admit this had more legs than I thought. The dailies and Sundays are in dire straits right now - and advertising income from the global corporates is for most a lifesaving source of income, and also one that gives the same global corporates great power over the proprietors. As for the 'rebel' Tory MPs - with the exception of those clots Baker and Bone, like some gaslight Victorian double act, who were daft enough to be manipulated by the press - well, it's the Remainer wing of the party all over;

There are more, but you get the picture. These are the easily manipulated non-entities, May supporters, anti no-dealers. You can expect that having blown their cover, many will now come under scrutiny from their constituency associations. I expect John Stafford, on our blogroll, will be preparing an edition of 'How to deselect a sitting Conservative MP' from his experience with the last bunch of Remainers.

Add to them Tobias Ellwood, who for some reason wishes to place the UK armed forces under the control of unelected bureaucrats in the Berlaymont, and Mark Pawsey, with his own brilliant scheme to immediately rejoin the EU and you have a prime selection of parliamentary dross.

Then of course there are the bishops - deeply opposed to Brexit, but so quick to slam shut the doors of their cathedrals at the slightest threat to their own perfumed adiposity and lock out the faithful in desperate need of spiritual comfort. #ScumBishops also made an appearance on Twitter.

The attempted coup fizzles on. This is their last ditch attempt to block our final independence from the EU, and it's brought all the supranationalists, all those in the pockets of the global corporates and the grey men who have captured the State out in the open. We can see you. We know who you are.

Blue tick meltdown as anti-Boris coup fails

To understand yesterday's extraordinary events, one needs to realise that it was not about Covid, but about Brexit. I warned last week that the period until the end of June would be the last-ditch battle of the Remainian forces; the decision that no trade deal is achievable, and that the UK must transition on Australian terms, or WTO terms, will be taken in five weeks. On the one side we have Boris, Dominic Cummings, David Frost and their close supporters and Leave voters and on the other around 40% of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, the entire establishment, the Civil Service, the press and media and the CBI wing of business, the global corporates.

It has been clear for a few weeks that a power grab attempt has been building inside the Tory party. You need to understand, as any member of the party who meets other members of the party understands, that there are essentially two kinds of Conservative. The first sees the party and political power as an opportunity to gain a personal advantage, to use contacts, curry favour, get on the inside track and make money, gain personal power and influence, make business alliances and so on. Then there are the genuinely selfless, who want to make the world, and Britain, a better place for all her citizens, who rail against corruption, injustice and authoritarianism. There is often an uncomfortable match between the two species, which came to a head in our party over Brexit. The CBI wing and their dreary leadership candidate were trounced by the altruistic populists - but they haven't given up, and in the past weeks have been spotlighting candidates to replace Boris. Sadly, their offerings to public and media exposure have also been dreary beyond measure; uninspiring mediocrities, soporific nonentities lacking even a spark of charisma.

The events of the past few days offered a perfect opportunity to mount their coup. Those for whom no trade deal with the EU is unacceptable - the CBI wing - could use the opportunity to dis Boris by targeting Cummings. And a prominent handful did so. They are supported by the dark establishment, the grey men, who have vowed never to allow a no deal Brexit that would hurt the global corporates, and the media, who are defending not just supranationalism but their capture of the State, now under dire threat from the populists.

Yesterday's blue-tick meltdown on Twitter was a joy to behold. They became completely unhinged, and exposed themselves. We now know who our enemies are in the party, and the public know, despite their previous abject denials, where the interests of the prominent media hysterics lie. Poor Boulton was re-tweeting anti-Boris bile at such a frenetic rate that he surely must have dropped a stone overnight.

The Press are in the gutter as far as public opinion goes - never have they been held in such utter contempt by the British people. And like Peston, they have no self-awareness - they simply don't realise that their opinion doesn't matter. We're not interested in their opinions. We have our own.

But more egregious by far was the unrestrained reaction from one of those who have captured the establishment. This is far more serious than anyone is letting on, and though it was deleted within 11 minutes, it will live for decades -

 Hang on tight. The next few weeks will get rough - not Covid, but Brexit.

Footnote
======
Steve Baker is the exception that proves the rule. Steve was a valuable member of ERG during May's demented bungling, but he's really not up to a ministerial job. He believes he deserves one, however, I think, and this frustration boiled over yesterday. Thus proving he really is a bit of a plank.

