tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150376092024-03-14T08:02:50.771+00:00Cicero's SongsMusings on World events from the perspective of a Social and an Economic Liberal.Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02090838836212624633noreply@blogger.comBlogger1337125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-51600901117031602012023-08-12T18:59:00.003+01:002023-08-12T18:59:58.600+01:00Concert and Blues<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn.</span></p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hope and truth and positivity, but in the dark night I carry their despair to bed and it becomes my own.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">I am tired of hearing the horrible stories. The utter cruelty that has been visited upon totally innocent people. I am tired of the painstaking way we continue to try to construct political coalitions to get Ukraine the critical support they need. This despicable invasion seems so self evidently a fight of good and monstrous evil, that we cannot understand how western leaders can even hesitate.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">We seem to be back to those terrible early weeks, where fear and grim determination was in the eyes of the Estonians as we faced the reality that if Ukraine lost, then we would face the same fate. Its different of course, we do not think that the Ukrainians will be destroyed now. Yet, yet the costs that they have to pay are so horrific.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Now the insanity of the Putinists has descended to drunken raving: mad threats to NATO, threats of nuclear attack and the constant barrage of demented hate from the Vermin in the Russian media. Another thing that has changed is that we now see that this is normal, that the Russians support this fascism. The perception of Russia as anything positive at all, has simply fallen to pieces. The tolerance for them has utterly gone. I know that those who have the perception must make the allowances, but even with my Russian friends I struggle not to feel profound rage and hatred, and I think that this is now everywhere that the Soviet flag once flew. I warn myself not to even consider hatred as an option. It is a symptom of how tired we all are, the fear never goes away, the little coiled spring at the back of your mind.... This could happen here. It could happen again.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">So why stay? Of course my life is here, I am settled, I love this country. To be driven out by runty Vova and his cast of gargoyles is insupportable. So I stay. But there is a price, even as the concert crowds gather, the shadows linger in the corners.</span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-628231622107195372023-02-24T08:36:00.000+00:002023-02-24T08:36:02.390+00:00One Year On<p> <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day!</span></p><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, the Estonian Prime Minister, and the whole country, is that Ukraine shall stand. Over 40,000 Ukrainian refugees are here, and per capita, Estonia leads the table of assistance given to Kyiv.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Estonia now believes that Ukraine can ultimately defeat Russia. Indeed defeat for Putin cannot be optional: the monstrous evil that has unleashed a totally unprovoked war against a peaceful (even sleepy) democratic neighbour will stop at nothing. The war has been marked by a brutality- child rape and torture and the murder of innocent civilians- that stands high in the catalogue of human crime. Yes, Putin could even overtake Hitler, Stalin or Mao as the Human race´s greatest murderer, were he to unleash his nuclear arsenal. The fact that this is even possible, is why Russia must be defeated and either restored to the ranks of civilized nations or destroyed.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Nor is it hubris to point out that the criminal regime in the Moscow Kremlin is a brittle and weak government. There are protests in Russia and an entire generation of well educated young men have walked away from Putinism. The brutality of operations in Ukraine reflects a primitive and weak system of government and a corrupt and incompetent high command. The splits between the thuggish Wagnerite, Progrozhin, the dimwitted homunculus, Kadyrov, and the bovine Putin loyalist, Shoigu, will be battle lines of a civil war as Putin´s power inevitably drains away. The return of the meat grinder has destroyed Wagner and is destroying even "elite" units that are not the poorly trained sweepings of Russian jails.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">With new equipment and better training, the ZSU can return to winning ways as snow and mud gives way to the drier summer. So after the tragedy of one year ago, we look to the future with hope, thanks to the courage of Ukraine.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Glory to Ukraine, To the Heroes, Glory! Слава Україні! Героям Слава!</span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-81215518048862653492023-01-21T18:43:00.002+00:002023-01-21T18:43:50.023+00:00A Hard Frost<p> <span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: helvetica;">After a week of slush and damp, tonight there is a hard frost in Tallinn.</span></p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">The general election campaign has started with the parties submitting their lists of candidates and announcing their programs. The polls seem to show a polarization of views. Although the Liberal Reform party of PM Kaja Kallas is set to remain as the largest party in the 101 seat Riigikogu, the steady rise of the far right EKRE seems to place them firmly in second place, replacing the Social Liberal Centre Party, who seem set to lose several seats. In addition to the Conservative Isamaaliit and the Social Democrat SDE, there is a fair likelihood that a new party will join these in Parliament, namely the Business/Green minded Eesti 200. The Greens and the Libertarian "Right wingers" look like they will struggle to gain seats. A Moderate Reform/SDE/E200 coalition would be a good outcome, but the numbers will have to fall just so, otherwise there remains the chance of another Centre/Isamaa/EKRE coalition, which is unlikely to be either stable or effective. There remain suspicions about EKRE, as there are about any far right group in the EU.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">The backdrop to the election is increasingly grim. There is a real sense of shock and anger that Germany has blocked any Leopards going to Ukraine, at a time when Estonia is donating over 1% of its entire GDP to Ukraine. Although the Baltic Assembly was diplomatic in expressing its disappointment, the truth is that the Balts feel increasingly exposed and deeply concerned about the prospects for a Russian counter attack.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">The stunningly callous way that Russia has been murdering its own soldiers is not a surprise, but the revised CIA assessment of Russian casualties:of over 188,000 of which nearly 120,000 are dead, remains shocking. Unfortunately the meat grinder is also hitting Ukraine, and several thousand Ukrainian troops were killed in the last week as Russia consolidated its hold around Bakhmut. The need for military assistance to Ukraine is becoming an emergency, and German delays will be publicly condemned in very strong terms from here and elsewhere, if Leopards are not on the move soon.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">In contrast British assistance in Estonia- Chinooks and more equipment, mostly, has arrived at the bases in Tapa and Amari and the cooperation between the UK and Estonia is increasing all the time.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Medvedev emerging from his Vodka bottle with more blood curdling nuclear threats can be discounted for the time being, but the longer this war continues, the more likely the use of nuclear weapons becomes. The depraved murderers in the Kremlin will stop at nothing, and they must be stopped. There is a growing sense that Germany may betray the Eastern flank, and that Russia has extended its subversive activities across the West.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">A hard frost indeed as we wait out the dark winter days.</span></span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-45317158464431905992022-09-27T09:42:00.002+01:002022-09-27T09:42:20.720+01:00KamiKwasi brings an end to the illusion of Tory economic competence<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">After a long time, Politics seems to be getting interesting again, so I thought it might be time to restart my blog.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">With regard to this weeks mini budget, as with all budgets, there are two aspects: the economic and the political. The economic rationale for this package is questionable at best. The problems of the UK economy are structural. Productivity and investment are weak, infrastructure is under-invested and decaying. Small businesses are going to the wall and despite entrepreneurship being relatively strong in Britain, self-employment is increasingly unattractive. Red tape since </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brexit has led to a significant fall in exports and the damage has been disproportionately on small businesses. Literally none of these problems are being addressed by this package. Even if the package were to stimulate some kind of short term consumption-led growth boom, this is unlikely to be sustainable, not least because what is being added on the fiscal side will be need to be offset, to a great degree, by the need for higher rates. Owing to the structural weaknesses of the economy, the depreciation of Sterling will not so much stimulate exports as import inflation. The Bank of England therefore will need to set rates increasingly high, and the sugar rush of this nominal fiscal stimulus will rapidly diminish. The fall in Cable yesterday was a sharp warning that an old fashioned Sterling crisis could be just around the corner.</span></span></p><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 14px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial;">Politically the package is more or less a disaster. "Reverse Robin Hood" is a charge that will stick and it is a very bad look from an Old Etonian chancellor. The shameless Mail and Express can witter all they like, but "massive tax cuts for the rich" is charge that cuts through, because its true. After nearly a decade of Tory sturm and drang, the voters are getting tired. Even a "coalition of chaos" looks good compared to this Conservative chaos. Tories may deride SKS as a dull figure, but such dullness is increasingly reassuring compared to the reckless and incompetent policies outlined yesterday. Over the course of the next six months, I predict, the voters will make up their minds that change is needed and the Conservatives must go. The glum faces on the government benches yesterday shows that the Tories fear this and also know that the chances of this actually working are not good. Meanwhile, the risks being taken with the economy could torpedo their party for a generation.</span></div></div>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0Tallinn, Estonia59.436960799999987 24.753574612.431215863876474 -45.5589254 90 95.066074600000007tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-20373717082038644792021-03-09T13:22:00.006+00:002021-03-09T18:35:30.172+00:00Media misdirection<p><span style="font-family: arial;">In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">As at December 2020, <a href="https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-70-of-test-and-trace-contracts-were-awarded-without-any-competition-12157638">70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made</a>. The program is overseen by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido_Harding">Dido Harding</a>, who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no noteworthy experience or competitive advantage, but which are owned or led by donors to the Conservative party.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In Estonia the cost of the <a href="https://news.err.ee/1125119/feature-estonia-launches-coronavirus-exposure-notification-app-hoia">Hoia</a> track and trace system was mostly carried by a small consortium of tech companies and the <a href="https://news.err.ee/1132208/estonia-s-coronavirus-notification-app-hoia-downloaded-100-000-times">cost to the state was €30,000</a>. Even all in the cost wa</span><span style="font-family: arial;">s less than €2 million. That is 0.005% of what it cost the UK, and although there have some glitches in the Estonian system, it has generally performed far better than the UK system.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Over the course of early 2020 the Conservative government spent a further £18 billion in generally untendered contracts for personal protective equipment for health care staff in the NHS. The way that these contracts were awarded, several -again- made to politically connected companies with little or no track record in the field, was <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-procuremen/uk-government-broke-the-law-by-failing-to-disclose-ppe-contracts-court-rules-idUSKBN2AJ1IA">found to be illegal </a>in the High Court on February 19th of this year.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">£55 billion has been spent by the Conservative government in a manner that is at best questionable and at worst actually illegal.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But the Conservatives´ allies in the UK media would far rather that we discussed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In a way you have to pity the discount British media, since the revenge that Harry and Meghan took on the feral press by talking to Oprah, the largest individual media figure in the world, instead of for example, the obnoxious Littlejohn or the shallow, self-regarding oaf, Piers Morgan, has been exactly the treatment that they deserved.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The fact is that the Conservative government is as dishonest as it is incompetent. Billions are being wasted and the UK media, and even if the average journalist understands the scale of the crime they do not seem to much care.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">We should care. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">We should demand a trial for those responsible for wasting public money on such a spectacular scale by paying their cronies.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">As to the media, that willfully ignores corruption and viciously attacks members of the Royal family (but not the ones facing actual legal investigation), they are contemptible. