Reasons to be cheerful

The latest polls out yesterday put the Conservatives on 46%, a good ten points ahead of Labour on 36%. Not bad for a government in power, not bad for a government that has blundered through the Wuhan virus and not bad for a government facing an opposition that should be enjoying a bounce. As I predicted, Captain Hindsight is not a leader to win the election in 2024 but to reform the Labour party to give it a good crack at 2029.

That the Conservatives are really annoying not only the comrades but elements of the authoritarian alt-right means the party is getting it right. That the PM is a one-nation libertarian much like myself gives me a good feeling, and gives little traction to an attempted counter-reformation move last week by Hammond, Gaulk and their media supporters. These supranationalist dags of the global corporates could only accuse the PM of being 'authoritarian' - a frankly laughable accusation. Sweeties, a strong and confident libertarian remains a libertarian.

We have a cabinet adjustment due in the autumn and we know already that David Frost is due to take over as National Security Advisor in September. The triumvirate at the heart of change, the PM, Dominic and Michael Gove, will be strengthened. Reform is high on the agenda - the NHS, PHE, the Electoral Commission and the BBC are already scored, and the Integrated Defence Review should be ready to report. So Health and Defence are key cabinet seats to watch.

As Nick Drew has for some time pointed out over at C@W, green energy is now going mainstream. Business is taking it on in a big way. And here again our reclamation of our 200 mile EEZ should stand us in good stead. The shallow North Sea, and in particular the Dogger Bank, most of which is British, make offshore wind an easy win for the UK, to an extent that could surpass our daily grid demand. At night, when we're not using power, it can be used to make Hydrogen, the combustion fuel of the future. And all those empty North Sea wells also in the UK zone give us a fantastic storage potential for CO2.

Green has broken free of the XR cranks and has gone mainstream. And the public, the voters, have also accepted this is the way to go.

In the Culture War, the PM's open refusal to kneel to imagined guilt gets the support of 67% of the British public, and of all libertarians, and leads a pushback against the tyranny of the metropolitan mob. Little Owen Jones, a spiteful and vicious leader of the Cancel culture, may have realised in a Marat-moment that the hate could turn back on him. In 1793 Jones would have been the shrieky hysterical little sans-culotte offering head after head to Madame Guillotine.

For the financial backers of the several attempted blows against the government, you've lost your money. These pushes for power either succeed at first instance or they fade and falter into background attritional noise. The attempted coup around the orchestrated attempts to get Dom came closest, but exposed the key players and marked them for later disposal - to be sidelined into irrelevance, excluded from the circles of power, briefed against and so on.

Of course we've still got the collapse of the global economy and a lethal pandemic virus to crack, but all in all things look good. Many reasons to be cheerful. 

Public blunder - it's Crimea all over again

A tempest is blowing through the complacent hubristic corridors of power in Whitehall. They have been tested and have failed utterly and humiliatingly, and now they must face the gales of change.

NHS central procurement and NHS and PHE central testing, we were told yesterday, wasted £25bn due to incompetence, a confused commitment to central command and control, a concentration on fashionable management nostrums and jargonistic pabulums rather than on efficiency and effectiveness. It was the rule of dire and dismal senior managers with a focus on reducing sugar in breakfast cereal rather than saving lives. It is the grossest and most culpable mismanagement; indeed we have seen nothing like it since the debacle in the Crimea exposed the manifold failings of army management.

You may know how the media and the telegraph shone the disinfectant sunlight into the dark establishment corners of mismanagement, blunder and stupidity in Crimea. Medical and logistic failures. Troops with no tents or winter clothing, no means of preparing food hygienically, inadequate medical care, flogging at the wheel, a system of buying commissions that left the army in the command of idiots and fools. The British public at the time were outraged - but the establishment aristocrats who ran the army closed ranks and blocked all attempts at reform, for a while at least. It took Prussia's thrashing of the Kermits and an establishment panic that eventually allowed Cardwell's reforms of 1870 - 1881. Barely a generation short of powered flight and the cinema we stopped flogging servicemen.

The Whitehall establishment will make the same impassioned defence of their blunder, malfeasance and incompetence as did those cretin generals back in the 1850s. They are as far out of their depth now as they were at the time of Crimea. They have no place in office, no place in power, no place in control of our taxes and no place in a democracy with a government with a mandate to cleanse them.

Pre-Nightingale NHS hospital in Crimea - disease prevention by PHE

Rogue nations, book burners and ethics

Many who have business or overseas contacts with not only Chinese but many people from SE Asia will know the importance of 'face' - and of saving and losing face. The raucous, primitive, violent and abusive nature of social media is not a happy place for those with such sensitivities, yet several times, normally after I have criticised China, I have received a wounded but polite little note. I suspect they're from Chinese students doing their compulsory two hours a day on the interweb defending the motherland - 'chide gently to bring offender onto path of righteous truth' or something. Yesterday China avoided the stigma of sanctions for human rights abuses announced by Dominic Raab in the Commons against named officials. The loss of face if Chinese individuals are named as human rights abusers would be grievous. 

He certainly managed to hit a spot with Russia, KSA, Burma and North Korea, though only the first three pretend to be liberal if not quite democratic. Chinese executions, concentration camps, organ harvesting and repression haven't earned them this disgrace as yet - maybe we still need their PPE. The latest repressive security law imposed on the people of Hong Kong literally encourages the book burners - books condemned by the Beijing regime are, even as I write, being seized and destroyed; Hague writes about it in today's 'graph. 