The death of the HR department

Back in 2017 Nicola Thorp turned up for a temp assignment at Price Waterhouse Cooper staffing the reception desk. She was sent home for wearing flat shoes; the company dress code clearly stated that women employees must wear 2 - 4 inch heels. And despite the press reactions - photos of shapely calves in stilettos from the Sun, outrage from the Guardian - it quickly blew over. Dress codes were and are a quite legal and enforceable power of company HR departments. And it doesn't end with what employees can wear to the office. In the past twenty years they have ended the City's lunchtime drinking culture. The pubs heaving with suited traders getting a couple of pints down their gullets are a thing of the past - the HR departments decreed that, on Health and Safety grounds, the company had a new no-alcohol policy. Any employee with alcohol in their bloodstream was deemed to be an unacceptable risk in the workplace.

Of course it extended even further. Not only must employees not smoke in the workplace, they must not smoke in the vicinity of the workplace or when they can be identified as employees of the company, whether during their paid hours or otherwise. When your DHL driver finishes his shift, he can still be disciplined for having a fag in his liveried overalls in a Tesco car park.

And then there's social media. The reason I started blogging under a pseudonym was counsel's opinion that had been circulated to us confirming that contractors, IR35ers and employees could all be compelled to desist from expressing any form of personal public opinion that could be linked to the company. There's no point in Joe Potato going on Twitter with the bio "Structural Engineer with Thames Water - opinions are my own". They're not. His opinions belong to his employer. Of course, Momentum activists working in the NHS don't have this problem, as the employer doesn't mind being linked with them, but an NHS worker openly declaring membership of the Brexit Party on Twitter will certainly face disciplinary action - not for the membership, but they'll dig into past posts to find one that violates company policy. Offence archaeology. This last pernicious smothering of personal political opinion by corporate HR departments has surely been the most distasteful use of commercial power.

HR litigation has been a rich seam of earnings for law firms, so much so that the workplace has become an incredibly high-risk legal environment. In the past decade cases have even sought to establish that normal human contacts in the workplace can be a cause for action; don't even think about smiling reassuringly at the new girl or joking about the Transport Manager's weight.

And Covid-19 might just have driven a tank through the whole bloody edifice of corporate HR control.

Are female employees of PwC working from home still expected to wear 4" heels when Zooming from their sofa? Can you swig from a can of cold lager in the garden on a steaming hot day while engaged on a work voice call? Can you smoke whilst constructing complex company spreadsheets on the kitchen table, or if you develop lung cancer can you sue the company for secondary smoke from your wife's fag in the workplace? Can you playfully jiggle your spouse's breasts on company time?

And as work itself changes away from permanent employment in a workplace, as will be inevitable, will the legal relationships between employee / contractor and employer become more equal? Will employees cease to be a 'resource' like iron ore or petroleum feed stock or power or produce and start to become sovereign partners, if unequal in financial size?

I started work having an office, a desk with an ashtray and a culture of the three-pint lunch, of Christmas parties that provided opportunity for Bacchanalian fornication. The job of the personnel department was to write the salary cheques. Most people met their partners at work, and their longest lasting friends, bonded over beer and fags and Christmas lunches. It's now the turn of the Puritan zealots from the HR departments who ruined it all to go. They won't be missed.

Update 9.53
=========
I neglected to mention the effects of Covid on liability insurance premiums - general liability insurance, Directors & Officers insurance and Worker's Compensation insurance. In the end it won't be government legislation on distancing that kills the office workplace, but the unaffordability of the risk.

On the bright side ...

Climate activists will no doubt be contemplating a new series of disruptive protests at the news. The sunshine and good weather, it seems,  is down to dramatically lower levels of atmospheric pollution across the world. It surely cannot be long before the increased levels of UV trigger a new fear campaign. "Unless we stop this lack of pollution that protects us from harmful UV rays, the whole country will start tanning and producing more vitamin D!"

Seriously, what has surprised many is the speed with which the earth has bounced back from a pause in human activity. The force of life in nature is tremendously strong and an entire city will return to jungle if we abandon it, if we stop the daily fight to keep nature at bay, halt the weeding, the mowing, the cultivating, the taming of all that incessant growth.

