So much for the Red Duster

It speaks volumes for the state of the British merchant shipping fleet that, of the three businesses contracted by the UK Government to fulfil "no-deal" ferry arrangements, the first was Danish, the second was French and the third was a UK company that has neither ships nor any trading history.

Britannia used to rule the waves ...

 

African affairs

The Sunday Times appears to be more concerned about the opulence of the Home Secretary's holiday accommodation than the migrant crisis:

Sajid Javid was last night forced to abandon his family holiday at a luxury safari hideaway in South Africa’s Kruger National Park after a growing backlash over his handling of the migrant crisis.

The home secretary came under fire after he declared a “major incident” over the surge in Channel boat migrants while he was staying at one of the most luxurious safari lodges in sub- Saharan Africa.

Javid, his wife and children were staying over Christmas at Dulini, a lodge that charges £840 per person per night. It offers guests private plunge pools and in-room massages to relax after game drives spotting leopards, lions and elephants by the water hole.

 Perhaps if Javid had remained at home, The Sunday Times wouldn't have bothered with the story?

 

Do you ever wonder if the police know what they are doing?

The Guardian reports:

Detectives were examining a damaged drone for clues on Sunday night after they had to release two people who were exonerated over the incidents that have repeatedly brought Gatwick airport to a standstill.

Confusion deepened as a senior police officer in the case said it was “always a possibility that there may not have been any genuine drone activity in the first place”. DCS Jason Tingley added that although the damaged drone was a significant line of inquiry, wet weather could have washed away evidence. He also noted that there were no pictures or video of the drone incursions into the airspace around Gatwick . He said there was “no available footage and [officers] are relying on witness accounts”.

Tingley later clarified that police did believe the drone sightings were credible as there had been a large number of witnesses. “We are actively investigating sightings of drone activity at Gatwick airport following 67 reports from the evening of 19 December to 21 December from the public, passengers, police officers and staff at the airport,” he said.

   

Theresa and the drones

This is the kind of thing that destroys governments.  The Times reports:

Chris Grayling shelved plans to introduce laws regulating drone use in Britain despite being warned on multiple occasions about the risk they posed to airports, The Times has learnt.

Gatwick was forced last night to shut for the third time in three days after another drone sighting, causing further misery for thousands of passengers. It reopened after about 90 minutes. A man and woman were later arrested by police.

The army and police had appeared powerless to stop drone operators despite deploying a counter-drone system that they said was capable of jamming the devices.

,,,

This year the Department for Transport quietly ditched plans for a draft bill aimed at controlling drones and developing technology to prevent them from being used near airports. The legislation, which had been due for publication in the spring, was dropped amid pressures on the department, with civil servants diverted to work on Brexit.

Issues like Brexit. like homelessness. like social care. are complicated.  Voters understand that and may forgive a government which fails to deal with them adequately (although the present bunch of tossers has hardly made a decent fist of trying).

But when the government stands by, impotent in the face of what is little more than a toy disrupting the lives of many thousands of citizens, there will be an account to be settled.  It will not be forgotten.


   

Music?

Smells like panic?

The Times reports:

Theresa May is to start culling Tory manifesto commitments after her cabinet decided yesterday to accelerate planning for a no-deal Brexit.

David Lidington, who is in effect the prime minister’s deputy, will start in “short order” to identify policies to be shelved to free resources for the no-deal, a senior figure said.

Reforms to social care have been identified by one minister as a likely casualty of yesterday’s decision, which escalated preparations across Whitehall. A Department of Health aide confirmed that some staff had already been diverted from social care to prepare.

With 100 days to go until Brexit day on March 29, businesses were told to start their own contingency plans. Households will be given further instructions on issues such as travel, medicines and banking in the coming weeks. HM Revenue & Customs will email 80,000 businesses this week to explain the impact and provide 100 pages of updated advice online on possible changes at borders.

Philip Hammond, the chancellor, announced an extra £2 billion for no-deal planning, with the Home Office, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and HMRC receiving the lion’s share of the cash.

...

