An Apology: Work, Party, What’s The Difference?

Our great leader, Honest Boris the Incorrupt and Competent has had quite a week of wriggling. The long-awaited Gray Report on 10 Downing Street parties during the Covid lockdowns was released yesterday. It wasn’t flattering to Johnson, other than as a host. Johnson’s standard explanation (standard for a while, but into overdrive in the last 24 hours) is that he genuinely believed these civilised gatherings were work related, thus permitted under the rules. That he wrote the rules should count for something here.

However this Scotsman would like to offer an apology for his criticism of the PM.

In my defence I genuinely believed Brexit was an ill-conceived act of self-flagellation, and Johnson’s implementation a disaster. The extent of trouble he created in Northern Ireland was bemusing, though the very idea of Brexit would inevitably cause some.

I believed the government’s Covid response a shambles. The lack of planning, preparation and resources can’t be blamed on Johnson. These were a legacy of the Cameron-Osborne Austerity Years, from earlier in the current Conservative government’s twelve year stint. But I believed the floundering response displayed a leader and team not suited to administration, let alone crisis management. I believed the incapability to learn from other countries’ responses could be blamed on Brexicide-Isolationist bigotry or just plain stupidity; neither flattering.

I genuinely believed the sloth to lock down which killed thousands (as confirmed by the revised WHO figures) an example of Johnson and his Crapinet’s directionless and dithering style of management. The premature unlock, compounded by public-subsidised spread of disease (aka Eat Out to Help Out) was a rash gamble that took no account of science at a time when we had no vaccines. I believed the car crash of a Test and Trace program – building a centralised one from scratch when the whole country has experienced local teams who do specifically this – was inexcusable.

And that’s only for starters. However I now see I was wrong in my assumption the prolific mistakes were the fault of a blundering, incompetent and arrogant government.

As I look at a Gray Report picture of Johnson summoning his troops over a table with five wine and one gin bottle I see the fault, and feel the sympathy. After a load of pints this Scotsman regularly genuinely believes he can run a country, and tells the pub so too.

UK Benefits – Sunak Says Computer Says No

In an interview with Bloomberg TV last week Saint Rishi Sunak, the now not-so-shining UK Chancellor (Minister of Finance), said that he couldn’t increase welfare spending to help with the inflation-fuelled cost-of-living crisis because the ancient computer systems won’t let him.

A couple of points here:

  • Who’s been in charge of these systems for the last twelve years and why haven’t they been maintained?
  • If the levers are so stuck they can’t be pulled why are we employing an operator to hold them?

The reality is that the UK Conservative party are allergic to welfare increases. Their base view the poor as parasites sucking off the hard working taxpayer, so their professional electables view welfare increases as career suicide.

Sunak’s talked lately about tax tweaks to fix these problems. The reality is that while inflation can become a chronic problem the effects are very acute. If you can’t feed the meter this week you need help this week. Tax changes take years to effect society.

There’s also a fundamental fault in this (assuming he’s not lying): tax systems are there to take money off people very generically, they’re not good at giving to those who need it. We do have a system specifically designed to do that: the benefits (welfare) system. Even if it’s completely broken he still managed to give an extra £20 a week to welfare recipients during Covid times. Use the tool for the job. You can open beer bottles with axes, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

All in all it sounds like Saint Rishi is talking crap to not do what’s needed because it might effect his political career. Rishi, that career went south when you didn’t resign with your fine. Get used to it.

[20/05/2022]
Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty have just made The Sunday Times Rich List. My apologies to our Chancellor for criticising his welfare policy. He’s probably not familiar with feeding the meter.

Northern Ireland Assembly – Here We Don’t Go Again

Here’s democracy: The Democratic Unionist Party, recently elected as the second biggest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, have just prohibited the same Assembly from doing any work.

The Assembly, a local state government, has responsibility for a wide range of things including health, social welfare and the local economy; all things that might need a hand on the tiller during a cost of living crisis. It does not have any powers over international relations, under which falls the infamous Northern Ireland Protocol (managing how NI trades with the world). This is the responsibility of the national government in London.

