Smoke and mirrors

The Times suggests that the Northern Irsh border question is nearing resolution:

EU leaders are preparing to offer a two-year Brexit transition deal as early as January after negotiators said that they were close to a breakthrough over the Northern Ireland border.

British officials tabled proposals this week to avoid a “hard border” in Ireland that could unblock the last remaining major obstacle to a deal, The Times understands.

In return the EU will pledge at a summit in Brussels next month to speed up approval for a transition deal that maintains Britain’s present relationship with the EU, reassuring businesses that might otherwise begin implementing plans for a hard Brexit.

Sources in Dublin said that there was “movement” on the issue and growing confidence that a deal could be reached before the summit on December 14-15.

The British proposal is understood to commit the government to work towards “avoiding regulatory divergence” in Ireland after Brexit even if the rest of the UK moves away from European rules. This would involve the government devolving a package of powers to Northern Ireland to enable customs convergence with the Irish Republic on areas such as agriculture and energy.

I'm not convinced.  If Northern Ireland develops customs arrangements which are different from those which apply to the rest of the UK, it stands to reason that there would need to be controls on the passage of goods between the rest of the UK and Northern Ireland.  Otherwise, the chlorinated chicken imported from the US into Britain could leak into Northern Ireland and thence into the EU.

   

The future of capitalism

It's no longer selling or making things.  The Guardian reports:

Just Eat, the online takeaway company, was on Wednesday night officially promoted into the FTSE 100 list of Britain’s blue chip companies, with a valuation of £5.5bn – making it worth half a billion pounds more than the UK’s second biggest supermarket chain .

The UK’s love affair with having pizzas, curries and kebabs delivered to their door has spawned a mobile food business with no products and no outlets that is more highly valued than Sainsbury’s, which sells 90,000 products through 1,400 stores – and also owns the Argos chain. Just Eat is also worth more than Morrisons and Marks & Spencer.

Little-known Danish technology entrepreneur Bo Bendtsen is the single-biggest shareholder in Just Eat with a 13% stake in the business now worth just over £730m. But Bendtsen, who had just 88 followers on Twitter at the time of writing, did not found the company, which provides takeaways to 19 million people.

Meanwhile Babcock, the company which has built two British aircraft carriers is relegated to the FTSE250.

Financial madness ...

 

Quote of the day

From The Times Red Box:

The performance art installation that is David Davis continues. The latest highly sophisticated production involves him having a row with MPs about the quality of impact reports that he has only had to produce because he boasted about them existing when they didn't.

And from The Guardian (here):

Over in Brussels, Michel Barnier raised a glass. As he had suspected, he really was dealing with idiots. 

   

Will Prince Harry be allowed to bring Meghan to live in the UK?

As she is a US national, she will have to demonstrate that she and her intended have a combined income of £18,600 per year.

I understand that she has given up her job.  Not clear as to what Harry's employment status is.

Or perhaps the rules don't apply to royalty ...

 

Three things we learned from Scotland's victory

• Gregor Townsend’s plan is working.  Once again, after a sterling performance against New Zealand,  the Scotland XV outpaced Australia with high tempo rugby.  Yes, there were mistakes, but speed of thought, admirable awareness and constant pressure delivered an excellent result against what was in theory the third best team in the world and a team which had beaten the All-Blacks less than six weeks ago.
• When did Scottish rugby players get so physically fit?  Admittedly, the Australians spent much of the match with only fourteen players.  But, towards the end of a match of such intensity, for the Scotland team to display such energy was almost unbelievable.  Not least after a match of comparable intensity seven days before.
• For years, the Scotland team has been plagued by the limited pool of players on which to draw.  But suddenly we seem able to cope with the absence of such stars as Stuart Hogg and WP Nel.  And the replacements used during the match against the Australians in no way weakened the team.

Bring on the Six Nations!

Music of the week

Useful to know

I was once a slave to fashion, believe it or not.  But this was never my style:

The Guardian reports:

The defining element of 2017’s party season is not a LBD or a statement earring. Instead, fashion is focusing on a slightly less glamorous place: the sock drawer.

Glitter socks, the sparkly kind popular with pop stars like Madonna in the 1980s, are back. Seen on the catwalk on Gigi Hadid at Isabel Marant and multiple models at Gucci, they are also a celebrity favourite. Kendall Jenner wore them on the red carpet earlier this year, and Beyonce, Suki Waterhouse and Rihanna are fans.

Aye, but do they keep your feet warm?

 

Cattle class

Proof that Ryanair treats its staff as poorly as it treats its passengers.  The Guardian reports:

Ryanair cabin crew have been told they could face “disciplinary proceedings” and have their working hours forcibly changed unless they sell more perfume and scratchcards.