It is however Russia and China that are stoking the fires of the Culture War on the internet in an effort to destabilise the West. Whilst naive and credulous children are rioting on the street in London because someone called a trannie a tranny on the interweb, Sergei Magnitsky and Jamal Khashoggi, a lawyer and a journalist, were being murdered by their own state officials. 

And it's partularly important to distinguish between people and regimes, between holy Russians and Putin's gangster regime, between China's Beijing autocrats and the people of Hong Kong. These subject peoples simply don't enjoy the democratic freedoms that we take for granted; the rampant voting corruption even in Putin's most recent referendum on his own tenure is accepted with just a shrug of the shoulders. 

Whilst I'm encouraged by our finally moving out of the twentieth century and into one in which GRU assassins and CCP executioners, Korean torturers and Saudi head-choppers are not only unacceptable but that such actions have consequences, we cannot be complacent about the threats that such rogue nations pose to our liberal democracy. At least it seems we now accept that China, Russia, KSA and the like are not benign regimes but threats to our way of life. Now we must reform our economies to stop selling them arms and technology and buying from them factory goods and fuel that are killing their own citizens and undermining ours. 

The global corporates have been quick enough to respond to inconsequential movements such as BLM. Let's now test them with a commercial and trade policy in line with an ethical foreign policy when human lives and human freedoms rather than hurt feelings are at stake. 

Rogue states are once again burning books

Aircraft and theatres

I trust you all had a decent weekend and hope that many of you managed a visit to the pub. The pub, of course, is far, far more than just a sector of the entertainment industry - it is local democracy in evidence, a temple to free speech and expression, free from the constraints of remote censorship but subject always to peer evaluation. Drunk people may be incapable of maintaining social distancing, one police service senior manager opined, and undoubtedly for many who managed to get a leg over at the weekend there will be a degree of gratitude for this grievous failure.

The question this morning is what is the difference between an aircraft and a theatre, in epidemic terms that is? Why is it OK to sit close to a group of people for several hours in an aircraft but not OK to do so in a theatre? I suspect there may be an answer in the air filtration and circulation systems, but it's hardly convincing.

It seems we've found the path to living with Covid some months after other nations - testing, testing and testing. Sweatshops, meat plants, overcrowded housing and other risk environments will all incubate new outbreaks, but the more swiftly we detect and contain them, the more the rest of the economy can attempt to recover before the big dip hits.

One final tiny point is niggling at me. Is the imaginary line that separates the legal and administrative jurisdictions of Scotland and England a border or a boundary? I'm genuinely not sure.

Map frenzy

Sometimes one unintentionally hits a nerve. So it was this week when scrolling through my Twitter timeline I saw a map posted by a US academic I follow; just as a comment in response I put up another map. Here they are -

If I'd wanted to get a full flavour taste of the culture war in the US I couldn't have done better; over 50,000 impressions and a representative array of comments from the hostile (essentially the US Census Bureau was racist for making such a map) to the scientific and including a score from Americans who had little idea they were so German. Well, there may or may not be a correlation there, but the important thing is we're six months into this pandemic and we still don't fully understand it. So anything that might point to risk is relevant.

I'd like to see more maps. I'd like to see maps of poverty, overcrowding, extent of medical insurance, housing tenure and other potential factors. I'd like to know more about those lands and reservations in which native Americans have been so badly hit - their populations were devastated by coronaviruses caught from Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries. You can never have too many maps. 

And for the apparently huge cohort of Americans who have never seen a map of their own ancestry made by their own government before, well, glad to have been of assistance in improving your knowledge. Knowledge often leads to wisdom.

The City reboots itself

The threat from Brussels was as crude as one from any third-rate mafia hoodlum - 'Give us all your fish or we'll destroy the City'. The more old-maidish amongst the commercial gents, probably the sort who would have advocated giving Mr Hitler exactly what he wanted, were quick to point out in their broadcasts and newspaper columns that fishing was a tiny fraction of the UK's GDP, a piddling insignificant part of the economy, and should certainly be surrendered to save the City. Indeed, if Catastrophe May had still been in power, she would have tried to do so. Fortunately for us this government is made of sterner stuff.

The City itself seems to have shrugged-off the threats, as Matthew Lynn wrote yesterday in the Telegraph. Indeed, his entire piece is so upbeat it's hard to pick a single snippet to quote; we're turning our backs on EU regulation and our faces out to the world, and the City is starting to feel the stirrings of that old buccaneering spirit again, after forty years under the sclerotic over-regulation of the unelected officials in Brussels. It's not a puff-piece though - there's a potential hard reality -

Step by step, the City, under the control of the Bank of England and the Treasury, is shaping its own regulatory system. True, there are risks in that. The City may lose access to European markets. That matters. British financial exports to the rest of Europe amount to £26.1bn, or 21pc of total UK services sold across the Continent, and that is far more than we import. And yet, despite that, it is still the right decision.

My own view is that right now, and for the immediate future, the EU simply won't be able to deliver on its Covid rescue package without the City. They will make whatever post-transition adjustments they need to secure continued access to the bits of the UK financial services nexus they need. But their ambitions are still to displace London with a hub of their own - Frankfurt, Paris or Amsterdam.

Of the three, Amsterdam is the only serious contender and although, handicapped by the EU as it is, it will never overtake the City, it will provide healthy competition and stimulate continuous innovation and improvement in London. They're like us; northern, with a liking for legal probity. Germany is too corrupt, the courts too partisan and biased, shareholder protection the worst in Europe, creditor safeguards too low and business is endemically bent. Frankfurt is a dreary little provincial town, Paris is too frivolous and France too bankrupt.