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-33739909498153311742021-01-02T11:27:00.006+00:002021-01-02T11:27:57.104+00:00Winning Ugly<p><span style="font-family: arial;">The <i>Daily Heil</i> and the <i>Daily Excreta</i> and rest of the off-shore and foreign owned British media are greeting the supposed Brexit day with made up drivel about new dawns and nonsense about <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9104299/Macron-says-Brexit-product-lies-false-promises.html" target="_blank">splits in President Macron´s family</a>, while -with no irony at all- <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55499773" target="_blank">Boris Johnson´s father applies for French citizenship</a>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">So Brexit Britain. As bitterly divided as ever and with the incompetent clique of Conservative journalists, PR bullshitters and other ne´er-do-wells who by a nasty fluke have ended up in power are costing the country millions every time they take another ill-judged or unfair decision. The latest nonsense is the series of U-turns on the second jab for elderly patients and the hokey-cokey on whether schools reopen next week. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The far right have got their victory. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">They have Britain out of Europe and a clique of like minded inadequates in charge.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">They won.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But they won ugly. They won by bare faced lies. They won with the support of dodgy foreign money. They won with a corrupt and biased media and a rigged electoral system. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">There will be a price for this ugly victory. Because the truth is that Britain still faces all of the same challenges we faced before. We still have a sclerotic economy based on dodgy financial deals in the City. We have a school system that is used as a political football and which systematically drives talented educators into the ground. We have badly structured and poorly funded medical services which receives only lip service and PR from a Tory party that doesn¨t much respect the NHS. We have a centralized and unaccountable political system where corruption is flourishing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Brexit will not relieve the burdens on British business, it will increase them. Small businesses are being drowned in new regulation while much of the corporate interest, which also often makes large donations to the Conservative coffers, has flourished, even in Covid times.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Almost unnoticed the political temperature is rising.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The mismatch between the declarations of Johnson and his cronies and reality is growing so big that even the propaganda sheets masquerading as newspapers admit that things could go badly wrong with their policies "if Boris screws it up"... the scapegoat ready and waiting.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Ministers are dropping the ball so regularly that even <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/05/robert-jenrick-controversy-was-factor-in-ethics-advisers-resignation" target="_blank">the kind of ethics problems of Robert Jenrick that would get a private sector executive fired</a> and<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/10/boris-johnson-legal-challenge-priti-patel-bullying" target="_blank"> behaviour from Priti Patel</a> that could trigger major disciplinary sanctions are likewise ignored. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The sleaze is growing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Soon the butchers bill will start to be paid.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-54881511537962297602020-12-23T10:05:00.001+00:002020-12-23T10:06:25.837+00:00Britterdämmerung<p> <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The growing problem for the Conservatives now is that, while a no deal is likely to cause a pretty sharp economic contraction, even a "deal" cannot now avoid most of the same problems. The core of the cabinet has no business experience and their critical failure to understand that UK PLC needs time to plan and respond in order to avoid disruption is now leading the country to a major crisis. The infrastructure of customs and immigration simply does not exist and the utter incompetence of the Home Office starts with the useless and unpleasant Ms. Patel herself. I could go down the cabinet, but everyone, even Tory loyalists know: Johnson is NBG and most of the cabinet are worse.</span></p><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">"Even the best of political leaders would struggle in the current crisis" is the get out clause the Tories are giving themselves, but in the country at large public opinion seems increasingly to believe that the Tories have caused the Brexit part of the crisis themselves and their handling of the Covid part of the crisis is a shambles. Then there is the growing whiff of corruption.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">There are now two more crises barreling down the track: the economic fall-out, which will see a major cull of small and medium sized businesses and a major pick up in unemployment. Sunak´s policies are a not especially good band-aid on the severing of a major artery. The emerging battle for the Tory leadership will ensure at least a six month delay before the Treasury can focus, and it is already too late now. The Scottish Parliament elections in May might also add to the growing sense of Britterdämmerung, although just possibly these may be delayed to October for Covid reasons. By that time the SNP civil war may finally impact their support, but unless such a delay occurs the Brexit, Covid and economic crisis will be joined by an existential threat to the UK itself.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">No one could say that this was a good record. Although slower, this government is already in its 1992 Black Wednesday meltdown and the 1997 style defeat seems a growing prospect, or quite possibly a major realignment on the scale of 1922.</span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-25497618399461755712020-09-29T16:50:00.000+01:002020-09-29T16:50:44.150+01:00Peace, Retrenchment, Reform Part I<p><a name="_Hlk51243145"><i><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In December 1905 Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman (C.B.) became
Prime Minister and a month later he led the Liberal Party to a landslide
victory. It was by some margin the most radical government to date. 115 years ago C-B still chose the old Liberal
campaign slogan of “Peace, Retrenchment, Reform”. Over a century later James Oates thinks the future
success and prosperity of our country now depends on rediscovering our Radical
traditions and has written three articles on translating them into a coherent
programme for the future. This is the
first essay: “Peace”.</span></i></a></p>
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk51243145;"></span>
<h1>Peace: The Place of Britain in the World<o:p></o:p></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>The challenges we face<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Liberalism, from the Midlothian campaign of 1880 onwards,
has always been an outward looking ideology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We understand that there are core democratic principles that do not
change, no matter what the country or the culture. These principles are
enshrined in the United Nations Charter and include an unbreakable commitment
to the dignity of the individual, the equality of men and women and to promote
the progress of human rights and social justice. The “scourge of war” can only
ever be used as a final resort and in the defence of these collective values. These
are fundamental Liberal principles, and indeed many Liberal politicians and
thinkers have made major contributions to the cause of world peace and
international justice. As Gladstone in 1880 spoke up against the crimes of the
Ottomans in Bulgaria (for which, by the way he has a street named after him in
Sofia), so each subsequent Liberal generation has campaigned for international democratic
freedoms and against injustice.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is why Liberals, from the beginning, have supported the
European Union, because from its inception it was conceived as a project that
would build peace in a continent that had experienced three major wars and
several more minor wars in a single lifetime between 1870 and 1945. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the past five years the grinding battle over British
relations with the rest of Europe has overshadowed all else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result has been an economic and political
crisis that has destroyed our international reputation and threatens our very
integrity as a state. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Leaving the EU has made Britain far more vulnerable to
political and economic pressure from China, Russia, the US and indeed from the
EU itself. In fact Britain has also been made vulnerable to subversion and
corruption, and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>yet the report of the
House of Commons Intelligence and Security committee, finally released on 21<sup>st</sup>
July this year could not assess the scale of this subversion threat in the UK,
because the intelligence services had been purposely denied permission to
investigate. Nevertheless it would be safe to assume that a significant and
ongoing Russian subversion operation against Britain has been active for
several years and that it is likely that similar bribery and subversion
techniques proven to have taken place in other Western states have been used
against us. Such activity has included proven financial support for The <i>Front
National </i>(now renamed <i>Rassemblement National</i>) in France.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the United States there are highly credible
allegations of Russian support, practical and financial, for Donald Trump.
Therefore in Britain close personal relationships between proven Russian
intelligence operatives and several domestic political figures, such as Alex
Salmond (employed by Russian propaganda channel RT) and several leading
Conservatives, including significant financial contributions by Russians to the
Conservative Party, is and should be, a great concern to us. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Britain is facing new threats on a daily basis. Subversion,
hybrid war, and cyber war are being waged against us and we have been
struggling to find an effective response. The collapse of the national standing
of our country has already increased the damage inflicted from contending
Russian, Chinese and indeed even American and European interests.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The cynical, transactional foreign politics of China, and
Russia, and even- under Trump- the United States, are a direct threat to the
principles of the UN charter which are designed to defend the interests of
smaller and weaker states from larger and stronger, and as such they directly
threaten British national interests. The fact that the Johnson government
itself has been prepared to jettison even basic principles of international law
is an act which Liberals should take very seriously, up to and including
seeking prosecution for those responsible. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As part of our commitment to international justice Liberals
have promoted British commitment and funding of international development. In
fact, the DFID has been a noted success, promoting technology transfer and
improving the lives of millions of the very poorest in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That success has rested on expertise and a
non-transactional approach. We promote genuine goodwill to our country because
we do not generally put strings attached on the assistance programmes we have
funded. The decision by the Johnson government to merge DFID and the Foreign
Office and to explicitly link projects to British interests will not promote
Britain, and in fact will diminish the effectiveness of our programmes and the
positive image we have had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yet the greatest, international challenge is climate change.
It is only in concert that humanity can use the tools we have to stop and even
reverse climate change. Again, our European allies have been most aligned in
facing this challenge. Vast investment in new technologies will need to take
place, and Britain, as a country vulnerable to sea level rises, must become far
more active in addressing the crisis. Coordinating our own measures with those
across the planet is a huge challenge, and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The continuing challenge of Putin’s Russia, the growing
challenge of XI Jinping’s China and the disaster of Donald Trump in the USA
underlines the need to Britain to continue to work for the principles of the UN
and Atlantic charter and to restore our damaged links with the European Union.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As Liberals, we believe that our national interests are best
served by an unshakable ideological commitment to these ethical norms of
democracy, global justice and peace. We fought the Cold War in order to protect
those core beliefs, and our support for our membership of NATO is rooted in the
Atlantic Charter, upon which rests both the NATO treaty and the UN Charter. The
damage that the Trump administration has done to these principles underlines
why we may need to establish a foreign policy less aligned with the United
States.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What we have learned is that pacifism itself does not
preserve peace, it is our willingness to defend our freedoms that maintains
them and promotes them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet our ability
to defend ourselves is being compromised by new threats and the decline of a
key ally, the United States, which under Donald Trump, has seriously reduced
its commitment to NATO, and to a degree abandoned some of the principles upon
which the Atlantic alliance was founded.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>What is to be done?<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The battle against climate change may begin at home, but it
still requires Britain to reach out to all nations. However, we need to
interact with different nations in different ways. Britain may issue a
declaration of goodwill to all nations, but it will not be reciprocated. The
fantasy that we can return to global influence on the back of an abbreviated
form of the British Empire, CANZUK or some restructured Commonwealth is just
that, a fantasy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Australians, Canadians
and New Zealanders have fused their native cultures with cultures beyond the
British Isles to create new, hybrid nations which do not look to UK an any way,
and most likely will soon abandon the Monarchy, Neither has our historically
close relationship with the United States delivered much on the battle against
climate change. Meanwhile our immediate European neighbours face similar
challenges to ourselves. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is clear that our first priority is to rebuild trust with
our European neighbours and major trading partners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An early goal should be to quickly restore as
much as possible of the links and cooperation that the Conservatives have
wilfully damaged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem for
Britain is that for practical reasons of administration and budget disruption,
immediate EU re-entry is likely to need some time to adjust to the new situation.