Gavin Williamson, the defence secretary, said that 3,500 troops were being “held at readiness” to cope with disruption at ports and elsewhere. Civil servants will be working through the Christmas break as 320 no-deal “work-streams” are fully activated.

Or perhaps it is just the illusion of panic, in order to persuade MPs that no deal can only be worse than Mrs May's deal ...

 

Motes and beams

This would appear to raise some questions:

Theresa May will urge MPs on Monday not to “break faith with the British people” by demanding a second referendum, as she faces intense pressure to give parliament a say on Brexit before Christmas.

...

“Let us not break faith with the British people by trying to stage another referendum,” the prime minister will tell MPs. “Another vote which would do irreparable damage to the integrity of our politics, because it would say to millions who trusted in democracy, that our democracy does not deliver. Another vote which would likely leave us no further forward than the last.”

Was "the integrity of our politics" enhanced when, after three days of debate and countless denials, the Prime Minister chose to dodge a vote she was certain to lose?  Was "the integrity of our politics" improved when she called a general election after weeks of denying that she would do so?

And as for the ability of our democracy to deliver, the obvious failure of the government to produce a negotiated settlement of Brexit is hardly s sign that all is well.  While the bickering over party leadership continues to do little for good government.

 

Huniliation? Or just incompetence?

The Times blames the EU:

Theresa May was humiliated by European leaders late last night after they rejected pleas for any further concessions to get her Brexit deal through parliament.

France and Ireland led a move to strike out a compromise agreement that would have given the prime minister “political and legal assurances” that Britain would not be trapped in an indefinite Irish backstop.

Instead EU leaders took an uncompromising stance, refusing any form of binding guarantee and deleting a pledge that the backstop “does not represent a desirable outcome” for Europe.

The Independent has a different take:

After arriving in Brussels with promises to help the prime minister, European leaders were left amazed when she turned up without any developed requests or ideas.

The 27 heads of state and government subsequently decided to delete lines from their council conclusions saying the EU “stands ready to examine whether any further assurance can be provided” and that “the backstop does not represent a desirable outcome for the union”.

...

Accounts of the meeting suggest the prime minister’s speech, in which she called for help to get the agreement “over the line”, was repeatedly interrupted by Angela Merkel asking her what she actually wanted from them.

Senior UK government officials admitted that the prime minister did not bring any documented proposals with her to the meeting.

Either way, Theresa received no Christmas prezzies from the EU Santa ...

   

Quote of the day

From The Guardian (here):

May’s morning hadn’t got off to the best of starts with the announcement the ERG had finally managed to count up to 48 and rapidly went downhill with an endorsement from David Cameron, tweeting from the comfort of his £25,000 shed. The last thing she needed was the support of someone even more useless than her. Just. The battle to be the UK’s worst post-war prime minister is going down to the wire. Her car couldn’t even get into the Commons at the first attempt as the gates were locked and she had to circle Westminster Square. The second time in two days when she’d been trapped in a back seat. Write your own metaphors. These are the moments when you realise you’d have been better off staying in bed.

Not for the first time, prime minister’s questions provided May with 45 minutes’ respite. Anyone visiting from another planet might have thought the UK was in robust shape, rather than staggering towards self-immolation. Jeremy Corbyn had begun in shouty mode – someone must have been tampering with his allotment – but the Labour leader seemed genuinely unaware there was a Tory leadership contest going on. It’s almost as if his body clock is set 48 hours behind everyone else’s. As an Arsenal fan, he’s going to be mighty pissed off when he finds out that Spurs drew with Barcelona.

   

What is it with right-wingers and their neckties?

An attempt to compensate for deficiencies elsewhere?

 

"I love Paris in the fall" (?)

An outcome I did not expect ...

