It's Friday Morning... Welcome to Freedom

We're out.

Free of the ECJ and the ECHR.

Able to control our own borders - though the Romanian crime gangs will continue to put beggars on the coaches, who will get through with no problems at all.

Able to make super-duper trade deals with the up-and-coming economies of the world. If they don't all get wiped out by This Month's Virus.

And fairly soon, I think we're going to find out what all the rich people knew that we didn't.

In the meantime, you can tell your grandchildren about how it was the Conservatives who executed the will of the British Working Man, while the Labour Party called him fifteen nasty names.

Everyone Gets The Brexit They Want

Here’s the Brexit situation. The EU - May agreement is unacceptable because of the backstop. Speaker Bercow won’t let it come before Parliament again until there’s a significant change to it. Which there won’t be, because the EU have said they won’t change it. An extension that’s conditional on the agreement being voted in isn’t going to happen, unless Bercow accepts that as a significant change. However, there’s still no guarantee that enough MP’s will change their minds.

No MP is going to propose cancelling A50. The Whips wouldn’t stand for it: it’s one of those things where everybody has to trust everybody else, and there’s too much political capital to be gained by welching on that trust to seem like the Party that’s faithful to the British People.

I give outside odds against Angel Merkel telling the EU to drop the backstop - this would be about Wednesday - so the MPs can vote for the rest of the agreement before the 29th. She gets to be the saviour of Europe, after being its Prime Traitor. Nice legacy.

I’m not changing my position that the EU wants the UK out because we will impede their lunatic Federalism. And the UK wants out because we don’t want to spend our lives fighting lunatic Federalism.

If the EU was staffed by proper grown-ups, it would have talked about trade first and payments afterwards. Instead it is staffed by corrupt and second-rate bureaucrats, all of whom failed in their national political scene. They claim to love Europe, but they hate the people of Europe, and they hate the parliaments of Europe, in which they failed so badly. They have to punish all wrong-doers, and so must make all the other countries think twice. So the UK always was going to get an unacceptable deal.

No-one must be seen to making the decision to leave without a deal. Nobody must be to blame. Everybody must have plausible deniability. That’s why nobody will bring a motion to abandon A50. That’s why the EU stuck in a condition that they knew was unacceptable.

Theresa May has been accused of being a closet Remainer who wants Brexit to fail. Au contraire. She hates the EU in its post-Lisbon guise, and she hates the ECJ and ECHR. Given a choice between destruction and staying under the jurisdiction of the European Courts, she will burn the world. Resigning, by the way, would be tantamount to burning the world.

I suspect that Theresa May was deeply affected by the story of A Fistful of Dollars, where Clint Eastwood’s Stranger plays two factions off against each other, walking away with a lot of money and leaving ruins behind him. He gets beaten up before he can win.

The quisling media portrays Theresa May as a weakened, powerless incompetent. That’s George Osborne projecting his own personality and life on her. That wasn’t the Prime Minister I saw making a statement from Downing Street, skewering the MPs and appealing over their heads to their constituents.

Brexit Chaos aka Democracy In Action

Puzzled or infuriated by what’s happening in the House of Commons around Brexit? It’s called democracy. Democracy is supposed to be messy when big decisions are at stake.

The EU does not want the UK in the EU anymore. It is too Socialist and the UK is too Free Market. The EU countries love being run by administrators who went to good schools - like the ENA - while the politicians are rendered powerless by their lack of education and inability to make friends. Quick, how many European countries have a two-party system? Yep. The UK. The EU wants an European Army and there is no way that Her Majesty - the C-in-C of the UK’s Armed Forces - is turning her lads over to a Belgian General who is at the behest of a bunch of unelected officials. The EU wants the unrestricted immigration of unskilled, uneducated young men from all over the world who have been thrown out of their home towns and villages for bad behaviour. The UK thinks would rather have well-behaved, educated, skilled people who speak English from all over the world.

Theresa May has known this all along. So did David Cameron. What do you think MI6 and GCHQ have been doing all this time?

The EU bureaucrats and other elitists thought that they could do a deal and not involve Parliament. Really. That’s elitists for you. Theresa May knew that even if she got The Best Deal Ever, she would have to present it to Parliament. This is because the UK is a democracy. There aren’t many of those in the world, so it’s not surprising that you don’t recognise one in action when you see it.

No negotiator, no Cabinet member, not the Prime Minister, nor even HRH QE2, can decide the terms on which the UK leaves the EU. Only the elected representatives of the British people can do that. Only they can do it, because only they can lose their jobs if they go too far against the wishes of their constituents. Read that again carefully: unless I can get rid of you, you don’t get to make decisions that affect me. That’s the basis of democracy.

Those elected representatives have had their orders for a long time. The opinion polls confirm month after month that those orders have not changed. Sovereign courts and border control. Free trade is a nice-to-have.

Hence Theresa May had to work hard to get the best deal from the EU that she could get. So we would see how devious and one-sided it was. She has to champion that deal, because it is her deal. The House of Commons should rightly reject the deal and send her back to the EU to re-negotiate. Because they know that the EU never folds until 23:59:59. And if it isn’t going to fold, it has to be the EU who is shown to be intransigent and devious.

It’s supposed to be all about The Backstop. The Irish border is the biggest non-issue in contemporary politics. Anyone who makes it one is effectively threatening us with a new IRA / UDA bombing campaign. Everyone knows this, and no-one is going to make a decision about the UK’s political status on threat of a few IRA bombs. We did this already. Remember? Bombing the British doesn’t work. We’re stubborn like that.

Right now, the matter is in the hands of the members of the House of Commons. No lawyer predicts the jury decision. I hope they feel they have blustered too loud now to turn and accept the deal after Christmas. Unless it turns out that when Junker clarifies ‘No’ he means ‘Yes’. The Honourable Members will not be voting for a hard Brexit, but for more negotiations. If the EU refuses, the EU will be the one forcing a hard Brexit.

So expect lots of noise about preparing for a hard Brexit. Which is, I repeat, something that your employer should have done already. My suspicion is that most companies will have done this, or replaced their EU business with exports somewhere else. If you are working for a company that does business in Europe, and does not know how it will carry on if the UK is not in a free-trade zone with Europe, look for another employer NOW. And ask the interviewers what their hard Brexit plans are.

Stuck Inside of A50 With The Brexit Blues Again

Are you fed up with the Brexit propaganda in all the media? I am. The only thing I’m more fed up with is yet another article whinging about how it’s a terrible injustice that privileged ambitious white women aren’t being given even more privileges. I don’t read those articles past the W-word in the headline. Anyway…

To recap: the EU cannot and should not give up the demand, that two conditions of super-privileged access, are a) the legal sovereignty, of the European Courts, and b) the Four Freedoms. The UK Government was given strict instructions by 17+ million voters that it was to regain control of its borders and legal system. So no capital-A Agreement is possible. The people whose jobs it was to understand this stuff knew this about thirty seconds after the referendum result was announced. The A50 rules forced them and everyone else into two pointless years of fake negotiation and preposterous posturing. The only real diplomatic problem was wondering how to blame the Irish, and the Border did the trick. (Irish and UK Customs authorities say they don’t need a hard border to make it all work post-Brexit, but hey, where diplomacy needs, the Devil take the Customs man, or something.)