Standing up to bullies has more benefits than just exposing their weakness. It allows us to discover we still have a spine - and for the City, the scent of freedom is intoxicating.

A new world

Well, we didn't expect that to happen so quickly.

Let's just take a quick recap of the shifts in defence and security policy over the past few years. Reviews are now normally every five years; past reviews in 2010 and 2015 were typical dilettante Cameronian fudges; the future was supranational and international, UN good, NATO good, EU better. And we've ended up with a pair of carriers that were obsolete as soon as they rolled down the slipway, so vulnerable to a new generation of hypersonic missiles that they can't be let anywhere near a war zone. Possibly useful as a platform for fishing surveillance drones, though - anchored in the North Sea, bang in the middle of our EEZ, each housing a clutch of admirals. Unless we can persuade the EU Navy to buy one. Our Type 45's may be able to detect and shoot down a cricket ball travelling at the speed of sound, but that's not much use when the enemy are using missiles a lot faster than the speed of sound rather than fast cricket balls to sink our carriers.

Anyway, from 2017 Mark Sedwill was charged with conducting a run-up to the 2020 review, which needed to be broadened to include threats from State Actors. Tanks are out, deniable actions by unmarked troops are in. As Putin has shown in the Donbass, you can get away with it. And as the Salisbury poisonings and a score more GRU assassinations elsewhere have shown, even when they know it's you, what can they do, apart from ineffective sanctions and a handful of diplomatic expulsions? So long as Germany is dependent on Putin's gas, he has a get-out-of-jail-free card. China too has been a disruptor, using state cyber attacks on other nations' infrastructures as well as armies of hackers who infiltrate and disrupt social media. Iran's shipnapping in the gulf is open.

If Cameron was a dilettante, May was Queen of Chaos. She hadn't got a clue what she wanted, so long as she could keep it secret and keep the public, non-government experts and parliament away. Catastrophe May was a brainless ditherer, a dunderhead. On the basis that any plan was better than no plan, Sedwill acted in what he genuinely thought were the nation's best interests. He went to Washington to talk with those conducting Trump's review. He sent trusted civil servants to Brussels to tentatively commit the UK to EU defence plans. He invented the 'Fusion' strategy, allowing the UK to do everything at once with an Eton mess of defence, security, economic and other resources.

None of this made it through to what was scheduled to be the 2020 defence and security review. On taking office in 2019 Boris radically altered the terms of reference and downgraded Sedwill's role. Dominic Cummings had also long been a vocal critic of the UK's disastrous defence procurement regime. When Covid demonstrated that Whitehall's procurement systems couldn't even procure a few boxes of gowns and face masks, it was also an explicit admission that our mandarins couldn't be trusted with buying stuff like ships. Dom has written on his blog, bookmarked here, that utterly unfit Whitehall procurement "has continued to squander billions of pounds, enriching some of the worst corporate looters and corrupting public life via the revolving door of officials/lobbyists".

Champions for the MoD such as Michael Fallon and George Robertson have tried to not only hold the UK to our 2% of GDP commitment for defence but to increase this to 2.5% or even 3%. Defence interests - the admirals and generals - have done everything they can to ringfence 'their' 2% to tanks and ships and fast jets. Simply, their ideas are as redundant as the useless carriers we've just acquired.

The USMC has just junked all its tanks.

The decades to come will mean we must fight on the battlegrounds on which we are being attacked - green men, state assassins, cyber war. The ring-fencing that the men in medals want won't work. We need a mash-up of MoD, GCHQ, SIS and MI5, FCDO and the City. We need to throw into the pot the MoD's 2% of GDP, DfID's 0.7% and the billions of secret squirrel money. On the face of it, Sedwill's 'Fusion' idea was in the right direction - but the man had a 'reservation of mind' that meant interests other than the elected government's played a part in his delivery.

And Covid buggers everything. When GDP shrinks by 20%, 2% of that smaller pot will buy far fewer F35s or anti-cricket ball destroyers. Lord Frost will have exactly the right skill set, and will be able to put together exactly the right team to deal with that new reality. And my sincere hope is that Labour's front bench under Starmer can put a broad shoulder behind the UK's national defence and security strategy - after all, they may have to live with it from 2024.    

Doctor Bew and the malice of Davos

Way back in February, lost in the panic of the emerging threat from the Wuhan virus, the PM issued a written statement to Parliament setting out the terms of a comprehensive Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. Four months on, the merger of DfID into the FCO to form the FCDO from September was announced - just the first of the many changes to come. Undertaking the review, the PM announced, "a cross-Whitehall team in the Cabinet Secretariat, and a small taskforce in No10, will report to me and the National Security Council".

Snippets of news are also leaking that Mark Sedwill is deeply unhappy and may not last out the year wearing his triple crown of Cabinet Secretary, Head of the Civil Service and, since 2017, National Security Advisor. I strongly suspect it is the hubris of the last of those jobs that has been most greatly provoked.  For last year Boris brought in to the Number 10 policy unit Professor John Bew of Kings - and Bew is leading the PM's team. To get a flavour of John Bew's world view, I recommend the list of papers he has authored or co-authored, listed on his Policy Exchange home page. In particular, his paper on a post-Brexit NATO is as sound as granite. It comprehensively smashes many of the fatuous pabulums peddled by EUphiles in Whitehall and Parliament, and by supporters of PESCO and the UN -

- There is a false narrative about NATO that presents it as being less important than, or even contrary to, British involvement in the United Nations.