So, while a Liberal or Liberal coalition government might seek an immediate
restoration of the <i>status quo ante</i>, there will still need to be a period
of adjustment before any return to the EU is realistically possible. This is would
certainly be for a minimum of one budget round, which lasts 7 years. So Even if
a decision is made to seek re-entry today, then the earliest likely re-entry
date would most likely be in 2027, and the longer we delay reapplication, the
less likely that even this target could be achieved. So full re-entry might
need to wait until 2034. The truth is that for much of the next decade we will
not be able to repair the damage that the Conservatives have inflicted, and for
the time being there is not the political will to even begin such a process.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the interim, Britain will need to tackle the failings in
its own defence and while aligning our trade and wider economic policies with
the EU, this will be on the basis of minimising the damage rather than
proactively contributing leadership to the European Union.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Meanwhile, even post-Trump, the United States will be asking
the European allies to contribute more to their own defence. In this area,
Britain can contribute greatly. Although the West European Union of European
NATO states was declared defunct in 2011, Britain could lead the drive for a
replacement that could co-ordinate the European NATO states, including non-EU
states such as Norway, Iceland, Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and
Turkey. Equally, relationships with neutral EU member states, such as Ireland,
Austria and especially Finland and Sweden could become closer. For historical
reasons Sweden and Finland have struggled to accept membership of NATO, even
while they acknowledge the deadly threat that Putin’s Russia is offering them.
A British policy of support and participation for a more independent European
security pillar will help the European security architecture and help to
rebuild trust and respect for British capabilities.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As part of that more open policy Britain should consider
changing our nuclear deterrence posture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is increasingly clear that our submarine based ballistic missiles
systems are out of date. Submarines are increasingly easy to track and thus are
becoming useless. More to the point, the UK Trident fleet relies on support
from the United States, and in particular relies on regular refitting at the
King’s Bay naval base in Georgia. It cannot be said to be an independent
nuclear deterrent in any meaningful sense of the word, and the advent of the
Trump administration underlines that this could be a very dangerous position
for Britain. If the country is to maintain at least a minimal deterrent, then a
lighter, more flexible delivery system, not to mention a cheaper one, should
now be developed. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">British capabilities in intelligence remain formidable, and
this must be maintained. Cyber attacks are launched against us on a daily basis
and the state actors behind these attacks should be challenged and defeated.
This will require renewed support to operations such as GCHQ that are in the
front line in this conflict. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Climate change is an ethical as well as a technical and
economic challenge. The fact is that the poorest on the planet have little
choice about wither the things they do to keep themselves alive harm or help
the planet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the key successes in
British overseas aid has been helping to change this. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Make talking the climate emergency the policy
priority<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Promote a foreign policy based on Liberal
principles<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Rebuild our relationship with the EU, before
ultimately seeking to rejoin<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Reinforce our defences against subversion and
corruption<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Modernise and develop our armed forces<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Seek a lighter and cheaper form of nuclear
deterrence, not dependent on the US <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Extend our capabilities in cyber and hybrid
warfare<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Work with our European neighbours on key matters
of military and political security<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Maintain and develop our role in international
development<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Support those in authoritarian countries who
wish to move to democracy and freedom <o:p></o:p></p>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-58371985357385111662020-06-11T09:39:00.000+01:002020-06-11T09:39:05.304+01:00An Ever Flowing Stream<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>“But let justice roll down like waters,<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and righteousness
like an ever-flowing stream.”</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Amos 5:4</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The response in Britain to another murder of a Black Man by
American police has been curious. The UK is much more comfortable inhabiting
the past than discussing the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Working out a path towards a more just and fair society is hard to do,
it involves discussing the warp of the crooked timber of humanity, accepting
difference, making uncomfortable choices.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, we did not do that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We choose instead to condemn the past, rather than build the future. This
is not to say that there is nothing to condemn in the corpulent complacency of
the tycoons of the slave trade. The profits in trading human lives were made in
suffering and blood that seems inconceivable to any rational human, and yet it
was so. Nevertheless, the past is no less difficult than the future, for every Edward Colston there was a William Wilberforce. Eventually the British Empire was among the
very first to abandon slavery and then to fight it.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Britain itself, of course, it had long
been established that slavery was illegal. There is a context to the past which
is lost in the easy answers of the mob. In the end we must condemn the slavers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet once all the statues have been removed, what then?</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is ridiculous to place Churchill in the same disgusting
Pantheon of evil as Adolf Hitler, yet if we fail to do that, then we apparently
are complicit in the Bengal famine.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The crimes
of Cecil Rhodes are different from the crimes of Edward Colston, South Africa
thousands of miles and hundreds of years from the West African slave markets. Yet
some among the protesters demand that we condemn Colston, Churchill or Rhodes
with the same vehemence as we condemn Heydrich, Hitler or Stalin.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Honestly, I think this is to draw the wrong
lessons from our past. Relative evil or relative good are concepts that history
invents for each succeeding generation, we are always rewriting the past, since
the past lives in us in every passing day, but to turn Churchill from a half
angel to a whole devil is a judgement that few fair minded people would make,
whatever the social context of his times and indeed of our times.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, when the fuss has died down, what then?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A few empty plinths, a few art installations, but
fundamentally we need to unite to build a common future.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Britain we do not have the legacy of segregation
that so poisons society in the United States. The fact that slavery was the original
sin of the United States made Martin Luther King’s plea for brotherhood so
powerful. Yet inter-marriage in the United States remains low, prejudice
remains high, and injustice remains a daily occurrence.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Britain inter-marriage rates are ten times
higher than the US. People of African or Asian heritage are joining the body of
our society in the same way as Vikings or Huguenots have done in previous centuries.
Our social context is not the same, the slavers have been dead for nearly three
centuries, while American segregationists still walk the streets… and vote for
Donald Trump.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The challenges for Britain are not the same, even though US
culture is present in our living rooms daily, through TV shows (and TV
news).</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For Britain is far more of a
cultural melting pot than the United States.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It may not be evident that political, cultural and social assimilation is
more far reaching in the UK than the US, and yet it is so. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are those, both black as well as white, who are
uncomfortable with the idea that cultures evolve and merge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fanatics who talk of “cultural
appropriation” clearly do not understand what culture is, nor that “imitation
is the sincerest form of flattery”. These cultural separatists are as prevalent,
if not more so, on the political left as on the right. They are just as wrong
headed and poisonous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fact is that
to build a just and fair future we must initiate ourselves to the cause of
respect and openness; we must remember our common humanity and we must remember
that humanity is a flawed and partial state. If we are to build a common
political will, then sooner or later we must accept that there is not “us and
them”, there is only “us”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, as we examine our past, and contemplate past cruelties
and injustices we must also take lessons to the present and to the future.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is not particularly wise to let mob rule
dictate who we commemorate, especially when such judgments are often incomplete,
yet we must learn to understand our past in the context of the future that we
wish to build.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We need to engage in a
national discussion as to what we can do to ameliorate injustice, but this
cannot take place in the context of the American culture wars.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I cannot be the only one who feels very uncomfortable that
the debate about racial justice seems to be immediately hijacked by debates
about many other forms of injustice, and that some of these discussions are
spectacularly intolerant.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Watching
Etonian educated Eddie Redmayne and the almost equally privileged Daniel
Radcliffe condemning Jo Rowling for expressing the concerns that many women
feel about Trans rights has been extremely uncomfortable. The truth is that
women in general have been treated unfairly in our society, and certainly in
terms of numbers that is a greater injustice than the injustices made against Trans
people. Yet to even state this truism risks being condemned as a bigot, since
it implies that one may be equivocal about Trans rights.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The fact is that there needs to be a respectful
discussion, and being quick to condemn in such a sensitive topic risks
undermining the whole campaign for greater social justice. I am a great admirer
of Jan Morris, whose wise and warm books show much of the best of humanity, but
there are more sinners than saints amongst humans, and a debate about Trans
rights that refuses to acknowledge that there may be evil doers, risks creating
far more dangerous problems, and it is not bigoty to acknowledge that the world
is not perfect and even amongst victims of injustice there may be plenty of flawed
and hostile humanity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Justice is the fundamental goal of a healthy and happy
society.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet our social organisations
tolerate inequalities and differences to quite a high degree. The question is
when does economic inequality become economic injustice, and I would argue that
this is when the poor have so many barriers that they cannot become rich no
matter what, and when the rich have so many protections and privileges </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">that they cannot become poor. This asymmetry is
true in most levels of injustice: hostile prejudice on the basis of sex, race,
religion or sexual orientation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The crooked timber of humanity will not give clear answers,
not matter how we may wish for them, but we can at least understand our own
biases and work together for the greater good.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the end, like Elizabeth I, we should not seek “windows on men’s souls”,
we should accept positive actions and not seek to condemn what people may feel
uncomfortable with.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We should discuss
the future, not be imprisoned by the past and we should above all, reflect our
common humanity as the highest goal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It may sound idealist, but Justice is built on the search
for a better way. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<br />Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-27934228147235146342020-01-22T13:47:00.000+00:002020-01-22T13:47:06.671+00:00Post Truth and Justice<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics. Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and the judgments that they made. Edward Murrow or Walter Cronkite in the USA and Alistair Cooke or Charles Wheeler in the UK established reputations for accuracy and integrity, while not generally compromising their core beliefs. If bias was unavoidable, then let those biases be informed and educated... and declared.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Instead of journalistic judgement, the current generation of opinion leaders in the UK and the USA have formed a political-media complex, where reporting and politics exist in a co-dependency of lies. Obvious conflicts of interest are simply not acknowledged. For example, those UK newspapers that are most hostile in their reporting of the affairs of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are all facing legal action from the Royal couple. This is simply not discussed by the media outlets involved. For example, Piers Morgan- a disreputable journalist with a series of scandals in his professional career- faces personal involvement in one of the cases, but he never declares his interest, while all the time spewing bile and simple lies about his accusers. Nor is Morgan alone. As <i>Foreign Affairs</i> magazine noted in 2016, despite noticeable high spots: The Economist, the BBC and the FT, <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/08/the-tragic-downfall-of-british-media-tabloids-brexit/">the level of journalistic integrity in the UK was abysmal</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Journalists have often made the jump to politics, but rarely have so many maintained their income solely from journalism after being elected. Winston Churchill, admired to the point of adulation by our current journalist-Prime Minister, had also been a soldier and successful author as well as a journalist. Now journalists simultaneously prosecute a political career, but they are player and policeman at the same time. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson have long been paid more by their proprietors than by the state for their services and no man can faithfully serve two masters. As the level of journalistic integrity has fallen, so has political propaganda reached new depths of lies and deceit. So too the behaviour of our political leaders focused less on reality and more on selling the story. The citizens of the state, who pay these men to serve them, are being radically short changed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The twisted agenda of the political-bullshit complex has reached its apogee in the self serving trip of Donald Trump, but The right wing in the UK too has been no less disconnected from reality. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When Truth is relative and reality subjective, the capacity of the state for injustice is limitless. Every foundation of our society, from law to science, demands objective standards and a minimum level of integrity in applying them. If our political leaders refuse to apply these standards then they undermine not only their own integrity but also the integrity of the state itself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That is not a prospect that any democrat can view calmly.</span><br />
