Unearthing The Marker

A year ago, I wrote a blog about putting down a marker - a prediction for how the next year or so would spin out, following the result of the General Election the day before.

Of course, there's a Black Swan here that had no small impact on basically everything. Mister Coronavirus. First detected around about the time I wrote that first blog, actually, I think. That kind of means a bunch of predictions can't be assessed based on how we voted as a nation.

For example - all the predictions about everything getting worse for people who work for a living and have to pay rent and such, that was just a general look at how things were going in the first place, and an indication that under Johnson they would continue to slide assward. Which they have, though the Pandemic is just really seeking to heighten those difficulties and disparities.

Luckily, another tower block didn't burn down - but nothing has come of Grenfell. Total whitewash. As predicted.

We did, indeed, not get 50,000 more nurses. Government spending on the NHS wasn't ideal in any way, in fact. We also didn't get 20,000 more police officers.

I was wrong about there being precious little protest, though. And it was a protest that needed to happen.

A thing I couldn't take into account, as I said in that original post, was Brexit - and just how much of a shitshow that would be. We went from No Deal being "a million to one chance"...

...to it being basically inevitable by the end of the week. We went from everything would be great, to "we haven't lost our current trade deals with Canada so that's alright". Fisheries? The former department of Nigel Farage? Yeah, now we have some goons demanding that the Government dispatch the ROYAL NAVY to guard our fish stocks. Literal gunboat diplomacy.

And when we voted, last year, admit it - there was a swathe of people that wanted Boris Johnson as Prime Minister because it was funny, yes? Like, he promised Brexit, but also, he's funny and goofy and hahaha if you ignore the fact that he's a fetid prick with a serious tendency toward bigotry.

Well. Turns out that having a joke for a Prime Minister who promised you a good Brexit, means that you have a joke for a Prime Minister trying to negotiate your good Brexit, and that means you don't get one.

This whole thing is going to be an absolute disaster, and puff pieces are being run in the press even now, demanding that Remainers not gloat about the sorry state that this country is going to be in, in three weeks.

We aren't. We're going to be too busy worrying about our jobs, trying to afford groceries as they get more expensive, navigating a world wherein everything was made more difficult for everyone below a certain income bracket for....

...for what?

So the very wealthy can dodge a bunch of tax loopholes being closed and then make an absolute mint on the collapse of a nation's economy?

So the Tory Party can be more united, as was David Cameron's original plan back in the early-to-mid 2010s?

So our bananas can be bendy again?

Was anything, anything at all, worth what we are facing right now?

I don't think so. And I'm not smug about that. I'm tired, and in physical pain, and I'm sad, and I'm angry, and I'm afraid for the future of my friends and family and loved ones. Because we're the ones that have been sold up the river. We're the ones that will suffer the consequences - and a percentage of us will do so while grimly and doggedly believing that this was better than the alternative.

Oh, and by the way, an Australia-type deal IS No Deal.

Foxes Guarding The Henhouse

Just a brief one, but I feel this needs to go on record somewhere. It's only part of the wide shower of shit that is hitting a large number of fans, and probably the leaks of this information (from Whitehall and Government sources no less) are doing so to try and distract us - but I am pretty sure I can pay attention to corruption AND ever-rising Covid numbers at the same time, so.

The organisation Ofcom is Britain's official regulator for broadcast and electronic media. It covers TV, radio, telecoms; it is the adjudicating body when there are press complaints relating to television news, amongst other things.

In a breathtaking display of reach-around cronyism, Boris Johnson has decided to make Paul Dacre the head of Ofcom.

This is Paul Dacre.

Dacre has been the top of the Daily Mail totem pole for decades, having been made editor in 1992. Now if you know anything about the Daily Mail, or the Mail group in general, you will know that it is right wing to a degree that should make even the most wishy-washy centrist wince with discomfort. It is a rag. It has been referred to the Press Complaints Commission multiple times - and never really seemed to get punished very much.

I wonder if that's because Dacre was a member of the PCC for a decade, and following that was made Chairman of their Code of Practice Commission, a position he held for eight further years? Who knows, I'm sure.

Either way - you can probably ascertain his views on numerous topics by the way that the front pages ran under his guidance. Several fun topics include how everyone who didn't want Brexit was a "saboteur" or an "enemy of the state", and how several members of the Labour party were "terrorist sympathisers". He also has a specific set of guidelines on how women have to appear in photographs in the Mail, something that has attracted complaints, which are usually followed up with attack campaigns against the individuals that, um, didn't like him being sexist.