The Irish airline has previously denied pressuring staff to hit specific sales targets, after it emerged they were encouraged to sell products in return for bonuses.

But letters sent to crew members by recruitment firms that supply staff to Ryanair– seen by the Guardian – warn of dire consequences for those whose average sales per flight fall “below budget”.

The letters highlight 10 products, including drinks, confectionery, cosmetics and scratchcards, listing the percentage of flights in which individual cabin crew members had not sold enough.

As a frequent passenger, I do my best to help out the crew on the drinks front.

 

Advert of the day

Because it made me smile:



 

The do-nothing budget

... or, at least, the do as little as possible budget.   Nothing to scare the horses.

OK, there was some cosmetic massaging of the housing crisis, but a reduction in stamp duty for first-time buyers and a modest focus on urban site development do not address the housing crisis.

Liquor and fags?  More or less as you were.  (Unless you are a white cider addict.)

Fuel duties?   Nothing to make the petrolheads lose sleep.

Income tax?  No change, other than a slightly increased personal allowance and a bit of a bonus for higher rate taxpayers.  (Why, for heaven's sake?)

Corporation tax?  Pensions tax relief ?  No change.  

Public sector pay?  Nothing except for a rather vague promise to look further at the position of nurses.

Tax avoidance?  The UK overseas tax havens will not be quaking in their boots.

Social care?  Not a dickybird - just ignored.

Altogether, rather a poor show.

   

Never trust a man with a centre parting ...

... espacially if he is the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

 

Academic rewards

The Times  is exercised about the salaries of university vice-chancellors:

The universities minister, Jo Johnson, has called for VCs’ salaries to be pegged to that of the prime minister at £150,000. I took a cut last year from my salary of £185,000 and this year I have agreed it should come down to £150,000, the balance being paid back to the university for charitable purposes. My university is small, albeit growing quickly and first in the country for teaching quality, so my salary should be less than the others. But no vice-chancellor should be paid more than £350,000 and then only at those institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial which are at the top of the international rankings and attract leaders from across the world.

Does anybody in any profession need to be paid more than £350,000 per annum?  Indeed, is £350K not at an excessively high amount?  

And it is an essentially circular argument to suggest that, as others gain, so should I.  The whole system of executive pay has spiralled out of control and common sense.

Why?

Depressing.  The Independent reports:

MPs have voted against a Labour bid to retain EU human rights measures in UK law post-Brexit after the Government offered Conservative rebels an eleventh-hour concession.

The amendment to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill was defeated by 311 votes to 301, giving the Government a majority of just 10.

Just one Conservative MP, Ken Clarke, defied the Government whip and voted for the motion to retain the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, put forward by Jeremy Corbyn.

Civic organisations warned over the weekend that individual rights to privacy, equality, freedom of expression, fair working conditions, a fair trial, access to a lawyer and the protection of personal data are all in potential jeopardy if the charter is stripped from the UK state book after Brexit, in March 2019.

 Which of these individual rights does the government propose to abolish?  I think we should be told.


 

Parallel trainspotting

It's stretching it more than a bit, but The Independent views the Brexit negotiations through a mirror, darkly:

I have always found it helpful to view the Brexit negotiations through the prism of the hotel room drug deal scene at the end of Trainspotting, and never more so than now.

It is not merely because Begbie, Renton, Spud and Sick Boy so accurately mimic the intellectual deficiency, generalised psychopathy and jaw-dropping untrustworthiness of our current political leaders – though it does all those things very well.

It is simply the utterly hopeless mismatch between the two parties, and the panicked arrival of reality, which may very well finally have happened today.

If you want to imagine the scene at Theresa May’s newly formed “Brexit War Cabinet” which met on Monday morning, you only really need to re-watch those short few minutes. When a gang of chancers who think they’ve hit the big time suddenly realise, as the professionals sweep in, how hopelessly out of their depth they really are, and how utterly non-existent any leverage they imagined they might have had.

...

But the similarity is not total. At least, in the end, this small gang of drop-out smack addicts are capable of grasping reality, which is where they differ from certain sections of the Conservative party.

Even as Theresa May and the rest appear braced to do what they were always going to do and double the offer to Brussels, from £20bn to £40bn (and, in the end, no doubt more), Tory voices still seem determined to stampede toward the cliff edge.

   

Two major flies in the ointment

It's all very well that the UK Government thinks that a Brexit breakthrough is imminent.  Bloomberg reports:

The U.K. could be about to improve its financial offer to the European Union ahead of a crucial meeting of the bloc’s leaders in December.

Members of Prime Minister Theresa May’s divided cabinet will consider Britain’s divorce from the EU at a meeting Monday of the Brexit cabinet sub-committee that could be key to unlocking the most controversial matter in the negotiations -- money.