We’ve reached the stage where everyone is talking openly about a hard Brexit, and the most sensible remark I’ve read about that is that, while the British will pay the price of a hard Brexit, it is not so clear that the individual European countries will want to.

Remember your history: the Brits are good at four things (as well as pop music, inventing stuff, banking, flexible legal systems, and a bunch of other things, and on the other hand they did need the EU to tell them to clean up their filthy beaches, but I digress)

First, getting off ships before anyone else has heard the water coming into the bilges. The EU will never be a federal nation state, but it will ruin itself trying. Time to leave. Especially before the Euro falls apart.

Second, being prosaically, anti-climatically, practical. The Brits can reduce the consequences of what looks like an history-shaking event to a handful of petty changes. For instance, the uncertainty about customs arrangements, all that huffing and puffing, and what does it mean? That a firm in Rochdale has to fill in EU/HG/12-35UTF/RE and file it a week in advance, instead of getting by with a UK registration plate on the day. And UK Passport-holders have to line up behind the Ugandans rather than the Poles when they pass through Immigration at Nice Airport. Duh.

So don’t be surprised when whole swathes of the British economy wind up being prepared for 30/4/2019. Some won’t be, but that’s only because they wanted to create a crisis they didn’t want to waste.

Third, being able to handle ridiculous amounts of ambiguity, aka It’ll all work out in the end. God, as we know, is an Englishman, and he looks after his own, ever since he took his eye off the job in 1066. So it will work out. How far away that end is, and how much it will cost to get there doesn’t matter to the Brits, which brings us to...

Fourth, the UK Government has never been shy of bankrupting and indebting its taxpayers to win a war. They did it twice in the twentieth century. They only beat Napoleon at Waterloo because they borrowed a ton of money to hire the German Army. Further back, they paid the Danes boatloads of silver to stop looting and raping in the streets of Newcastle. Real historians could doubtless list a dozen much more ordinary examples.

Few other countries are prepared to bankrupt themselves in any cause. That’s why it’s taken the 27 an age to understand that the Brits will bankrupt themselves to keep their precious independence. While a hard Brexit might hurt the British more than any random European country, it’s going to cost that random European country, and not spare change either.

And remember, in a hard Brexit, the EU doesn’t get its money.

So there will be a hard Brexit, because there can’t be a capital-A Agreement. But it won’t be a malicious Brexit. The EU can’t afford the PR. The French will be awkward for a couple of months, but they love that kind of publicity. The Dutch don’t. The Germans don’t. The Iberians and the V4 can’t afford it. Everyone else wants as much business-as-usual as possible. So there will be lots of temporary transitional arrangements (TTAs) to keep things going. That, I’ve always thought, is what the negotiators are really doing now: working out the TTAs. There will be Trade Agreement on the Canadian or Japanese model agreed tout de suite (once special access is publicly acknowledged to be non-negotiable) and the EU will get a chunk of its €50bn.

The final part of the drama will be that those TTA’s will only be introduced at the last moment, when it can be spun as preventing a world-wide economic crisis the like of which mankind would never have seen before or after. TTA’s can’t be introduced sensibly, beforehand, as that would let Parliaments argue about stuff. It has to look like an emergency.

Can’t help feeling this is exactly how Donnie told Terry to play it.

A Hard Brexit's A-Gonna Happen

A brief return to Brexit. I was heartened by the Danish Finance Minister telling the EU to get on with it and stop bitching about the divorce payment. A couple of days later I woke up and realised it’s not going to work out like that. A day or so ago, Donald Tusk confirmed as much when he denied that the EU was working on plans for a hard Brexit.

The problem is the EU’s legal imperialism: that for special trading terms, a country must surrender its legal sovereignty to the ECJ and ECHR, and allow the four freedoms. The Swiss gave up when the EU insisted on that. The British will not back down on legal sovereignty either. So that’s that. No agreement on special trade conditions is possible.

As for the payment, that will have to be a number based on a bill of goods that can be sold to Parliament. My guess is that Parliament will recognise it has to pay for some of Junker’s wine cellar, but won’t want to think it’s paying for all of it. It’s just possible the EU could be sensible about that, but not likely. This is why the payment is linked in the British negotiation with special trade terms, so that the EU only get any money if they give up the legal imperialism. That’s why the EU want to settle the bill before they talk about trade and therefore their legal imperialism. You gotta think the politicians kinda got that at the start.

Far more important for the EU is that any agreement is not hi-jacked by EU members, many of whom - especially by Ireland and Liechtenstein - have a lot of previous form at that. Barnier thinks it will take six months to achieve ratification, which means he’s expecting a lot of internal horse-trading. There’s even a chance that the horse-trading will - how surprising - require a last-minute and unwelcome change to what was agreed in autumn 2018. The idea being that everyone will be so tired that they will agree to anything to get shot of the thing.

If I can see that coming, I’m fairly sure people who do this for a living have as well.

That’s why, on March 29, 2019, there’s not going to be an all-encompassing agreement that covers trade, immigration, the role of the European Courts, the four freedoms, and Junker’s wine bill. The UK will leave Europe, possibly without paying a cent on the day, and be free at last from the European Courts.

Which is the exact desired outcome both sides want. It allows the EU to maintain its doctrine of legal imperialism, and the UK to achieve legal sovereignty. It prevents the last-minute horse-trading that nobody, in the EU or the UK, wants. It removes the need to have 27 countries agree on everything from cheese import quotas to how many Romanian builders can work in the UK at any given time.

Now you know this is what everyone wants, do their actions make more sense? They aren’t trying to reach an agreement. They are trying not to reach an agreement in a polite and constructive manner. The autumn 2018 deadline will pass, March 2019 will loom closer, everyone will realise that more talking time won’t do it, and March 29th will come and go. Not so much with a bang, but a whimper. The French will impose a bunch of spiteful bans and inconveniences in their national interest; and the EU will impose tactically another bunch of equally irritating bans and inconveniences. (The UK will not impose any spiteful or petty bans, because that’s how they make the EU look like a bunch of petty twats in the eyes of the world.)

It’s then possible for both sides to agree on individual issues without compromising general principles. The UK will agree to pay for pensions, the EU will lift some of its petty bans. The UK will agree to pay slightly inflated prices for participation in Europol and other individual pan-European institutions, and other petty bans will be lifted. Everyone will agree that this is terribly un-European, and just the sort of thing those perfidious Brits do, but after all, business must go on. For cosmetic purposes, the EU and the UK will start trade talks, expected to last at least twenty years, to avoid using WTO terms. (By the way, Canada doesn’t seem to have suffered for the last twenty years without a special deal with the EU, so WTO can’t be all bad.)

2019 will feel a little chaotic. there will be ‘administrative agreements’ and ‘temporary arrangements’ to prevent the paperwork stopping trade, and a switch to WTO tariffs (instead of EU tariffs). The small but irritating number of welfare scroungers and Euro-beggars will return to Europe – but some will stay on to be the subject of populist shock headlines in five years’ time. There will be a short hiccough in the supply of young people from Southern Europe and builders from Eastern Europe, until the word goes round that the UK is still open for business – and who really wants UK citizenship? Some medium-sized companies who thought that Brexit would ‘work’ will have hard times, but the large firms will be fine. It will turn out that all that manufacturing in China means that we were already really trading under WTO rules anyway.