- Another false narrative that risks undermining NATO is the idea that it is the European Union that has kept Europe at peace for more than half a century.

- For most of NATO’s existence, with the exception of a brief period in the 1980s, there has been a broad consensus on the frontbenches of the major British political parties as to the Alliance’s vital importance to UK interests and European security.

- There is no viable successor to NATO as the guarantor of European security or the foundation stone of transatlantic unity.

In re-affirming the primacy of internationalist rather than supranational solutions to security threats, Bew will risk the malice of the Davos globalists as well as the fifth-column inside SW1.

John Bew is Professor of History and Foreign Policy in the War Studies department at King’s - an outpost of academic probity and scholarship that has so far managed to resist the contagious madness that is sweeping through academia. The same department has also given us David Betz and MLR Smith, both very much alive to the concept of State Capture, and co-authors of a paper for the Bruges Group in January 2019 -

For thinkers like Adam Smith the rule of law was intended to maintain balance and ensure the integrity and fairness of the market to prevent monopolistic behaviour. In a not dissimilar manner, the role of parliament in a mature democracy like Britain was to balance out competing interests and claims to power, which included giving a voice to the lower orders. For such a system to flourish it required parliamentarians to be somewhat representative of the people who elected them. Thus, they functioned as the will of the people in parliament, whom through dialogue and debate would mediate and resolve issues in a manner that broadly accorded with the expressed wishes of the electorate.

With the rise of the new political classes, a different political dynamic is emerging. Drawn from similar backgrounds (often middle-class, university educated, with little prior career experience outside politics itself), members of parliament increasingly sound alike, think alike and act alike. The evolution of a monochrome political establishment is producing a radical disconnect, which the Brexit denouement is throwing into stark relief. 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.

Unwinding more than forty-years of 'the long march through the institutions' would tax the most capable of governments even in normal times. That those who have marched into the heart of the State are not in this instance Gramsci's communists but a privileged and elite minority who have lost touch with an electorate that gave the Party an 80 seat majority last year makes it much harder. The burdens of the Wuhan virus makes the task almost but not quite a Sisyphean burden.

I am unequivocally ready to give everything I can to support the government's internal struggles. The so-called Culture War is a sideshow, a big frothy flatus that will burst and fade as the economic crisis descends. We cannot divert our attention from the fight that matters -  reclaiming the State.

Police are not immune to Instagram culture

Back in Suffolk in the 90s I used to rough shoot with a bloke who'd bagged several empty Halls to market and sell; this was before City, pop-star and footie player money moved out into the country, and though just about every village had its Hall house, an astonishing number were empty and unwanted. Anyway, point is this gave him many hundreds of acres of rough shooting whilst he was agent. One morning after shooting the grounds of Mockbeggars Hall we stopped at the village shop for a couple of ham rolls. The cottage next door to the shop had been bought by a county copper, who had an irrational dislike of anyone parking outside his house. Not a great deal of foresight in that mind. Sure enough, while we were in the shop he was out there examining the Landy for Road Traffic Act breaches. In the (locked) back were our guns. He was pumped like a toad when we came out

"Do you know how many times I've had to face someone holding a shotgun?" he demanded

"Never" replied my mate,  a Countryside Alliance gun-rights star, with a hard light in his eye. He did actually know every single shotgun crime incident in the county for the past twenty years and was just waiting for the parking space bully to challenge him. The toad crumbled, mumbled a few words of advice about gun security and retreated into his cave.

Today of course, a selfie with the Landy in the background would be on Instagram within minutes. If there's one myth plod loves to perpetuate about the Job it's their contact with weapons. That and dead bodies. "Do you know how many bodies I've had to ...." must be the most popular opening police line in constraining human joy - and in most cases the answer will be, as it was with our plod, "None".

So when two junior officers were tasked with guarding a murder crime scene recently, neither could resist taking selfies with the dead and posting them to Whatsapp. How many more officers have done the same, and keep the pics on their phones, so if anyone challenges them with a "none" they can provide evidence that they have, in fact, seen a human dead body? Police are no more immune to the Instagram culture than any others of their age, background and education.

There is a serious question. Should we continue to allow police officers to go on duty with their mobiles? Or members of the armed forces, or the emergency services? Or should we just accept that these distasteful records are a part of modern human culture?

Wirecard - German corruption comes to bursting point

There's a magnificent lightning storm outside and thunder is roiling in the valley, I have a packed and frantic day ahead anyway and last night at about 9pm to cap it all the crew who had been working since dawn to get the hay in were standing abjectly at my front door. When wrapping the vast hay-balls in the flat field above my back meadow, one of the bales had taken off down the hill and smashed a corner off my barn roof. OK. I'll deal with that as dawn comes. But with regard to the Wirecard fraud story, I hope you'll forgive me for re-posting a 2019 post -

*******************************************************************

30th April 2019
The stench of corruption from Germany's businesses

Back in April 2018 we ran a fairly lengthy piece on German corruption. The German government had in effect encouraged widespread business corruption with law changes that made it easy to get away with - and for the past decade, it has been pervasive, deep and substantial. We quoted a report that found

A staggering 43 percent of German business executives polled by EY (formerly Ernst & Young) think bribery and corruption are fairly commonplace in Europe's economic powerhouse. That's a big jump from just 26 percent in 2015.