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<br />Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-32073271434490156172019-12-23T11:38:00.002+00:002019-12-23T11:44:51.013+00:00We need to talk about UK corruption<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After a long hiatus, mostly to do with indolence and partly to do with the general election campaign, I feel compelled to take up the metaphorical pen and make a few comments on where I see the situation of the UK in the aftermath of the "Brexit election".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">OK, so we lost. We can blame many reasons, though fundamentally the Conservatives refused to make the mistakes of 2017 and Labour and especially the Liberal Democrats made every mistake that could be made. Indeed the biggest mistake of all was allowing Johnson to hold the election at all, when another six months would probably have eaten the Conservative Party alive. It was Jo Swinson's first, but perhaps most critical, mistake to make, and from it came all the others. The flow of defectors and money persuaded the Liberal Democrat bunker that an election could only be better for the Lib Dems, and as far as votes were concerned, the party did indeed increase its vote by 1.3 million. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">BUT, and it really is the biggest but of all: the party was simply not prepared for the general election. As my friend and colleague, Craig Harrow, candidate in Ross, Skye and Lochaber, told me on the day the election was declared: "Its simple: the election is 6-12 months too soon for us to win". That was true in Gordon and in many other seats, we simply had not done enough ground work and we knew it. It was, after all only 2 years since the previous election. Establishing credibility for the Lib Dems is everything, but the idea that we could win seats such as Esher, where the Tories had a majority of over 23,000 simply because Dominic Raab is a bit of a shit, was simply wrong. By contrast, we could not hold North Norfolk, despite plenty of signs that Norman Lamb wanted to stand down. The Tories were prepared, and we were not. In Scotland, the London media refused to look to closely at the SNP claims to be the voice of remain and we were squeezed, even in areas that were Liberal or Liberal Democrat for two or even three generations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As the pressure grew, headquarters staff were stripped to campaign in held seats, and the efficiency of the campaign, never that great to be honest, simply fell apart. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The targeting became more and more frantic and less and less effective as again and again the Liberal Democrat message was ignored and derided in the air war and laughably inept in the ground war. Having made much of being "candidate for Prime Minister", the party had no come-back when this debatable claim was drowned in the false choice between Johnson and Corbyn. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yes the media was astonishingly biased: I was asked repeatedly "But what are you <i><u>really?</u></i>" As though Liberalism was some jumped up fraudulent ideology, when of course that is Conservatism. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Simon Jenkins put out a classic example of the genre, to which my response is simply: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/16/lib-dems-tories-split-vote-labour" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">f*** you!</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I think my favourite joke of the campaign was "Robert Peston is so far up Johnson's a**e, that he can see Laura Kuenssberg's feet". Even by the despicable standards of the corrupt right wing press, the coverage was disgraceful, and this time even the broadcast media simply went along with it. The UK fourth estate now forms a dubious celebrity continuum which starts with Katie Price, goes on to Kay Burley, La Kuenssberg and ends with Alexander Boris de Pfeffel "Johnson". The </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/victory-boris-johnson-election-jeremy-corbyn" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Political-Bullshit complex</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> has twisted the truth and placed our country into the hands of immoral and degraded crooks. Johnson can't even tell us how many kids he has, never mind the scale of Russian influence peddling at the highest quarters in the UK. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Which brings me onto the next five years.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We have already seen the scale of the corruption of the Trump administration- it is after all why he has become only the third President- and the first Republican- in history to be impeached. Johnson has the same attitudes and the same dangerous recklessness, he also has the same <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/22/johnson-visit-to-lebedev-party-after-victory-odd-move-for-peoples-pm">questionable relationship to Russia</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The <a href="https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/is-crispin-odeys-low-profile-in-anticipation-of-a-peerage-20191216">rumours of a peerage for Crispin Odey</a> are just the standard low-grade patronage/corruption that the House of Lords has long been known for, and likewise the peerage for Zac Goldsmith. Yes it shows bare faced contempt for the voters that just threw him out, but hey the PM's old Etonian mate is not the first to be rewarded for failure. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/13/tories-russian-money-report">Likewise the suppression of the report detailing the large amount of questionable Russian money given to the Tories</a>. It is outrageous, but no more than the average episode of "Yes Prime Minister".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">However, given the fact that most administrations start as they mean to go on, then I think we can already see the second theme of the Johnson government, the fifteenth Prime Minister of the reign of Elizabeth II, and quite possibly the last. Of course Brexit will remain the first touchstone for the UK, and if economists, businessmen, financiers and other people apparently less skilled than Johnson are to be believed, then the next few years will be pretty unstable. Covering up mistakes will be the natural bias of the regime, and given that the Conservatives do not have a shining record of unblemished competence, mistakes there certainly will be. So incompetence covered up with lies. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I think we can predict with a reasonable degree of confidence that the Home Office will screw up several high profile cases and doubtless the reputation of the country will be further damaged. That is simply business as usual for the Home Office, and the aggressive and obnoxious Pritel Patel will demand ever more aggressive and obnoxious policies. On the bright side though, after the third or fourth scandal she will most likely be an early casualty. The UK will move sharply from migration magnet to brain drain and Johnson certainly will not be blaming himself for the sudden exit of academics and staff shortages in the NHS.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Then there is the elephant in the room: the City of London. Odey's oleaginous toadying may get him a peerage, but almost immediately after January 31st the EU will undertake a comprehensive review of MIFID II. Germany in particular does not consider that London's financial markets are "socially useful". In fact it is well known that more or less all the German political class views the City as a den of thieves. It is London that has hosted the most egregious examples of financial mismanagement and corruption, from money laundering through Baltic banks to the wholesale theft of Russian, Arab or even Chinese assets. It is not the Panama, Luxembourg or Maltese companies that lead the world in corruption: it is onshore British, and there is surely a scandal brewing about how much the UK authorities both knew and were even complicit in huge levels of financial crime. If Brexit itself does not cause the UK to tighten up its own house, then the continuing EU will force the pace. So the supporters of Brexit, who were quite willing to sell out the UK family owned farms to US agri-businesses, and equally happy to sacrifice the Pharmaceuticals companies and the auto sector to the US and Germany respectively will also find that UK finance will need to be seriously reformed if it is to survive the post Brexit world. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So after probably the most corrupt election I can ever remember, I do not hold out much hope for the future. Yes we failed, and yes we fell into every trap, yet in the final analysis, we were right: Johnson is unfit for office. While he walks in victory today, as sure as night follows day, his own flaws will find him out. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The utter tragedy is that the price of our failure will be paid for by the whole country and will be in the hundreds of billions remarkably quickly. The future of our economy, our healthcare system, our national reputation looks bleak indeed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So, I will consider what to do. I have a job overseas and the dubious prospect of campaigning for another five years for a very iffy chance to enter the House of Commons is not one that looks especially appealing. On the other hand, the people who are the government now are likely to fail... so what then?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps I should simply return to using this blog as a bully pulpit, to talk to politicians rather than to attempt to be one. Well, over the Christmas holidays I will think about it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So I wish my readers a Happy Christmas and let us hope for a better 2020.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-49978036236725218652018-12-10T13:47:00.000+00:002018-12-10T13:47:17.917+00:00The Will of the People<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.112px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.112px;">“There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.112px;">The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately outflanked by the position of Jacob Rees Mogg and other Conservatives who were equally determined that "Brexit means Brexit", in other words the complete severing of all ties between the EU and the UK.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.112px;">The Conservative civil war on Brexit has been the single most destructive political dispute in my lifetime. The Extremists will not compromise with anyone, and they are so determined to have their way that they threaten violence: the laughable Mr. Farage threatens to "pick up a rifle". </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.112px;">So these extreme right wing figures, in the pay of Russia, claim to be patriots while systematically trashing the political rules of our country and even common decency. Farage, Rees Mogg, Johnson are all guilty men, and in the face of the current crisis, it is equally clear that they must be stopped. I would advocate an EFTA based compromise to avoid the damage we will face before we rejoin, but in the face of the arrogant intransigence of the Brexit crew, I find that I am even more determined to get a People's Vote and crush those who have been so utterly irresponsible with the UK's economy and its political culture. </span></span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-74613994117451905622018-11-20T08:52:00.000+00:002018-11-20T08:52:17.071+00:00Brexit update...<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The political discourse over most of my lifetime has been "who are these lying liars who are lying to me". It is incredibly rare to get an interview that tells you who a politician and why they believe what they believe. No wonder we get the "you are all the same" on the doorstep. The fact is that on all sides of the political spectrum and, indeed the Brexit debate, there are genuinely honest and caring people trying to do their best for their constituents and the country- often at considerable personal cost. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That a small group of fanatics have been able to hijack politics, injecting poison and lies- yes Nigel "reach for my shotgun" Farage and Dominic "misleading" Cummings, I'm talking about you- is deeply regrettable. The media who create an equivalence between true and false in the interests of "balance" are at least as guilty as politicians themselves. The BBC prefers the "entertainment" of a political cock fight to the "informing" and "educating" part of their mandate, and that should give us considerable pause.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I still believe that the best option for our country is to stay in the European Union, however I accept that many people- for quite valid reasons- have a different point of view. What I cannot except is the reckless way that extremists in the Brexit camp are prepared to risk major economic harm by advocating a Brexit that includes a total break at every level- especially as our country's enemies in the WTO, such as Russia, seem set to cause major trouble even on the most basic WTO accession. Leave won the referendum, but by a small margin and, as we now know there are increasingly murky circumstances around Russia, the funding and indeed the truth or otherwise of the campaign. Before the fanatics shout back "Project Fear"- the fact is that a lot of experts are expressing very profound fears about what happens to our economy- and as investment drains away, on the balance of evidence they are more likely to be right than Brexiteers whose intellectual stance has shall we say lost credibility in the past few weeks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The victors in the referendum would still get their way under the terms of Mrs. Mays deal: the UK would leave the EU. However Brexit cannot be on the extreme terms put forward by the extremists. The closeness of the original result and constant polling since suggests that "the will of the people", in as far as we can tell seems pretty OK with a variety of halfway houses, but the insistence of the extremists to make no compromise and yet not put forward any coherent alternative of their own makes people like me more determined to resist any extreme Brexit and to go for a second referendum to validate that. I can reluctantly accept the deal on offer, in the hope we may limit the damage, and -yes- one day rejoin, since I think that is the best way for the future of the UK. If that deal is rejected then I will fight tooth and nail to get a second referendum and I expect that the voters would reject any Brexit then on offer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Support for Brexit is collapsing because of the antics of the extremists, and unless a new willingness to compromise emerges from the Brexit camp, I think Remainers are totally justified in calling out the outrageous statements coming from the other camp: "you won, get over it". A fanatic is one who won't change their mind and won't change the subject, and the failure of Johnson, Davies, Raab et al is not the fault of Remainers, it is their own miscalculations that have discredited the Brexit process.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mrs. May's plan is the only Brexit on offer, and if the Brexiteers can not accept compromise, we are totally entitled to scuttle the whole process- it is not in Britain's interest to leave anyway and the No-deal scenario is way beyond irresponsible.