Within five years, everyone in the EU will be fed up of being run by the German Finance Ministry, the Poles will refuse to accept more immigrants, and the EU Army, aka the Deutches Heer, will escort the refugees over the Polish border. Oh yeah. The first time as tragedy, the second as comedy.

March 2017 Review

I finished the month with the Spring Cold. In the middle of these colds, I wonder if I will ever be well again. Will I be able to walk more than twenty yards without getting breathless? Will I be able to focus enough to do any work, even from home? Will I ever have an uninterrupted night's sleep again, and will that sleep ever be free of fever-driven obsessive imagery and stories? Intellectually I know it will all be over in a few days, that doesn't help me get through it now. I'm used to being clear-headed and physically on form, unlike the rest of you, who have hangovers, mysterious aches, low days caused by eating curries after too much lager, and dodgy sleep from having a row with your partner, or from the kids teething. None of that happens to me, so when anything breaks my serene routine, it's Literally. The. Worst.

I got in a training session in on the last Saturday of the month, and that was it.

I saw Personal Shopper at the Curzon Mayfair, and John Wick 2 at my local Cineworld. I went through half of Angel S4 at a clip, and then stopped. I will carry on, but I wasn’t in the mood.

I read James Salter’s The Hunters, Somerset Maugham’s The Merry-Go-Round, Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, David Szalay’s London and The South-East, and Svetlana Alpers’ The Vexations of Art. I can commend the first three, but Szalay's novel left me feeling like I needed a shower. Alpers' book on Velasquez is in that style of art commentary which mixes interesting history with that weird art theory that finds great epistemological significance in the fact that the painter stands in front of the canvas to paint.

Sis and I had her birthday supper at Picture, because we like it there, and I had an early supper at the Argentinian restaurant in Richmond with another friend of Bill and Bob. Between my teeth and the winter, this is the first time I've been eating out socially. I stopped by Gulu Gulu for their unique take on sushi the Thursday before The Cold.

I went to a delightfully arcane City ceremony called a "Wardmoot" in the Parish Hall of St Botolph's Without Bishopsgate. It's where the candidates for the Council of the Ward of Bishopsgate are elected and confirmed in their position. People who work in the City get to vote for Councilmen as well as the very few residents in the Ward. Most of the people there were officials and candidates, including a Beadle who shouted Oyez Oyez Oyez and called on us to attend, shut up and listen. I thought one of the people wandering about in fancy gowns looked familiar, to the point where I thought "That's Baroness Scotland", and then when I got the Agenda, there it was. Patricia "The Overspender" Scotland is the Alderman for the Bishopsgate Ward. The ceremony was full of people saying admiring things about each other, as often happens at these ceremonial events. There are six councilmen, and had been IIRC nine or ten candidates in February. Then four dropped out and there was no need for anyone to vote for anyone. That's democracy for you. The next one is in four years' time, when I might not be working, so I'm glad I had that little glimpse of City ceremonial arcana.

And was I the only person to spot a distant but important resemblence between Sir Tim Barrow

and Sir Thomas Beaufort as portrayed by the mighty Brian Blessed in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V?

(Sir Thomas is on the left)

 I know that Sir Tim was only delivering a letter to a guy he saw on a fairly regular basis, but though it looked like this when he handed it over

what was really going on was this


History. Lived through again.

What To Expect After The A50 Declaration

The FT told me over the weekend that A50 could be triggered in the week commencing 13th March. I'm going to explain why you should not believe what you're going to see, hear and read in the early months of the negotiation.

The EU has long wanted two things: its own armed forces, and the ability to tax EU citizens directly. The EU bureaucrats have also long reckoned they could sell this to the member States, most of whom have small armed forces and would welcome the chance to hand off the task of managing them: France and Germany would agree on the basis that a) they were the "someone else" and b) Britain was never the "someone else".

Britain would never agree either to an EU armed service, or to Federal taxation. That's "never" as in "out of my cold, dead hands", not, "in return for some extra fishing rights". The EU bureaucrats have known this all along, but it hadn't mattered until the Accession countries joined and 2008 happened. That made a Federal Europe seem almost inevitable, and at some point, some EU officials explained to some UK officials that Federal taxes and armed forces were going to happen, and that when Britain was the last hold-out, it would be reminded sharply that the European Court of Justice works for Europe, not Justice.

That, as I have suggested before, is the point: the EU wanted Britain out, and Britain wanted out of the EU. All the rest is theatre for the benefit of the 27, and the associates, such as Norway, Denmark and Iceland.

Why is all going to be theatre? Because a sizeable chunk of the economy of the UK is owned by EU companies, and a collapse in the UK economy would not help the cash flows and share prices of those companies. Because the European operations of Japanese and other non-European companies are only viable if they have access to the UK and Europe, but not if they face punitive costs for trading with the UK or Europe. Then it would make sense to supply from their home base operations, shipping being plentiful and cheap. Because making it difficult for UK service industry firms to sell in Europe would mean those firms would buy European companies through which to do business. Because there isn't a town in Europe which can, in the next two years, build enough office space housing and transport infrastructure to take a serious chunk of the work being done in the City of London. It would not be long before those towns realised they had simply created "London on the (insert name of river here)", that brought no new jobs, but a lot of resentment, to the local residents. Also, modern financial markets can't work under the laws of most European countries, which don't believe in finance or markets.

And also because if I was a politician in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, the V4, or Poland, I would not want to deal with a population that no longer had the hope of going to the UK to get work. The UK can get workers from China, India, the rest of the Anglosphere and South America to replace those from the EU. The EU can't create three million jobs in two years.

So, no, I'm not expecting a negotiating bloodbath. I'm expecting the UK to pay directly for things like Europol and Erasmus, and to pay increased customs duties to replace some of the donations we make to the EU now.

I'm expecting a whole bunch of melodrama and posturing. The CBI will claim that any change to anything will cause the collapse of the FTSE 100 and mass unemployment (oh, wait, they do that now). The Trades Unions will claim that workers' rights will be thrown in the dustbin and henceforth we will all work for free (oh, wait, they do that now). The UK fishing industry will be threatened with extinction (oh, wait...) and at some stage something to do with beef and sausages will be briefly important. Many companies will use leaving the EU as an excuse to hike prices, even when there is no reason their costs will increase (oh, wait, companies put their prices up or their quantity and quality down because… any reason). It's not for the UK's benefit, but for the EU's. They will bang on about "no access to the single market" and how what the UK is going to get is so much worse that "single access" because that's what Brussels sells. Then they will start haggling about quotas for Somerset brie and whether Canary bananas can be sold to the UK (yes please!). What's important is boring stuff like paperwork and certification processes, and nobody will haggle over those, and nobody will notice nobody haggling over them. Haggling over that stuff would be really dumb.

I'm expecting negotiations on fishing to go on forever, but then, negotiations on fishing have always gone on forever. The EU's daily business is trade negotiation, but it doesn't feel like it because it is perceived to be internal bureaucratic wrangling. So of course we will be negotiating on this and that for decades, because we always did and being part of the EU didn't change it.

I'm expecting the French customs to create huge delays and queues on Day One when the UK finally leaves, but anyone who doesn't expect that hasn't been paying attention to anything.