So who cares if most of German business is bent, the nation's judicial system ranks with Greece in terms of probity, shareholder protection is amongst the lowest in the developed world and there is little creditor protection? Who cares that courts and lawyers are beyond the reach of most victims, who must passively take the hits from German corrupt dealing?  Well, we wrote

This deep and endogenous German economic corruption will not play well in the rest of Europe. The UK, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations, with low levels of corruption and high scoring of commercial rectitude and probity, will be feeling fouled by contact with German corruption - and will now be adding up the commercial losses that German crookedness has cost them. The southern nations will be aggrieved that they have been bullied, coerced and hectored by a deeply crooked nation wearing a false disguise of moral superiority. And eastern nations such as Poland and Bulgaria, countries Germany has robbed of billions of Euros in corrupt complicity with Gazprom, will be looking at concrete measures to get their money back.

Yesterday Matthew Lynn broke yet another tale of German corruption in the Telegraph. The latest scandal is fraud at Wirecard - a rapidly ascending start-up that replaced the moribund Commerzbank in Germany's DAX index. The Telegraph and the FT are reluctant to be too specific; one suspects m'learned friends are hovering, and even the linked piece in the Anti-Corruption Digest is careful. Lynn writes

We have an image of Germany as a very law-abiding country, and on one level that is certainly true. The streets are safe, and no one can pay a bribe to get out of a parking fine.... yet right at the top of the country’s biggest companies it is starting to look painfully obvious there is an honesty issue.

The Germans are fond of portraying themselves as the exemplars of responsible, socially conscious capitalism. In truth, however, the hypocrisy is starting to become nauseating. There is clearly something rotten within Germany’s business culture – and even worse, no one seems to want to do anything about it.

It is the sort of casual, 'who cares?' corruption that saw Martin Selmayr's crooked appointment to EU capo shrugged off and Germany's biggest industrial names reduced to international gutter reputations no better than bootlegging prohibition gangsters.

So don't be surprised that when the downturn begins to bite, the entire German commercial edifice comes tumbling down - and the German economy proves as much of a paper tiger as did Soviet military might in 1989.
*********************************************************************
Ends

Siemens, VW, DB and all the other past disgraces and now Wirecard. But why has it taken 14 months since Matthew Lynn broke the story (carefully) in the 'graph? Germany's business culture stinks like week-old Mackerel, and the Autumn will see an overflowing of the German bent business cesspit as the Covid recession bites far deeper than the bubble-bursting I was expecting when I penned that piece. You'll need your facemasks - the stench will reach every corner of Europe.

They must let Scotland go

No, no not the nation. The Blairite life-peer who has headed the Commonwealth secretariat for the last four years, and whose term is now coming to an end. We are about to embark into the world as a sovereign independent nation seeking trade deals, new relationships, a post-globalist and internationalist thrust, a re-orientation of perspective. What qualities would you look for in a Secretary-General?

Well they probably wouldn't be those displayed by Scotland. Hauteur. Extravagance. A dodgy contract awarded to her mate from Bradford. Some 50 breaches of procurement rules perhaps awarding contracts to other chums. An illegal Tongan maid. Scotland is a very grand lady indeed, and she seems to love the pomp and status that goes with the job, the Commonwealth less so. In response to what is seen as chaotic and potentially corrupt mismanagement of the Commonwealth secretariat, the UK suspended its £4.7m annual contribution earlier this year until acceptable financial controls are in place.

The UK is just a member amongst many, of course, but is amongst the Commonwealth's biggest players. One assumes the CW would therefore look to another of the big hitters - India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Malaysia - to provide the next Secretary General. So far, Canada, Guyana, Nigeria, New Zealand and India have already provided post-holders. So Malaysia remains a possibility, as does Australia - but counter forces are at play.

First, Patricia Scotland doesn't want to go and has mobilised one or two of her Caribbean chums to support her. Secondly, in an era of BLM, the CW will be looking for potential candidates from Africa or the Caribbean. However, the next four years will bring many changes and challenges for our Commonwealth, and we need someone other than Scotland at the helm - for the sake of the organisation's 2.4 billion citizens from 54 nations including us.

Postscript

=======

Don't discount Chinese dirty tricks for this appointment - they want to block India, Australia and independent Pacific rim states and promote their tame African politicians, their mouths stuffed with Belt-and-Road gold.

And don't discount that the government's opposition to Patricia Scotland may involve similar reasons to which we aren't privy. 

Labour's love affair with Racial Hygiene

Funny old thing, history. Too often it defies the desires of the simple-minded for it to be neat and to conform with stereotypes. We have seen this week that the Guardian, woke rag of the snowflakes and soyboys, was itself founded on the profits of slavery. Those seeking reparations should perhaps look to the Scott Trust as a local port of call. And then there is the whole troubling history of the Labour Party's racist and totalitarian past, pursuing policies of compulsory sterilisation and the state controlled breeding of the British people to prevent race-dilution and mental defectives 'mongrelising' and 'polluting' the racial hygiene of the Isles. 

It was Major Archibald Church, Labour MP for Wandsworth, who as late as 1931 tried to get a compulsory sterilisation Bill through parliament, "in advance of public opinion". Hansard reports his speech

Of course, it may be urged that mere sterilisation is not enough. It may be urged that that will not cure the problem of mental disease. We are not suggesting that it would, but we are suggesting that the knowledge which has been obtained and the statistics which have been compiled as to the ancestry of mental defectives in a number of different States and countries, show that anything from 45 to 80 per cent. of the mental defectives in those various States and countries are so because they have inherited defective germ plasm. We are suggesting that it would be advisable to take the risk and sterilise all the defectives in the hope that by a generation or so we shall reduce the mental defectives to measurable quantities.