 

Paragraph of the day

From The Guardian (here):

It’s right up there among the worst moments of my life. On the way home from a night out at the opera – a first-rate, if not stellar, production of Verdi’sSimone Boccanegra – the Northern line tube train was crowded. Rather gracelessly, my wife pushed me aside and made a beeline for the only available seat. Just as I was glorying in my heroic selflessness, a young man of about 30 got up to offer me the priority seat for elderly and disabled passengers. At first I blanked him, unable to believe he was actually talking to me. But he wouldn’t give up and asked again if I would like the seat. I hastily said I was fine, that I was only travelling a couple of stops but – through gritted teeth – thank you so much anyway. It then turned into a face-off. He kept insisting and I kept saying I was fine where I was, until I caved in and sat down. My wife looked at me and burst out laughing. I just wanted to disappear. I am now officially that old person to whom the more polite offer their seats. That person I somehow never thought I would ever be. It’s all downhill from here.

I know the feeling.

   

Deal or no deal?

When you begin telling fibs, you have to remember which ones you told.  According to The Guardian, President Trump seems to be floundering:

Cohen pleaded guilty to making false statements to Congress about a deal he pursued on Trump’s behalf to build a Trump tower in Moscow.

Court documents revealed Cohen was in contact with top Kremlin officials about the prospective tower; that Trump was closer to the negotiations than previously acknowledged; and that the deal was alive as late as June 2016 – six months longer than Cohen told Congress.

The court filing appeared to expose multiple and repeated public lies by Trump about his links to Russia. “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away,” Trump said at a press conference during the presidential transition. “I have no deals … because I think that would be a conflict.”

Confronted with the contradiction outside the presidential helicopter on Thursday morning, a visibly agitated Trump said “this deal was a very public deal – everybody knows about this deal”, then denied there was ever a deal, then said if there had been a deal it would have been no problem.

“This was a deal that didn’t happen,” Trump said. “That was no deal. If you look – this was an option. To my way of thinking, it was an option that we decided not to do.”

Exactly.

   

Beyond the call of duty

It must be 1 April?  The Guardian reports:

A team of doctors who swallowed Lego and timed how long it took to pass through their bowels say the results of their research should reassure concerned parents.

In a paper published in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, six researchers from Australia and the UK swallowed the head of a Lego figure – roughly 10mm by 10mm – in the “noble tradition of self-experimentation”.

Toy parts are the second most common foreign object that children swallow, and frequently cause anxiety among parents, but usually pass in a matter of days without pain or ill-effect.

...

They developed their own metrics: the Stool Hardness and Transit (Shat) score and the Found and Retrieved Time (Fart) score.

The Fart score – how many days it took the Lego to pass through the bowels – was between 1.1 days and three days, with an average of 1.7 days.

Using the Shat score, the researchers also found the consistency of their stools did not change. They compared Shat and Fart scores to see if looser stools caused quicker retrieval but found no correlation.

Sounds like a load of crap ...

 

Reductio ad absurdum

The Times has a means of cutting short the Great 5-day Debate:

There are essentially three points that all MPs now make: a) this isn’t great but it’s as good as we’re going to get; b) this is dreadful and we should leave right now on Canada +++ terms; and c) this is terrible and we should have a second referendum.

They could just rise, say “argument B, Mr Speaker” and Mrs May can reply “I refer you to the answer I gave earlier”. It would save an awful lot of time.

   

It is of little consolation

Brexit realities revealed by The Independent:

Your fellow citizens are deluded racists who read the Sun and the Mail, fetishise two World Wars (and one World Cup) – get used to it

Brexit might be “the moment” when you simply have to come to terms that the folk you share this sceptred isle with aren’t as clever/open-minded/tolerant/humane/woke/whatever as you are.  But you’re lumbered with them. Even the shift in opinion since 2016 hasn’t been that dramatic, and, while Remain would probably win now, and a Final Say is the right thing to do, a solid quarter to a third of your fellow citizens just want out of the EU whatever the cost, and would probably personally volunteer to bomb Germany. Worth acknowledging if nothing else.

   

Compare and contrast

From The Guardian:

Here:

Denise Coates, the multibillionaire founder and boss of the gambling firm Bet365, paid herself £265m last year in a record-breaking pay deal for the chief executive of a British company.

...