The DUP don’t like the Northern Ireland Protocol. The DUP has MPs in the the London (Westminster) parliament. The Conservative government controls dealings on the NI Protocol. The Conservatives don’t sit in the NI Assembly. The NI Assembly has no powers over the NI Protocol (did I mention that?).

The DUP have refused to elect a ‘speaker’ to the NI Assembly, which means it can’t do any work (on things like health, social welfare and the local economy), because they don’t like the NI Protocol… over which the NI Assembly has no powers.

Is this beginning to sound repetitive? Welcome to Northern Ireland.

Good Times to Pick a Squabble

Countries, like people, often disagree. Grown-ups deal with that through negotiation and compromise. Sometimes a bit of petulant shouting is part of the negotiation.

Lookatme Truss, UK Foreign Secretary and Self-Publicist has made clear the UK intends to throw its toys out of the pram over the Northern Ireland Protocol, the UK-EU deal her boss made and signed 17 months ago. This is not part of a negotiation with the EU.

The Northern Ireland Protocol is explained here. Brexit was always going to make hassle necessary; Honest Boris’ choice of Brexit made it particularly difficult; what they got is a hassle, but equitable compromise can smooth it; equitable compromise requires trust; the current Clown Government has worked hard to make the UK among the most untrustworthy in the democratic world.

Truss is now proposing to walk away from the NI Protocol, an international treaty. We’ve been here before. These are the same toys Johnson threatened to throw out of his pram last year. What’s the game?

The recent elections in NI have elected a majority of uncompromising idiots who’ll fail to form a government. But what’s new there? In one corner is a tribe who blame the problems of the world on the NI Protocol (it probably caused Covid, and Russia to invade Ukraine you know). Teresa May had the misfortune to depend on these nuts, but times have changed, The Johnson Party have an eighty seat majority now. They don’t need to pander to any NI basket-cases these days. So what’s up?

The success or failure of Northern Ireland won’t be keeping Honest Boris up at night. Standing by some ex-allies while the doctors ponder their sectioning won’t be on his list. Maybe Truss wants to make some noise (for a change)? But Ukraine’s a big platform for her, this would only be a risky distraction.

The only explanation I can see is to rally the Conservative backbenchers. Local Tory associations have been trained to hate the EU, with its cloven hooves and tail. Blowing raspberries at it will always get cheers. When you’ve been convicted in office, are lambasted in the media, lost a bucketful of local council seats, and are being polled to be the biggest drain on votes you probably want some cheers. Understandable, that’s politics.

Walking away from the NI Protocol will cause a trade war with our biggest partners. Even threatening to diminishes trust. This isn’t the road to peace and harmony. Even without actual negative consequences the rest of the world sees The West behaving incoherently; the rest of the world like Putin, Xi, Orban and others that need to see us acting together. Why would Putin believe any threats we make if we can’t even trade on the terms we just signed a treaty on?

Internal Conservative Party politics caused Brexit, something that will lead to the atrophy and possibly dismembering of the country. Internal Tory politics would be an unfortunate reason for the weakness of the West in front of autocracy.

There are necessary times to negotiate and there are good times to shout. On this topic now isn’t either.

Programme for Government

What a relief there’s so little in the world to worry about. No great events to distract governments. No wars, no famines, no plagues; no cost of living crises; no housing shortages; no climate emergencies. The UK Government today announced their legislative programme (we call it a “Queen’s Speech” here, although she never writes it and didn’t read it this year).

On the agenda this time round: letting people vote about their neighbours’ extensions and maybe picking a squabble with our neighbours.

There are those who’d say there are important things that do need dealing with, but aren’t there always? Funnily enough there were things the government had in the legislative pipeline for a while (audit reform – think Carillion, Thomas Cook; employment reform – think P&O). Maybe they weren’t interesting enough.

Far be it from me to say, but perhaps they’re out of ideas. After twelve years, and the current comedian’s purge of their senior talent, it would be understandable.