It's mating time for both house spiders and salamanders here. The first are no problem - but little webs I've not previously noticed are suddenly holding a pair of spiders. Leave them be until they've done their spider stuff. The salamanders though are as daft as bricks. They've been crawling slowly up the old stream bed each year for a thousand years or more to mate, and the fact that a cart track has become a little road with two or three vehicles an hour at peak times doesn't phase them. But it does me. So as I spot them, I become a salamander lollipop man, sometime picking them up and carrying them across if they're moving too slowly. They seem to give me a look of withering contempt - "We'll still be doing this long after you've gone, human".

It's the trees I feel sorry for. We've just reduced their lush diet of CO2. It won't be long before the Gretas start blaming us for that too - the year of Covid will be recorded for posterity by a thin, emaciated growth ring. All our fault. And the bloody things are probably getting sunburnt, to boot.

Michael Gove runs a tight ship

More of a placemark than a post this morning; I'm sure we will all need to find these documents quickly over the next few weeks as the activities of the Brexit saboteurs rises to a crescendo.

The focus, clarity and process of the talks is a tribute both to Michael Gove and David Frost. What a change from dreary May's demented bungling, and the idiocy displayed by Oliver Robbins.

David Frost's letter to M. Barnier (.pdf)

Draft agreement on Fisheries (.pdf)

Draft Trade agreement (.pdf)

Frost's letter is a model of reasonableness, and recognises that poor M. Barnier has been given an impossible brief by his principals. It also sets out the UK's position to the rest of the world and makes it very difficult for the EU to deploy their usual threat and pressure tactics of smear and confected outrage. It is a well-constructed attempt for the UK to take the moral high ground, and to my mind succeeds admirably.

We will all have learned that all successful negotiations always allow both sides to claim some gains, and I suspect that for the EU these will be tariffs. France, the biggest global consumer of Scotch whisky, may pressure the EU to penalise her own drinkers in a fit of pique. But I'm sure we'll get over it - too much and we boycott EU goods in the UK, which is the last thing that German carmakers want.

Over to you, M. Barnier.

Update
======
M. Barnier responds to Frost - "I don't like your tone, my man" - but no rebuttal of UK's fisheries position other than "consequences - we will punish you". Twitter comments include "Lord North all over". Judge for yourselves

Barnier response to UK

Superspreaders

Evidence continues to emerge about the way in which the Wuhan virus spreads. There's good news and bad news. The good news is that instead of 60% of us having to be infected to achieve herd immunity, we could do it with 10% - 20% in combination with behaviour modification. The bad news is that the behaviour modification could knock the arse out of our lives. 

The key is that not all of us are infected equally, and those who are infectious are not all equally infectious. It's nothing to do with individual physiology and everything to do with location and positioning, as the Telegraph reports today -

By applying a mathematical model to reported outbreaks of the disease outside China, they estimated that 80 per cent of all secondary transmissions were caused by a small fraction of infected individuals - around 10 percent.

The risk is in strenuous or energetic activities with more rapid, deeper breathing in crowded closed or indoor situations. A mosh pit is very high risk, the Bodleian library much less so. Groundworkers, brickies and scaffolders (provided they don't crowd into the mess rooms) are safe on site, second fix joiners, sparkies and painters less so. And if you want to get around London, I'd suggest the upper deck of one of those open-top tourist buses.

But for most of us, it's our most common and uniting experience that may never be the same again - the pub. They've re-opened here, but table service only, not more than four to a table and bookings are needed. The whole point about going to the pub is (a) it's spontaneous and (b) the opportunity to meet new people, expose yourself to social interaction and to strengthen bonds of identity and community. We have to pin our hopes on a vaccine to get back to anything like normal. 

Post-Wuhan gasthaus

The final round of EU trade talks - sham ECJ crippled.

I have long claimed here that the ECJ was named in the same way as Orwell's Ministry of Truth. It is the EU's political court, and has taken on the mantle of bending the law to facilitate ever closer union, to achieve a federal European state. It has as little to do with pursuing justice, equity, right or fair play as Orwell's fictional bureaucracy has with championing veracity. AEP's latest column for the Telegraph does a magnificent job in underlining the institution's failures -

The ECJ merely asserts primacy. The doctrine was invented out of whole cloth in the landmark Costa/ Enel case in 1964. This bootstrap jurisprudence - in essence a bluff - has been indulged and tolerated by member states. Until now.

