Fire them!

Don’t know about you but I’m fed up with people saying we need more time for businesses to get ready for the end the year when we will finally have left the EU and all its controls.  What have these business leaders been doing for the last four and half years?     

A writer to the Letters Page of the Daily Telegraph hit it on the head.   

“SIR – I am the CEO of a small-to-medium enterprise that trades almost entirely in Europe.  A hard Brexit holds no fears for us.  Indeed, our market share in Europe continues to expand month by month.  So I was astounded by the insipid helplessness of other CEOs (“What would a no-deal Brexit mean for business?”, telegraph.co.uk, December 11).    

Here’s my advice to shareholders. 

Fire your CEO and the board if they haven’t already configured the business for a hard Brexit.    

Fire them if they only offer products and services that are so unremarkable that they can’t withstand ordinary World Trade Organisation tariffs.   

Fire them if they haven’t already developed plans for new markets and found new and better sources of materials to import.   

Fire them if they can’t run a business except in a heavily protected market.    

Fire them for still whinging four years after the vote to leave the EU.”   

I couldn’t agree with John Palmer of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire more.   

Are businesses ready to leave the European Union?   You bet they are.   To see an example of a sensible company, have a look at what I wrote about one last year on Monday 12^th of August 2019.  

Kick down the doors.

After Wednesday evenings dinner in Brussels, the agenda for which would have been an insult to any other nations elected leader, with the UK being told that they would have to follow EU law even though they have left the Community (such a non-threatening word is it not), one wonders if a different tactic is required.   

Perhaps it would be more productive if UK pro EU business leaders, politicians and much of mainstream media that have disgracefully and actively sought to undermine the democratic wishes of the people of the United Kingdom for 5 years, rather than ramping up Project Fear again, went and kicked down the doors of the European Commission and demand that they respect the UK as a sovereign nation?  

Think that will happen?  Me neither.

Doc Martin. Right diagnosis. Wrong solution. Just like for Covid-19.

Remember the series?  Or in particular do you remember the episode when Louisa went for interview for the head teacher post.  She was already a teacher in the school.   (Spoiler, she got it).     

There is an outbreak of a highly contagious skin infection at the school and Martin is initially confounded, until his brilliant diagnostic skills uncover the source.  And his solution?  Apart from the medical treatment, lockdown.  At the interview Louisa was accused of not following Doc Martins advice which was to stop the children coming to school.  She was encouraging people to break the lockdown as it were.  You can watch the whole episode here.    

I could not help thinking that this programme, recorded in 2005, should have been essential viewing for the prime minister, the Scottish first minister et al  before they took the mad decision to virtually bankrupt the UK by going into lockdown.   

Doc Martin (think of him as the current SAGE advisors to the government) said it had to be lockdown.     

Louisa, (think of her as the kind of people the establishment regard as a bit of a loose cannon), argued that half the children had their parents working, and they needed to work to put bread on the table.    

The establishment, (read that as most people working in the taxpayer funded public sector with the notable exception of those on the real front line: nurses, doctors, and all the other essential hospital staff), sniffed at that as an excuse to allow the children into the school to be taught when they really knew better as the establishment that the childen should be in lockdown.  

We ended up with an incandescent Louisa telling the interview panel that she wasn’t going to let her pupils suffer and had ensured that each child who was infected was securely isolated in the school and, in that isolation, continued to be taught.  It was quite a performance.    

So why, when it was obvious to a humble primary school teacher in a soap opera set in beautiful Cornwall in 2005 that lockdown of everyone is the wrong answer, have we arrived at the insane situation of billions of pounds being wasted and lives and businesses (yip, the ones that paid the taxes that pays for the public sector) ruined by doing the complete opposite to what Louisa did? 

3.3% vs 3.8%

Here’s an odd one.   

INnthe USA the Democratic Party are demanding that, with an apparent lead of 3.3% over the incumbent president, Mr Trump should do the decent thing and give up the fight.   

I do hope that they will be similarly minded in pushing for the result in the UK EU referendum, which was won by a margin of 3.8%, to be respected by their presidential candidate, Mr Biden.  And the EU.

The 0.1%.