You mightn’t always like a government’s ideas – the first six years of this one’s were awful – but those swings and roundabouts are how society progresses. When they run out of them altogether it must be time to go.

Edinburgh Council Elections

This Scotsman has to vote tomorrow, but they won’t tell me who to vote for.

Council elections here use the Single Transferable Vote method. This is the only sensible electoral system. It’s a Proportional Representation system, unlike the laughably awful First Past The Post (FPTP) used in Westminster – rant here – and lets us pick candidates, unlike the Holyrood Party List thing which is beholden to party hacks (and not especially proportional). This means tomorrow I get a genuine input to picking four councillors in my area. For this reason (and many about wanting to pick the right people) I am duty bound to vote.

But my choice rationale isn’t as it should be.

Nobody votes on what they’re asked about. Just as referenda on great national questions are decided on whether the bins are collected, tomorrow I’ll be choosing my bin-collection chiefs on national issues. This is wrong, but valid. The issue is in perception. Imagine a party wonderful at local stuff but horrendous at running the country. Imagine all voters are Dr Spock and vote logically to re-elect this party to the councils. The party will infer the electorate are happy with them in general, and keep up the awful job nationally. In reality the logical electorate won’t be perfectly so, and will assume everyone else is happy with this party in general. Each voter will be less convinced by their dissatisfaction and more likely to re-elect the awful party nationally.

In short, by voting Conservative for the council tomorrow I’ll increase the likelihood of Honest Boris the Most Corrupt and Incompetent lasting longer. That would be a Bad Thing.

It might be a Good Thing for the council though. An SNP/Labour shower are there at the moment, and have made a shambles of it. Luckily the perceptions continue…

Governments have a sell-by date. There’s only so long they have ideas and motivation, and a finite period before they get too comfortable (read corrupt). At twelve years the Tories in Westminster and fifteen the SNP in Holyrood are past their time. No votes for them.

Labour mightn’t be shining in Edinburgh, but negative success for them tomorrow will translate to negative success for them nationally. As they’re the only opposition to the worst national government in my living memory I might just have to pay that price.

Regular readers will know I wouldn’t have been voting SNP anyway, for many reasons, some local and others about perception:

  • They’ve been useless in Edinburgh, clearly
  • They’re past their sell-by date in Edinburgh (fifteen years I think) and Holyrood
  • Scottish secession, let’s call it Scexit, is as stupid as Brexit was, and for the same reasons
    The last is important, and has further effects (below).

So, one party that shouldn’t get a vote will (though probably not a ‘1’), and two others are ruled out (fairly or not).

For the ‘Scexit’ reason above the Greens have to fail. The most important problems in the world are environmental, but Scottish Greens have hitched themselves to the secession cart. This is a gross mistake on their part. An independent Scotland of 5.5 million and piffling GDP will have less influence on the world – thus important things – than as an influential nation of the UK. In reality the Scottish Greens are an SNP-extra. They must learn this, and for perception reasons I won’t see my vote supporting an environmentally less influential policy. No vote.

(Here’s the issue…)

As for the rest? On my turf we are replete with independents. Cool. Usually these are nuts, but occasionally they’re people with a real motivation concentrated on their area who don’t feel obliged to hitch themselves to huge political machines. So how do I discern which? Good question. I’ve had flyers through the door for a few, telling me what they’re against not what they’re for. I searched the interweb and failed to find websites for any. All I want is a manifesto (i.e. a list of I’m for… things), to no avail. Some have Twitter and assorted social media feeds, but my life is too short to follow weeks of dialogue.

So guys, give me a bullet-point list of (no more that ten) things you want by lunchtime tomorrow and you may have my vote. But, surprising though it may seem, I’m not voting for people who won’t tell me their policies.

BTW…
Alba are just the Alex the Groper fan-club, nae chance.
Lib-Dems are reasonable, rational and moderate. They have to be a shoo-in for no.1.