Oddly enough he and Boris Johnson apparently don't get on very well; Dacre once described Johnson as having "the morals of an alley cat", and accused him of having "a phalanx of minders to padlock his zipper".

His last year at the Mail, he was paid £2.5m.

He's not the only former editor of a massively right-wing newspaper being handed control of a swathe of the British media.

This is Charles Moore - or to be more accurate, Baron Moore of Etchingham.

Charles Moore loves Brexit and Donald Trump, he hates the BBC and the NHS, and he was a former editor of the Telegraph - a newspaper commonly called toe Torygraph due to its almost offensively obvious bias toward conservative and right-wing politics and attitudes.

Moore is a fan of banning muslims from travelling, and decided that two female members of the Labour party shouldn't win the leadership contest in 2015, because they were - quote - "grotesque". Not believing in climate change, Moore has called for a "bonfire of green regulations". He loves hunting, and he studied at Eton in the 70s, and he compared allowing same-sex couples any marriage rights to allowing people to marry their dogs.

He is, also, very soon to be made the chairman of the BBC.

It is notable that the Daily Mail covered this possibility like this:

So if all of a sudden all of the news channels start singing from the government's song-sheet, and anything questioning that particular angle gets sidelined, well... now you know why.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

Gold Beneath The Ruins

I blogged, once upon a time, about how screwed up the infrastructure of my home town is, and why it doesn't necessarily get fixed. In doing so, I talked about how Beirut got rebuilt, and the fact that doing so was considered an investment by the company doing it.

A ruined city, torn apart by a civil war that nobody living in it really wanted, became an investment opportunity.

For a more recent example - if you somehow missed the fact that Halliburton, a company that the US vice-president of the time (Dick Cheney) headed for five years, was given the keys (and the cash) to rebuild Iraq following the 2003 invasion... here is a reminder

It's not just actual warfare or mass destruction that results in profits, either. No, there's other ways. Shorting shares, for example. If you don't know how that works, there's a good description here, but let me give an example:

You know the price of milk is going to tank (harhar) so you go to your mate Billy the Milkman and ask if you can have ten bottles. You promise you will give them back tomorrow, and maybe give him some money on top of that. So he gives you ten bottles of milk.

You then go and sell the milk for its current market price - and overnight, the price of milk crashes. You sold the milk for £1 a bottle, and now it only costs 50p a bottle in the shops. (I don't know what would cause this, just roll with it.)

So - you take the £10 you made from selling the milk that wasn't yours, you buy 10 bottles for Billy the Milkman for £5, you give the bottles back to him, and give him £1 for his trouble. £4 profit for you, for essentially doing very little indeed, with things that aren't even yours.

It's only the rather unique way the stock and share markets work that allow this to happen, obviously. The thing is, though - it also allows people who can directly make money from shorting, to be in the sphere of influence or friendship with the kind of people who can influence share prices.

Let's say you are mates with Sheila the Shop Owner. Have been for years, went to school together, you used to work for the shop once upon a time. So you have a means to, for a period, influence the price of milk. So you go to Billy the Milkman, and instead of borrowing ten bottles, you borrow ten thousand.

You sell the ten thousand bottles of milk for £1 each. The next day, the town wakes up and the Shop is selling milk for - let's be conservative - 80p a bottle. So you take the £10,000 you just made, and you spend £8,000 to buy back the ten thousand bottles. You give them back to Billy. You give Billy £200 for his trouble, you give Sheila £800 for her time, and you pocket a cool £1,000.

These two examples are grossly simplified, but I think they give an accurate depiction of how this whole thing works.

Of course, shorting and share-dealing isn't available to literally everyone. It's a level of brokerage that you require expertise to get into, expertise and money of your own - getting that expertise also requires money - it's a literal class barrier.

What is missing from the example above, however, is what it means to everyday people like you and me - and how that would be represented is simple:

To cover the shortfall from a 20% reduction in milk prices, Sheila the Shop Owner cuts staff wages and increases prices everywhere else.

So we have two kinds of people, here; the majority, who would suffer if share prices suddenly dropped because the costs of such losses would be pushed down the line to the average consumer - and the minority, who would stand to not only avoid suffering under such circumstances, but could also make a significant profit from everyone else's misery.

That's pretty gross. It's amoral, obviously. It's also a built-in function of the system as it stands.

Why is this relevant?

Well - there have been several reasons why a referendum on our membership with the European Union has been suggested in the past ten years, one of the first being that our then-Prime Minister David Cameron wished to garner the support of the eurosceptics within his party. Throughout Ed Milliband's tenure in charge of the Labour party, he was strongly opposed to a referendum on leaving, which of course made Cameron's position much more concrete. More anti-immigration rhetoric started to creep into the justifications around 2014. It wasn't until the years following that the movement really started to pick up steam, though.