</span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-10224414236255042862018-11-01T13:00:00.002+00:002018-11-01T13:00:59.562+00:00Breaking the Brexit logjam<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The fundamental problem of Brexit has not been that the UK voted to leave the European Union. The problem has been the fact that the vote was hijacked by ignorant, grandstanding fools who interpreted the vote as a will to sever all and every link between the UK and the European Union. That was then and is now a catastrophic policy. To default to WTO rules, when any member of the WTO could stop that policy was a recipe for the UK to be held hostage by any state with an act to grind against us. A crash out from the EU, without any structure to cope, was an act of recklessness that should disqualify anyone advocating it from any position of power whatsoever. That is now the most likely option because the Conservative leadership, abetted by the cowardly extremism of Corbyn, neither understood the scale of the crisis, now had any vision of how to tackle it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Theresa May is a weak and hapless Prime Minster, and her problems started when she failed to realize that there was a compromise that would have fulfilled the referendum vote, but not totally alienated the 48% who wished to continue or even deepen the UK relationship with the EU. Her "Citizen of Nowhere" speech was a jingoist rejection of nearly a century of British engagement with Europe and showed a willful blindness to the social and economic changes that 40 years of EU membership have brought to Britain. Remain may have lost, but by a whisker and many of those who voted to leave, including Dan Hannam MEP, believed that EFTA and/or a single market were the most likely post-EU arrangements.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If seems clear that the policy of the Prime Minister: to mirror EU rules with sovereign British rules, while obtaining certain concessions on how the UK conducts trade policy, is close to breakdown. The Chequers agreement has, in fact been no such thing. The hardliners continue to reject it. Yet from the point of view of obtaining an agreement there is nothing else on offer. It's a very poor deal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">However a leader with vision would choose to avoid the crisis that a crash-out will create. That leader is not Theresa May. She has committed herself to exit/mirror and if this deal fails, she would have to go. The problem is that there is no other viable leader either. Corbyn is unelectable. Other figures in the Conservatives, such as Michael Gove are even more divisive than the hapless Mrs May. A second referendum is even less likely, despite the general support it now has.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">So what is to be done?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The growing scandal around Aron Banks may yet persuade voters that a second referendum is now essential, but if it is not, then we need to think practically. The collapse of the government would need the Article 50 deadline to be extended. However the EU is only likely to agree this, if a viable policy emerges in London.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Unless the entire referendum process is discredited (which it may be) it seems unlikely that the Leavers can be reconciled to Remain, but equally Remainers cannot be expected to support the Hardline policy that is offered as the only option.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">There is a compromise policy, and that policy is </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">EFTA membership. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">A leader who has the vision to speak out for this may finally be able to break the logjam, end the uncertainty of a crash-out and begin to heal the fractured body politic that this whole tawdry affair has inflicted on our country.</span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-46354815844906059082018-10-31T09:12:00.002+00:002018-10-31T09:12:19.713+00:00Time Future contained in Time Past<h1 class="quoteText" style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Time present and time past<br />Are both perhaps present in time future,<br />And time future contained in time past."</span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">TS Eliot</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eliot is, I think, one of the greatest of poets, and as my own eye is distracted by ever more intractable problems in our political process, I have often taken comfort in the more nuanced and universal eye of a truly great poet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This blog eschews detailed futurology, the present is difficult enough, and the future in detail cannot be accurately predicted. Yet there are ways we can think about the future. We can identify trends, we can make general statements, and as humans, most of all, we can use our imagination to shape the future.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Neither is this blog particularly relativist. There are some universal truths, and saying "it ain't so" does not change them. We can use the scientific method to establish facts about our existence. No matter how powerfully contrary opinions may be expressed, the facts remain supported by analysis and evidence, when mere supposition is not. More to the point the same, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method">Socratic,</a> method can establish worth for a variety of different concepts. We can establish the likelihood of achieving desired goals, and we can set relative values on those goals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Objectively the world is not the mess of popular imagination. At no point in human history have we lived longer, more peacefully, or more prosperously. In general, we have been spared the pestilence and famine that has afflicted all previous generations. Even the crises that afflict our discourse: in the middle east for example, the level of violence- cruel as it may be- is pretty low by historic standards. We know more, travel more, see more, than we have ever known. We share each others cuisines', languages' and indeed countries' in ways that would astound people even two generations past.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet we do see, despite this unprecedented wealth, that there is one area which is weaker than the past: our leaders. Faith in democratic institutions is falling, and national leaders are generally assumed to be incompetent and/or corrupt. In a sense the emergence of the crooked braggart, Donald John Trump, as the leader of the worlds most powerful state is a symbolic symptom of a wider democratic retreat. But the root cause is a failure to recognize some universal truths. Responsible politics must rest on Socratic virtues like wisdom, temperance, courage and justice,.However, the political brands are marketed like soap powder. Instead of talking about establishing key principles for how difficult government decisions should be made, we turn political debate into a choice of which incomplete and ill thought out policies should be imposed, regardless of changing times, as parties seek to offer bribes to the electorate. We talk about "tough choices" without justifying them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet the electorate is wise to this process, and the gathering disillusion has led to a dismissive "you're all the same", a statement that could hardly be more corrosive of democracy in general. Under such circumstances the voters turn to people who <i><u>are</u></i> demonstrably different- be that shyster American real estate celebrities or thuggish Brazilian neo-Fascists.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile those who have espoused conventional politics, such as Angela Merkel, seem lacklustre or clumsy. A new broom in politics is called for. Yet the deep fear is that we are in a time that mirrors the 1930s, where violent and criminal leaders overthrew democracy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It could indeed be so. I took the <i>nom-de-blog</i> of Cicero because I feared that I was living in a time of collapse, similar to that of the late Roman Republic. I still have that fear, but equally, and like Cicero himself, I believe that there are political solutions that can maintain freedom and wise, temperate and fair societies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However in order to do this, we must relearn some lessons. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The first is to recognize that we have failed to express the higher goals of our society. We offered transactional policies, and when the bargain failed, we alienated the voters. People tell me that political messages need to be simple, and certainly when one listens to opinion polls that show many people still believe things that have been comprehensively disproved you do begin to despair a little. Yet dumbing-down has not improved the clarity of the debate, indeed in many cases it actually insults the intelligence of the electorate. Expressing well thought-out ideas should not alienate, even if not all understand them: they may still give you marks for intelligence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The second is to relearn the virtues of moderation. There are ideas in every platform that have validity, and instead of belittling and attacking all ideas of our political opponents, we should engage and critique. If we know our own principles, we can accept policies that support those principles, while at the same time being coherent in our own world view.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The third is to express and to follow a moral course. It is the cynicism and self serving nature of politics that puts off most people. We need to praise those who serve the public good, as well as attacking those we oppose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These are high principles, but as we examine the history of ideas, we see again and again that divisiveness is best fought with the counter-intuitive ideas of inclusion and collaboration, provided- of course- that we do not compromise on principles, especially the Socratic virtues.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We live in a time of fear. Our systems and leaders weakened, with the growing possibility of economic and social breakdown and even war- a war likely to involve a nuclear exchange. Yet this does not have to be a parallel to 1930s collapse. We have the ideas to solve our problems: ecological, social and political. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The question is can we, individually and collectively make moral choices to change things for the better? </span></div>
Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-40925149704103773782018-10-25T12:39:00.001+01:002018-10-25T12:41:46.718+01:00Justice and Civility<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For some time public figures have received threats. Rarely do they take them seriously, and in fact only very occasionally are they serious. However in recent years the political discourse has grown very ugly. Although neo-Fascists and populists have fanned the flames of popular hatred, in fact the crisis of "civility" goes back a pretty long way. After forming a coalition with the Conservatives in the UK, the Liberal Democrat leader faced significant abuse: dog shit through the letter box and all the rest of it. This routine and increasingly extreme abuse against MPs has now become simply an occupational hazard. In the 1950s MPs were generally respected, which is why the profumo scandal was so impactful, but now they are pretty universally denigrated and derided. In fact I believe that the majority of MPs are decent and honourable people who by-and-large deserve our respect, there are very few prepared to express that point of view. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">However, it is fair to say that those MPs who have greedy or anti-social motives for seeking office are not distinguished from the rest. Thus the relatively rare examples of corruption and even criminality have tarred all politicians. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">How regularly do we hear the angry chorus "you're all the same"? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The fact is that not all politicians are the same, but we have a system that punishes the good at the expense of the bad. We need to be discriminating in our choice of leaders, but we have a take-it-or-leave-it electoral system. We can vote for political ideas, but elect a bad MP, simply because they have the right colour rosette. Alternatively we can vote for a good MP, but one who does not fully share our own political ideas. The fact is that there have been good and bad MPs in all parties, but the voters do not control the process as much as they should. This is leading to a sense of alienation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The fact is that the voters do not and have never felt that we "are all in this together", they have the evidence that we have privileged elites who have twisted the banking system for they own crooked ends. They see injustice in the health system, the benefits system and at work, and the coziness of the rich to the powerful alienates society still further from its controllers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The hypocritical Mr. Trump condemns the attacks being made on figures such as George Soros, and now wider attacks on figures in the United States deemed to be "Liberal". Yet it is Mr. Trump's invective that has given license to the disaffected and the mentally ill. His policies do not address injustice, they create it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The fact is that thoughtful arguments do not stir the blood, but if we really want to adress the problems of our society, then we will have to learn to listen to brains and not to gut feelings. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Despite the invective of the neo-Fascists, which -for example- killed Jo Cox MP, we must try to shape the argument for justice in the language of reason. Fighting hatred with hatred will not work, we have to return to the still small voice of calm.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Justice requires civility as well as rectitude. The bombastic and the wrong can be stopped, as Joe McCarthy was stopped. </span><br />
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Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-56346170590497343382018-10-03T15:42:00.000+01:002018-10-03T15:42:09.566+01:00The politics of banality<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The essential circus of party politics in the UK is never more cringe making than at party conference time. The spectacle of socially awkward, physically clumsy individuals trying to get "down with the kids" in a vain attempt to assert a non-existent popularity is always a fairly barf-making sight. Even the best political figures tend to feel uneasy about the false ballyhoo of the conference set-piece speech; I recall Paddy Ashdown coming off stage amid a minor fireworks display and muttering a gentle imprecation at the slightly surreal farce he had been forced to take part in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Neither Theresa May nor Boris Johnson are particularly good political figures. May is an exceptionally awkward personality: "a bloody difficult woman" as other Conservatives have long noticed. Her management style is authoritarian and insecure, her personality lacks empathy and is unusually defensive under pressure. By contrast the extrovert Boris Johnson is a warmer figure, but his charm is lessened by a level of self centredness which goes well beyond the narcissistic and into a pathology. He is unprincipled and reckless in both his personal and political life. So an introvert and an extrovert collide and the Conservative party has been caught between them. The problem is that the country is also collateral damage in the fight between these two very limited personalities.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Perhaps these two believe the tinsel of the party conference reflects genuine emotions in the country at large (spoiler alert: it doesn't). But while Mr. Johnson affects to believe his own fake sub-Churchillian schtick, in fact it is the Prime Minister's fake speech that in its banality maps out the future. It will doubtless be reported as the "speech that saved the Prime Minister", but actually it does not even go part way to erasing the disgraceful "Citizen of Nowhere" speech which she made upon acceding to power. She is still mapping out a course that does not pass between the devil and deep blue sea, but aims directly at both of them. She still believes six impossible things before Brexit despite the EU negotiators retaining a clarity that has been disgracefully lacking on the UK side. He speech is as empty and vacuous as its reception is staged and fake.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The only thing that keeps this shop window of stupidity alive is the fake money that drives the modern Conservative Party. Intellectually moribund and the bear garden of deformed personalities, the Tories deserve utter ruin. Banal, empty and bereft of all energy, let the Titanic Tories go down to the punishment that their reckless immaturity richly deserves. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-15520446352055485222018-09-13T14:01:00.001+01:002018-09-13T14:01:44.434+01:00The rumbling financial markets<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Security specialists use a variety of ways to address the
risks that they face: and these risk assessments are made in the certain
knowledge that the actors in the system hold only incomplete information.