Her pay is more than 9,500 times the average UK salary, 1,700 times that collected by the prime minister and more than double that paid to the entire Stoke City football team, which Bet365 owns and which was relegated from the Premier League last season. Coates’s pay is also 27 times that earned by Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, the world’s most valuable company.

And here:

The quadrupling of child problem gamblers to more than 50,000 in two years has been branded a “generational scandal”.

A Gambling Commission audit due for release on Wednesday reveals that the number of problem gamblers aged 11 to 16 rose to 55,000 over two years. It also found that 70,000 youngsters were at risk and that 450,000 children bet regularly, the equivalent of one in seven children aged 11 to 16.

The audit, reported in the Daily Mail, said the youngsters were staking an average of £16 a week on fruit machines, bingo, betting shops and online games, which are all illegal for under-18s.

 
   

Quote of the day

From The Guardian (here):

... the ERG has seemingly managed the impossible. In less than a week, they have made Theresa May appear vaguely plausible while relegating themselves to an embarrassing, long-past-its-best, music hall act. With Rees-Mogg as Archie Rice. In a straight fight between the ERG and Dad’s Army, Captain Mainwaring would come out on top every time. Tuesday’s event had all the feel of the final hurrah before the knacker’s yard.

Behind the stage was a placard with the words “Global Britain”. Global Britain turned out to be seven old, white men waiting for the golf club bar to open. Only the presence of Rees-Mogg brought the average age below 65 and he was feeling every one of his 49 years. Even he never thought he’d sink this low. Whatever would Nanny think?

   

Somewhat premature?

Now who is over-egging the pudding?  The Times reports:

European citizens will no longer be able to “jump the queue” for jobs in Britain, Theresa May will pledge today as she attempts to shore up political support for her troubled Brexit blueprint.

...

She will hint that the deal being negotiated in Brussels for the future relationship will allow the UK for the first time to create a level playing field, as EU citizens compete with other countries for the right to work in Britain.

“The difference will be this: once we have left the EU, we will be fully in control of who comes here,” she will say. “It will no longer be the case that EU nationals, regardless of the skills or experience they have to offer, can jump the queue ahead of engineers from Sydney or software developers from Delhi.

As I understand it, the position on immigration will not change until the transition period has ended, which may not take place until 2023.  And, even then, it will depend upon the deal to be negotiated on the future trading relationship.

Furthermore, is it really the case at present that EU nationals regardless of skills and experience "can jump the queue" ahead of Australian engineers or Indian software developers?  And, if it were the case, perhaps the Home Office (recent proprietor - Theresa May) and its obsession with cutting immigration may bear some of the responsibility?

   

The last straw?

Disaster looms.  The Independent reports:

The iconic chocolate nougat Mars bar could face extinction in the UK should the country leave the UK without a Brexit deal, secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs Michael Gove has been warned.

Last year, it was revealed that all confectionery imports in the UK, including Mars bars, would drastically increase in price as a consequence of a hard Brexit.

However, the situation could be even more dire than previously thought, with representatives from the food industry telling Mr Gove that a no-deal Brexit may result in the country running out of Mars bars in a matter of weeks.

The country will never forgive that Rees-Mogg fellow.

 

Picture of the day

From New European:

Quote of the day

From Theresa May:

“When you strip away the detail, the choice before us is clear, this deal … Or leave with no deal, or no Brexit at all.”

I'll vote for no Brexit at all, thank you.

 

Quote of the day

Matthew Parris in The Times (here):

Listen to Mrs May’s proposed deal as it unfolds. Listen to the caveats and exclusions and tortuously worded ambiguities. Listen (as Democratic Unionists now can when they read yesterday’s leak to The Times) to the strangled verbal formulations. And keep repeating this single question: “How is this better than just being in the EU on the terms negotiated by Margaret Thatcher and John Major?”

Answer comes there none, nor ever will, because there is no answer and the prime minister knows it. She accepted the instruction to get the best deal available. But it isn’t any good.

Can we call the whole thing off?

   

The wagging finger

 

Deja vu again

The Independent records:

Theresa May has denied she is preparing to hold another general election, stating that another vote would “not be in the national interest”.

