Dealing with sudden death

Growing up during the Cold War we reckoned there was a fair chance we would all be obliterated in an atomic storm before reaching adulthood. Living in the middle of Europe's largest military airfield - East Anglia - made us even more aware of the risk. Then, in Needham Market, additionally, we had the RAF sheep and the Polish spies.

The RAF sheep are the easiest to explain. Just down the road we had a vast underground aviation fuel dump, running for about 2km at the side of a B road. The tanks beneath the grass-covered tumps were connected, we supposed, with RAF Wattisham, our closest nuclear target amongst the scores of UK and USAF airbases across the region. They were cleverly camouflaged and there were no visible signs as to what the vast bumpy fields actually were, except for the sheep. It was whispered that the risk of fire had ruled out the use of gang mowers to keep the grass short (this was old school '70s - even a secret, camouflaged defence facility needed short hair and discipline) so the fuel dump was populated with RAF sheep. And we passed them daily, grazing atop the millions of gallons of incendiary aviation fuel, utterly unaware of the danger, calmly gazing back as they chewed the RAF grass.

The Polish spies were hiding in plain sight. At a time when there was virtually zero trade between the West and the nations behind the Iron Curtain, the Polish tractor and agricultural machinery firm Ursus Bison opened an outlet and service centre just outside Needham Market. The tractors were heavily discounted to ensure sales across East Anglia. Then, to 'improve customer service', they imported a Sikorsky helicopter, a couple of pilots and a ground crew, ostensibly to deliver spares and engineers to farms across East Anglia. We reckoned any farm within spitting distance of a NATO facility that bought a tractor would find the injectors quickly blocked or the fuel pump fouled and a friendly Polish voice on the telephone offering to fly an engineer out immediately. We once had the inevitable conversation, watching the Sikorsky wobble across the sky minutes after a flight of F4s had screamed over our heads at low level leaving us covered in a faint mist of unburned Avgas Kerosene.

"Do you reckon they'll warn them?"

"What, when they launch the missiles? Nah."

Like the blissfully unaware RAF sheep, both we and the diligent Poles would be condemned to instant nuclear annihilation by Soviet nukes. Such was life.

For the millennials, the Chinese plague threat will be the first time anything has actually threatened their lives. Whilst I hope and pray the thing is contained, if it is not it will be up to our generation to set the example as to how to live with the threat of premature death. And being British, I'm quite sure our response will include humour. Even before the first case has been confirmed, you can bet the first joke will have hit the internet.

Time to take a firm grip on Whitehall

I was once called upon to drop everything and go have a look at someone else's scheme. It was essentially an engineering job, with a fair bit sub-surface, and the Balfour Beatty subsidiary who were the main contractor had already spent well into double figure millions, were a year late and only half-done. They were asking the client to double the budget. Well, reader, it was a pickle. They'd jammed the job to a standstill. Just one example - painting. It was a minor part of the job. They were painting steel and had already spent £0.75m putting the first coat on an area the size of a B&Q store roof. It had taken 10 weeks so far. They were using a specially formulated water-soluble steel paint to avoid hazardous fumes to other workers in the sub-surface part, only because of the damp atmosphere it cured at the speed of treacle. So they had a pair of mechanical engineers at £3k a week the pair to monitor paint curing. 

Well they knew they'd screwed up and went into construction industry defence mode - assume that everything you say, write, instruct or report will eventually be used as evidence in the Construction Court. So the monthly progress reports were bound volumes of 200 pages, the Gant charts cramming so many activities onto each A3 sheet  that you'd need a scanning electron microscope to read the text and the project team meetings attended by about 30 had to be held in the canteen - the largest space on site.

And it really wasn't their fault. They lacked any form of cogent leadership, and in the circumstances did what headless, directionless professionals will always do - retreated into rigid professionalism and risk-aversity. Well, I advised the client that it was a Gordian Knot. Further time extensions and budget increases wouldn't clear it, and the main contractor knew it. He had to pull the plug. He did, of course - but there was a sting in the tail. If I was so bloody clever, I could finish it. I did. The painting? My newly-appointed tame lead engineer and CDM supervisor were both sympathetic to my suggestion, and we closed the site to all other trades for 48hrs whilst a paint team used the solvent-based 'Jotun' paint used on North Sea oil rigs and finished it off. Cost £20k. And not a penny spent on mechanical engineers watching it dry.

I bore you all with that anecdote to underline the point that the HS2 scheme seems to smell awfully familiar to the job above and a few other failures I have seen. For a start, it's too big. Too big to be managed as a single scheme. Then it's irrelevant; the route it improves is not London to Birmingham but Brussels to Birmingham, and is part of the Ten-T spoke-and-hub transport corridor scheme devised to connect the subject nations of the EU. Finally, it adds nothing extra to GDP apart from the construction costs. Even Keynesians at least aim to get £1.50 of economic benefit for every £1 spent.

So scrap the London to Birmingham route in favour of track, signalling and crossing improvements and minor realignments of existing tracks. Split the balance of the Northern interconnects into coherent smaller packages and let them manage themselves. Look at modal swaps; do we really need steel wheels right into city centres, or can we have rail interchanges further out and rubber wheels and light rail  in the centres. More trams, everywhere - they're one of Europe's delights and I love them.

Allister Heath sums it up in the Telegraph; there's more at stake than just taxpayers' money 

This is a key test of Johnson’s determination: does he really want to help the rest of the country, or is it just PR? If the former, as we all hope and believe, he should replace HS2 with a whole list of new infrastructure projects focused on the North and Midlands, including roads and rail connections between cities, and cancel the London to Birmingham link. If he bottles it, the message will be grim: the Blob will have won a psychological victory, and its appetite for Tory flesh will have been whetted.