It will all be theatre. All for show. All to throw some work to some bureaucrats and their chums in the trade-negotiation business. (Those people must have thought Brexit meant Christmas forever and their pensions secured, and the British government has been signalling to them that it isn't going to be like that. Why else were they talking about doing a deal in two years?) All to tell the other 27 countries and the associates that they too will get a terrible deal if they dare think of leaving.

A50 gives UK industry two years to make deals everywhere else in the world, and a business that currently trades with Europe and doesn't start looking for customers elsewhere in that time also deserves to go broke. I'm expecting a number of businesses to go broke. Because some businesses are run by bad managers.

As a good Popperian, I will specify the conditions under which I will abandon this hypothesis: when European companies start selling their UK investments. If that happens during the A50 negotiations, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Looking-Glass Liberals and The Extinction Burst

What we’re seeing is not fightback, resistance and protest. It’s two things: players who are hedging their bets to avoid alienating customers and activism groups, and the activists and snowflakes who are having the mother of all extinction bursts.



Liberals are moral progressives. They impose their beliefs on the People through legislation and media content. Some of those were needed (racial equality legislation, TUPE), some have turned out to be dubious (Divorce Reform), and some are simply bad (Angela’ Army). There’s a built-in obsolescence to the liberal programme: once they have imposed legal and cultural enlightenment on the society and economy, if not in the hearts and minds of the people, they’re done. Time to quit liberalising and go get a proper job. Said very few political movements ever. So having done the sensible stuff, those liberals who can’t get proper jobs go in search of even more recherché causes to foist on the People. In the end, they choose a cause too far, pass through the Looking-Glass, and the People become the enemy. Through the Looking Glass they can fight the causes of cultures and people who represent everything their parents professed to despise. Which is why we have female snowflakes wanting to import unskilled, unemployable men from a deeply misogynist culture who would put those very snowflakes in burkas and confine them to the kitchen. Because all the snowflakes despise now are the taxpayers with jobs and children they want to prepare for the world.

Once Liberalism passes through the Looking Glass, it attracts the dispossessed, the alienated, and many of the younger, disaffected people who can’t get jobs. Those people also hate the taxpayers. Communism never got a real grip in the UK because young people could get jobs, and they suspected correctly there was more to it than workers’ rights. Looking-Glass Liberalism has its following in the West today because there are a lot of young people who suspect that they will never benefit from participating in their economies, and who also suspect that they were not raised with the skills or temperament to participate advantageously. In which case, some of them will be quite happy to tear it all down. After all, what has post-modern Capitalism ever done for them?

Populism is in part a reaction to Liberalism Through The Looking Glass. It says “Enough!”. It says: “This is not your country” and much worse than that, it says “You are not Good People.” Populism is an existential identity threat to Looking Glass Liberals, who have no other source of self-identity and self-esteem than the craziness of their causes.

Populism appears when Liberalism passes through the Looking Glass, and has established itself as the dominant cultural and social doctrine of the Chattering Classes (media, PR, advertising, politics, diplomacy) and is the dominant mood of mainstream literature, film, theatre, comedy and art. As it wakes up, Populism says “This is not my beautiful country, this is not my beautiful culture, my god! What have I done?”.


And then it seeks to evict the squatters and bulldoze their camps. Metaphorically, and in the case of “The Jungle” at Calais, literally.

Business has to do its PR, recruiting, advertising and investor relations within the mainstream mood. It cannot afford an avant-garde moral appearance: it can only change sides when the new winner is clearly ahead and in sight of the finishing line. Until then, it has to go with the favourite. Right now, Looking Glass Liberalism still looks good. If you live in a large city. If you are well-paid and have marketable talents. The Tech giants don’t care about immigrants, only cheaper programmers for the commodity tasks. If they cared about human rights, they would not be outsourcing to China or Mexico. Taiwan is just about okay, and that’s why my Apple kit gets made. When keeping a supply of cheap(er) labour and cosying-up to the mainstream can be achieved by signing a motion deploring 90-day immigration bans, they will sign the motion. And when it doesn’t, it won’t. And unlike governments, corporations can spin on a sixpence. It takes five minutes to tell HR they don’t have to bother with LBGQT hires anymore. The Looking Glass Liberals know this, and they know they and their crazy causes are a cost, not a benefit, to most corporations and all taxpayers. But the corporations will be the last ones to turn, unless they are run by a Rupert Murdoch. Someone has to go first.

Until then, we have to live with the screeching of Looking-Glass Liberals and their fellow-travellers being thrown out of their place in society, culture and politics (they never had much of a place in the economy, except as recipients of other people’s taxes). And all the posturing idiots don’t seem to know that someone is taking names.


The ass-kicking will follow.

The Telling Strangeness of Brexit

On the 23rd June 2016, the British people asked their Government to get them out of the EU. It was a non-binding referendum. If the Government didn’t like it, they could ignore it. After all, the French did in 2005: their rejection of the European Constiution was made to fade away like the morning mist.

But something strange happened. Everyone in the EU treated the British referendum as binding and final. The Liechtenstein Lush didn't call Cameron and say "You're going to fix this, right?" and go on his way with a smug, knowing grin. Nobody said "We must give the British time to come to understand what they might still do". Junk The Drunk did not behave like a statesman, but like a schoolboy who has finally got rid of the irritating kid in the class. The EU could not wait to be shot of the UK: they wanted Britain to trigger A50 then, in June 2016.

It was the British bien pensants who thought they could get round the referendum. Who thought that Parliament would debate, with the help of right-thinking mavens, the meaning of the vote and whether the British people had voted in thier best interests? Whether it would be the Right Thing to heed the vote and leave the EU, or whether they should set the result aside. It wasn't binding after all. Surely no-one would wrench them from the teat of EU subsidies and Erasmus scholarships?

The EU officials, the 27 heads of state, did no such thing. The British were leaving. End of story. They had it all worked out: they threw our clothes out of the window and changed the locks on the doors. The 28 became the 27 and they took schoolboy glee in excluding Britain from their meetings.

Snowflakes think of Brexit as a divorce, and saw the referendum as Daddy and the kids throwing another ultimatum at Mummy so she would quit drinking for a while. What Mummy EU was supposed to do, after a couple of months, was make a handful of serious concessions to Daddy, so everyone could go back to their dysfunctional family life again. This time Mummy shrugged and told Daddy to take the kids and spilt. That's what's upsetting the snowflakes: Mummy doesn't want them anymore. And maybe never had, for many years.

And it's all Daddy's fault that they found out. Mummy EU was a useful socialist counter-balance to the natural free-market, world-trading, worker-exploiting nature of much of British social and political culture. And now the snowflakes are stuck with life under Daddy: and because they know they don't deserve their grants and subsidies, they are scared Daddy will cut back. He will, but not as much as they think. Hence the wailing of the snowflakes, and their desperate signalling to Mummy EU that they love her still and will she please find a nice comfortable job for them somewhere? But Mummy doesn't love them, and hadn't done for a long time, and it hurts, hurts, hurts to find that out. Nasty Daddy!