There is no Treaty basis for EU legal supremacy. Judicial expansionists in the EU legal services unit tried to slip it into the Lisbon Treaty but all they got was a thin Declaration in the annex stating that the “settled law of the Court” has primacy over national law.

The German judges have repeatedly objected to judicial activism by the ECJ, thunderously denouncing its misuse of the Charter to extend its power. Their finger has been on the trigger. Finally they pulled it. The implicit has suddenly become explicit.

AEP, who has successfully predicted twelve of the last three recessions, is not sanguine about the effects of this bust up. We are wrong to believe it will be bodged over with the usual Eurofudge, wrong to imagine that the ECB can just carry on with its QE programme. He strongly believes that this time it's a binary choice between Germany's continued membership of the EU and the Euro.

Their mistake was to trust in a popular misunderstanding. For years we have been lectured that 'EU law is superior to national law and supercedes domestic legislation' - true. It was easy for everyone to assume or be led to believe that if EU law was superior to national law, then the EU's court must be superior to national courts - not true. 

Meanwhile, as the penultimate round of talks on an EU trade deal before the June deadline collapsed, with Boris holding firm against the EU didactic stubbornness, we are reminded that there are just six weeks remaining in which an extension can be agreed. Even though the government has made plain that no extension will be sought or accepted, this won't stop the entire forces of Remain and #FBPE idiocy from going flat out.

As the final round of pre-deadline talks start in June, expect hysteria from all the usual quarters, eager for the UK to handicap itself or shackle our laws to their sham-court, just so cruelly exposed as such by the German judges. 

Expect Blair back on the Today programme explaining why an extension is essential, and the MSM to dig-up the crazed fools who were kicked out of the party; Grieve, Soubry, Rory Stewart et al. Oh, and of course Major will rise from his sepulchre to do the same. Plus the gerontocrats from the Lords will croak their protests over inadequate phone lines and PTSD Adonis and 'Howler' Grayling will melt down. Also expect the BBC to put out a Panorama explaining how not extending will cost more lives than the Wuhan virus, and Sky to interview no-one except closet Momentum members. Hey ho. 

How far will London house values fall?

London has seen some of the most bullish house price inflation in the country as the nation's ceremonial centre has been in the process of going from a national capital to a world megacity. Everyone expects domestic property values to fall as a result of the Wuhan virus, but by how much? There at several factors at play, I think. One is the fall in values that mirrors a fall in GDP; we saw this in 2008, when a small drop in GDP saw a much larger fall in house values, which fell between 15% - 20%. Add to that in 2020 the increased biohazard risk driving a flight to the country. All those shabby, noisy, flimsy multistorey blocks thrown up in the past fifteen years that have been so profitable for the volume builders have just become about as desirable as Rio favela-shacks made of crinkly tin. My own guess is there's a long way to fall. Property in the counties and towns with gardens and fields within walking distance will fare far better.

A counter argument may be that London is ahead of the rest of the country in acquiring immunity - and recent research suggests that rather than 60% of the population having been infected, it could take as few as 10% - 20% to provide herd immunity, provided the right people, i.e. those most liable to infect others, have been infected. London's economy could therefore bounce back far more quickly than the rest of the country, and dampen a drop in values. I don't understand why crowded, rammed, jostling London should be better off than the post-industrial NE, but there it is.

I've constructed the chart below from the Land Registry HPI for London, taking the flats values, and the ONS quarterly GDP data series, both rebased to 1995 = 100. Interesting. And that verse by Louis MacNeice from 1934 always comes back to me -

Splayed outwards through the suburbs houses, houses for rest
Seducingly rigged by the builder, half-timbered houses with lips pressed
So tightly and eyes staring at the traffic through bleary haws
And only a six-inch grip of the racing earth in their concrete claws;
In these houses men as in a dream pursue the Platonic Forms
With wireless and cairn terriers and gadgets approximating to the fickle norms
And endeavour to find God and score one over the neighbour
By climbing tentatively upward on jerry-built beauty and sweated labour.