Although much mocked at the time, Donald Rumsfeld’s categorization of “known
unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”, is now generally recognized as a succinct
summery of his strategic quandaries. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By contrast, actors in the financial markets have a more
sanguine assessment of the risks they deal with: they divide them into two
kinds of risk: quantifiable and unquantifiable. Unquantifiable risk is not
generally considered, since there is usually no financial profit that can be
made except from pure supposition. Therefore for the purposes of the financial
markets, any given event is priced relative to its level of probability, that
is to say its quantifiable risk. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Depending on the market, higher levels of risk
generally carry higher prices, lower levels generally lower prices. Clearly
such an assessment of risk may not be objective, so markets have evolved a “psychological”
approach to price discovery. Nevertheless, in the course of the twentieth
century a detailed mathematical analysis has been developed, first in the
credit market- what you owe- and later in the equity markets- what you own. In
assessing risk, market actors use statistical models both to assess the
internal functioning of the market and also to examine the external context of
the market. Bell-curve based models have offered a relatively simple way to
understand the process of price discovery and the impact of rare or highly
improbable events are usually less considered, because in the majority of cases
a large sigma divergence from the market mean is a low risk event.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet low risk events as defined by statistics may still have
drastic impacts, and it is becoming clear that the financial markets have been
fundamentally mispricing risk for a prolonged period of time. Put simply,
conventional financial risk models seem to work in normal market conditions,
but they lose strength in extreme conditions. Essentially this means that
conventional risk models have failed, and that persistent failure has been
compounded by regulatory collusion to create the probability of even more
unstable conditions in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
prolonged policy of global low interest rates that was adopted to deal with the
credit crisis of 2008 has continued despite a growing appreciation that it is
multiplying risks in ways that are poorly understood and which has the
potential to return financial markets to a period of even greater instability.
The risks in the global financial markets have real world consequences, and
there is now a growing sense that the global financial markets have emerging
problems that could have significant economic and geo-strategic impacts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The impact of highly improbable events, memorably described
by Nassim Nicolas Taleb in his books “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fooled
by Randomness-the Scandal of Prediction</i>” and “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Black Swan</i>”, is still not fully recognized. By definition six
Sigma market events are rare and given the average age of market practitioners,
there are not many traders who have experienced the drastic crisis moves
associated with a “Black Swan” event.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yet, as Taleb argues, the once in a lifetime events that statistics
predicts, in fact occur with far greater frequency: roughly once a decade. This
of itself implies that the statistical models that lie at the heart of the
modern financial trading system are built on a predictive model that
consistently misprices risk assets. The models purport to be an objective
measure of risk, but in fact they are based on a closed model system, which
implies finite and knowable inputs into the process of price discovery. In fact
markets are fractal in nature, and therefore the risk model should, by
definition, be an open ended system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
turns out that predicting the future in financial markets, as with anything
else in life, cannot be relied upon, and the most successful traders are those
who react to risk, rather than those who rely on predictive models, no matter
how sophisticated. Long Term Capital Management collapsed despite the fact
(Taleb would say “because of”) the company having several Nobel Laureates in
Economics, who built extremely sophisticated predictive risk models. George
Soros, by contrast, relies on a structured form of psychological analysis
(“Reflexivity”) which is more open ended, and despite many failures, he is
still in business.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In addition to the issues of risk taking, there is the
matter of risk recording.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The extreme
complexity of the instruments that are being circulated has led to considerable
debate about if, when and how profits from these booked trades should be
recorded. In some cases, famously on some structured derivate trades between
AIG and GS, it has transpired that both sides of the trade were booking
profits- a literal impossibility in the zero-sum world of financial
instruments. The audit companies were complicit in the mispricing of trades,
and given the essential oligopoly of the “Big-four” auditors, the market
failure the risk of mis-recording the results of trades in complex financial
instruments remains unaddressed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the face of the fundamental market failure that was
revealed in 2008, the regulators also have to shoulder their share of the
blame. The fact is that they too do not seem to recognise the open ended nature
of risk, and as a result continue to believe that greater capital resources are
the primary means to avoid significant weakness in the financial markets. In
fact what has happened is that the requirement for larger capital resources
means a greater concentration of risk in reduced number of market players.
Market players that are deemed “too big to fail” create greater moral hazard in
the longer term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The extraordinary
blizzard of regulation that was created following the 2007/8 credit crunch had
several goals in mind, but the ultimate effect has been to create a more rigid
process in risk taking and a larger capital requirement to enter the
market.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ring fencing of bank
deposits has grown stronger, and there has been some tinkering with the
permissible assets that may be held on bank balance sheets. However, the major
impact of the 2008 crisis has been the assumption by monetary authorities, and
by extension the taxpayers, of a gigantic liquidity pool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The full faith and credit of finance
ministries and monetary authorities is still being used to underwrite liquidity
in the market, even at negative interest rates. Effectively the global
regulators flooded the market with “good” money in order to replace the
problematic credits with "undoubted" government money.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A decade later, market conditions have still not returned to
historic norms. Since its foundation in 1694, the average Bank of England base
rate has been around 5%. Even with a recent rise, the current rate is 0.75%- a
long way off historical norms. This pattern is repeated across the global
financial markets. Policymakers are now in a bind: they are still nursing
banking systems that have been deeply damaged by the long credit boom which
ended in 2008, but are aware that they must sooner or later raise rates before
the adjustment to higher rates becomes disruptive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since 2008 global financial markets have continued to grow,
and this is not solely the result of the liquidity bonus injected by the market
regulators. After 2008, as much as before, there has been a major shift in the
global economy which has unleashed a spectacular level of global growth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The emergence of China allowed a massive
increase in efficiency in global supply chains, as huge Chinese corporations
became globally competitive and were able to offer goods that met global market
expectations. The globalization of production has had a drastic impact on
economies throughout the world, and although there have unquestionably been
losers, the net result has been an extraordinary productivity gain. Nor has
globalization been purely a matter of substituting cheaper Chinese production
for more expensive production elsewhere: there has been a general maturing of
economies across Asia, America and Europe as innovation centres emerged and
service businesses replaced manufacturing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even in China, the service sector has grown dramatically, and lower
value production has been off-shored to even lower cost manufacturing centres,
such as Vietnam or Bangladesh. Among economists, there is little doubt that the
massive increase in wealth that has resulted from the emergence of more
globalised economies has been an unalloyed good. Thus financial markets have
been operating in extremely favourable macro-economic conditions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However there are several threats to this long-term virtuous
economic circle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Firstly there is the
question of sustainability. The ecological damage of unrestrained production is
now unquestioned, and it is clear that Earth does not have the resources to
maintain unsustainable economic growth. The human population spike- with our
species likely to peak somewhere between 9-11 billion individuals within the
next century- will require much greater efficiency in order to allow the planet
to absorb the population shock. As CO2 pollution becomes a greater worry, there
is a growing risk that delicate ecological systems are already breaking down,
and reducing still further the ability of the planet to sustain such a large
human population. The economic effects of these extremely complex processes are
unknowable, but it certainly is clear that there is greater uncertainty about
the sustainability of –for example- food production than at any time since the
“green revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Equally there are more immediate macro-economic threats. The
first is the nature of innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
mid-twentieth century saw huge changes in, for example, transport and
communications speeds. It was only 66 years form the Wright Brothers making the
first controlled powered flight to the first flight of the Boeing 747 and
indeed the first landing on the Moon. In the nearly fifty years since 1969 the
speed of transport has not increased- indeed with the withdrawal of the
supersonic Concordes in 2003, commercial faster than sound flights no longer
exist. Yet the expansion in use of commercial jet liners has increased
drastically. Likewise the speed of a telephone call has not increased much
since the creation of a global telephone network, but the use and density of
the network now allows the exchange of colossal amounts of information,
especially through mobile systems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
the Olympics represents “faster-higher-stronger”, global digital technology is
simply broader on a scale that was never forecast at its inception.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The question, from an investment perspective,
is how to maximise the payback period for any given innovation. This proves
easier to manage with digital businesses than physical goods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Innovation delivery that can be made by a
simple download of information is likely to be far more profitable than the
modernisation of physical goods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Market
changes can severely impact huge investment programmes: a good example is the
Airbus A380, a plane widely touted to be the replacement to the hugely
successful Boeing 747, but which has struggled to find sales, despite its
extraordinary technological prowess. The innovation of lighter and faster twin
jets has made the A380s economics quite problematic in the current market
conditions. It is far easier to make structural changes to information systems
than to a physical piece of equipment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So, although we say that the twenty-first century is a period of
spectacular innovation, it is innovation of a very specific kind, of
information processing rather than physical processing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course this may change, with the creation
of widespread 3D printing, for example, but equally there are risks in the
digital world too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Following a series of
scandals, the value of Facebook has fluctuated quite wildly. It turns out that
consumer taste is still the prime driver of value in services- and consumers
can be fickle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The wave of information innovation has disrupted and
challenged human activity across the board. Even the idea of “money” has not
been immune. The so-called “crypto” currencies have challenged conventional
views about what cash actually is. Although Bitcoin looks like a bubble, and
despite the hostile stance of major investment houses- such as JP Morgan- the
crypto boom has changed but it has not gone. The usefulness of what Goldman
Sachs has labelled “consensus” currencies (as opposed to fiat currencies) remains
untested, but is still being explored and the emergent ICO market has the
potential to supply an asset base to support a fundamental value for such
currencies. The value of consensus currencies will probably mean that in the
long term they will form a larger part of the global financial markets- and one