 

The BBC: Managing decline

Tony Hall's deliberately designed surprise resignation was timed for one reason only - to allow the nation's biggest woke tax bludger, if it chooses, to mobilise for war with the government and people of Britain. The BBC faces the 2022 mid term review and the critical 2027 Charter renewal in the unique position of not only facing a hostile Conservative government, but having lost public support. The Thatcher government tried to muzzle the BBC with little success because at that time Auntie enjoyed widespread public backing - but the BBC of the 1980s was not the BBC of the 20-teens. Then we took Only Fools and Horses to our hearts - it could simply not be made today by the BBC unless it starred a disabled lesbian and Rodney was Sudanese.

De-criminalising non-payment of the licence fee would be a good first step from 2022. On compassionate grounds alone, criminalising the poor, over 70% of whom are women, for failing to pay the TV tax at a time when the deeply flawed UC system forces many to use food banks is simply morally unjustifiable. The BBC cannot continue to use its force and power to persecute so many of the most vulnerable in our society.

Allison Pearson does a reasonable job in the Telegraph this morning of capturing our feelings at what must now be the managed decline of the BBC; a certain regret, a nostalgia for the good times in the past, but a recognition that it has developed behavioural problems that mean we can no longer give it house-room. She writes

If you look at an electoral map of Britain, amid a vast sea of Tory blue, there are a few small islets of Labour red. Those islets are where BBC staff live and from which they draw their ideas......To justify demanding a TV tax from every household, you have to truly speak for the nation, not an elite corner of London.

The selection of Tony Hall's successor will tell us much about how the BBC will face its nemesis; in co-operation with the government and people, managing decline to ensure the best is saved and the worst woke waste is ditched, or whether they want a high-profile showdown during which they will lose even more public support and risk fouling the brand for all time. 

Britain's booming 'austerity' economy

Two charts that bear close study form the base of today's post. The RSA's Fabian Wallace-Stephens (who with a name like that should probably be standing for Kier Starmer's Deputy in the Labour leadership hustings) has looked at the fastest growing and shrinking occupations from the Labour Force Survey - here are the charts (clicky) and my comments below.

The first thing to note is the degree of substitution - occupations having the same skill sets and that enable workers to migrate from one category to another. This includes for example workers who move from sales and retail assistants jobs to call-centre jobs. Secondly are the changes in the structure of the labour market away from permanent employment by a single employer to a melange of self-employment and short term and temporary gig work; the full-time waiter is being replaced by a new breed of actress/waitress/whatever who may supplement their instagram enabler role with a few evening sessions carrying plates at the local pizza parlour. Without the counterpart to these charts - the charts that map the rise and fall of business and commercial activities - some changes are misleading.

However, a few trends are noteworthy. Supporting the Prime Minister's undertakings and undermining the NHS Cassandras, we have seen about 70,000 more nurses between 2011 and 2019 and an equivalent additional number of nursing auxiliaries and assistants. We have seen almost 80,000 additional care workers and 65,000 nursery nurses and assistants. Just those four categories have gained some 285,000 additional workers, demonstrating the growth in demand. What we must do now is work out how to pay for it.

The internet impact on retail is clear, with significant losses in shop and retail jobs offset by the growth of some 100,000 delivery driver jobs, and I suggest many more amongst the huge 4159 admin class gain* (nec = not elsewhere classified) are part of the internet shopping logistics tail. I'd suggest the one anomaly in class 7111 - massive female losses in retail sales but a modest increase in males - may be due to the blokeyness of mobile phone shop staffing.

The clear gainer though is what we used to call IT. As one would expect as we transition into the next wave of an AI economy. And the most visible impact is on central and local government - both clear losers, and not as the unions would have you believe from 'austerity' but from, well, change.

And one overall change that is inescapable - and confirmed by an unemployment figure that has dropped substantially during this period - is that employment growth overall greatly exceeds shrinkage; obvious in the images even given the exaggerated job-shrinkage scale in the graphics. And that really is good news.

Evening Standard, 21/01/2020 - * another increase for SOC 4159

Time to come to heads with the BBC over bias

Nominations are open this week for Select Committee chairs and the appointments and memberships of the committees could be interesting. At a time when the Conservatives have a stonking majority in the House, the opposition will seek to use the Select Committees to win media airtime. You will remember the Brexit Committee during the last session, under the Chairmanship of Hilary Benn, with 14 remainiacs dominating the 7 leavers and including Joanna Cherry and Stephen Kinnock. They lost no opportunity in piling onto pro-Brexit victims and in calling every Project Fear crank and nutter to listen with smiles and nods at their inflated drivel.

Well, no doubt you'll be pleased to learn that the Brexit Committee is back, and still to be chaired by Labour. Whatever fond wishes the Prime Minister had about relegating Brexit to obscurity after the end of the month and concentrating on trade deals will be dashed - the Brexit Committee will see it as their chosen mission to Keep Brexit Alive. There may well even be a SecondReferendumber or two sitting. Their task will be to seize on every minor glitch in negotiations (there will be many) and to summon ministers with the sole objective of seeking to bully and humiliate them. I don't know how Parliament can deal with this.

The Committee will be encouraged no doubt by the eagerness of the BBC in giving them disproportionate airtime - and we must make this a subject of intense scrutiny and complaint, possibly even legal action. There are 28 Select Committees. An unbiased, fair and objective reporting of Parliament's activities would balance reporting of the activities of them all. If the BBC gives undue eminence to the anti-Brexit activities of one single Select Committee, the organisation's access to Parliament should be suspended. It's time to get serious about embedded BBC bias.

