EU nations divided by visceral self-interest

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

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

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

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

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

O'Shaughnessy and Tanner - Trashed by their own spin

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

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

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

But Hanbury Polling say it was Politico

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

Are we raising a generation of fascists?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police - Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harland and Wolff

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

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

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

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

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

Set the Finance Spivs on German savers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glück Auf!

The Politics of Woke

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

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

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

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

Brigands, Buccaneers, BT and Statutory Undertakers

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

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

Did you see what they did there?

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

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

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

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

The unbearable idiocy of the bien-pensant Left

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

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

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

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

AEP skiing off-piste

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry, Señor, no Pizza - Welsh rarebit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saint Greta will undergo the privations of a primitive luxury yacht

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

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

EU Zealots determined to unleash crippling pain on EU27

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

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

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

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

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

Britain's stinking corrupt honours system - Barwell to be Lord

Cameron may have knighted his hairdresser, but May will make her failed-MP chum Gavin Barwell a Lord, it's reported. Barwell, who assisted in blocking Brexit for three years, who frustrated the democratic will of the British people, who supported May in trying to inflict the deeply injurious Selmayr-Robbins treaty on the UK, is undeserving of anything more than a swift kick up the arse. The man who looks like a demented hamster - how anyone who looks so unmistakeably murine could ever be elected by anyone is beyond me - is to don ermine.

In doing so he will join the biggest collection of crooked thieves, spivs, mendacious self-lovers, those who have enriched themselves at public expense and political failures in Europe - the House of Lords.

Not only is our honours system befouled and corrupted by the stench of political corruption, our second chamber is filled with the feculent rotting zombie-corpses of the political class, men and women so loathsome, so unemployable, so unendurable that they are barred forever from decent human society.

Politicians befoul and beshit our second chamber and our honours system. It's high time we sent in the bulldozers to clear the putrescent enobled political filth from this gilded place - the Rennards, the Kinnocks, the globalist dags, all those who would deny the democratic will of the British people. Barwell will only be joining the antidemocrats in the Lords who worked with him so diligently to destroy Brexit whilst the dismally inept May was nominally in office.

'Lord' Rennard - google 'Rennard' and 'groping' for the story

Liveability, Localism and Law and Order - Boris in Manchester

Over lunch I've just listened to Boris delivering his Manchester speech (25 mts) and if you have the time it's worth a listen. The Leeds - Manchester fast rail link was well signalled and came as little surprise to the audience, but it really wasn't the point of the speech.



This was a speech aimed at Brexit Party voters, at Libertarians such as me, at Labour voters disgusted at their betrayal by the soft southern metropolitan ponces who have taken over their working-class party and at all those with a pride in their county, region, city or towns outside London.

He gave us Localism - greater devolution of powers across the regions (though Cameron said the same at the start and I believed him, too) but not too specific as to what Whitehall and SW1 will let be taken from their grasping talons.

He also gave us Liveability - a word banned from government since Gordon Brown's days. It's a word I'm very familiar with - I delivered one of the old ODPM's Liveability pilots back in the day in London. Under the tagline 'cleaner, safer, greener' we invested in declining local commercial centres with designs for easy maintenance, designs for safety and security, and for enhanced public transport access and use. I've just looked on google street maps at one of the marginal high streets we tackled back then - on the edge, declining and with vacant units when we picked it. Well, readers, I kid you not, they haven't changed our improvements and it's thriving - not a single vacant shop, a blooming pub, a clean and welcoming place through which to walk and shop. They've even left alone London's widest zebra crossing. You see, when I won the battle with the council's transport numpties to install a zebra crossing without barriers rather than the pelican crossing with extensive cattle-pen barriers they fought for, I rubbed it in. Zebra crossings have no width limit. So I instructed the designer to make ours 6m wide, on a raised table. I never thought it would have survived the petty vindictiveness of the local muppets whose transport planning ideas were stuck somewhere back in 1976 and who thought Jan Gehl was a Swedish rock band.

And then he gave us Law and Order. Prisons. Sentencing. Stuff to warm the hearts of blue-blood voters, despite himself being quite socially liberal.

It was all very well crafted and motivational. But you can judge for yourselves.

I'm soon going to have to search for something to be critical about in the Boris administration or the foundational purpose of this blog since 2008 - to hold their feet to the fire, and to do so day after day - will disappear.

Anglo- French race to space?

I'm starting to enjoy this Summer even more by the day, and the Ashes are just starting, which means guerillacricket replaces Radio Caroline on my portable bluetooth powered speaker. And now, harking back to the years of ironclads and Gloire, we have the prospect of an Anglo-French race to the stars.