Thrown into chaos, the Conservative Party huddled down to find a new leader. Then something strange happened again. Did they choose a clubbable Europhile with close relationships to the bureaucrats in Brussels, who might try to finesse the referendum? No. They chose a woman who had suffered six years at the Home Office being humiliated by the European Courts. They chose a leader who would not be accepted by the 27-Boys Club and who understands in her soul why the UK cannot not go on being over-ruled by a bunch of ideologically-motivated judges in Strasbourg.

Teresa May said "Brexit means Brexit" and to prove it in October the government said they would repeal the European Communities Act 1972. Brexit, it turns out, meant independence and sovereignty. The EU is such a totalitarian entity that everything else follows: if you don't accept its Courts and laws-out-of-thin-air, you can't dodge the 17% tax on shoes designed to protect the Italian shoe industry. Declare legal and political independence and you're back with WTO-based trade deals. Under the Most Favoured Nation rule, any concession the EU gives the UK, has to be given to every other WTO member. So Britain is effectively negotiating trade terms for most of the rest of the world. Those trade terms are the EU's raison d'etre, because it is there to protect the national interests of its members. Perhaps there are going to be more surprises in store: perhaps the EU will use the Brexit negotiations to change rules and tariffs it could not otherwise get past those twenty-seven sets of national interests.

This is a job for professionals who understand what's at stake. The rest of us can only cheer or jeer from the sidelines. In the meantime there will be a lot of posturing. Everyone will want to make it look like They Matter. Whereas they don’t. Not Nicola Sturgeon, not the MP for Lower Cokeatington. Angela Merkel and Victor Orban won’t matter much either. But they will all want to get their shots in. The saddest poseurs of all are the Remainers, deep in denial about the fact that the EU hasn’t wanted them for maybe a decade or more.

Those negotiations will be mostly sound and fury signifying nothing. Face-saving for EU bureaucrats. It’s got to look tough for the UK so that the minnows don’t think they can do it as well. I suspect the British team will play their part in maintaining the charade. I suspect that the professionals know most of the answers already.

When the memoirs are written we will find out that the professionals in the EU wanted the UK out, and the professionals in the UK wanted out of the EU. The catch was that there was no way of doing it that was politically acceptable. So when Nigel Farage turned up - a Euro MP who wanted out of Europe - and when UKIP got 13% of the votes in the 2015 Election, the game became playable. That’s the only explanation that makes sense of all the behaviour that looks so strange under the assumption that the EU and UK wanted to stay together.

Bicycle Baffle

I've just come out of the other end of my Annual Autumn Cold and Fever, which oddly always strikes after half-term. I think I'm thinking about something, but I can't think what it is: every time I try to have a thought, it vanishes in a puff of indecision. Hence all the photographs, taken earlier in the year when the sun was still shining.

I've lived through a number of social changes and political shocks, but never what we're seeing with Brexit, on a much larger scale with Trump, and will see with Wilders / Le Pen. The
Workingman's Left was destroyed by Thatcher / Reagan, and was replaced by a nomenklatura of teachers, social workers, university lecturers, political consultants, "left-wing" journalists and government-funded activist groups where what mattered was saying the right thing and an increasing adherence to the victim-based ideology of identity politics. The Populist Revolution is about unmasking the hypocrisy and self-serving goals of this elite and of everyone else who hides material ambition behind a mask of right speech, online activism and a love of all things distant that hides a contempt for all things close. It's about the self-image of the snowflake, and people will fight to the death to preserve their moral camouflage, and even the fact they are wearing any.

Reading the mainstream media now feels like listening to a bunch of spoiled infants being told that it's bedtime. They are squalling and pretending Mommy is cross with them, yelling "abuse" when Daddy picked them up, and saying what children of all ages say: it's not fair, we're not doing it, go away.

And I guess that's really what worries me. There's so much virtue signalling and moral posturing that someone might forget it's all for show, take it seriously, and drop a major economy into the middle of a constitutional crisis no-one even thought would happen. I'm still going with Trump-Wilders-Le Pen. (I can't decide whether Angela Merkel is a misguided but ultimately pragmatic politician who will see the light sometime in summer 2017, or is an East German agent still carrying on the good fight against the Capitalist West.) But I think there's just a chance that one of these adolescent snowflakes of all ages will confuse their image with their duty, sell out their people, and cause unrest the like of which we haven't seen since the Communist bloc really did hack the Trades Unions.

I'm pretty sure it's all posturing and attention-seeking and posturing. I'm pretty sure the snowflakes at the Guardian, the Economist and on US campuses everywhere are actually pleased that Daddy is putting them in the car and taking them home. I just hope that's the way they feel underneath all the posturing.

God Bless America - Viva Los Despicables!

I can remember Thatcher-Reagan. This feels like that, but it's about different things.

Thatcher-Reagan was about ideology, and May-Trump is going to be about practicality. Theresa May wants to go down in history as the ultimate professional politician, the first of a new breed, acting on behalf and in the interests of the electorate, not selling them out in the name of abstract elite ideals. Trump? Same thing.

This is about ending the rule of the technocrats and the dominance of a virtue-obssessed febrile liberalism driven by a hatred of regular (white) people. The Austrians have a Presidential election and the Italians are voting on constitutional reform in December. The Dutch have elections in March 2017, and the French start campaigning in April 2017 for elections in June 2017. There are more German State elections in the first half of 2017 and then a German General Election in October 2017 at the latest. By this time next year the European political world will look totally different and the EC technocrats  - the guys who, when it gets serious, tell lies - will look like 1980's hairstyles.

And it's around then that it will occur to everyone that the Brexit negotiations are not about what Britain gets and gives, but about what the new EU is going to look like.

And no matter what happens, capitalism will make money from it.

That Brexit Court Judgement Is All Just Part of The Plan

Are Teresa May and I the only people who understand what’s going on with the British political system and Article 50? Everyone is banging on about what a disaster it is that three judges have ruled that Parliament must vote, whereas that’s all part of the plan.

Of course the eurocrats wanted to rush the Conservatives into invoking A50 by royal prerogative. Then they could refuse to accept it at any point in the negotiations because their tame Euro Court had ruled on request that because the referendum was non-binding, the British Parliament had to vote on it. On the other hand, politics being what they are, May could not say that she wasn’t starting until Parliament had voted for it, because the arguments and posturing would have gone on for months, to be decided by a General Election. So by the same mechanism that gets some Private Members Bills through while others vanish, a legal action brought by a hairdresser and a banker gets fast-tracked and accepted. Because your barber knows who to call to start an action like this. Right? So now Parliament will have to vote, not because the Prime Minister has asked nicely but because the Law has told them to. How the MPs will vote is entirely up to their consciences and what the Whip’s Office decides.

The British negotiators will go into the room with a constitutionally solid backing and a remit to report everything to Parliament, who will then discuss it in public. This is the best thing that could happen to them. On the other side of the table is a Belgian lawyer who is used to having his negotiations covered by confidentiality clauses and has never had the press go after him. Any time he tries anything remotely dodgy, the British team can say that while they, no they can’t have secret talks, because they have to report the day’s proceedings to Parliament, and no they can’t do sell open borders for lower trade tariffs because the British people were quite clear they wanted border controls. The EU negotiators will have no such political support. They will have twenty-seven countries which have conflicting goals and will be unable to promise or deliver anything. The British negotiators will look like masters of decisiveness by comparison.