Here is the full list of Chairs up for nomination this week -

Backbench Business Committee (non-Government)
Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Labour)
Defence (Conservative)
Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Conservative)
Education (Conservative)
Environmental Audit (Conservative)
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Conservative)
Exiting the European Union (Labour)
Foreign Affairs (Conservative)
Health and Social Care (Conservative)
Home Affairs (Labour)
Housing, Communities and Local Government (Labour)
International Development (Labour)
International Trade (Scottish National Party)
Justice (Conservative)
Northern Ireland Affairs (Conservative)
Petitions (Labour)
Procedure (Conservative)
Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs (Conservative)
Public Accounts (Labour)
Science and Technology (Conservative)
Scottish Affairs (Scottish National Party)
Standards (Labour)
Transport (Conservative)
Treasury (Conservative)
Welsh Affairs (Conservative)
Women and Equalities (Conservative)
Work and Pensions (Labour)

Revolutionary fervour and the Parish Council

Anyone who imagined that the resolution of Brexit would be an end to the polarisation of public opinion in Britain will have been disillusioned by the appearance of  Laurence Fox on QT. I have long said that Brexit was merely the proxy for an underlying revolt against the takeover of the establishment, of the institutions of the State, even of the police by a woke metropolitan elite, and that the fight now will move to rolling back their suffocating control and sclerotic grip on our nation. Betz and Smith outlined the takeover in a semantic piece for the Bruges Group almost exactly a year ago

It seems that for at least twenty years the new political classes in Britain have been placing a bet on the political future. They are betting on the quiescence of the public at large, who will either not notice or not care that elites are entrenching their own power and interests. They are gambling that the public, kept compliant by political spinning, a constant diet of soaps and reality television, debt, social media pap, welfare dependency and the like, will not work themselves up into any state of anger of the sort anticipated by Nigel Farage if their political preferences are dishonoured. Or at least not enough of them will to make a difference.

In other words, for many years now, governments, along with a significant fraction of the population, have calculated that the bulk of the people can either be kept in a state of apathy or bullied into submission. How, it might be asked, have they reached such conclusions?

Conservative governments before Boris have been as complicit in this takeover as have the Blairite excrescences of 1997 - 2010. Secrecy, obfuscation, distortion, NDPBs and unaccountable State agencies of the sort loved by Theresa May have flourished. Little people faced smoking bans and wardens issuing £80 fines for dropping litter or putting out the bin on the wrong day whilst council bosses, police, politicians and the apparatchiks of the new elite condemned thousands of innocents to neglect, abuse and loathsome criminality through malfeasance, misconduct in office and maladministration, all in the name of prosecuting their woke social oppression. Robert Nisbet wrote of this in The New Despotism -

What we have witnessed, however, in every Western country, and not least in the United States, is the almost incessant growth in power over the lives of human beings — power that is basically the result of the gradual disappearance of all the intermediate institutions which, coming from the predemocratic past, served for a long time to check the kind of authority that almost from the beginning sprang from the new legislative bodies and executives in the modern democracies.
...

What has in fact happened during the past half century is that the bulk of power in our society, as it affects our intellectual, economic, social, and cultural existences, has become largely invisible, a function of the vast infragovernment composed of bureaucracy's commissions, agencies, and departments in a myriad of areas. And the reason this power is so commonly invisible to the eye is that it lies concealed under the humane purposes that have brought it into existence.

The greatest single revolution of the last century in the political sphere has been the transfer of effective power over human lives from the constitutionally visible offices of government, the nominally sovereign offices, to the vast network that has been brought into being in the name of protection of the people from their exploiters.

This takeover of the State, this takeover of our democracy, was not a coup, a plot or a deliberate strategy. It was not a conspiracy. Nisbet quoted Justice Brandeis -

Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the governments' purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Allister Heath in the Telegraph is conscious of the deleterious effect of the loss of what Nisbet terms our intermediate institutions

Instead, as Michael Lind, the US academic, argues in The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite, the real clash is between a highly credentialed, entitled, managerial and technocratic class that has seized control of the most powerful public and private institutions and is using them to serve its economic interests and impose its faddish worldview; and an alienated, ignored and denigrated “working class” that has lost control.

In the British context, for working class read not just blue-collar workers but also swathes of the middle classes and anybody else who hasn’t got with the Left, social-liberal programme, including many ethnic minorities.

This revolutionary alliance used to feel they had a voice; some were even part of the old establishment. Now they feel they have lost their local institutions, clubs and civil societies, believe the wrong priorities are being pursued by unaccountable elites and that their (relatively) conservative values, their love and loyalty to family and country, are being mocked.

Crucially, their views in 2020 are quite liberal in a classical sense: they are tolerant, anti-racist and want to protect the environment. But they are aghast at the excesses of the woke agenda, at its totalitarian overtones, its obscure obsessions, and want to leave the EU, pay less tax, have better public services, and enjoy a drink at the pub.

And that has been the takeover of our nation, our democracy, that we are now engaged in reversing. Peacefully. Through the ballot box, and by re-forming the Little Platoons, the militia of meaningful democracy.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Don't forget to order your fireworks online, or visit a specialist store - they won't be in the local shop!
https://epicfireworks.com/
https://www.galacticfireworks.co.uk
https://dynamicfireworks.co.uk
And others (no connection)

The future of air travel

I can predict that 2020 will bring many news stories about air travel. This week we have the saga of Flybe, and the paradox that rail travel is tax subsidised by £29bn a year, road travel by £15bn a year but that passengers of airlines competing with these modes of travel within the UK must pay through the ticket price to build their own airports, buy and operate their own aircraft without subsidy and allow the operators to collect additional taxes from passengers to boot in the form of APD. Despite the predictable whines from the rest of the industry, the government has agreed to give Flybe a pause by postponing tax due.