One of the major announcements lost in the noise of Boris' spectacular Commons debut yesterday was the indication that we, the UK, will be launching our own GPS Sat system* - no doubt a cogent move against being locked out of the currently broken down and Chinese-infiltrated Galileo system. It's not yet complete, and their actual satellites are built here. The EU doesn't have the know-how. So I suspect an export ban on satellites if the EU continues to be obdurate, plus the launch of contracts for our own £10bn programme (a much better use of the money than HS2) will soon change things around. Yes, I know everyone thinks it's for road pricing but I don't care.

One of Penny Mordaunt's last acts before her defenestration as defence secretary was to green-light developments in the UK's Space Force. As the paper reports -

An RAF spokesman said: "The UK is already is a world-leader in small satellite technology and we’re excited to be partnering with Virgin Orbit, one of the industry’s leading figures, to boost our space ambitions even further." Ms Mordaunt also said the UK is joining Operation Olympic Defender, a US-led international unit aimed at strengthening deterrence against hostile actors in space and at stopping the spread of debris in orbit. Joint Forces Command, which co-ordinates activity across the armed forces, will also be renamed Strategic Command, the Defence Secretary announced.

Speaking at the Air and Space Power Conference in London, Ms Mordaunt said: "Science fiction is becoming science fact. One day I want to see RAF pilots earning their space wings and flying beyond the stratosphere".

I wonder whether British spacecraft will be equipped with a feature unique to British tanks, an inbuilt tea-making facility? One hopes so. But our ambitions are not unique - M. Macron across the channel has similar hopes for France, which he hopes to achieve with German money.  As Politico EU reports-

The French government will develop laser weapons to fend off attacks in orbit and deploy mini-surveillance satellites by 2023 to protect space-based infrastructure, Defense Minister Florence Parly said today. "Today, our allies and adversaries are militarizing space," Parly said in a speech that confirmed France will set up a space command in Toulouse from September 1. "As time to build resilience gets shorter and shorter, we must act." As Paris moves to counter threats from China, Russia and India, Parly said new legislation would be prepared to consolidate control of France’s space activities directly under the defense ministry.

Ah, it's all becoming so ...... 1859. You will recall French hubris was shattered just a year after they built the first ironclad, when we rendered it utterly redundant with HMS Warrior.

* "We will have .... satellite and earth observation systems that are the envy of the world. We will be the seedbed for the most exciting and dynamic business investments on the planet."

Wow. I don't think anyone was expecting that.

A taste of the way things were going yesterday came early, with news that Dominic Cummings was in the Number Ten team. Then we knew Boris was serious, and would be a PM of very different stamp to the dilettante David Cameron or the dismally incapable May. Every new announcement of a new member of the Dream Team brought rapture to Leavers on social media and meltdown to remainers.

Boris has three jobs. First, to get the UK out of the EU by 31st October. Second, to consolidate a party whose congruence has been dented by EUphile rebels. Finally, to trounce Corbyn and win an autumn general election. The team he has put together has been designed precisely to deliver those three outcomes - and so far all the square pegs have gone into the square holes.

There were a number of media columns yesterday suggesting that Boris should trigger an immediate election. Risible nonsense. It is time for the Treasury to release its grip a little so that measures to sweeten the changes of the coming months can be appreciated by the electorate before they go to the polls; the public would also not forgive an election until Boris is forced into one by a petulant and obstructive parliament. Those forcing an election will be compromising our ability to put all our efforts into an October Brexit, and thus will be acting against the interests of the British people.

As for Brexit, his message is clear. We are planning for a clean Brexit, but are asking Brussels to accept a cut-and-paste deal taking all the best bits from May's mess; citizens' rights, travel, pets, financial passporting and those sorts of things. If the inflexible bigots and zealots won't budge then so be it; a clean Brexit. Any fall out will be the EU's fault - we tried. And we keep our £39bn.

Cleverly as Party chair is a good move. He's a plodder, not a cerebral. House trained and socially skilled, he can schmooze with the best of them and is utterly loyal to whomever is in power. With the lesser posts filled overnight, this morning we have a cabinet of 30 with 14 leavers and 16 who voted remain in the referendum - though who now are fully committed to Boris and to a clean Brexit.

So many good appointments. And so many strengths - a cabinet that can both manage leaving the EU and plan an election win, that can win loyalty from both the parliamentary party and the Conservative Associations. I'd almost forgotten what a capable PM looked like. DUDE.

Now to bring the party funders back and fill the war chest. James, go!    

Just enjoy their discomfort

Columns will be filled for many months with Boris and Brexit, and we have a way to go and a likely general election to face, but just for today, for one day whilst Boris moves in, let's give ourselves a break.