that is beyond the control of current market regulations. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ten years after the great crash, the risks in the Financial Markets are as high as ever. It looks like being an uncomfortable Autumn.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-81586001443753383002018-03-02T12:56:00.003+00:002018-09-12T15:40:17.263+01:00Rallying Round Theresa... No Chance<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Prime Minister (<i>pro tem</i>) of the UK has made another speech imploring the British people to rally round and come together in order to make the country a success post-Brexit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Let me state why I, for one, will not be doing that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The surprise result of the referendum on British membership of the European Union could have been answered by the Conservative government in a variety of ways. Once the Conservatives had time to change their leadership after the precipitate departure of David Cameron, it could have been reasonable to say something like: " we understand that the British people, by a small margin, are asking us to start the process of leaving the European Union. However we believe that it is imperative to retain our economic links in the single market and the customs union, so we will initially negotiate an economics-led relationship that could either be full membership of the EEA, like Norway, or a customs union, like Switzerland, once this is enacted, we can either consult again or continue as we then become.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Theresa May did not say any of those things, she said two things: one, that the UK would no longer recognize the jurisdiction of the European Court, and therefore two, "Brexit must mean Brexit". This meant that the goal of her Conservative government, from the beginning, was to leave all of the European co-operation framework, including Euratom, EuroPol, the air traffic system, and so on. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ALL OF IT. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The UK would retain nothing and become a third country in all of its dealings with the EU. Frankly this was not what such Anti-Europeans as Dan Hannam said they were campaigning for. It was an extreme position, unquestionably not supported by the majority of the British people.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Since that time, over 18 months ago, it has become clear that the decisions made in haste have made it impossible to complete any negotiations within the 2-year time frame of Article 50. It usually takes about a decade for a comprehensive trade agreement to be made. However the long term transition period that would imply is also not acceptable to the extremist Conservative position. No, everything must be wrapped up within 2 years of the UK departure, in other words before spring 2020. More to the point, the agreement to do this must be completed before September 2018. This is not achievable even by by a government that is not run by a cabal of incompetent, narcissistic, ego-driven third raters. Johnson, Gove, <i>et al</i> do not have any executive experience worth a damn, and their PR/Journalist skill set is totally inadequate to the tasks that must now be completed within an accelerated time frame.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In other words, the Conservatives are demanding an extreme position, not supported by the majority of UK voters, within a time frame that can not be delivered. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Why should anyone support a government whose policies are both extreme and extremely reckless?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In fact the simple impossibility of what the broken-backed Conservative government is proposing is now totally manifest, and it is not a stab in the back from those who oppose the Tories, it is a self-inflicted stab wound by the Conservatives themselves.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The UK economy is showing an increasing number of warning signs flashing red- all of the very worst fears of what could happen under Brexit are now showing every sign of coming true. This is not the caddish slur "project fear", it is project reality, and the Conservative government has no one but itself to blame.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even if you loath the EU and all its works, what was wrong with an interim position of the EEA? It is the sheer unreasonable, intemperate fanaticism of the 62-odd Tories in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Research_Group">ERG</a> that is bringing the UK to the brink of a serious economic, political and constitutional crisis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So, I will not be rallying round. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Conservatives are clearly unfit for government and must be removed from office as fast as can be arranged. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sure, some may say "But, but... Corbyn". I make no bones about my fervent opposition to his brand of neo-Marxism. However this is not a case of "better the devil you know"... We know that the Tories are leading us to disaster, any outcome is now likely to be better than the continuance in office of this discredited, incompetent and sleazy crew of Conservatives.The fact that Corbyn now supports at least a customs union has been recognized by such unlikely cheer leaders as the CBI as a massively more moderate position that the Conservatives witless "Brexit must mean Brexit".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The country deserves more moderate choices, including my own preferred choice of a second referendum, without the presence of questionable, Russian-flavoured money. The Tories will not offer that- they only offer the narrow extremism of Rees Mogg and other public school bigots. From the local elections in May, the Tories must be kicked out bag-and-baggage, and ultimately driven from power at every level. The "strong-and-stable" guff that was such an insult to the intelligence at the last election must now receive a payback.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Tories OUT!</span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-34414254236506350072018-03-01T08:01:00.001+00:002018-09-10T14:29:06.801+01:00Trump and Brexit are the Pearl Harbor and the Fall of Singapore in Russia's Hybrid war against the West.<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In December 1941, Imperial Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor. After the subsequent declaration of war, within three days, the Japanese had sunk the British warships, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, and the rapid Japanese attack led to the surrender of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941 and the fall of Singapore only two months after Pearl Harbor. These were the opening blows in the long war of the Pacific that cost over 30,000,000 lives and was only ended with the detonations above Hiroshima and Nagasaki.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"History doesn't often repeat itself, but it rhymes" is an aphorism attributed to Mark Twain, and in a way it seems quite appropriate when we survey the current scene. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 1941, Imperial Japan, knowing its own weakness, chose a non-conventional form of war, the surprise attack. Since the end of his first Presidential term, Vladimir Putin, knowing Russia's weakness, has also chosen non-conventional ways to promote his domestic power- standing down as President to re-emerge as Prime Minister- as well as projecting Russian power overseas. Russia continues military occupations in Moldova and Georgia that predate Putin's accession, and has launched new ones in Ukraine and Syria. Moreover, the scope of operations of Russia's hybrid command has grown ever more ambitious. suborning former Western leaders to promote Russian interests proved surprisingly easy. Cyberattacks have grown more damaging and more numerous. On a daily basis Russia marks out Western interests as inimical to its own and seeks to subvert and damage, wherever and whenever it can.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is now a matter of public indictment that Russian leaders have been conspiring to subvert democracy in the United States. It is a matter of public investigation that Russia has interfered, through illegal finance, blackmail and other means in the democratic process in Europe, including the United Kingdom. In particular the financing of the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum is now under serious investigation, although sadly not in the UK itself, but in the United States.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Many, including this blog, have warned about Russian subversion in increasingly blunt terms. There is now substantial evidence of Russian involvement in the election of Donald Trump, and equally compelling evidence of Russian intervention in the Brexit vote.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The problem in fighting back is that we cannot use the Russian methods against their work in our own societies. <i>Disinformatsya</i> is a Russian tactic of lies, yet the only way to confront the Russians, and other corrupt governments that wish to subvert Liberal Democracy is to fight with truth and the rule of law. This is why Robert Mueller is now the most important man in the world. His commitment to the rule of law and legal ways to confront the attack that has been launched on American democracy is the only way the West can defeat the hybrid war without being itself corrupted and therefore defeated. It is a moral battle as much as a legal one. Morally compromised figures, such as Donald Trump, can only be removed in legal and moral ways. Robert Mueller has given every sign that he understands that his country must be a country of law and due process if it is to overcome the hybrid attack of corruption that has launched against it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What then of the United Kingdom?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As evidence mounts that the Leave campaign received illegal funding, money laundered from Russian sources, there has been a steady rise in those who would challenge both the disastrous extremist polices that the Conservatives have adopted in response to the vote and indeed the legitimacy of the vote itself. Public supporters of Vladimir Putin, such as Arron Banks were also the largest donors to Leave, and in the world of Russian hybrid war, suspicion is itself suspicious. The judicial investigation that is now said to be under consideration, must now be launched</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If there are any doubts about the referendum then the UK must do what the US cannot do with its Presidential election: that is to re-run it. Meanwhile as public understanding of the Russian attack on the West grows, then we must strengthen our own institutions, challenge the media that not only failed to warn, but was itself corrupted by the hybrid attack, and hold the political system to higher standards. This is not to insist on perfection, in fact the exact reverse. Western liberalism is built on the idea that human beings are weak and corruptible and provides checks and balances to make sure that even if it is attacked that rule of law and due process will prevail.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This requires a less shrill media and a more discerning attitude towards both political parties and political people. Nationalism and a closed society, like the Russian model, can only be weaker than globalism and an open society, but for globalism to prevail, it must be built on strict foundations of the rule of law.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If the moral fight for freedom is built on justice, not on greed, then globalism, so long under attack, can still prevail against the corrupt and the closed societies that are ranged against the West.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Hybrid war is a battle of lies versus truth and of corruption versus justice.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is a war that we can win by making the right moral, ethical and political choices.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is a war as significant and as dangerous as the War in the Pacific launched nearly 80 years ago.</span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-21447440030689261172017-12-21T10:21:00.001+00:002018-09-10T14:29:06.763+01:00The American National nightmare becomes a global nightmare<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is a basic contention of this blog that Donald J Trump is not fit for office.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A crooked real estate developer with a dubious past and highly questionable finances. he has systematically lied his way into financial or other advantage. His personal qualities include vulgarity, sexual assault allegations and fraudulent statements on almost every subject. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He has, of course, been under criminal investigation practically since before he took the oath of office. The indictment of some of closest advisers is just the beginning. His track record suggests that in due course there is no action he will not take, whether illegal or unconstitutional in order to derail his own inevitable impeachment and the indictments that must surely follow the successful investigation of Robert Mueller into his connections with Russia.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, all of that is a matter for the American people. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is also a matter for the American people that Trump is cheating the US Treasury with his outrageous, self interested tax bill. Robbing the average American to benefit the corporate interest is the settled will of the Republican party, and at present they have every right to enact the legislation, however unjust, however economically wrong headed, however loathsome. It will continue to undermine American democracy by making it ever more impossible for the poor to get on the ladder to a better life. The American dream is being crushed by greed and selfishness: the perfect metaphor for the catastrophic Trump Presidency.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet even this act of economic and political vandalism is not the low for this vile administration. Defying the studied ambiguity of the past fifty years, Trump unilaterally decided to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel. It is a potentially very dangerous move, resisted for decades by all previous administrations. As always Trump rushes in where angels fear to tread. Yet having committed this act, he then turns on those who criticised the move in the United Nations general assembly, saying that aid would be suspended to those who voted against the move. Since the United States was forced to veto the Security Council resolution, it is clear that the US has very few friends on this issue.