Then there's saving the planet. St Greta avoided air travel by crossing the Atlantic in a large private yacht, but that's not an option available to many. The wealthy and virtuous have the option of booking passenger cabins on merchant vessels - these have been a little known secret for many years but are hardly a substitute for business travellers. I suppose we could tax air travel back to the ticket prices of the 1960s to discourage use, but this would need to be a global initiative.

Then there's airport expansion and nuisance. Heathrow rows haven't even seriously started yet, and not a single elderly home counties lady has yet chained herself to the bulldozers. And we've yet to see the egregious Meghan Markle flying back first class long haul to LHR and forcing her limos through hordes of climate change and anti-runway demonstrators to attend a conference on saving the planet.

That's the problem with air travel - we all use it, many of us even depend on it, but few of us like it in the way we like trains, for example. We hate the budget airlines and their cash scams, for which Flybe are one of the worst offenders, but continue to book their seats.

Just what is the future of air travel?

Update 08.43
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Matt nails it -

Manchester still has one newspaper worthy of the name

Manchester once had a brave and crusading newspaper edited by CP Scott. The Manchester Guardian was libertarian, reformist, anti-establishment in stance and valued journalistic integrity. If it were published today, it would probably be my go-to newspaper, but sadly it exists no longer. A shadow of its former self, it moved to London, became The Guardian, and disavowed its libertarian and reformist stance to become a platform for bigots and cranks and a tool of the new establishment takeover of the UK's state institutions.

During its incubation in Manchester, the Guardian has a sister publication, the Manchester Evening News, founded in 1868, and owned by Guardian Media Group until the sale of the title to Trinity Mirror, now Reach plc, in 2010. It is the MEN that has inherited the crusading honesty of its former press-partner, while the Guardian has become complicit in the lies, cover-ups, distortions, misrepresentation and obfuscation of one of the foulest scandals of this millennium.

The Manchester child sexual abuse scandal is the just the latest in a tsunami of child abuse scandals in the UK that became institutionally embedded as acceptable amongst police, social workers and local politicians. It is the most egregious tale of police and official malfeasance, maladministration and misconduct in public office, and heads must roll and persons must do jail time for the wrongs they did. The bromides of the guilty establishment - "we empathise with the pain you must feel" and "lessons have been learned" - don't work any more. We want prosecutions.

We owe a debt to the Manchester Evening News and the city's mayor Andy Burnham for this story being fully investigated. 

I was in two minds whether to write this piece, as I know the assortment of deeply bigoted comments it is likely to attract. So let me make things clear. This is primarily a story about public officials, the police, the media, local government and many senior figures in government wilfully covering up the most shocking and disgraceful abuse of the most vulnerable in our society. The crimes were carried out by paedophiles, nonces, who also belong in jail. Those officials were covering-up paedophilia.

And this piece is a piece in praise of the upright and the righteous who abandoned their establishment comfort-zone to expose the wrongs. It is not an opportunity to vent vile and disgusting discrimination against the adherents of the Muslim faith or the nationals of a single nation. Or a deluded opportunity to aver that the harassment and victimisation by a convicted street-thug of this minority under the pretence of exposing wrong has any equivalence to the actions of the MEN, Andy Burnham and Maggie Oliver. It does not. So although I'm not closing comments, please be very careful.

Marking our exit from the EU

There will not I think be any evening of television hosted by Jools Holland, with streamers, fizz and jazz bands, on the 31st January to mark our departure from the EU. There will, though, I strongly suspect, be lots of firework displays, which will pose the police with an interesting problem.

The current firework laws allow fireworks only until 11pm other than on Guy Fawkes night, Diwali, Chinese New Year and Christian new year. One of the quirks of the WA is that it specifies midnight on the 31st CET as the exact moment of the UK's departure - 11pm UK time. Technically, fireworks ignited before the hour are quite legal, those exploded after could earn a visit from Plod.

I don't think this will be an issue anywhere outside the most remainery parts of London, in which the victims of Brexit Derangement Syndrome will deluge the Met with phone calls, tweets and emails  complaining about the fireworks. Brexiteers will take a delight I suspect in guerrilla celebrating - sneaking into closed parks and onto open spaces to set off half a dozen rockets after 11pm, then flee. One can understand and sympathise with such actions, and  we could see the skies of the whole of Britain (even Scotland had a substantial Leave minority) lit up in a coruscating display of sound and light.

What we will not hear, it appears, are the bongs of Big Ben. This, I think, is probably right. TPTB have invented a theoretical cost of half a million to ring the bells and that's enough to kill the idea. It is not a good look for any official bodies to appear triumphalist about leaving; our national and state institutions belong just as much to remainers as they do to leavers, and it really wouldn't be right to use them to crow. The fireworks and private celebrations will be quite enough.

Electoral housekeeping

There were many rumours last week of the government bringing forward in the very near future a Bill to tackle some much overdue electoral housekeeping. Two potential changes were outlined in the manifesto - the roll out of voter ID at polling stations, and the ending of the 15 year limit on the entitlement of overseas voters to participate. Two further changes were not mentioned but will be of much greater interest to many people.