Aye, that's what she said the last time, up to the point when she decided that it was in the national interest.

 

The do-little budget

No change in

• income tax rates
• corporation tax
• inheritance tax
• capital gains tax
• dividend allowance
• ISAs

   

Quote of the day

Will Hutton in The Observer on Sir (for the moment) Philip Green (here):

Green was a foul-mouthed, amoral deal-maker with an ego the size of a house who could only float to the top in the crazed world of credit-driven, property-bubble Thatcherite and Blairite capitalism, aided and abetted by an unsavoury cast list of loan sharks, fraudsters, indulgent bankers and fawning journalists, notably the former Sunday Times business editor Jeff Randall to whom he regularly fed gossip in return for admiring write-ups.

He had a talent for cutting costs, but his greater talent was creating the reputational halo that allowed him to get finance to acquire the next business and then using every available loophole to direct as much money as possible to himself – from the £1.2bn tax-free dividend to his wife in Monaco in 2005 to the attempt to avoid his responsibility for the BHS pension fund after he had knowingly sold it to a bankrupt. Under intense public pressure last year he finally inserted £363m into the fund.

   

Music of the week

1.  The Story of Bohemian Rhapsody

2.  How The Beatles rocked the Kremlin

3.  Sergeant Pepper's Musical Revolution

Enjoy!

 

Why not just hit it with a hammer?

When my desktop computer starts acting up, my less than fail-safe solution is to turn it off and start again.  It seems that NASA takes the same approach to the Hubble telescope.  The Guardian reports:

The Hubble space telescope is close to resuming full operations after Nasa “jiggled it around”.

The telescope was sidelined earlier this month after a gyroscope failed, leaving it unable to point in the right direction during observations....Nasa has said Hubble is expected to return to normal science operations soon after it performed a “running restart” of the gyroscope on 16 October, which turned the device off for a second. The intention was to clear any faults that may have occurred during a restart on 6 October.

The wonders of modern technology.

   

 

The law is an ass, but ...

So Lord Hain has taken it upon himself to name the individual businessman at the centre of the Me-Too allegations.  He did so by using parliamentary privilege to overcome the application of a legal injunction forbidding the media to reveal the businessman's identity.

We may consider the businessman's behaviour deplorable (and I do).  We may think that the decision of the courts was legally and morally questionable (and I do).

But this is the legal system we have.  Like any legal system, from time to time it may throw up 'wrong' decisions.  But is it right that any maverick parliamentarian may choose to subvert that system, just because he happens to be in the House of Lords or Commons?

 

Ridiculous

According to the BBC:

President Donald Trump has called on people to be more civil in politics, after a series of suspected explosives were sent to high-profile US figures.

...

Speaking at a Wednesday night rally in Wisconsin, the president vowed to catch the perpetrator and called on the media to "stop endless hostility"."Those engaged in political arena must stop treating political opponents as being morally defective," he said.

Some might think that President Trump has done more than most to coarsen the political discourse of our times ...

Some rustic charm ...

 

Quote of the day

Theresa May, lost among the backstops.  The Guardian reports:

As expected, the final 5% was the Northern Ireland backstop, which the EU had managed to deceive the UK into signing last December by sprinkling magic dust in the government’s eyes so that no one bothered to read what they had signed up to. May was outraged that the EU had reservations about the UK’s insistence on reopening the negotiations.

Their lack of trust over our own proven untrustworthiness merely proved that they basically couldn’t be trusted. And because they were now asking for a backstop to a backstop, she was going to up the ante by demanding a backstop to a backstop to a backstop. Or something like that. Basically she had no idea how to resolve the matter but expected that sooner or later she would make some kind of compromise that she would try to pass off as a gain.

   

Music of the week

Newly released acoustic version


 

Getting found out

In my time. I have done plenty of public speaking, and it's never easy.  So I can sympathise with the Prime Minister in her difficulties:

Theresa May had 15 minutes to impress European Union leaders with a new way out of the political morass that has become Brexit.