My wider family have recently been seeking to purchase a new home.  Buying a new home is one of life’s great joys.  But it is also one of its great stress points, new job, marriage, and death being the other ones.  

However, when the finish line is in sight, there is a warm feeling.  Almost there.  99.9% certain we will get it over the line.  And emotionally that is a big high.  But as our common sense keeps reminding us, it is not a deal till the papers are signed.  And so it was for us.  Going through the fine print, there it was a problem.  A big problem that was big enough to have to walk away from.  But even though emotionally we want to be over the line, rationally we know we must not simply trust someone’s word, or our emotions, that it will be all right.  We know that there is only thing that matters.  A legal document.  A document that may end up one day in a court.   

Which brings me to ask you an odd question.  If I were to offer you a gun and tell you that I was only 99.9% certain that it was not loaded, then invited you to point the said gun at yourself and pull the trigger, would you?  If like me you would decline the trigger pulling opportunity, you may be also amazed by the number of highly intelligent, otherwise independent, and level headed people who have decided that 99.9% is 100%.  

I am of course alluding to the presidential election in the USA.    Has Biden won?  I suspect he has.  And all the best to him if he has.  The numbers are certainly going that way.  

Has the result been 100% proved?  No, it hasn’t.   Some polls are being contested.  

Now of course those doing the contesting may being nothing more than mischievous.  Seeking to undermine the democratic vote.   But the reality is, main stream media has, almost without exception, decided that 99.9% is good enough for them.  

99.9% equals 100%.  It is a Biden victory.  Say it often enough and people will start to believe it.   And at the extremes, that can have terrible consequences. 

We have all have read about, or even participated in, the experiment where everyone in a room says one thing about an incident they witnessed.  But you know you saw it with our own eyes totally differently.  But as the experiment shows, when up against it, most people accept the narrative of everyone else in the room, even though they know it is wrong.   You go with the flow, the path of least resistance.  And the MSM (the people in the room) narative says 99.9% equals 100%.  Say it often enough and people accept it.

Surely, rather than saying Trump is a bad loser and he should concede, the press in a democratic nation should be encouraging Trump to put any evidence before a court.  There he will be humiliated beyond measure.  Or it be found to be the 0.1% who was right.

The fog of war. The fog of numbers.

What’s happening?  And why?   Who's figures are right?  And who's are wrong?  Is it that simple? 

Let’s start with the data from the Cambridge statistical unit that the Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance, relied on.

- The data was three weeks out of date.   More recent data from the same unit is less apocalyptic.  So why didn’t he use that?       

- The PHE/Cambridge model predicted 1,000 people a day would die by November 1st. They’re not. Therefore the model is invalid.     

- Prof Tim Spector’s KCL data is showing infections are “flatlining across the board”.      

- The Government has focused too much on worst case scenarios.     

- Government policy isn’t guided by the evidence; rather, it is massaging the evidence to justify the policy.      

- The Government is ignoring the costs of lockdowns, both economically and in terms of non-Covid deaths.      

- The PCR test identifies people as “positive” if they’ve had the virus three or four weeks ago and are no longer infectious.      

- If we go into a second lockdown, what’s the exit strategy? In Cornwall, for instance, there are only about 40 cases/day (out of a population of ~566,000), yet Cornwall is being forced to go into lockdown. So how low do case numbers have to be before we can come out of the lockdown?      

- Yes, the NHS is running at about 90-95% capacity, but that’s normal for this time of year. Why the panic?     

Not my words but those of Prof Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidenced Based Medicine at University of Oxford.

 

A dodgy dossier?

“Next slide please”.  There were a number of very scary graphs painted in angry colours with illegible axis scales put up by Sir PatrickVallance FRS FMedSci FRCP is Government Chief Scientific Adviser  and Head of the Government Science and Engineering, on Saturday night.    (Actually, you can read them on the web site, just.  The words show these are not forecasts or projections.   Just scenarios!.)   

At face value they show that things are getting worse in a very scary way. Extrapolating the curve we can see that everyone will have died at least twice by end of the tax year.   So, at last, we really can spend a year dead for tax reasons!!!     