It was formalised in late 2015 - and the very beginning of 2016 began the formal introduction of an EU directive that had been years in the making, a package of anti tax-avoidance measures. Just a coincidence, I'm sure. Definitely just an absolute coincidence, that the Economic and Financial Affairs Council reached agreement on the directive literally two days before the referendum was due to take place. Just... plain lucky, I suppose.

But is that enough? The government has been utterly baffled by how much this little exercise is going to cost us individually and as a nation, or at least, has made little effort to be transparent to the public about such costs. Going so far as to quash the release of internal reports detailing suggested emergency measures, for when we start running out of insulin and all of the ports are in gridlock. It should still be patently obvious that the cost is going to be significant. We're already suffering for it.

Meet Jacob Rees-Mogg.

I'm going to do my best to not make any jokes about this man. What I will stick to is how he is relevant to what I am talking about.

1. Rees-Mogg is one of the hard-line Brexiteers within the Conservative party - he has gone on record as saying that the EU is a "threat to British democracy", which is a delicious irony given our current unelected PM just shut down Parliament because he wanted to.
2. Up until July 2019, Rees-Mogg was an advisor in finance company Somerset Capital Management. He "stepped down" from his role when he was made Leader of the House of Commons. He still owns 15% of the company, mind. It took the protective measure of opening a branch in Dublin to fend off some of the damage the finance sector will suffer during Brexit, another irony.
3. Rees-Mogg's father, William Rees-Mogg, was a Baron when he died in 2012. He'd worked for the Times, the BBC, and described Rupert Murdoch as a thoroughly nice chap. One of the books that Rees-Mogg Senior co-wrote with James Dale Davidson (ardent supporter of right-wing news company Newsmax TV) was all about how to make money in a crisis, and it was literally titled, Blood In The Streets. It was released in 1987. Here's the cover.

"The time to buy is when blood is running in the streets."

And that is why Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson will happily prorogue Parliament to push this through. That is why he will do literally anything he can to maintain the majority of one that he currently enjoys. That is why he will sidestep and countermand any check or balance that would allow Parliament from stopping us from leaving the European Union by any means necessary.

Because people like him, and people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, are part of that minority that will be just fine when it all crashes down. Because people like them already know how they are going to profit from the collapse. Because people like them have probably already optioned shares in the companies that will be brought in to fix the nightmare that will follow.

They have prorogued parliament, they will see Brexit through, they will call an election in November, and then let the chips fall where they may. All the better if they aren't the ones in government when the costs really start being counted and people really start hurting - when people start dying - when the blood is running in the streets.

Then you can watch them slink off, one at a time, resigning or retiring or taking some family time. To go back to their investment portfolios and their overseas homes, to avoid the fallout of their work.

They'll still be able to profit from the gold beneath the ruins.

But yeah, sure, project fear, we'll be fine.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

From Despair To Where?

I am sure most people reading this are aware of the current status of the country.

It was decided back in 2016 that, following a rather... controversial referendum, we would be leaving the European Union by... well, look at that, it was meant to be next Friday. 29th March.

And then all hell broke loose.

David Cameron, who delivered the Referendum, slipped off into the shadows to retire to the French Riviera or wherever it is that he lives now. Just like I predicted he would in this blog right here. I wasn't aware at the time of the forthcoming changes to EU tax regulation, that would have made the entire situation a lot murkier - but that is neither here nor there.

We were told we definitely weren't having a general election, which of course led to us having a general election. The new pick to lead the Tory party, Remain campaigner Theresa May, demonstrated her mandate to lead by immediately losing 13 seats in the House of Commons. She realised she didn't have a good enough majority to push anything through, so she paid the DUP a billion pounds to vote the way she wanted them to. This wasn't considered bribery, for reasons I am unsure of.

Those tasked with putting together the actual, you know, mechanism for leaving the European Union without all of our contracts and agreements simultaneously ending did apparently very little for about two years. Several members of the government decided that they would far rather have no deal than anything else, while several others didn't really know what they wanted. If anyone has had to do a group project in higher education, they will understand exactly how all that went.

The European Union itself agreed to a deal that was put in front of it by the Prime Minister. Given how hostile the attitude of about a third of this country had been towards them, the equanimity offered in return was nice to see. The issue, of course, was that there was a significant gap between the deal that the Prime Minister presented to the EU and the deal that the government - even members of the Prime Minister's own party - were willing to accept. So the EU waited for us to sort out what we actually wanted, while gently reminding us of the date and of the various things that could happen if the deal wasn't actually signed.