For three years we've had a remainer government that didn't want to deliver Brexit working hand in glove with a remainer parliament that doesn't want to deliver Brexit. Now, for the first time since 23rd June 2016, we will have a Cabinet and key mandarins and sherpas committed to leaving. This has of course triggered all the fifth-column remainers - and their petulant, juvenile tantrums are a joy to behold.

Florence of Belgravia has flounced out and will continue to be a prat from the back benches. #RoryWanksOn. Hammond, Gaulk and other nobodies have gone before they're sacked. Boulton is so puce with anger I thought his head would explode, the Guardian is in meltdown, social media is as stunned as it was three years ago and despite their #NotMyPM tags they will find that in fact he is. So for a day, chill, laugh and enjoy their discomfort.

'Noncefinder-General' Tom Watson under fire for credulity

Watson has long been a conspiracy theorist. After the Savile failure, he made the cardinal error of telling fellow MPs that he believed in a kiddy fiddler network amongst the political establishment. It was the sort of weak-minded credulity equivalent to announcing in the chamber that the da Vinci Code was a factual book, or that Prince Philip had killed Diana. The sexual fantasist 'Nick', who has subsequently been convicted, was then easily able to identify Watson as a suitable patsy to whom to spew his sick imaginings - and Watson was crass, credulous and gullible enough to lap it up.

Now MPs, even very stupid ones, have a certain status, and when Watson started repeating 'Nick's' sick fantasies the police could no longer ignore them, and weak, back-covering colleagues in the house such as the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, were also compelled to act. As the Telegraph has it

... the police who were, by now, committed to believing any sex abuse complaint, however outlandish. Basic checks that would have disproved Beech’s lurid claims were not carried out. A homicide inquiry was set up solely on the basis of his unsubstantiated allegations and, against this backdrop, Theresa May as home secretary instigated a public inquiry into historic sex abuse. One senior police officer even called this farrago of obviously fanciful tales “credible and true”. They were neither.

Watson's involvement was pivotal in the unjustifiable persecution of many wholly innocent public figures, their reputations, established over a lifetime of service, traduced. This fat credulous, cretinous owl, now nicknamed 'the Noncefinder-General' after the 17th century woman-hater Matthew Hopkins, made an utter arse of himself.

Watson is so far refusing to apologise for his substantial role in this nonsense, and for the utter waste of public resources. However, Labour members - and potential Labour voters - must now be asking whether Watson, himself now a proven fool, a believer in absurd conspiracy theories, a weak gossip and repeater of tittle-tattle, a credulous dullard, is a suitable person to lead the Party,

Steve Bell satirises Watson's 'Noncefinder General' tag

Boris is right - the dreary pessimists must pack their bags

I think today will be the last Monday - at least for some time - that Boris Johnson's column appears in the Telegraph. His final appeal is for an end to the gloomy prognostications of failure, the hangdog jowls, the droopy bitter eyes, the negative vibes. When he moves into Number Ten, we can be sure at least he will not be dragged down by a depressive, negative neighbour - Hammond has already been pictured packing, and will be gone before Boris arrives. His main point is that fifty year ago we put a man on the moon. Solving an issue of a customs border in Ireland is piffle. 

I've lost count of the times on construction schemes when I've been told it can't be done, it's impossible, the cost will be prohibitive. The reason I was picked to deliver so many 'difficult' schemes (and they are still trying to get me to do so - despite my strict instructions to my agent as to my very picky criteria for new work) I believe is that I had a reputation for being 'agile' at a time when the term wasn't even in the vocabulary of the management consultants. Usually all it took was a quiet and sympathetic chat with the boss of the engineering / design consultancy, telling them I understood if the task was too great for them, if they couldn't cope. There was no shame in it. We would arrange their quiet replacement by another practice. Fee-earning firms don't expect to be sacked - they expect their word to be gospel on the feasibility or not of some scheme aspect. Nine times out of ten it did the trick. You see, the task was very rarely impossible - more often the key consultants just didn't want to do it my way.

So I am with Boris on this. I've had a working lifetime of dreary dullards predicting failure and a lifetime's experience of proving them wrong. Boris writes

And I am afraid that there are technological pessimists – some of them apparently in London – who seem genuinely to think that such technical solutions are impossible, that they are a kind of logical contradiction, a mythological species that we will never see in this universe. Are they right? Of course not. There is abundant scope to find the solutions necessary – and they can and will be found, in the context of the Free Trade Agreement that we will negotiate with the EU (and this is common to both candidates in the current leadership contest) after we have left on October 31.

It is absurd that we have even allowed ourselves to be momentarily delayed by these technical issues. If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border. There is no task so simple that government cannot overcomplicate if it doesn’t want to do it. And there are few tasks so complex that humanity cannot solve if we have a real sense of mission to pull them off.

For a final column, that's not bad.