If anyone thinks that Britain is going to stop plundering the world of cheap labour and smart, socialised young people, they have to be crazy. Of course tourists, students and businessmen will be free to come to the UK. Of course builders and economics graduates who have job offers will be free to come to the UK. And more controversially for the workers who voted Leave, of course seasonal unskilled labourers will be let in. There’s no alternative in the short term. Who can’t come in for more than a holiday or a business trip? Anyone who doesn’t have a job.

It’s then up to the British government and British employers if they want to stop dumping large numbers of British-born people on the scrap-heap because it’s too much trouble to socialise them as children in schools and at work. The competitive advantage of Spain, Poland and a bunch of other countries is that they have better parents and better schools which raise better-socialised and more work-ready young people. That, bluntly, is not going to change in a generation.

Here’s what’s going to change: first, the UK will become legally sovereign again, EU laws won’t automatically apply and their courts won’t have jurisdiction; second, the UK will be legally able to secure its borders against un-wanted economic migrants and whomsoever else it deems undesirable; third, the UK will be be legally able to remove people it doesn’t want. Of course, none of the organisations responsible for any of this will have the practical capability to enforce it, so that Brick Lane will still be full of illegal Pakistani cooks and waiters, Midlands factories will still be staffed by under-paid temporary workers from Szeged and Cluj-Napoca, and gangmasters will continue to supply Norfolk farmers with cheap labour from farms around Starachowice. (If you care about bankers, sure, about fifty-seventy thousand jobs will leave the financial services sector in London, but almost none of those will be presently done by British people. All those Japanese and Indian banks will transfer their offices and staff to Frankfurt or Amsterdam.)

What no-one will tell you until they come to write their memoirs is that “everyone” in British politics and banking knew that the UK had to get out of the EU before the Euro destroyed it. There was no way of doing so without actually saying as much, which doesn’t bode well for any negotiations. So a reason had to be manufactured. The British political establishment had to stumble clumsily into Brexit. Which is way Nigel Farage and UKIP were treated as if they mattered. UKIP did get almost 13% of the votes in the 2015 election, even if that translated into only one MP. There was no reason to hold that referendum, but they did. And Remainers conducted a campaign of spectacular stupidity, doing the one thing guaranteed to turn the ornery British voter against them: they talked down to Leavers, and pulled Project Fear. Really? They couldn’t do better than that? Because I could. So could you. Saatchi’s certainly could have.

The catch is that “everyone” isn’t actually everyone. So a lot of people have to be brought onside. I’m surprised by how much allegedly smart people are still on the wrong side of history on this. I voted Remain, and I’m not ashamed to say it, and it took me less than an hour to understand what had happened. I’m with the Brexit because it’s going to happen and we had better get the best deal we can. Teresa May is with the Brexit because she’s a professional politician and negotiating a good deal is her job. If she does it well, she goes in the history books along with Margaret Thatcher. She’s been at the Home Office for several years and knows what the issues are. Oddly, the journalists and other Good People who are still deploring the Leave vote, and show it by their spin on the news, have not worked at the Home Office.

I’m writing this three days before the Trump-Clinton election. I think I know what’s going to happen, but I don’t want to bring down the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.

The Government’s Duty to Repatriate the Non-Contributing Non-Native

The conceptual problem many people have with forceable repatriation of unwanted immigrants is that a person’s nationality is not morally relevant. Plenty of people born in a country can’t or won’t make a living for themselves either, but are tolerated and even housed, clothed and fed by welfare. The mistake of this objection make is that repatriation is not done on the basis of nationality, but of contribution.

It is a moral duty of any resident in a country to pay their own way, usually by being employed and paying taxes. This duty is waived for extreme disabilities of birth or accident. Someone who will not work or lacks the skills and temperament to be employable is a free-loader. They are failing in one of their duties as a resident, and if they can be sent home, they should be. Their place can then be taken by someone willing to contribute. No country or community is under any obligation to take in and support people who are lazy, work-shy or who lack the skills and temperament to be usefully employable. Nor is any country under any obligation to train or to socialise adults from other countries who force themselves across its borders.

Castro may have been the first to export his criminals and psychiatric cases to the West as a form of warfare. The Russians certainly exported their Jewish criminals to Israel. The latest version has been the influx of vigorous young men of military age from the Maghreb and other Muslim countries into Europe. They are not refugees.

Real refugees are families with children: equal numbers of men and women and of all ages and classes. If the young Muslim men are in mortal danger, what has happened to their mothers, grandmothers, sisters and nieces? Why haven't these young men died defending their women? Because their sisters and mothers are in no danger. Which means the young men are in no danger either. Most have been sent by their families, villages or local governments to farm welfare benefits from Europe. By definition of the process, they are the least-skilled, the least-well-adjusted, the least valuable in their own countries. (And some, the criminal and the disruptive and the mentally-ill, were let loose by governments and warlords.)

No country, wealthy or poor, Occidental or Oriental, is under any obligation to take these young men. Indeed, any government is under an obligation, to its native population, to remove them.

Removing over a million vigorous young men by force would be a mis-use of the police and armed forces. Since they have been sent to farm welfare, they must not be paid welfare. (Fed and housed for humanity’s sake, but the bill comes off that country’s foreign aid budget.) The unskilled must not be offered jobs or training and they must be confined to camps, where they can sit and rot until they sign up to be sent home. If they try to escape, they can be deported as criminals. They were sent because they were the least useful people in their families and communities, and they can be sent back for the same reason. They are not the receiving country’s problem. They are the sending country’s problem. Their fate is not on the conscience of the receiving country.

Look carefully, and what the people are doing is letting these young men rot. Some are not, and more fool them, for all their good intentions. It is the first duty of any government to protect and advance the interests of its citizens. The British reminded its government of that duty recently. The Austrians, Americans, Germans, French, Dutch and many others will follow. We can only hope.

I have no problem with Westernised people coming to the West and wanting to work hard and do well. If they are not Westernised, they won't be productive, and so they won't be making any contributions.

Today, in Greece, an EU country, poor Greeks cannot afford bread even at 50 cents the loaf. There is a scheme where people with money can buy a loaf for a poor person who comes in later.

If there is any wealth to spare in the "rich" EU, maybe it should go to the Greeks, fellow EU members first. Or what is the point of being in the EU, or any other association?

Castro, ISIS and Weaponising Fake Refugees

Can you keep count of how many young Arab men are killing Europeans? I can’t. And more and more they aren’t suicide bombers, but berserkers. Driving a truck along a crowded Promenade des Anglais is not a political act, but the act of a mentally unstable person off his head on drugs. The same with axe-killers. These people are crazy, as in, psychiatrically crazy. Where have we seen this before?

In the 1980’s and 1990’s Cuba generated hundreds and then thousands of “refugees”, all of whom gained sympathy from well-meaning liberals who would never have to live next to one of them. It didn’t take the US long to realise that Castro had been clearing out his jails, dumping HIV carriers and packing off homosexuals and other people he didn’t want.  In addition, Cuba was short on food, so letting a few thousand people go not only cured some political and social-order problems, it exported Castro’s food shortage problem as well.

Oh. Wait. Where else has had terrible harvests for the last few years? That would be Syria. And probably any other Arab country be-devilled by civil war and insurrection. Got a problem feeding the people in your Caliphate? Take a lesson from Castro.