People got angry.

The Leave campaign was found to have been run illegally, were fined £81,000 for doing so, and the result of the referendum would have been declared non-binding and forcing a re-run - if it was actually binding in the first place. Because it was strictly advisory, it didn't, and so everything was fine. So we continued with plodding toward our leave date, because of course, just because the result wasn't legally binding doesn't mean that those who could stop it would be willing to. Also the corrections to the literal lies that were told throughout the campaign process didn't have to be published anywhere, so they just stuck around in people's heads.

Nigel Farage managed to keep himself in the news headlines constantly, despite apparently doing very little. He seemed to oversee a campaign about taking power back from unelected EU politicians, while having been an elected EU politician himself for five years, and nobody that turned up to any of the events that he ran seemed to be brave enough to ask him about that.

Labour demonstrated they were a serious opposition party by not really opposing us leaving the EU very much at all. Then a whole bunch of folks who would have been happier with Tony Blair still in charge decided to go and start another party, because their constant attempts at overthrowing the actual leader of their party met with Wile E. Coyote levels of failure. Their new party wasn't so much a new political party as a new business movement that isn't properly registered as a political party, but that doesn't seem to matter much right now.

Propaganda started showing up on the tables of Wetherspoons, because their owner is basically Al Murray's Landlord character but real and less funny. Businesses started shunting their future plans and current operations into bits of the world that aren't here. James Dyson reassured us that everything would be just fine, while shuffling his production lines over to Singapore. Jacob Rees-Mogg's finance company quietly relocated, and nobody inquired as to whether or not it was a conflict of interest for a standing MP to be involved with a finance company.

People got more angry.

Days went by. Time passed. We all kept going into work, and some of us started having meetings about what might happen as of 30th March. The rest of us just hoped that nothing much would happen at all. We hoped that the economists and the lawyers and everyone else were wrong, that nothing awful would happen, and we'd just be able to keep going as we were before - just with more to complain about, and with those who we could actually blame for this mess slipping off to the Riviera Cameron-style. But you know, paying less tax, because we'd no longer be part of EU tax-dodging regulations.

Lots of votes happened in Parliament. The House of Commons threw away the Prime Minister's deal, then threw it away again, then she had to be reminded that she can't keep bringing the same thing back over and over again, and yes, that's been a thing for about four hundred years, so it probably isn't an EU conspiracy. Then Parliament said they didn't want to leave with no deal, which made all the people who don't want to pay tax very angry. Then Parliament said they would like an extension to the date, please.

Two marches ran at the same time - one in support of leaving, one in support of a second referendum. The one in support of leaving consisted of between fifty and a hundred people. The one in support of a second referendum ran to around a million. An online petition on the government's official petition website racked up 4,960,000 votes in about a week, as of the writing of this blog. Several folks have made the snide but very witty observation that they won't care until it reaches 17.4 million, the number of votes for Leave. If the petition was allowed to run as long as the campaigning time for the referendum itself, a referendum we had to all legally be made aware was happening and all legally be given access to, I doubt that would be a problem.

Which brings us to today.

Nearly three years ago, I watched the results of the referendum being totalled, and this sick feeling started knotting itself up in my stomach - because I knew that this would go badly, and it would go badly in the worst way, because that is how things work. It couldn't just go straight to hell - it would bounce down every single step in purgatory first, so we land in the brimstone with broken bones.

Most people I know wouldn't change their minds on the referendum. Most of those that would, would vote Remain now. That is a very small sample size, and is probably not representative of the country - if anything it is more indicative of the kind of people I socialise with.

I have been called a traitor, a fascist, treasonous. Not by people that actually KNOW me, obviously. By people that know my vote and why I put it where I did. The woman who started the petition - which has picked up six thousand votes in the time it took me to write four paragraphs - has received literal death threats. I am sure that there are those who voted Leave who have received similar vile treatment. Probably those who didn't vote at all, too.

There isn't really a punchline for all this. There isn't really a conclusion, which makes this a bad essay. So what I will end with, is a simple statement.

If we really shouldn't ever take back our vote - if, while having as many votes as the Prime Minister wants in parliament is considered democratic and just fine, a second referendum would be considered totally undemocratic and a betrayal of the public - then I would like to remind the world that the referendum in June 2016 was, in fact, a second referendum.

Leave won this most recent one with 52% of the vote.

The first one - held in 1975 - was won by those that wished to remain, with 67% of the vote.

I mean, that looks like a mandate to me. But then, I'm not the one driving the bus.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Why We Should Stay

On 23rd June we will vote on whether or not we should leave the European Union.