What I find quite remarkable is that the official Opposition are suggesting they will back the government.  If they do, they will be equally culpable for the disaster ahead. They should join the Conservative MPs that are threatening to vote against the legislation unless the Government comes up with something that is a whole lot better than what they have so far fed us in what can, not unreasonably, be described as a dodgy dossier.    

It certainly doesn’t pass the smell test.  On Saturday, Public Health England reported 278 new Covid deaths in England.   The average number of deaths for the past seven days is 214, up 50 per cent on the week before.  

If deaths kept on rising at that rate then, yes, you would get to 4,000 deaths a day in December.     

However, a better guide to future deaths is the figures for new infections, which, of course, tend to lead the death figures.  Over the past seven days PHE has recorded an average of 22,521 new cases a day – which was a six per cent increase on the week before.     If deaths follow the trajectory of new infections – as surely they must, unless Covid-19 suddenly mutates into a vastly more deadly form – they will be nowhere near 1,000 a day by Christmas, let alone 4,000.   

The figures stink.    

I just hope there is not another David Kelly “suicide” when someone blows the whistle.

Let's talk about money money.

A new lock down is being thought about.  Apparently.  And once again it is being touted on the basis of if we don’t, more people will die.  And the rather banal, and questionable mantra, it will save the NHS.    

The problem with that statement is that you could also argue that if we do go into lockdown more people will die.  And the NHS will not survive.   

 
There is one simple question to ask.   If businesses cannot open, where will the money to fund the NHS come from?    

Everyone knows that if you work in the public sector you never pay enough tax to fund even your own salary, never mind the infrastructure of the public sector.  The hopsitals.  The police station.  The roads.  The schools.  The parks.   

So, let's assume a nurse pays 30% of her salary in tax, she in effect is paying 30% of her own salary.  And she doesn't contribute to paying other nurses salaries.  Nor for the hospital where she works.  Who pays for the other 70%?  And the hospital?  The private sector.  And that is a good thing.   But it must be remembered, that is how it works.   

Funding the infrastructure of, for example, the NHS, comes in two ways.  It is 100% funded by the taxes on the private sector and the people who work in the private sector and borrowings.    

It is obvious if businesses do not trade because they are in lock down, they do not pay taxes as taxes are levied on the profits the business makes.  So that is one area of funding lost.  The other key area is the people who working the private sector.  They are taxed.  So if they are not working there is no tax coming in from them either.  A double whammy. 

With a lot less tax coming in how can we continue to sustain the public sector?  Two ways.   

One is to borrow more.  But your parents probably wisely told you not to borrow money to pay for the weekly running costs, only for things like a house or a car. The infrastructure.   So we should not be borrowing money to pay for salaries.

The second is to look at the public sector payroll and ask, what is essential?  Nurses?  Essential!  They work their socks off.  Teachers?  They generally work their socks off.   

But unless they provide a full education service just like nurses provide a full healthcare service, their salaries should be adjusted appropriately.  After all, that is what is happening in the private sector, the sector that pays for a large percentage of every public sector salary.   

Indeed, anyone in the public sector taxpayer funded payroll who cannot deliver their full service then salaries should be adjusted appropriately.   

If someone is working from home and cannot provide a full service when they are working from home, then they should not be working from home.  The very fact that someone is a public sector employee should mean they are essential.  Essential work should be done.   

If money is too tight to mention, everyone needs to take the same hit.  Not just the private sector that pays for everything.

Lockdown vs Time

There is a brand of watch that few can ever hope to wear.  PatekPhilippe.  Swiss owned and made. Their brand slogan is disarmingly simple and emotive.  “You never actually own a Patek Philippe.  You merely look after it for the next generation.”      

You could create a similar PR slogan for Covid19.    Lockdowns don’t stop Covid19.  They simply postpone infections till the lockdown ends. 

Wonder what the fuss about the Withdrawal Agreement is all about?

Well, former prime ministers, well-known Remainers, John Major and Tony Blair give the game away in an article in the Sunday Times last week.  It is their view that if our democratically elected parliament passes the Internal Market Bill, then the UK is ‘bound to end up before the European Court of Justice’ because ‘under the Northern Ireland Protocol, [the ECJ] retains jurisdiction over EU rules’. 