Britain is “on the brink of making some serious movement forward” and starting to break the “logjam,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond told the BBC on Sunday.

There are two major difficulties here.  The first is the question of the Northern Ireland border: the Irish Government will not allow negotiations to go forward unless thay have cast-iron commitments to a permeable border free of customs duties.  The second is the collapse of the negotiations to establish a German government - Frau Merkel may not be in a position to offer any binding commitments to accept any UK offer, particularly if another general election in Germany has to be called.

Update:  From The Guardian (here):

In the meantime, Merkel and her grand coalition cabinet continue to serve as caretakers. Hopes in the UK for a political deal with Berlin on Brexit were unrealistic before but have now become even less likely. The EU’s negotiation guidelines, including the need to pay a sufficient amount of money in the run-up to the December European Council, are still the basis for any deal, now more than ever. Eurozone build-out jointly with France remains a task for the next government, but conversations will remain on ice until the deadlock in Berlin has been broken. 

And that is not likrly to happen soon ...
   

Music of the week

Not one of my favourite mistakes

Yes, I am a shareholder.  It looked a reasonable prospect at the time.  Government contracts, handsome dividends - what could go wrong?  Well, just about everything.  The Guardian reports:

Carillion, one of the construction companies working on the HS2 London to Birmingham rail line, is racing to refinance its business after issuing its third profit warning in five months and suffering a collapse in share price.

Shares in the company, which is at the heart of several major building projects in the UK, were suspended eight times on Friday after the shock update to the City that it would breach the terms on its existing lending at the end of the year.

The shares crashed 60% when the stock market opened on Friday – to their lowest ever levels – and closed down 48% at 21.5p. At this price, about 25p, the shares are barely a tenth of the 240p level seen at the start of 2017 and the value of the company is just £92.5m.

 Ach weel, you win some, you lose some.

Quote of the day

Vacuous, utterly vacuous.  The Maybot in full flow.  From The Guardian (here):

Leaving the summit in Gothenburg, Sweden, May told reporters she agreed that more needed to be done to advance the negotiations. “But we are clear and I am clear that what we need to do is move forwards together and that’s how we can ensure that we are going to get the best deal for the UK and for the EU,” the prime minister said.

   

This is not going to work

The consequences of Brexit for the Northern Ireland border have moved up the agenda.  The Independent reports:

Theresa May has been handed an ultimatum to guarantee no hard border on the island of Ireland by December if Britain wants to move to trade talks before the spring.

The EU and Ireland made clear on Friday that the issue of the border had joined the divorce bill as one of the two main problems where “much more progress” is needed to start talking about a transition period.

Following a meeting with the Prime Minister in Gothenburg, the European Council President Donald Tusk suggested British ministers must be joking if they believed it was the EU’s turn to make concessions in talks, attributing such suggestions to an “English sense of humour”.’

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said Ireland and the EU needed a promise in writing by December that there would be no hard border and suggested eurosceptics had not “thought all this through” in the years they had been pushing for the UK to leave the EU.

I do not see how this question can be resolved.  If the UK insists on leaving the single market and customs union, there would have to be some kind of controls on the Northern Irish border, a position which is now declared by the Irish Republic to be unacceptable.  If Northern Ireland were to remain by itself  in the single market, there would need to be border controls between it and the rest of the UK, a position which would be equally unacceptable to the British government (probably even if it were not dependent on the DUP for its continued survival).  The only other conceivable option would be for the Republic of Ireland to leave the EU along with the UK; and that is obviously a non-starter.

I cannot see an available fudge or compromise.  I don't know where we go from here, other than towards either a cliff-edge no-deal or the abandonment of Brexit altogether.

   .

Quote of the day

The Times ponders the raison d'être of the Conservative Party:

The usual conservative view is risk-averse and frightened of grands projets by their sheer complexity and by the low capacity of the state to administer them. The true conservative, who is not a reactionary in thrall to the past, is also not a radical excited by a better tomorrow. He or she instead makes a fetish of the present. Better not to risk change for fear it will be worse than what we have. The caution and the complacency can be infuriating but it is a fool who sees no wisdom in the position.

Where are these conservatives today? Can you name a single one? Who is the person who holds the quintessentially conservative view, which is that the EU is a bit of a mess for which no affection can really be mustered but who thinks that leaving is really not worth the candle? The process of leaving, thinks the historical conservative, is just too difficult, too far beyond the capacity of the civil service to deliver, just far too much bother. To attempt the most complex administrative task that the British state has undertaken since the conduct of the Second World War is just a profoundly unconservative thing to do.

Wise words.