This is the source of some quite heated debate, frankly - and I am thrilled on one level that people are actually engaging in politics at all. That's a fantastic change. I asked for some quotes on my Facebook, some of which are presented below:

"either way it is the elite who win"

"In because our government wants to rewrite the human rights act, take away workers rights and dismantle the NHS."

"Out democracy over bureaucracy!!"

"To quote a Clash song...should I stay or should I go !!"

I will put my heart on my sleeve right now, for purpose of bias sweeping: I think we should stay, and this blog is in part to tell you why - but also an observation on the campaign on both sides.

I'm not going to touch the amount of waffle there is in the media. There's a hell of a lot. Nor am I going to really touch on the absolute shitstorm of somewhat inaccurate facts being thrown around as gospel both for and against - though I suspect in a couple of cases on the Stay side that is rather deliberate, such as in the case of the BBC.

Anyone who pays attention will notice that the BBC's somewhat left-centrist news has shifted to the right a hell of a lot in the past three years. Could this be because their previous head of news was forced out after some vague allegations, and replaced with a former News Corp employee? Given that they now often toe the same line as the Murdoch press, it's hard to imagine otherwise.

Pardon. I digress.

What I'm going to touch on is those apparently in favour of staying, and those apparently in favour of leaving.

A list of those who have expressed support for the stay campaign includes names such as basically the entire Labour and Green parties, several former Chancellors of the Exchequer (who have actual economic experience), and...

...well I never, David Cameron.

Why?

Anyone who knows Dodgy Dave must know that leaving the EU would be a huge feather in his cap. They've been decrying his party's actions for a long time. Their troublesome clinging to the Human Rights act and their awkward tenacity for worker's rights - it's kind of counter to policy.

So why is he voting to stay, when most of the rest of his party - the NEW Tories it bears mention, not the old school like John Major - are voting to leave? Notably Theresa May, Iain Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson?

It's simple: he knows full well he is one of the most hated men in the country, and has said himself that he won't run in the next election. He's the perfect sacrifice.

It's the only reason he would publically condone something his friends and allies - including Rupert Murdoch - actively condemn. Even more so than the people actually making the policies that are killing and disenfranchising British citizens, the country HATES David Cameron, and will - like Pavlov's dogs - instantly go against anything he stands for.

Think about it.

If we as a nation vote to stay in then it is a final victory for him, a high point for him to end his career on. "At least at the end I could stick to my principles," he may say, as he waves and leaves Downing Street. A legacy. In 20 years, when we're not looking down the barrel of yet another recession, someone might look back and stay - hey, if we weren't in the EU, we might have had some serious issues. Bravo, David Cameron. Bravo. Release biography, make millions, retire to life of consultancy.

On the other side of the coin - if we vote to leave, then his party gets what it wants. He can slip out of the door having been shown it after supporting the Stay campaign, and leave the party in the hands of one of those folks that supported Leave. He's done a solid for his chums, and they won't forget it. Bravo. Release biography, make millions, retire to life of consultancy.

He wins both ways.

He's not the only fifth column, either. I mentioned the BBC earlier? Well, with their steadily more obvious right-wing leanings and the degradation of their brand as a news service, their apparent support of Stay by scaremongering Leave is going to undermine the Stay campaign significantly.

Which is of course exactly what Rupert Murdoch - you know, the BBC's head of news' previous employer - would want. He has his hooks in our government, and they love it; the less interference from outsiders, the better. He can't make a phone call and make the EU do his bidding - but he CAN engender some scurrying around from Tory HQ.

The same Tory HQ that will be making decisions on whether or not the BBC continues to exist - a BBC that is losing support daily in part down to its news direction; that old Thatcherite trick, to undermine while miming support, to allow failure, to declare unfit for purpose, and to monetise.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories. I believe the truth is right there if you look for it. It's not hidden in a huge web of deceipt and double-talk. All this that I have just told you is fairly simple, if you just look.

If we were to ever leave the EU, then it should be when our economy is strong, and we can easily weather the temporary hit that we are guaranteed to take in doing so. Negotiate from a position of strength. Right now - we don't have that strength. We like to think that we're the strong twenty-something that can leave any time they want and be just fine (which anyone living in this country will realise is just as much a fallacy, unless you have a REALLY good job). In truth, we're the frail old man, cantankerous and stubborn. We talk about how we can leave the nursing home any time we want, back in our day we did all this, we did all that, of course we'll be fine.

We think we're Dick Whittington. We're closer to Don Quixote - and if we keep going down the path of austerity, we'll end up as Weekend At Bernies.