Yes, you read that correctly.  The UK could still be taken to court by the EU which we have actually already legally parted from in January, for decisions it takes in its own sovereign territory.    

Well, we have to say a big thank you to Messrs Major and Blair for putting this in crystal clear language.  And telling us exactly why they don’t want the Withdrawal Agreement to be replaced.  But there is nothing new here.  They are simply reminding us that they reject the largest vote in the history of this country. This is their last throw of the dice to impose their views over those of the majority.    

We know Messrs Blair and Major are as determined to retain EU oversight in the UK as they ever were.

One amusing, but scary part of their article is where they argue that adherence to international law is ‘just as important’ as adherence to domestic law; that internationally drafted treaties should be viewed ‘in the same way’ as the laws drawn up by the elected parliament in the UK itself.      

Bingo!!  In print (or online if you are digitally minded), the Brexit battle summed up. 

As Brendan O’Neil, the editor of Spiked writes, “There are those who believe that international laws, rules, regulations and treaties, whether drawn up in the EU or the UN, should have the same authority as laws drawn up in a democratically elected national parliament, and there are those of us who believe that the parliament we elect should be sovereign over everything else, including treaties we signed and have now changed our minds about.  A parliament bound by international treaties it cannot change, and threatened by legal action from a foreign court, is not a free parliament.  There is only one problem with the Internal Market Bill: it doesn’t go far enough.  To defend democracy in the UK, the Withdrawal Agreement must not only be tweaked – it must be torn up.”

Borders and Good Friday

Let’s just look back a few months, or is it years, this is so long and drawn out after the people voted to Leave the EU.     

In summary, post Brexit, the UK wanted to keep the current Irish Border open.  I think we are all agreed on that.  But so the Republic of Ireland also wanted the border open.  I think that too is an agreed position   So far so good.      

But then the EU basically insisted that, in order to preserve the integrity of the EU internal single market, keeping the border open was not possible as there was no current electronic solution acceptable to the EU – and what would be the EU’s ‘hard’ border, would be a threat to peace.  Of course, the feet dragging EU will quite possibly never find any solution acceptable in spite of similar situation existing around the world where there are “hard borders”.    

But here is where the EU are being cynical.  Having similar (electronic) EU-UK border solutions at the Irish Sea, where the Britain – N.Ireland 200-year old internal market must now have (EU imposed) barriers, is to Brussels/Dublin ‘peaceful’, despite several times more trade passing over it electronically than at the current Irish Border.    

And by the way, the EU putting obstacles in the way of an open current Irish Border border does not contravene the GFA as there was no mention of keeping the Irish Border open within the Good Friday Agreement.  

But moving the Irish Border to the Irish Sea and setting up EU customs/tariffs between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, without the consent of the Northern Ireland Assembly, does contravene the GFA - as a 3rd party (the EU) is attempting to control north-south affairs – and EU member the RoI would clearly beneficially gain from that 3rd party.

The GFA is an international treaty.  The WA international treaty does not overrule the GFA.   The EU and the UK agreed within the WA, via the Irish Protocol, that Northern Ireland is in the UK’s customs territory, and no customs duties will be within the UK.  This is now what the EU apparently now disputes.

So it is very clear to anyone who cares to look that it is the EU looking to knowingly contravene the GFA.  It is not the UK.   Nd the stooshie of the Internal market Bill?  Well it is there, if needed, to protect the integrity of the UK’s single market, and the GFA.  The only people who could possibly not agree with the UK having such a back up are those who still refuse to accept the will of the people.   

Just a final point, 88% of our GDP is generated by activity within the U.K., and unless you think that the other 12% will just disappear, (which of course it won’t), you need to stop being such a pessimist and doom monger.

Do your homework, Mr Potential President.

Presidential hopeful Joe Biden and U.S.A. Senate and Congress leaders need to do their homework.  For example, Nancy Pelosi says that there will be no deal if there is a border put in Ireland between the north and the south.    

Or as Joe Biden, the man who would be president warns, any trade deal between the US and UK "must be contingent upon respect for the agreement and preventing the return of a hard border."     

How depressing that the man who aims to be the so called leader of the free world can be so ignorant. There has never been a hard border.   The border has been an open one allowing free passage of people since 1923, just after Ireland seceded from the UK, and of goods since 1993, long before the Good Friday agreements.    