The first is postal voting. Formerly restricted to expats and members of HM Forces overseas, and to the housebound sick and disabled, the numbers involved were negligible. Then came Blair's pollution of our democratic institutions. In December the volume reached 38% of all votes cast - of 31.8m votes cast, 12m were postal votes. Objections are twofold. Primarily is the extent to which postal votes can be abused by vote harvesting, personation, coercion or diversion. No reliable figures are available on the extent of this, but then, if abuses were successful, they would not easily be discovered. The introduction of photo ID at polling stations without having restricted postal votes will of course only vastly increase the numbers of postal votes, and we must ask ourselves whether we want an electoral process in which 75% of ballots are cast in a way that evades all the scrutiny, security and transparency of polling stations, votes and boxes. The second and more minor objection is that the act of physically voting - the polling station, poll card, interactions with polling officials and fellow electors, recognition that those voting with you may be voting for another candidate and so on - is in itself a powerful reinforcer of local democratic identity, one of the parade drills of the Little Platoons.

The second change is to initiate a fresh boundary review, but this time based on the existing 650 parliamentary seats rather than the somewhat aged review on Cameron's instructions that sought to reduce the number of seats to 600. The registers of electors on which the Cameron reviews were based are now even further distant, and were Cameron's review to be recast on the 2019 registers it may produce different boundaries. However, fundamentally I object deeply to Cameron's attempts to reduce the numbers of MPs by 50.

In 1922, the first election carried out within our current national borders, we had 615 seats for a population of around 44m. We now have a population of some 66m. In addition, the centralisation of the State since the Great War has meant that MPs now have very much more on which to legislate. Before that time, water, power, gas, health, hospitals, almshouses, welfare, roads, lighting, transport, planning, public health, licencing, education and policing were funded, designed, managed and delivered locally by democratically accountable members and bodies. Whilst I will campaign for parliament to divest itself of many of the powers accreted over a century, we still need 650 MPs - if only for the great reforms that the Prime Minister must introduce to get our nation and people back upon an even keel.

Tarquin's and Jemima's Euro-freebies

You'll have noticed that petulance yesterday hit 9 on the Coogan Scale at the Commons rejection of an amendment that linked the Erasmus scheme to the WA Bill. Soyboys and snowflakes across the land swooned in grief as the great middle-class freebie was left at the future discretion of the government. Let's take a quick look.

The following table was published by the EU back in November -

Erasmus has a budget of about €16.45bn for the 2014-2020 programme period, of which the UK currently pays around 11% or €1.81bn. From the EU's table above, we get just 3% of Erasmus awards, worth around €0.49bn. We're therefore currently paying around €1.32bn to give the children of other nations a nice freebie - and it's clear that both France and Germany are the nations that benefit most.

Erasmus is the sort of scheme that most benefits kids from ABC1 homes, university top-streamers, those with comfortable parental incomes, kids who can easily master a second European language, with parents with the time and inclination to drop their offspring and their huge rucks at airports, collect them again as required and fill their accounts with spending money. Gap year kids. The privileged offspring of our privileged metropolitan elites.

You might consider this to be both criminal waste and squander and a not very fair use uf UK tax resources. Certainly we should encourage and assist our young people to travel and learn in Europe. We should also ensure we give UK taxpayers value, and we should ensure that young people from all backgrounds, including apprentices and those at tech and vocational schools as well as universities, can fairly and equitably access any grants.

So I'd encourage the government to steel itself to resist the sharp elbows of the middle classes, the petulant whining at the red end of the Coogan Scale and to introduce proposals for participation on fair terms.

Copyright Notice
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The real news today isn't about a vacuous B-list actress

Sajid Javid will have his work cut out at the Treasury if he is to use government economic intervention to 'even up' the UK. Believe me, I've done my fair share of Treasury funded regeneration schemes; every significant regeneration scheme needs one not only to jump through microeconomic hoops but to provide stuff unheard of in private investment analysis. No Treasury case is complete without adjusting for Optimism Bias in the prescribed fashion and backing one's construction cost estimates with a Monte Carlo analysis of likely contractor bid values. It's all about additionality - sustainable improvements to the UK economy as a whole, and not just Keynsian helicopter money stimulating temporary demand in the economy. So here's what they'll be looking at

Deadweight
This is what would happen anyway, without government intervention. Not as easy to quantify as it appears because it is dynamic; Brexit will release a wave of pent up foreign direct investment, the certainty of a government with a majority will increase business confidence and even the government's policy strategy to intervene to even-up will affect regional investment. Brexit will also catalyse disinvestment decisions from the global corporates, the world's business gypsies, who even now are eying up Serbia for their next plant. Without having a good grasp of the baseline position - the deadweight - you cannot estimate the additionality that economic intervention creates.

Displacement
Up until now wisdom has been that public money is wasted if it just moves the same economic activity from one place to another. What, for example, are the additional economic benefits to the UK of the BBC moving operations from London to Salford? Here is a typical case of a business move motivated by lower factor costs - land, labour, housing and contractors are all cheaper in Manchester than in London, producing real gains for the BBC. If you can get the taxpayer to pay for the new factory, offices, studios or warehouses and enjoy the commercial benefits, brill. Except for the taxpayer, obv, who gains nothing. Sometimes called pork-barrel intervention; building a new plant in Joe Potato's constituency means a plant closing elsewhere.

This will be a critical consideration at the Treasury. Creating growth in the NE, NW, SW and elsewhere that just moves economic activity out of London and the SE is not evening-up but evening-down. And comes perilously close to gerrymandering.

Substitution
Sort of like displacement but within regions, localities or sectors. It's about exchanging economic factor inputs with no additional economic effects. Buying rice rather than potatoes from your local Sainsbury's alters your dinner menu but leaves your carbohydrate consumption unchanged. Employing unemployed workers who come with a government grant only to release an equivalent number of existing staff through redundancy / early retirement may refresh the firm's workforce (or lose scores of years of accumulated experience, depending how you look at it) but creates no additional economic activity. 