Wands and Lycra louts

As a teenager I was a fearsome cyclist. I had, I recall, three bikes; a heavy chugger, a utility bike and a whiplike racer, for naked speed is fun, all built or re-built by me. The chugger was a heavy old steel machine with Sturmey-Archer gears and wired-in lights powered both by batteries and a dynamo and despite its age was superbly comfortable for long, low speed rides. It was also very sturdy - I once carried a No.19 radio set including power unit and variometer, which must have weighed 30kg, for about 25 miles. All in all, I cycled many thousands, even tens of thousands, of miles. The object wasn't health or exercise but either exploring or visiting mates, who were scattergunned across half the county. I was already smoking, and never quite managed to overcome the uneven burn on a fag when smoking whilst riding, though at 14 I bought a pipe in an experimental effort to do so. So I should be well disposed towards cycling, which I am. But not so well disposed towards the arrogance and violence displayed by many cyclists in London.

Londoners may have failed to notice the little plastic bendy rods springing up in long snakes along their roads; it's what the councils have been doing during lockdown. These wands designate new road space for cyclists. So rapidly have these been deployed, so assured the position of the new routes, one can only imagine that instead of stockpiling PPE the London authorities were stockpiling plastic traffic wands, ready for a crisis such as the Wuhan virus to roll them out overnight. London's incredibly low rate of new infections at just twenty-four a day may mean that drivers venturing out from lockdown will encounter these for the first time, and find that their own roadspace has just been reduced by a third or more.

What I'd like to see are these new spaces colonised by families on bikes, including the wobbly learners, by slow pleasure riders of all ages with wicker baskets or panniers, by cycles with babies and infants strapped into carriers, all cheerily smiling and nodding and behaving gracefully. What I fear we'll get is the lycra louts, with an enormous sense of entitlement, who will with great aggression assume their right to dominate these new spaces, and feel nothing but vindication for their past boorish, uncouth thuggery. They will assume the lane expansion is a reward for their previous loutish and utterly selfish posession of cycle space. And until it becomes legal to kick the buggers off their bikes, I'm not sure what can be done about it.

Borders borders borders

As Europe stumbles in a spread field into phase II of the Wuhan virus response, crossing borders becomes the issue of debate. Although Brits have been warned that they won't be let out for Summer, much of tourist Europe isn't so sanguine. Austria has been trying to re-open the border with Germany, to allow in the floods of German tourists, but so far Germany has refused - and with a second wave of infections coming to Germany, is unlikely to do so.

There's no move from Austria to re-open the border with Italy - they're quite happy with having it closed - but the two nations announced yesterday that cowherds tending herds on the alm, the high alpine summer pastures that frequently straddle the borders, could cross at will. These almhutte high in the mountains are often popular with girl students spending a Summer away together, a group of five or six doing the daily milking and making cheese from May until September. Often connected only by steep cattle tracks, with no vehicular access, where everything has to be carried up and down, it's regarded as quality time away. When it's time to bring the cows back down to the valleys in Autumn, they the girls will go back to university. Or not. There are reputed to be almhutte that actually sit on the border, with the bedroom in Italy and the kitchen in Austria, rather like the Irish border.

The UK has announced that no quarantine will be needed for those crossing from France, only to earn a rebuke from the technocrats from their bunker beneath the Berlaymont. It turns out we can do it under their EU laws, but only if we say 'no quarantine for residents of France' rather than 'no quarantine for anyone entering from France'. Go figure. I suppose we must therefore bang-up Polish truck drivers for a fortnight if we pay any attention to the dreary officials in Brussels. Which I hope we won't.

Whilst the Germans won't be able to come to Austria, the Austrians won't be able to visit their own  favourite destinations in Spain. I'm not sure where the Spanish won't be able to go - except Portugal, of course, which will also be missing the English. Meanwhile Croatia is planning an air-corridor to fly in their preferred Summer guests, the Czechs. Greece, like Austria a heavy-smoking nation with a low rate of infection, is ambivalent about losing her crucial Summer trade. Perhaps she should open only to Europe's smokers - each visitor having to drag deeply on a Capstan full strength at the airport on arrival to validate their status.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have already opened their mutual borders, but with about a third of the population still working in the UK as bar-staff (now furloughed) there will be barely enough natives left to fill the foreign tourist restaurant tables. "What's the local speciality?" "Liver dumplings." "Oh that's strange. That's our speciality back home as well".

But remarkably, Europeans are reverting to a national border mindset more swiftly than I would ever have imagined possible after the Shengen experience. And that may be the biggest worry for Brussels.

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.