Hyacinth Morgan, opposing the Bill, said

The House has heard a harrowing tale which is mostly moonshine. The Bill is said to be in advance of public opinion, but it is really in advance of common sense and ordinary sanity. With regard to mental defectives there is said to be an increase rising crescendo in geometrical progression to overwhelm the world in an avalanche of mental backwardness, and to lure the progressive world headlong into an abyss of degenerate civilisation.

Of course Wandsworth and the mention of 'germ plasm' link Labour's Major Church with another dreadful old racist, the eugenicist Francis Galton, who inspired the founding of the Eugenics Society, which exists today (but perhaps not for much longer) as the Galton Institute, headquartered in Wandsworth.

Last week UCL announced that it was renaming a building named after Francis Galton because of his association with eugenics.  What other eponymous buildings, streets, structures, prizes and awards could be at risk?

Well, Labour and the Fabian Society were eugenics fascists in a big way. GB Shaw, of course, who wanted to use a 'humane lethal gas' in a sort of British Auschwitz as a final solution to mental defectives, Virginia Woolf who said of the mentally ill that "They should certainly all be killed", Huxley, Aldous and Julian, the latter wanting a scheme to inseminate (artificially, somewhat priggishly) British housewives with the sperm of superior white oxbridge graduates to improve the race, Harold Laski, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Beveridge, who spoke at meetings of eugenicists, JBS Haldane, Keynes himself and local south-London Labour MP heroes such as Will Crooks, whose views did not quite chime with those we hold today about the disabled. Crooks described disabled people as “like human vermin” who “crawl about doing absolutely nothing, except polluting and corrupting everything they touch”.

Can we can now expect a bonfire of eponymous monuments and memorials to these sick puppies?

How many residents of the Will Crooks Estate in Poplar know his racist and eugenicist views?

Of course, the nasty old slavery-funded Guardian also supported the eugenicists.

I'm afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign "the eugenists soundly urge". If it's any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp.

Writes Jonathan Freedland in a partially honest Guardian piece from 2012 - and indeed even the New Stasi has acknowledged some partial fault.

Be careful what you wish for, Comrades. 

Sadiq Khan and Chief Dick - we're watching you

Policing a demonstration in modern times needs several things. It needs sections of coppers trained to work together, it needs a stock of fireproof overalls, helmets and protective equipment for them to wear, it needs live monitoring and surveillance of the crowds and above all it needs police managers and commanders of talent and ability.

The BLM march two weeks ago was a disaster for the Met. Officers in light summer patrol dress with soft caps faced a baying, vicious and violent mob, and turned, ran and abandoned our democratic heart to vandalism and graffiti. Command was chaotic, a counter plan unapparent. The Gold commander of that farce, whether straight or gay, male or female, black or white, must be removed from duty. We cannot pretend it was anything other than gross mismanagement.

Last week's protests were better commanded, with only two major lapses - the unmanned barriers and an open footway at King Charles St in the morning, and a failure to anticipate the clashes on the South Bank after 5pm.

Then there was the assault on the PM's car following PMQs this week. A group of more than six protesters was gathered in contravention of the law. Specifically, s.7 of the The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (Amendment) (No. 3) Regulations 2020,

7.—(1) During the emergency period, unless paragraph (2) applies, no person may participate in a gathering which takes place in a public or private place—

(a)outdoors, and consists of more than six persons

They were watched by a few bored plods who were watching the nice shiny cars coming out of the palace of Westminster rather the protesters around them. One of the mob ran at the PM's vehicle, there was an emergency stop and a collision. It could have been an Islamist with a sticky bomb. Fail.

Again tomorrow, thugs will gather in London to seek to break the law, vandalise and destroy the public realm and to create fear and disturbance. We expect nothing less from the Met than that they uphold the laws made by our Parliament, a Parliament we elected. We expect the Met to prevent and to disperse any illegal gatherings of more than 6. We expect the Met to enforce the provisions of the Public Order Act. We expect the Met to safeguard our democratic heart in SW1, and to prevent mob damage to our national monuments.

Sadiq Khan and Cressida Dick, the eyes of the entire nation are on you tomorrow. We're watching you. We're watching you very closely.

Unpoliced illegal gathering - Chief Dick, please note

Told ya ...

From Wednesday 6th May

I have no confidence at all that the tracing app being developed by Whitehall will work. If it's up to the abysmal standards of error, malfunction, delay and inadequacy that have characterised the rest of the actions of the Department of Health, it will collapse half an hour after release, the first week''s central data will be hacked, warning SMS messages will be sent to everyone by mistake and the bluetooth errors will destroy thousands of phones.

Ahem. 

A great ox has stood on your tongue

I must say it cheered my heart to have the old Boris back yesterday. The effects of Covid are debilitating, enervating and sap bounce. His trouncing of Starmer at the despatch box was a delight. Starmer is a Karen, a Frinton-on-Sea litter warden, and when Boris told him a great ox had stood on his tongue when he would not answer why he's sitting on the fence over schools re-opening he, like most of the rest of us, had little idea what he meant. They don't teach that sort of thing at Essex litter-warden school. 

Classicists told us later it was a parliamentary way of saying the teaching unions had bribed Labour; in some ancient time, the coinage depicted an ox, and an ox on the tongue was someone bribed to stay silent. Glad they cleared that up.