I’m betting that ISIS, the Taliban and others emptied out the jails in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else they took over. And not just the jails but the mental hospitals as well. After all, what’s more dangerous than a bomb you know when it’s going to go off? A bomb you don’t know when it’s going to go off. They sent large numbers of hungry, and therefore angry, young men off as well. So they exported their food problem, and their social-order problem.

Everyone at the time remarked on how strange it was that the “refugees” from the Arab / Muslim countries seemed to be vigorous young men who were strangely well-informed about where to go and what to do on arrival. Those vigorous young “refugees” groping Europe’s daughters are uneducated farm-boys, so where did they get the money to pay for the people-smuggling bit of the journey? Um. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the smugglers got paid by the boatload by ISIS, and everyone was told to say they had to pay the people-smugglers, because the dumb Europeans would believe that and give them lots of money.

The equally dumb German politicians thought they were getting the fleeing Syrian middle-class on the cheap. No so much. They were getting the low-skilled, the insane, the criminal and probably the AIDS carriers as well. If that’s not an invasion, I don’t know what is.

Look for a wave of "political refugees" from Turkey as Erdogan empties his jails, addicts and asylums into the open arms of Germany. He will dump them off the shores of Greece for sure, and the Greeks will fire them at the Germans.

Here’s What the Brexit Negotiations Are Really About

In case you’re not clear. EC <> Europe <> EEC <> EU <> Euro <> European Parliament. The EC is a sort of activist Civil Service that thinks it runs the EU. The EU is 28 countries who send MPs to the European Parliament. That’s the thing that can be “ever closer union-ed”. The EEC is the free trade zone and the EU is part of that. So is Norway, which is not in the EU. Trade negotiations between the rest of the world and the EEC are done by the EC.

Brexit is not a divorce. It’s a business deal that must be settled by politicians. Until Brexit hit the fan, the EC thought that it would lead the negotiations if any country did invoke Article 50. Greece tried threats and the EC stomped on it. Greece was in the Euro and could not implement a Grexit unless it first re-invented the drachma. Britain is not Greece and never lost the Pound Sterling, and Brexit is simply too large and serious for bureaucrats.

Because they are not negotiating with Britain. They are negotiating with the 28 countries of the EU about what leaving the EU looks like.

Whatever Britain gets will be what any other country will get on exit from the EU. This puts the other 27 in an interesting position: in negotiating with Britain they are negotiating the conditions they will get if they want to leave. Would you put locks on that door? The negotiations are not between Britain and the other 27, but between the 28 and the European Commission. Guess which way this is going to go?

There Always Was a Brexit Plan B, But Now We Have Plan C

European Parliament President Martin Schultz said: "The British have violated the rules. It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate”.

And you thought politicians were insensitive. I have no idea what DSM-V grade personality disorder Shulz is suffering from, and if there isn't one, it needs to be in DSM-VI. That quote reveals the colossal self-satisfaction and self-righteousness of the anointed elite. And for some reason, I find myself thinking about this song



"Remain" didn't need a plan, because it was the status quo. Plan A was negotiate a Norway-like deal, which was going to be a hard sell to Parliament and the British electorate, but at least it could be talked about.

Plan B was to ignore the Referendum by sheer bureaucratic and political delay. It's what the French did in 2005, after all. That was always a known possibility.

Sadly, the adolescent posturing of the Anointed Ones has pretty much put the kibosh on Plan B. Those old men - and they are all hideously wrinkled old men who couldn't deadlift their trousers - seem to want the UK and all its ungrateful oiks out. How dare some unemployed fisherman in Boston, Lincolnshire vote against the Rule of the Anointed? Be gone, and be damned. So that's that Plan B gone.

This leaves Plan C, which before 2015 would not have been possible, and even after 2015 could not be talked about. This is to tear down the European Commission so that it is simply a civil service with no lawmaking powers, return to a free trade zone, restrict Strasbourg to trade disputes, seal the borders to refugees and have an EU points system for non-EU countries. Everything else stays except benefit tourism, and hiring people for less than some serious minimum wage. That means the UK gets together with other countries, of which there are several, invades Brussels, and breaks the European Commission.

There’s two reasons the EU people are so pissed off with the Brexit vote: a) they have long wanted Britain out of the EU so they could turn it into France, paid for by Germany; b) without the UK, it becomes clear to everyone that the EU is, the Netherlands aside, mostly a bunch of broke-ass failed socialist states, and the illusion that it’s a “world power” of any kind recedes in the haze.

The adolescent posturing by the Anointed Ones contrasts with the behaviour of the career politicians, and especially of the only politician who counts right now, Fraulein Merkel, who is not posturing and appearing reasonable. Right now she’s going down in the history books as the woman who destroyed the EU, and some statesman-like behaviour, to get some sensible talks under way when the Anointed Ones have finished having their fits of righteousness, will go a long way to saving her memory.

If the EU officials can't talk to each other about deals, the national Finance Ministries can talk to each other and the Treasury, and the the German Finance Ministry, with French support, can tell the EU what tune it's prepared to pay for. Such back-channel negotiations are being made more or less inevitable by the childish hissy-fits of the Anointed.

Brexit - Day Four

One of the many things that 9/11 did was to expose a large number of people who looked like “critics” of the West as actual haters. I mean you Noam Chomsky. It was a moral polariser of an event. The 52-48 vote non-binding vote in favour of Britain leaving the EU is set to be another such polarising event. Page through the reader comments in the liberal papers, and read the Financial Times this weekend (the Economist hasn’t come out yet, since it clearly didn’t prepare any articles for the eventuality). The howls and sophistries of the neoliberal elite and its useful-idiot hangers-on are loud and clear. One spin is that this vote is about young (Remain) vs Old (Leave). Another is that it is about Decent Educated People (Remain) vs Oiks (Leave). Except not.

Richmond-Upon-Thames is a slice of God’s Own Estate In Heaven planted on this mundane earth. It has the highest proportion of graduates of any country. It has millionaires walking the streets, it is stuffed to the gills with “middle-class professional people” except for a couple of council estates in the Barnes area. Richmond-upon-Thames should have been 95% Remain. It was 70%. Kensington and Chelsea was 70% and that’s close to being as Heavenly as Richmond. Neither area has a poor segment that's 30% of its population.

So even in Liberal Heaven, almost a third of the people wanted out. And no, it isn’t age. Median age in Richmond is 40. In Bristol, where the median age is 30, nearly 40% wanted out. The correlation with age is weak. The best correlation is with degree of brainwashing possession of a bachelor’s degree or better. (The Guardian data visualisation guys did a fantastic job on the results and real quick.)

The vote showed that when the British people were threatened with “stay or your lives will get worse”, 52% of them replied “Our lives are already worse”. To which one kind commentator said those immortal words “if you think your life is bad now, you just wait”. Ah! Human sympathy! Much more than this, it showed that 17.5 million people - a country larger than at least 20 of the EU members - thought the EC / EU sucks so bad they were prepared to take a few choppy years to get rid of it.

The vote was partly about Angela Merkel’s ill-judged importing of a million unskilled, girl-groping young men whom no-one wanted, and everyone now wants to send back to, well, anywhere that’s not Europe.