Truss on Putin

How strange the world has become when this Scotsman finds himself agreeing with Liz Truss, UK Foreign Secretary and Self-Publicist. A Tory of little judgement, akin to Johnson she’s concerned only with herself. In a speech this week she stated Russia should be pushed “out of the whole of Ukraine”, which would imply out of the bits it occupied in 2014.

There are dangers in this. First, of escalation. The louder everyone shouts the harder it is to stop the killing, and eventually more (ultimately maybe us) get involved. Second, of justification. Putin’s currently telling lies of the West starting it all, but TV clips like this give him genuine material to work with.

Simon Jenkins has an opinion in The Guardian. He argues…

  1. Truss is making noise for her own profile. This of course is true. That’s her raison d’être.
  2. We should be making soft sounds and working toward a compromise. Unfortunately this is rubbish.

Ideally when there’s a war on we want to de-escalate: everyone to put down their guns and calm down. The problem here is that Putin’s a thug. He only understands force. Compromise is for the weak – a lower form of life. He’d just use it to regroup and try again, against Ukraine or some other unfortunate target.

The only way to stop him is to hobble or remove him. He needs to be beaten, and seen to be beaten, so comprehensively that none of his henchmen let him try again. Or beaten so comprehensively that his henchmen (or maybe even the Russian people) depose him. None of them have the power now, but a big undeniable defeat could change that. Dictatorships can be very strong, but they’re brittle.

When negotiations come Zelensky’s terms should be brutal, and effectively supported by the West:

  1. Russia withdraw to August 1991 borders (at Ukraine’s Independence from the USSR)
  2. Vladimir Putin step down and apologise to the Ukrainian and Russian people*
  3. An International Commission establish reconstruction and reparation costs, and this be paid
    – First by Vladimir Putin from the assets he’s stolen from Russia,
    – If those are exhausted, second by the Russian state
  4. Russia explicitly acknowledge the right of sovereign states, including neighbours and former soviet republics, to exercise their own policies and align themselves as they see fit (no more ‘Sphere of Influence’)

There could be referenda in the currently occupied bits of Ukraine, but only after Russian withdrawal, they should be managed by outsiders, and that should only be offered as a sop during negotiation.
(* Yes, 2 contradicts my earlier point, but could be a negotiating gambit)

This isn’t pretty. It needs the West to support Ukraine militarily and isolate Russia economically. That’ll be long and expensive, in money and lives. It’s an awful shame, but Ukraine or the West didn’t start this.

Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” lasted less than six months. Giving in to bullies doesn’t work. And there are other bullies in the world right now. Don’t think they won’t interpret capitulation to Putin as open season.

UK Government Finds Xenophobia A Reliable Distraction, Again

Apparently we’re to send refugees to Rwanda. What an excellent fantasy, Johnson. Disturbing for the government to play that card though.

It’ll be no surprise there are sharper politicians than David Cameron. He had a problem with Tory backbench ‘Eurosceptics’, a fringe bunch of irrelevants who disguised their xenophobia as a rational dislike not of all other people, or a group of other people, but of a bureaucracy. He thought a referendum on their whines would be conclusively beaten and shut them up for good.

Given that this was what it was all about he was surprisingly unprepared when they played the racism card: immigration and immigrants (permanently ‘illegal-‘) were drummed up into consistent news. The EU was already a proxy for all bloody foreigners, Conservative heartland is The Daily Mail and Express, and he’d just had a trial run with our Nationalistas playing the Anglophobic card in the Scottish secession referendum, so he should have known better. But hey, not the sharpest spoon in the drawer.

Brexit was lost because a bunch of xenophobes couched racism in rationale, and shouted it.

Honest Boris the Clown Johnson noticed what a great distraction it can be however. He jumped on a campaign looking for a leader and must’ve momentarily looked away from the mirror to note their tactics.

Six years on there’s a scandal about the first ever Prime Minister to be done for a criminal offence in office. The natives, the newspapers and the Tory backbench are restless. Something must be done.