The abolition of DfID was just the start. Anything that draws a whinge from remainiac ex-PMs has got to be good. But he's got his work cut out - the war for the State is now out in the open, and it's us against those who have captured our establishment and institutions. As Allister Heath writes in the 'graph

The drift of the past two months has allowed the Left-wing establishment to reassert itself. The BBC has appointed one of its own as its new boss; an ex-Treasury, ex-IMF, Left-wing think tanker was appointed as head of the Office for Budget Responsibility; the CBI’s new boss used to advise Gordon Brown and work for the Guardian. The only economic policy we heard about – apart from the necessary spending of hundreds of billions to cushion the economy – were “green jobs”, state-infrastructure, government this and government that. The Left-liberal elites were beginning to hope again that Boris’ project was about to fail. The EU detected weakness, crashing the talks before seeking to prolong the transition.

With Boris at the helm, we're ready for the fight. Bring it on.

Keir Starmer bust commissioned by the teachers' unions?

Fish reality starts to sink-in

Remainer minds are remarkably resilient, and none more so than that of Jeremy Warner in the 'graph. The poor chap can simply not conceive that control of our 200 mile EEZ is more important to the nation than bankers' bonuses. Even now it takes more torque than dragging your granny away from Corrie to penetrate that kind of thinking. Again today Warner writes

If it is true that the EU is on the verge of conceding that Britain should have the same control over fishing rights as enjoyed by Norway, it seems reasonable to assume that there will be no concessions on equivalence. An economically hugely important sector is about to be sacrificed to the politics of an insignificant one.

Jeremy, sweetie, listen up.

It really is not a matter of the EU 'conceding' anything. From next year under international law the UK becomes an independent coastal state. The EU have absolutely no say in the matter, none at all. They cannot prevent it. It is a matter of immutable fact.

How has the EU managed to convince an otherwise sane and rational man against all the evidence, the law, the actuality, that they still have some sort of say over this happening? Incredible.

Bone-headed ain't in it.

And don't worry about the City. The timezone, the language, the judicial system and courts and above all the critical mass of analogous expertises in a world city of unparalleled attractions will mean dull, provincial little towns with a mime theatre and two massage parlours such as Frankfurt will never come close to being a threat.

Could the Wuhan virus save the car industry?

Investors may not have to write off the car makers and lease networks quite yet. As the dark lid of lockdown lifts, for many people their car is becoming a mobile extension to their virus-safe home. Bugger Greta, we're driving.

No problem for those of us with no carbon conscience, but a poser for the metropolitan virtue signallers. Those smug and pious Gretists who boasted that Eurostar and TGV was the only acceptable way to get to their Provence gîte are now faced with a dilemna. Load up the disco in the dark of night and go before the neighbours are awake and face the embarrassment three week later, or set off in a visible Uber and jump into a hired disco down the road?

No one trusts flying any more, despite the assurances about the number of air changes and the efficiency of the cabin air filtration system. Too many have come away from a short hop flight with a cold or flu, and the folk appreciation of the risk is widespread.

Comfort for the virtue-signallers is already here. The 'graph has a piece explaining that those driving to the Alps (presumably written in January and held over, as it's about skiing) can still claim to be green if you game the maths a bit -

According to research by Best Foot Forward, a car with four people in it going to Méribel in France’s giant Trois Vallées would generate two-thirds of the emissions than if you had flown to Geneva.

I can suggest a further pabulum for the virtuous - "Jeremy's IBS puts him in the at-risk category, so using any form of public transport is just too risky .." or "we would go by easyjet but Mère Prépuce is 87, and she insists on cleaning the place each day and we can't risk her health". You can think of a thousand others, I expect.

And for carmakers who have almost run out of gadgets, gizmos and apps to attract buyers, here's one. A HEPA++ cabin air filtration system, with the effectiveness of an FFP2 facemask, i.e. filtering out a minimum of 94% of particles down to 0.3 microns. Your car then becomes an item of essential medical equipment .. "We would have bought an EV, but only the Vulva Sauvete P3 has the air filter we need for Tarquin .." 

Biden, champion of the tech giants?

1911 was a key year for Standard Oil. It was the year the US courts decided that the company had been misusing its size and market strength to restrict and distort competition, and the company was ordered to be broken up. Hence we got Esso and Mobil instead, joined a few decades later by BP, Shell, Chevron, Gulf Oil and Texaco, the 'Seven Sisters' that dominated the world petroleum market until the 1970s. Which was of greater benefit to the consumer, monopoly or oligopoly? The arguments rumble on.

It's worthwhile looking back at some of those earliest criticisms of Standard. In the UK and in the EU, we're hearing the same noises about the US tech giants, and like the opposition to standard oil, the arguments may appear to be about economics or (today) freedom of speech, but are also very much about human mistrust of large, powerful corporations that are not subject to local or democratic control. And this is where the proffered solutions expose the supranationalists and separate them from the anti-Globalists; if you want Facebook to be subject to UK regulation in the UK, you're likely an anti-Globalist. If you want some sort of over-riding international internet authority to have jurisdiction, you're a dangerous supranationalist.

This is more than just about who regulates your gran's baby pictures on FB. If Biden beats Trump this November, a requirement to accept US hegemony in the form of the tech giants may be a cost attached to a trade deal - remember, socialism is a Globalist construct. For the EU, distaste for the tech giants is also about an endogenous dislike of what they see as transatlantic cultural imperialism. It's been a long time growing; the first time back in the '80s when I watched Die straßen von San Francisco dubbed into German in an Amsterdam hotel room you could see the way things were going. There are simply no home-grown alternatives to Netflix and Amazon Prime anywhere in the EU, and it hurts.