But mostly the vote was about all those "well-off" people in London getting their Amazon deliveries, their coffee and Mexican wraps, and their Ubers and Deliveroos, from people with no job security, minimum wages, zero hours contracts and few benefits. While the “well-off” are using mobile phones made by Chinese men and women working fifteen-hour days, and are wearing clothes made by Hondurans paid as much in a year as the “well-off" get in a day. The vote was won by all those people with the crappy jobs supporting the "well-off" people with the "good" jobs.

Because here's the joke: those “well-off” people can’t afford to buy the house I bought at two-and-a-half times earnings. And they think they have “benefited” from the neoliberalism that drives the EC/EU? Oh, wait. Air fares are low. And you can get a cool flat in Oporto from Air B’nB for a week much cheaper than a hotel. So that’s all good then. Ever wonder why people are talking about a shift to the “experience economy”? It’s because most people can’t afford to buy things any more.

Someone just turned off the music and turned up the lights. And behold - the club is tatty, and dirty, and the floor is sticky, and the roof has holes, and the walls have gaps, and someone stole their coat, and the bar prices were ridiculous, and it’s cold and raining outside, and nobody was as remotely as attractive as they looked when the lights were down. But for a few hours the music was loud and everyone thought they were having a good time.

I voted Remain. Didn’t happen. For the moment, we’re still in the EU. I can remember three-day weeks, 25% inflation, 15% mortgage rates, the Miner’s Strike and lord alone what else. That’s why I and the older folk are sanguine. The world has ended many times. And we’re all still here.

I Voted Remain

I voted Remain, not because I’m a Good European, but because...

a) the best deal the UK would get would be like Norway’s, and we’d still be kicking back to Brussels at about the same rate but without the voting and bureaucratic access that goes with it,

b) I don’t believe in the competence of the politicians and civil servants to exploit what advantages there might be in Leaving (look what a grat job they’renot doing with non-EU immigration already), and

c) I do believe that, good Davos 1% Globalists that they are, Cameron, Junker, Merkel and the rest would happily co-operate to teach the uppity English working classes a lesson by plunging them into a recession that will last more or less forever.

Oddly, the few people I know who voted in advance voted Leave, and they are good middle-class young graduate types - the very people who are supposed to be Remain stalwarts. They were reacting to the campaigns as much as anything else, and that’s the wrong thing to do. The campaigns have been egregious, and mostly have been a proxy Conservative party leadership challenge.

Remember, under the British Constitution, Parliament is sovereign and the referendum is only advisory. An honest politician with integrity who believed that leaving the EU would be bad for the British people would seek to defer the decision “until the time is right”, hand on until the next election and see if any party campaigned on “We will keep the promise to get the UK out”. However, I don’t believe that the Cabinet has politicians who are honest and have integrity, and I think that this Cabinet would sink the UK economy just to keep the plebs in line. They did it before, and they will do it again.

I don’t want to give them that opportunity.

Negative Interest Rates and Why We Need A £1,000 Note

This popped up in the daily press summary we get...

Banks in Europe and Japan are rebelling against their central banks' negative interest rates policies. Commerzbank is considering holding cash in expensive deposit boxes instead of keeping it with the ECB, while the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ has warned the Bank of Japan that it could stop its sales of Japanese debt.

In other words… Commerzbank are going to put the money under the mattress.

Aren’t they supposed to have unrivalled networks through which to discover great business opportunities in which to invest that money? So either Commerzbank doesn’t know about the business opportunities out there or it does and there aren’t any. Both can be true. There aren’t any and Commerzbank wouldn’t hear about them if there were. And no, before you ask, fintech start-ups and another sharing app won’t soak up that kind of cash. investment opportunities are skewed: at one end are small opportunities with speculative upsides and almost guaranteed but limited downsides; at the other end are the Crossrails, HS2, Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C, and other humungous vanity projects. The other big stuff, like developing the Dreamliner or Windows 10, is financed by companies, which may simply not need external finance (Apple, Microsoft) or will borrow it against their balance sheet rather than the future profits of a project.

Nope. Looking like the mattress is a good bet.

Central banks have to lie about why they are charging negative interest rates. The real reason is that there’s no way for them to make even a small return on the money other banks deposit with them, because the returns on government debt are so low. They can’t say that, because then the central bank would be admitting that the economy is screwed. So they mutter about using negative interest rates to encourage spending and lending - and that, of course, amounts to saying that there isn’t enough spending and lending going on, because there isn’t anything worth spending on or lending to, and that amounts to saying that the economy is screwed.

Commerzbank are posturing, of course, though they may also be looking at the costs of strongrooms.

Of course, if Commerzbank was going to store money of that amount in deposit boxes, it would need 500 euro notes to do it. Which the ECB wants to get rid of. I say the Bank of England should issue a £500 and even a £1,000 note for exactly these purposes. The Big Four banks in London should build a currency storage facility somewhere in the City. With £1,000 notes, it wouldn’t need to very large. The flight of capital to sterling would be exactly what it needed post-Brexit.

Remain vs Exit: Round 2

The central argument in the Remain camp is the awful economic consequence of the UK leaving the EU. The central flaw in that argument is seen by asking: how do those consequences come about? It won’t be UK companies refusing to do business with EU countries – why would they? It won’t be the UK Government banning all EU imports – why would it? So if there are sudden drops of trade, it must be because the EU is throwing a hissy fit and banning exports to the UK and imports from it. Or imposing ridiculous trade tariffs. And why would it do that? To encourage the others, of course, to demonstrate the wrath of Mama Merkel and Papa Junker. Walk through that door and we will cut off your inheritance.

That’s how this is being told: as a divorce between Daddy UK and Mummy EU. Mummy EU is threatening fifteen sorts of pain in the settlement, which leads one to wonder how she would behave if we stayed, or whether we should have married her in the first place.

Except this isn’t a marriage, it’s business. The day after the UK votes to leave, everything will go on as usual, including the UK’s payments to the EU. It will take a few years to negotiate the new agreement. Only two things will happen immediately: the Strasbourg Court will vanish from British legal consideration (except for trade disputes), and UK borders can and should slam shut to “refugees”. The UK will continue to welcome with open arms all the talented, educated, hard-working young men and women from countries with economies so awful that a job in Pret A Manger looks attractive. Send those people home and London closes down the next day. Retailers and many other companies would go broke before they could find UK citizens to do those jobs.

Earlier I said that “the world has changed” and for that reason we should stay in the EU and work from within. The world has changed, and the UK will have to negotiate with the EU and if it wants to export to it, make goods and provide services that abide by its rules. Sure. That’s true of any country the UK wants to trade with. The only question is whether it is better placed inside or outside the system. I suspect in the end it will make no difference, and I want the Supreme Court of the UK to be the final court of appeal. I don’t want Strasbourg (except for trade disputes with the EU, that’s a given). I want our management to have the right to refuse entry to anyone for any reason, and to expel anyone who isn’t a UK citizen for any reason. Everything else is business.

There are no consequences of Britain leaving that aren’t actually of the EC’s making. It will be the European Commission that takes it as an affront to its bureaucratic ego and tries to make the UK an object lesson for all the others. It will be the European Parliament who allows the Commission to do so. It won’t be your Leave vote.

Because you never stay with anyone who threatens you if you think about leaving.