The Treasury do recognise that outcomes may be social and environmental as well as primarily economic, but when it comes down to demonstrating additionality, the costs and benefits must always be quantified economically. This is now what Andy Burnham and his colleagues elsewhere in the regions must now set their minds to do; the political rhetoric of the election is over, the hard graft now begins.

And that is the real news, not the vacuous posturing of a publicity obsessed B-movie actress that seems to dominate the press today.

Bangs for our transport bucks

With a £10bn budget this year, Transport for London is a big transport player. In fact the entire budget of the Department of Transport, covering the whole of the UK, is just £25bn. OK, half of TfL's budget is from fare income, but TfL is big. I've seen it go from joining up London buses and underground to an integrated transport service co with state of the art smart ticketing, and a network that includes road, rail, light rail, underground and river services and responsibility for much of the associated infrastructure and road charging. It's actually done pretty well. Most recently, TfL's competence in running the East London Line overground has drummed up a chorus of public calls for the organisation to take over the running of all of London's suburban commuter rail services. The oystercard, and better trains, staffing and stations than the franchised operators mean commuters as far out as Dartford or Gravesend want to be part of the TfL network.

I did quite well personally from London's superb public transport network; expansion (i.e. better travel time distances to central London) put £50k+ on my house, just as Crossrail will do for homeowners along its entire 73 mile length. Businesses of course also benefit greatly; not only from enhanced customer access, but more importantly from enhanced access to staff, who can use multi-mode transport for their work journey. It works. OK, so TfL is good. So what?

Well, if you're reading this from Manchester, or Nottingham, or Peterborough, you'd have got the point already. This is from a Commons library report, now a little old

If you add London and the South-East together, this bit of our geography gets 38% of the national spend on transport. No wonder it's quite good.

It does also call into question as to who will benefit if HS2 goes ahead. Will these improved north - south travel time distances benefit folk in Birmingham as much as they do folk in London? And what of those who want to travel east-west outside of London? From Liverpool to Leeds, say?

With interest rates close to zero, there is no better time for government infrastructure investment. The problem is in ensuring it's the right investment.

Labour leadership - the gift that keeps on giving

Back in 2015, before I rejoined the Conservative Party I should add, I paid £3 as a 'registered supporter' to vote for Jeremy Corbyn as the new Labour leader. It was probably the best £3 I have ever spent; I helped to make Labour unelectable, helped them lose three elections in a row and helped to destroy a party that posed the biggest challenge to Brexit. Job done.

My loathing for the Blair-Brown cabal and the damage they had caused to our democracy overshadowed any concerns I had about Corbyn. We are only now in a position to unwind some of Blair's damage and to start repairing the place. I will not be paying £25 this time around to play with Labour again; it is pointless.

Two-thirds of the public have never heard of any of the Labour candidates; a has-been depressive with a face as long as a snake's arse, a purse-mouthed mekon, the fat lady, the cleaning woman, the plank. Not one of them with the charisma to lead a darts team. Behind them a pool of fools more interested in viciously fighting eachother for power than championing the British people; Lansman, Seamus Milne, the little Owen boy, Cohen, the militants, Trots, Fabians and prosecco classes.

One of these lefty rags published over the weekend the sort of throwback article of the sort favoured by Socialist Worker; Tory cuts, Tory destruction of the workers,Tory hatred of the North. It was illustrated by this photograph, captioned 'Ten years of Tory cuts';

With thanks to my new-found picture searching skills, I identified it as of Alfreton Road in Nottingham, a solid Labour council for generations. BTL comments from Nottingham residents had much criticism of the Labour city council's mismanagement of the commercial centre, lack of support for business and innovation, and suffocating municipal socialism. In other words of Labour cuts, Labour destruction of the workers, Labour hatred of the North. They should have captioned it 'Ten years of Labour neglect'.

We've destroyed Labour in parliament. Now we should remove their scourge from the town halls, and truly liberate the British people; those shops should be hipster start-ups, pop up restaurants, print-makers' galleries or the scores of other businesses that bloom and flourish under good local economic management. The waste of good buildings with life left in them is criminal - and Labour are the criminals. Let's turf them out altogether.

Crane-hangers and Head-choppers. Again.

The events of the Falklands war are now exactly equidistant between the present and the second world war. For many of you, as for me, for whom the Sun's front pages, the news of the sinking of Sheffield announced by Ian McDonald in sombre tones, the taking of Stanley, are as fresh as yesterday's breakfast, that will come as a shock. Sir Henry Leach, our Falklands First Sea Lord, actually saw active service in WWII. The current FSL, Tony Radakin, wasn't even commissioned until 1990, eight years after the Falklands.

I throw that in to demonstrate how rapidly the civilian experience of war passes; the jingoism, flag waving, anxious dedication to news output, simple emotions and sense of loss at every setback, shared grief for our inevitable losses. Somehow the 2003 Gulf war didn't count- perhaps it was too easy, or over too quickly, or had too little public support or absent innate rightness to count. So we have whole generations now on social media who not only missed the Falklands experience but who would be hard pushed to point to Iran on a map first-try. It's not much consolation that our domestic ignorance is likely a little less than the ignorance of Americans in this respect; No, that's Colombia. That's Nigeria. Whoa, now not even the right hemisphere. My generation will not only be largely able to stick a finger on the land of the crane-hangers first time but to name the seven nations it borders, or at least four of them.

Not only are we civilians as a whole less capable of expertise and of balanced judgement, more ignorant of geography and of geopolitics, but everyone now feels utterly entitled to call themselves an expert; the Tik Tok (I bet you haven't even heard of it) generation, who are also convinced the planet has caught fire and will burn up by next Thursday, have now convinced themselves that WW3 is here*, and war will destroy us all before climate change. By Wednesday, say. There is nothing that can be said to them to convince them otherwise.