It may be an uncomfortable realisation for both those in the UK and the EU who dislike the power of the tech giants, but their best hope lies in Trump's re-election in November. His recent spat with Twitter brought the revocation of a clause in a 1996 US law - 'Section 230' - into view. If he does so, it would cripple the power of the tech giants - and make many on this side of the Atlantic very happy. And this may just be the only policy aspect upon which Rejoiners and Brexiteers will ever agree.

Update
=====
The government clearly need to refine the 2m rule. Do they really think the British people are too thick to understand a more nuanced approach? Here's my suggestion - feel free to tear holes in it.

A few hundred thugs

I watched closely yesterday the live footage transmitted from the London protests on both You Tube and Periscope, and as I know the areas of the events intimately, had a decent appreciation of the geography of protest. Here's what I saw.

The Cenotaph incursion
The area permitted for the counter-demonstration was Parliament Square and Whitehall up to King Charles St - the street that separates the Treasury and Foreign Office. There was a double row of steel barriers across the road, but the footway on the south side was left open. Those gathered at about 10am were largely the peaceful ex-servicemen and the responsible early risers. The Whitehall barriers were staffed only by two bored police officers in patrol dress engaged in deep conversation. The counter protestors used their initiative in the absence of a police presence and surged over the barriers and up the footway to gather around the Cenotaph. Non violent.

Trafalgar Square
The march from the Dorchester was sparsely attended. BLM-UK had cancelled the official march so those that went straight to Trafalgar Square were unofficial and largely peaceful protesters. I saw animated protest but no violence.

The Thugs arrive
I can only assume the thugs on both sides are late sleepers, or maybe they preferred to get stoned or intoxicated away from the main protest areas, but it was about 1pm before the snide Chinese knock-offs of Hugo Boss leisure wear (oh the multiple ironies) began to be visible at the counter-protest and the hooded Antifa-cadets in Trafalgar Square.

There followed several provocative incidents initiated by the far-right thugs. They assaulted the police on the now-defended King Charles St barrier. A small group tried to invade the BLM protest in Trafalgar Square, and were cornered and beaten. The latter incident was carefully staged and filmed by the racists, who broadcast it on social media tagged as 'innocent' counter protesters going about their lawful business being set upon by black people. It was so transparently an attempt to incite violence as to be laughable.

5 pm
As the 5pm deadline for the end of the protests arrived, the police in Trafalgar square opened up exits to Charing Cross Road and the Strand, and at about 8 minutes past, the entire square emptied peacefully and in good order up the steps to the National Gallery and then towards St Martins.

In Parliament Square, the peaceful counter-protesters and armed forces veterans also left, their stewards litter-picking the area, clearing the bottles and rubbish into bin sacks which were piled for the Council to collect. A hard core of BF/ NF / EDL / BNP far-right racist thugs remained, looking for opportunities for violence. The thug who pissed in the corner adjacent to Keith Palmer's memorial was one such.

Aftermath

This was an affair of the thugs of both sides seeking each other out. The BLM thugs crossed Waterloo Bridge headed for the station, the Britain First thugs Hungerford and Westminster bridges, and there were isolated violent incidents at Waterloo Station.

Patrick Hutchinson - a top bloke in so many ways - rescues a foolish man

Sadiq Khan
The events of the past two weekends, and his statements to the press, have demonstrated beyond doubt that Khan is simply unfit to be Mayor of London. A shifty little narcissist, uninspired, untalented and with an ability only to affect the standard Labour glottal stop that the comrades imagine makes them sound attractive to working people, the people of London deserve so much better. Much more on this as time goes on.

Overall, the day was one of peaceful protest, generally well managed policing with two serious lapses (the unguarded Whitehall barrier in the morning, the chaotic and responsive policing of the limited violent post-protest incidents on the South Bank) and not much to see. It was a victory for public order, and a fail for the few hundred violent thugs from both sides.

'Fatou Bensouda of the ICC is corrupt' says US AG

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was founded with the best of intentions, but like the UN has been turned into an instrument funded by the West and misused against us by the third world and the dags of the anti-western powers. The ICC has been weaponised. The President of the ICC is a Nigerian barrister, Chile Eboe-Osuji, 57, but the weaponised bit of the ICC is the Office of the Prosecutor, which has treaty authority to conduct investigations into a wide range of human rights offences. The current Prosecutor is Fatou Bensouda of Gambia, 58, who qualified as a Nigerian barrister.

Fatou Bensouda 'corrupt' says US Attorney General Barr

As with other international institutions such as the WHO, there are suspicions that both Russia and China, neither of which are full members, have been responsible for using the ICC Prosecutor to launch an investigation into US military activity in Afghanistan. In response, the US has imposed sanctions on the ICC's senior players, and visa restrictions on their family members. US Attorney General William Barr is reported in the Guardian as saying "The US government has reason to doubt the honesty of the ICC. The Department of Justice has received substantial credible information that raises serious concerns about a long history of financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor". In other words, Bensouda is as bent as Geller's spoon and has been bribed to start the investigation.

The ICC Prosecutor has power to investigate a wide range of abuses, including slavery, bondage and sex slavery - areas of investigation high on political agendas across the globe, including in the West. Modern slavery is a curse, and so widespread that it requires international action to confront it. Why, then, is the ICC ignoring it in favour of poking a stick at the US? This may give a clue -

Nigeria is #7 and the Gambia #9 in the league table of Slavery offenders

Embarrasing. Both the President of the ICC and the Prosecutor are from nations in the top 10 of the world's worst modern slavery offenders.