Instead, the British prime minister came across as nervous, speaking too fast for an audience of non-native English speakers. At the end of her pitch in Brussels, no one was any wiser as to what the U.K. was bringing to the table other than a familiar serving of warm words. May left her confused counterparts to dissect her presentation over a fillet of turbot.

Nevertheless, you expect better of a Prime Minister.  I cannot imagine that Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown would have been similarly troubled.

 

Clear as mud

The Prime Minister's lexical tick offends The Times:

Theresa May has long believed that clarity begins at home. Or in the House, anyway. “Let me be clear” is the prime minister’s motto. Clearly it isn’t working. The more she tells MPs that she wishes to be clear, the deeper grow the furrows on their foreheads. Her explanations cut through the fog of Brexit like a guttering candle.

When Mrs May used the C word four times yesterday in a brief answer to Steve Baker (C, Wycombe) — let’s give three clears and one clear more for the hardy captain of the Brexit bores — I searched Hansard for how often she uses this crutch. And let me be very clear: the prime minister has said “clear” 98 times in the Commons since June. In second place, with 64, is Dominic Raab, her Brexit secretary. Keep saying it, chaps, and one day the mist will lift.

Or maybe not ...

   

The danger of not thinking things through

Deeper and deeper into the mire.  The Guardian reports:

Theresa May faces a frantic 48 hours to try to save her Brexit negotiating strategy after she admitted talks had ground to a halt because of the EU’s insistence upon a Northern Ireland-only backstop.

The prime minister is expected to plead with EU leaders to drop their Irish backstop proposal at a make-or-break summit dinner on Wednesday night after seeking the support of members of her cabinet on Tuesday morning.

With time running out before Wednesday’s meeting, May used an emergency Commons statement to say the EU’s plan “threatens the integrity of our United Kingdom” because it could lead to the creation of a customs border in the Irish Sea.

She should have thought of that last December when she formally committed the UK to no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.  Because that meant either that the UK remained in the single market/customs union or that the hard border was set in the Irish Sea.

Update:

And from elsewhere in The Guardian: 

May appeared to have forgotten she had already agreed to a Northern Ireland backstop last December and was now asking the Commons to share her outrage that the EU wasn’t prepared to rubber-stamp the UK’s attempts to renegotiate the backstop agreement with another that included the whole of the UK. Confused? You ought to be. When May started talking about “the backstop to the backstop”, a little piece of everyone died inside.

By now the prime minister was running on full Maybot. She wanted the backstop to be temporary but we shouldn’t get too worked up about finalising an end date because she hoped there would be no need ever for it to come into operation. Basically, she was waiting on a miracle. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” she concluded. “But a no deal outcome is one that no wants.” So something no one wanted was somehow better than something else that no one wanted. At which point logic died and her circuit boards melted.

   
   

 

Lost in a maze

Just like Brexit.  The Foreign Secretary and his European counterparts wonder how they got into this mess and how do they get out ...

   

Blown away?

This seems a doubtful prescription:

Doctors in Shetland are to start prescribing birdwatching, rambling and beach walks in the Atlantic winds to help treat chronic and debilitating illnesses for the first time.

...

Patients will be nudged to go hill walking on Shetland’s upland moors, and directed towards coastal paths to watch fulmars, to beachcomb for shells, draw snowdrops in February, and spot long-tailed ducks, oystercatchers and lapwings.

...

Helen Moncrieff, the area manager for RSPB Scotland, said that during winter the prescriptions would be “elemental”, where strong Atlantic winds would be the main feature.

Some people may be asked to take their hoods down and stand still and silent for three minutes, in a form of open-air mindfulness, for instance. The NHS leaflets were entitled “Nature your soul”, Moncrieff said.

Really?  Is it actually possible for fully healthy Shetlanders (never mind those with debilitating illnesses) to stand still for three minutes in the teeth of an Atlantic gale on the windswept upland Shetland moors?

 

Changing of the guard

Never mind about Zoe something taking over from the abominable Chris Evans.  Some of us still miss Terry Wogan.



 

It's not dad-dancing but ...