Shiti Patel – one of the nastiest UK Home Secretaries in a long time, but not in the intellectual First Division – announced yesterday that the UK will send refugees to Rwanda ‘for processing’, with no option to ever come to the UK.

There have been queues decrying this abhorrent and ludicrous idea. The media has been replete with experts and the principled explaining the legal, financial and moral unfeasibility. The churches are aghast. International organisations have been explaining our agreed responsibilities. It’s illegal under international law, it would be horrendously expensive, and it’s just wrong.

People in unknown potentially horrendous situations should be given a fair hearing. Taking care of people in distress is the right thing to do, that’s why we made it law. We are obligated to offer them protection if we can (and we definitely can) first and assess the truth of their story second. The world signed the treaties on this after, in disgust at our behaviour of refusing entry to NAZI victims before we emptied them from the crematoria.

So where does Patel’s silly idea come from? Honest Boris and his Merry Men’s story is that not ever being allowed into the UK will deter refugees coming via dangerous routes. They think this will make them sound firm but caring. They also know it sounds to many like Trump’s wall. But they also know it will whip up a lot of acrimonious shouting, and the Sending Foreigners to Africa racial connotations will elevate the volume. And the ‘caring’ touch gives them all cover.

Johnson’s forebears (like Farage) knew they could tickle an innocent hint and the UK Bigot Media would roll out a racist bandwagon for the ignorant to jump on. This is an old trick. Hitler and Mussolini used it, but it’s fuelled pogroms since time began.

The other (very old) trick is distraction. Johnson has a problem, so make a noise to distract from it. The racist bit is just the trick to make the noise very loud and distracting.

My guess is that – despite their vacuity – the government know sending refugees to Rwanda is going nowhere. Even Honest Boris’ Simpleton Squad must be aware the legal, practical, huge financial and political difficulties of this make it a non-starter. It’ll go for a review or two and be disappointedly dropped. But it will have taken a lot of the Partygate hot air with it.

It’s a shame he had to play the race card. That lowers the acceptability bar on the next incitement. In the long run it brings the next pogrom nearer.

[23/04/2022]
The Economist makes a good point in an editorial this week. Patel’s proposal is essentially paying to outsource our responsibility to refugees. If rich countries can do this it divides the world into The Payers and The Refugee Recipients. We would be setting a precedent making it acceptable for the rich to never receive refugees again.

Amateur Chancellor

Shiny Rishi seems to have lost some of his buff this week. That your wife as a foreign national holds ‘non-dom’ status and can pay some tax elsewhere is perfectly legal. There’s no laws against having a US green card while in UK office. All in all these show modern international cosmopolitanism refreshingly at odds with the Little England Conservative Party, this Scotsman would have to approve wholeheartedly. For someone seemingly on track to lead a country it shows a disqualifying half-hearted approach to that country though.

Saint Rishi is a political novice. A professional would have fixed this long ago. But there’s also no laws against inexperience.

He’s just had a much bigger test however. Saint Rishi and Honest Boris got fined for breaking the covid law they wrote. This is unacceptable. It’s a piffling break of the rules. But their rules. They must make the example. And cabinet breaking criminal law is a step too far.

The expectation and precedent is that they resign. Johnson will never do that, he thinks himself above rules and doesn’t care what precedents he creates – no-matter the constitutional damage he does (something beyond his ken). Nobody will expect Johnson to do any decent thing and he’s unlikely to surprise us. Johnson’s had his time though, he’s done the top job and now’s just looking for money.

Saint Rishi however should be looking to his future. If he were a natural politician (or had better advice) he would resign now. The second from top job will be hard to relinquish, but he’d look principled and self-sacrificing. The black mark of the fine would quickly fade and his reputation would end up enhanced. Looking a man of integrity and wisdom in a year or less he’d be considered prime Prime Ministerial material. As a bonus he’d make his boss look like the self-serving crook he is.

The next day or so will prove his political qualities, and his future. If he goes – the sooner the better – the more competent a politician he is. Let’s hope he’s got that at least; he’s not been much of a chancellor.