Well, the proxy war between the crane-hangers and the head-choppers in which we and the US have been caught in the middle has taken a new turn; the Donald may actually now succeed in pulling US forces out of Iraq and Syria, assisted by the Iraqi parliament, allowing them to assault eachother directly. Let them get on with it. Saudi oil is less important for the US; as soon as it reaches $60bbl the US frackers come on stream.

So no great pronouncements from me today. Let's watch this one. Calmly, as we do.

*As does the Daily Express - which I always imagined anyway was written for teenagers.

Planning for the impact of AI

If you searched the manifestos of the parties in the election just gone for their AI policies, you will have been disappointed. Apart from Brexit, the news issues were little different from those in 1997 or even in 1979. But AI was there - as a trap for the unwary.

John McDonnell stepped on a mine when his September conference pledge to reduce the working week to 4 days came back to haunt him; I suspect this started as an option for dealing with the effects of AI in some sectors as an alternative to redundancy for 20% of the workforce, but of course it became a source of ridicule. Combined with a pledge to increase public sector pay by 5% immediately, social media filled with memes from delighted NHS workers, train drivers, prison officers and judges at the largesse of the Messiah. Labour tried to counter by saying the 4-day week would not apply to the NHS, only to immediately create hostility amongst half a million Labour voters. Then they did the sensible thing and disowned it, pointing out that it was not a manifesto pledge.

McDonnell is of course a fool. He assumed that the UK would naturally capture the benefits of the changes brought by AI as well as the costs in lost jobs and GDP. Additional wealth and profitability, in McDonnell's imagination, could afford to pay the same wage bill for 20% fewer hours. This is not a safe assumption. Globalism may ensure that the 1% do well out of such changes, but it's also meant that economic benefits have not been wider, and have actually disadvantaged many of the traditional Labour voting areas that wisely chose not to trust McDonnell's economic illiteracy. The risk now is that the benefits of the AI revolution will go to the same nations that have benefited so greatly from Globalism - China, India, Brazil. Managing AI changes must be at the very forefront of our national strategy, and Brexit will ensure that we, as a nation, are agile enough to develop a policy free of the drogue of a sclerotic EU riddled with the self-interests of 27 players.

If the PM is to keep his pledge to all those ex-labour voters, we must drive AI with a determination.

Hence, for those of you who read the full-fat version of this blog with its sidebar, you will have seen a new blog entry from Dominic Cummings pop up yesterday evening in the blogroll. It's all over the papers this morning in a way that a government job advert from a sad HR department would never be - and hasn't cost taxpayers a single penny for half-page display ads in the Guardian or whatever. It demonstrates beyond doubt that despite the almost universal absence of AI from the election manifestos, it's right at the top of the government's agenda. And that is very reassuring indeed.

Cummings' dog training classes

The Telegraph reports on a planned reform of the higher levels of the civil service. We don't know what working relationship has developed between the PM, Dominic Cummings and Mark Sedwill over the past four months or so, but the fact that he still retains the triple crown of National Security Adviser, Head of the Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary clearly indicates that there is some sort of accommodation. Sedwill's role will be crucial in determining whether civil service reform is just changing the curtains or whether it will materially alter a service that was developed to meet the needs of the first industrial revolution, codified in 1870 by the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, and has remained essentially the same since.

The story attributes to Dominic Cummings that 

He has already made it clear in private that he will no longer stand for a culture in which it is seen as acceptable for senior officials to go on holiday the day before the announcement of a policy they have been working on for six months. 

Well, I have some considerable experience of that behaviour. They also go on leave (they won't call it holiday) immediately prior to any important decision being taken, any project key date or any critical deadline. Dubai is one of their favourite destinations - just far enough away to prevent vexatious recall, but just cheap enough to not raise questions about their wealth. In fact I'd be astonished if they haven't already developed some sort of civil service club there. It is quite deliberate, and they think it's quite clever. As soon as they know a key date in the project cycle, they book their tickets and get their leave signed-off.

My own attitude to civil service reform is neither vindictive nor self-defeating. I have a cousin who cannot control his dog; he holds a senior post, is a qualified lawyer, a good husband and decent father but the dog is in charge, to the extent that it has had to be fitted with a muzzle. It can never be let off the lead and is unsocialised with anyone outside the family. I see the civil service as like a dominant dog - capable of great affection, with the potential of great loyalty and selfless service and duty, but which will be fulfilled only when it recognises that it is not the master, but the dog. For dogs, it is only having a master that brings true happiness.

I wish Mr Cummings every success.  

A final roll of schadenfreude for 2019

If I have a new year resolution it is to heed the PM's plea to put the bitter Leave / Remain divides behind us and to consign the word Brexit to history. In one month we will leave the EU, and that act will kick-start the healing and reconciliation. However, for now, for this last day of the troublesome teens, let's look back with schadenfreude -

Tony Blair
A man who did his utmost to frustrate Brexit, making visits to the UK's EU adversaries and encouraging them to block and frustrate his own nation's diplomatic efforts. Fortunately, so hated is Blair by all sides of the political spectrum, the Remain side ignored all his pleas to deny Boris an election.

Andrew Adonis & AC Grayling
Both were early victims of Brexit Derangement Syndrome, each starting the Brexit process with an intact and valuable public reputation but ending the decade with their lifetime's reputational achievements in ashes, as mocked and derided figures of ridicule whom absolutely no-one will take seriously in the future

John Bercow
Stripped of his power, the victims of bullying, long suffering Commons staff and all who were subject to his gross unpleasantness will be breathing a sigh of relief at Bercow's fall. While noting he really didn't have that great a height from which to tumble. Bercow is now reduced to Italian game shows and entertaining shoppers on the Clapham omnibus. Ld Lisvane, who suffered little Bercow's bullying as Clerk of the Commons until 2014, cannot be looking forward to the sanctimonious dwarf's seemingly inevitable elevation to the Lords.