On a wider point, I think even the most ardent pro EU advocate would blush if they stated the EU wasn’t a bully.   We have seen then break agreement after agreement when it suited them.   And if they can bully the UK with all its strength, wee poor African nations desperate to sell into the EU have no chance.   The EU don’t respect democracy either.    

And if you think I'm over the top, just remember Ireland (yes dear old Ireland) being told by the EU, think again.  Just keep voting till you get it right.    

On the trade issue, I’m really quite staggered by the remain voices that simply haven’t the slightest idea of how trade works.  I make something. You want to buy it.  I sell it to you.  

That was what we did before we joined the EEC as it was.  And there is absolutely no reason why we could not just go back to that.  Anyway, the UKs business are ready to leave the EU.  Not that the CBI were not aware of it. 

But of course, in Brussels we have elite that really is not interested in democracy or free trade.  They want any trade to be wrapped up in their political ambitions for a European Super State.  The UK is now being a bit of a spoke in the wheel for progress towards that.  And they don't like it.  

The UKs problem is that under Cameron and May the EU were not relieved of their belief that the UK would roll over.   Perhaps it is late in the day but now they hopefully realise that leaving the EU means we are not subject to their courts of law.  Japan, Canada, USA, Australia, Brazil et al.    None of them as independent nations would allow such a situation to happen.  So why should the UK?    

On a final point, the EU has one of the most fearful PR department able to produce propaganda like never before.  This video is an example.  The less than subtle Message?   EU good.   Everyone else bad.   Classic. I’d hate to ever be on the wrong side of them.

Historical negationism. Pravda eat your heart out!

Seeing the statue of Edward Colston lassoed, hauled down, dragged through the streets and thrown in the docks at Bristol was very theatrical.  But it was also disturbing.     

Here’s the problem.  Mr Colstons ships were used to transport enslaved people from Africa to the USA.  But how did these Slaves find themselves on ships crossing the Atlantic?  And it here we are reminded of an uncomfortable truth.    

Nat Amarteifio (left)

 Let’s be clear, challenging the past and seeking to never repeat it is a good thing for any society to do.  The trading of human beings can never be right.  

But either through deliberate amnesia or ignorance, what the protestors in Bristol did on Sunday says something very disturbing for two reasons.  

One was obvious.  It's not up to a mob to take unilateral action.  We elect councils to make decisions and implement them.  Indeed Bristol City was debating what to do with the said statue.  What we witnessed was deliberate anarchy. 

The second, less obvious.  Neatly forgetting what respected historians like Nat Amarteifio, a former mayor of Accra, Ghana, have well documented, the Bristol Mob forgot that the suppliers of these Slaves were African ethnic groups that went into the business of trading their sisters and brothers to the USA.  Of course, they were already running their own internal slave trade in Africa.  But the profit motive took over their senses when the opportunity to trade with the USA came up.  Amarteifio says the Europeans weren’t going out and capturing Africans. They couldn’t — they got sick and died from illnesses like malaria.  Some African ethnic groups went into business, warring with other groups so they could capture prisoners they sold as slaves to the Europeans.  Amarteifio says they were organised and intentional about it.  

“To pursue slavery successfully, you need a highly organized group because somebody has to go out there — somebody has to locate the victims; somebody has to lead an army there; somebody has to capture them, transport them to the selling centers; all the time, keeping an eye on them to make sure they don't revolt,” he said. “And then sell them, and move on.”    

So the Bristol Mob was not seeking to right a wrong.  They were not demanding that African chiefs apologise for their involvement in the slave trade.  They were not standing alongside the Nigerian civil rights group that demands tribal leaders whose ancestors sold people to slavers should say sorry like USA and Britain.    

No, Sunday's crowd wanted to hold up one part of history and condemn it all the while trying to forget and erase from the libraries the other part of the story they don’t like.  The classic tactic of dictators down the generations, from Vladimir Lenin to Kim Il-sung and his successors.   

The Bristol Mob doing what they did, seeking to erase all views of history except the one they like, is frighteningly reminiscent of the days of the Soviet newspaper called Truth.  Aka, Pravda.