 

Labour Party leadership shenanigans explained

According to The Guardian (here):

 It has been no secret that Jeremy Corbyn and his deputy, Tom Watson, do not get on that well. The Labour leader reckons Watson is too off message, and does his best to keep him at arm’s length. So much so that Watson wasn’t even given a speaking slot on the stage of the main hall. At a pre-conference meeting, Labour’s national executive committee had come up with a plan to limit Watson’s power by backing a motion for the election of a female co-deputy leader. Doubts began to creep in over the weekend when some on the NEC realised that giving someone like Angela Rayner, who had been one of the favourites, a bigger platform might be more of a threat to Corbyn’s leadership than was comfortable, but what really swung it was when Watson himself backed the election as he found being deputy leader rather lonely. Anything Watson supported had to be a bad idea, so the NEC instructed conference to vote against the plan it had originally backed. If Watson were to run a campaign saying “Please don’t make me leader”, he would probably be in with a chance of the top job.

It would be nice if, just occasionally, politicians spared a thought for the good of the country ...

   

A man with problems

How long for Mattis before the "heave and ho"?  The Times reports:

The US defence secretary told hundreds of military cadets that he was so happy to be out of Washington for the day that he “could cry”.

Jim Mattis, a former four-star Marine Corps commander, told trainees during a visit to the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington that he had stopped reading or watching the news to save himself from getting depressed.

“If you watch the news you can start wondering what’s going on in this country . . . We all know our country is having a tough time right now,” he said. “I am so happy to be out of Washington DC right now I could cry.”

Mr Mattis told the cadets that he did his best to keep the Pentagon separate from “the heave and ho” elsewhere in Washington.

US sources revealed to The Times this month that President Trump has stopped calling his defence secretary by his nickname “Mad Dog” and now referred to him as “Moderate Dog” because of their contrasting stances on important security issues.

   

Slightly past its sell-buy date?

Jeremy Corbyn goes back to the future.  The Guardian reports:

The Labour leader will say: “Ten years ago this month, the whole edifice of greed-is-good, deregulated financial capitalism, lauded for a generation as the only way to run a modern economy, came crashing to earth, with devastating consequences.”

The "greed is good" trope originated (or at leasst was made famous) in Wall Street, a movie made in.1987, some thirty years ago.  Perhaps Jezza needs a younger speechwriter?




 

Pie in the sky?

I am not unsympathetic to Labour's idea of allowing workers to participate in company profits but I wonder about the practicalities in the hatest proposals.  The Guardian reports:

Employee ownership schemes in large companies could result in almost 11 million workers being given up to £500 a year each, in plans to be expanded upon by the shadow chancellor on Monday.

...

Under Labour’s plans, legislation would require private sector companies with 250 or more employees to transfer at least 1% of their ownership into an IOF [inclusive ownership fund] each year, up to a maximum of 10%. Smaller companies would be able to set up an IOF on a voluntary basis.

Labour calculates that 10.7 million people – or 40% of the private sector workforce – will initially be covered by the scheme. Dividend payouts will be made at a flat rate to all employees. The funds will be held and managed collectively and their shares cannot be sold or traded. Workers’ fund representatives will have voting rights in companies’ decision-making processes in the same way as other shareholders.

It is perhaps worth noting that companies do not in themselves normally own shares - shareholders do.  How then is it possible for companies to transfer 1% of their ownership into a separate fund?  Would companies forcibly divest each of their shareholders of 1% of their shareholdings?  Or would they buy back 1% of their shares on the open market?  Or would they create an additional 1% of their shares?  Each of these options has technical and political difficulties - the stock exchange has a myriad of rules on such matters.  I pity the parliamentary draftsmen who would have to prepare the legislation.

Eleven million workers being given £500 per year each in dividends amounts to an annual total of  £5.5 billion.  Given that this would amount to only 1% of the total dividends, that would imply total annual dividends of  £550 billion from  the companies involved.  Is that a realistic expectation, given that full year prediction for UK company dividends in 2018 amount to less than £100 billion?

Perhaps we willl learn more when Mr McDonnell delivers his speech ...