Grieve, Gaulk, Soubry et al 
Purged from the Party, humiliated at the ballot box, the miracle is that these narcissistic idiots imagined that people voted for them personally in the first place, rather than for the party for which they purported to stand. How anyone can so delude themselves as to the extent of a non-existent personal popularity defeats me - or perhaps they were willing to undergo this public humiliation, indeed expected it, for the sake of the higher pay-off due from the Commons to defeated MPs than that paid to resigning MPs?

The BBC
Though it has been long building, the BBC's support of every anti-Brexit position, almost in anticipation of the reversal of the 2016 vote, has now condemned it. Polls are now emerging, and will continue to appear, that demonstrate that the BBC has lost the public's trust. Criminalisation of non-payment of the BBC TV tax is now unsustainable, and we will see further major changes before the Charter is due for renewal in 2027.

The Dags - Mark Carney, Barack Obama, the CBI et al
Most dags are now engaged in pretending they never opposed Brexit or never supported Remain at all. Just like all the ordinary members of the NSDAP vanished in 1945, or members of the GDR Communist Party became invisible after 1989. The CBI in particular, having devoted four years fighting Brexit on behalf of the global corps, is now declaring it is 100% behind Boris and always has been.

You'll note I've included none of the capos in Brussels. That, if it comes, will be for this date next year.

In a spirit of non-sectarianism, I have ready both Jamesons and Black Bush, both Catholic and Protestant whisky, in addition to my now favourite Monkey Shoulder blended malt Scotch. I will raise a dram for us all - may we, and may the United Kingdom, have a magnificent 2020!

Localism doesn't mean just devolving rationing

A somewhat boring post title for a subject that will become increasingly important. The centre is under pressure; after having hoarded power for a century, jealously guarding it and snapping-up any developing shoots of Localism, the central State and its bureaucrats cannot now hold it. The dam about to burst, not just in the UK but across Europe, is social care.

When IDS, the architect of the UC scheme, unveiled his proposals, I wrote that he was creating an unworkable behemoth. Far better to devolve welfare down to as local a level as possible, almost back to the principles of the first Elizabethan poor laws if necessary, to anchor both the costs (tax) and spend right down to the communities in which help is needed. This is anathema to a central State whose reason for being is to act as a substitute parent to citizens from whom it has taken our intermediate institutions. You've all read my excerpts from Robert Nisbet's writings on the subject and in 2020 I'll bring them back, along with de Tocqueville and others.

The first stage reaction of central States to the pressures has been to devolve just the rationing decision - saying in effect "Here's the cake. There's no more. Now you ration it out". The roles of local government and the NHS are being merged, children's social work is now merged with education. The government is carefully hypothecating increased NHS spend into hospitals and nurses knowing health service managers will still use whatever opportunities they have to divert clinical care money into social care services - care homes, home helps and home nursing of the elderly. The Telegraph carries a story this morning that is surely the tip of the iceberg, of NHS managers charging relatives £300 a day to 'assist' their care applications. The Express carries another - this time the EU devolving the rationing decision on food bank support.

IDS is a fine chap with the highest ideals and best intentions, but he was not the Dominic Cummings that welfare reform needs. With UC he has given us an unintentional monster that needs an unacceptable level of central State tax take to function adequately. It is unsustainable.

I believe it will only work when local communities are given the power to make 'time or tax' decisions themselves - whether to resource the needs of the elderly, sick and disabled in those communities by sharing the care duties or paying tax to employ others to do it, and to decide the balance, for there will always be one, between time and tax. That needs a Localism big bang the pressure for which will continue building during the roaring twenties. Hold on to your hats.

Economic Dream Team and national dishonour

Why has the Netherlands been so successful? A large part of the place is below sea level, built on reclaimed land, it has no natural resources or mineral wealth, no source of energy, no great natural agricultural advantage and they speak a language that sounds like hawking phlegm. Yet their per capita GDP places them amongst the wealthiest in the world, and in terms of economic freedom they're at the top of the index, along with Switzerland, the UK, Ireland and Iceland. Their courts are un-corrupt, they have a monarchy and a proud history of plucky adventuring, once even sending a fleet of ships up the Thames to destroy the English fleet.

The answer of course is trade, commerce, secondary processes that add value, shipping and above all wide horizons that allow the Dutch to punch above their weight. Chemicals, petroleum refining, electrical engineering, banking and a scientifically productive horticulture and intensive agriculture sector all make the best of the Netherlands' greatest asset - the Dutch. They even enlisted cannabis and prostitutes into the tax economy.

The fact that the Netherlands seem firmly fixed within the EU is our loss and the EU's gain.

In response to the EU's veiled threats to block UK financial services from operating in the EU post-Brexit, a suggestion has resurfaced to form an FinAlliance between the UK, Switzerland, Singapore and HK. It's perfectly feasible, and it must worry at least 26 of the 27. But imagine what such an alliance would be if it included the Netherlands.

Dishonours
========
Again, the reward of the deserving has been fouled and besmirched by the awards of honours to the undeserving, those deficient of either exceptional merit or great worth to the nation. Sally Davies, chief health fascist, Alison Saunders, failed and vindictive prosecutor and Melanie Dawes, Jonathan Jones and John Manzoni are either failures or unknown mediocrities and none of them has a place in our national pantheon. The system stinks. Until we clear this meretricious trash from our honours system, the truly deserving will be devalued and befouled by association.