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Trump's threat is the end of the United States as a force for good in the world. It is an abdication of a policy of freedom and seeks to place the US as a hegemonic power without consent. Nothing could reduce the influence of America more quickly that to attempt to impose Trumps bullying and injustice on the international order. It turns willing allies into sullen satraps, and it will fail.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The problem now is that Putin's puppet can still cause immense damage before he is removed from office. Every day this thug remains in the White House is a national humiliation for the United States. The image of the US is being trashed, and the reality of alliances formed to support freedom and justice in the face of Soviet tyranny is being undermined- perhaps fatally.</span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-50402955955391653482017-12-13T09:06:00.000+00:002018-09-10T14:29:06.883+01:00The American national nightmare<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On August 9th 1974 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Gerald_Ford">Gerald Ford took the oath of office</a> to become president of the United States. In his brief speech he said:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"<i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over... Our </span><a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States" style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Constitution of the United States">Constitution</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"> works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men."</span></i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">43 years later, the American Republic is being tested in a way it has never been tested in the 241 years since the declaration of independence. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">It is not just that <a href="https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/11/09/donald-trump-embodies-the-worst-of-moral-relativity/">Donald Trump is a vulgar, boorish, lecher</a>. It is not just that he has consistently <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/28/12904136/donald-trump-corrupt">lied about his businesses and has consistently used mafia levels of intimidation and fraudulent promises in order to cheat his way out of trouble</a>. It is not just that his absurd self-regard renders him utterly unfit for any public office. It is not even that Trump was over three million votes behind in the popular vote.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">There are three intersecting crises in America today. They are economic, political, and constitutional.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The United States is no longer the engine of global prosperity. From being a global leader in a huge range of educational and business endeavour, The country has long ago lost its leadership in school education. American cities are often squalid and dangerous. Millions have lost the sense of aspiration that drove previous generations forward. The American Dream of material wealth and progress is challenged from within and without. China is set to overtake the USA as the world largest economy, while questions of sustainability and diversity now hedge American economy progress with doubt and uncertainty as to whether the goals of previous generations can be maintained, or even whether they should be. Although the American economy continues to innovate at a brisk pace, the innovators- whether in Silicon Valley or elsewhere- are often not themselves Americans. Meanwhile in manufacturing the US has continued its steady decline- outpaced only by the UK.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The sense of economic malaise has leaked into the politics of the United States. Divisive and confrontational politics are now the norm, fuelled by gerrymandering and a partisan media that routinely ignores objective truth in order to promote a biased and partial narrative. The result has been populist "uprisings" promoted by sinister and unpleasant figures such as Steve Bannon. The media manipulation is overt, but it supports covert and dangerous agendas. From the promotion of Russia to a populist view of taxation, information and arguments, whether these are legitimate or even criminal are simply not examined in any detail. The result is a media landscape which is an agora of lies, where any opinion counters any fact. The growing extremism of American politics has culminated in the ultimate wrong headed candidacy- the media creature Donald Trump.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Lets state it clearly: Donald Trump should not be the President of the United States. This is a judgement based on his flawed character, his dubious business interests and his connection with Russia. It also recognises that when a plurality of votes by a margin of over three million votes is overruled by the electoral college, then the will of the American people, which is supposed to be sovereign under the constitution, has in fact been ignored. The technicality that over-rules the will of the people must be corrected by early amendment. However, even before this, there is a more egregious fault in the American constitutional arrangement: gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is nothing more than the subversion of the democratic will. <a href="https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/12/preparing-strike-down">The Supreme Court is now hearing two cases</a> concerning gerrymandering, and should they fail to deliver a remedy for the problem, then the future outlook is very bleak indeed. In the end, the Congress is the check on the President, and a deeply flawed President demands a deeply responsible Senate and House. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The multiple crises in the United States are deep and probably long lasting. However the immediate delirium is the ongoing process against Mr Trump. The Mueller investigation is clearly entering a critical phase, and appears to be confirming the suspicion of Russian direct involvement in the Trump campaign and in the early days of the administration. The indictment of several senior figures, including Gen. Flynn, Mr.Trump's first National Security Adviser, would in some other countries- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Brandt">Willy Brandt in 1974</a> Germany, for example- have driven Mr. Trump himself from office, irrespective of whether there was direct wrong doing on his part or not. In the next few weeks, we will see if Robert Mueller has sufficient evidence to prosecute Mike Pence or Donald Trump or both for "high crimes and misdemeanours". </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The American Republic is being tested as it has never been. Over the course of 2018, we shall see whether the government is of laws or of men. It could be a very bumpy and very dangerous ride.</span></span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-76001761699145482702017-12-08T11:42:00.001+00:002018-09-10T14:29:06.956+01:00No island is an island entire unto itself...<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">OK so there has been a breakthrough apparently...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the breakthrough is not that a framework agreement to start substantive talks is kinda, sorta, done, maybe...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is that now the UK public knows that the leaders of the "Leave" campaign were a bunch of charlatans. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">David Davis took "hapless" to new lows with his "my dog ate my homework" explanation of why -in fact- no impact assessments of the single most important economic policy change in 60 years, were made. Whether you choose to believe or disbelieve the shifty excrescence is a matter for you, because its all the same to the Secretary of State as to whether you believe him or not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile the refusal of the Conservatives to recognise that Ireland is a separate and sovereign state, and that therefore of course the UK has a land border with the EU, nearly brought the whole process to a shuddering halt. In fact that actions of the DUP have now, for the first time brought the departure of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the point of being more likely than not, but that is not a breakthrough either.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The breakthrough is that there is no way to avoid a national humiliation. A humiliation that the Conservatives are wholly responsible for and which is the result of their arrogance and ignorance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The disaster will continue to unfold until either the UK, probably shorn of territory as well as billions of pounds and vastly diminished international standing, emerges into the cold world of a post EU economy; or the British people revolts against their incompetent and dishonest government. At the moment either is possible in the short term, with a slight edge towards revolt.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the medium-to-long term a major reset in the UK is now looking very likely indeed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The anti-modern Imperial measurement, Imperial mindset of the Conservatives is growing ever more absurd. Clinging to their vision of a better yesterday, the Tories refuse to face up to the fact that their vision of the country is deluded. Socially more divided than ever, the public realm, from the Houses of Parliament to the underfunded infrastructure, is increasingly squalid. The moth eaten relics of Empire now simply look absurd in the increasingly cold light of Brexit day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This starts with the system of government that has delivered a government of incompetence and an opposition of fools. The government gets away with lies because they face no opposition from a House of Commons which they can whip to their service and an essentially toothless House of Lords. Neither can the Monarchy control the evil nor the idiocy. In the name of the venerable Queen Elizabeth II baubles called the "Order of the British Empire" are still handed out to the great and the good- irrespective that the Dutch, let alone the French, have empires rather more impressive than the speckle of rocks that is the last inheritance of the moth eaten Land of Hope and Glory. The flummery of orders of the Bath or the Garter should fill any modern democrat with amusement, but for the fact that people take this dross seriously. The pageant of Monarchy "brings in the tourists", but fails to protect the rights of British citizens- it serves no useful purpose, unless you are a London hotelier. Yet still Prince Andrew and other highly intellectual, charming, and modest members of the Royal family are appointed counsellors of state with significant political power, on the clear understanding that if they use this power in public they will be swept away. The answer is clear: the substantial reserve powers of the Crown should be placed under public, not personal, control. As with the accession of King Karl Gustav XVI of Sweden in 1973, the accession of the heir of Elizabeth II should be marked by the end of the political power of the Monarchy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The modernisation of Britain- with or without Northern Ireland- should then proceed. Not merely the long overdue constitutional reform, but economic reform. Burn the current tax code and start again. This is the only way we can then begin to tackle the catastrophic public finances of the country. Promote savings over consumption- and yes that means a prolonged and deep restructuring of the entire economy. Times will be really tough, but instead of trying to save the outdated tax-and-borrow-for-current-consumption-and-forget-about-the-future model we have now, we can start to think long term and strategically. Infrastructure spending must increase and pensions and welfare made sustainable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So let us hope this "breakthrough" finally causes the British voters to understand the fact that the government system is broken beyond repair. Any government that has been so reckless as the Conservatives with their wealth and well being should be eviscerated and the political party responsible should be liquidated.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For the fact is that unless we punish the guilty at the next election we will continue be complicit in our own decline. A radical change of direction is not merely desirable, it is essential, and understanding that is the only way to make any kind of breakthrough and ultimate recovery.</span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-1142110977323486092017-11-23T15:18:00.000+00:002018-09-10T14:29:06.713+01:00In praise of off-shore tax havens<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The last few years has seen a spate of "scandals" about the use of off-shore tax havens. The hacking and subsequent leaking of data about who does and does not hold assets in off-shore jurisdictions has become an old perennial in the British press, rather like the "COLD weather happens in winter and QUITE HOT weather happens in summer", whose alarmist capital letter laced headlines are such a lazy part of contemporary "journalism". </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The increasing sophistication of the hackers, whether Russian-inspired or not, has resulted in a steady trickle of information becoming a torrent. After the relatively filleted release of data in the so-called "Panama Papers", the data release of the "Paradise Papers" is even larger. Of course, just natural curiosity dictates that the off-shore ownership, or even just "ownership", of assets is of general public interest. Celebrities, from the Royal family to the cast of Mrs Brown's Boys, are shown to wealthy, which may not be such a surprise, and to hold assets in places like the Cayman islands or Bermuda, which might be more of a surprise.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The UK press, in one of the more spectacular episodes of hypocrisy to which they are regularly prone, affects to be shocked and appalled by the fact that so many people "avoid tax" by holding assets in multiple off-shore and international jurisdictions. Just to remind the public at large: Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who naturalised American for tax purposes, holds assets in multiple off-shore jurisdictions. Lord Rothermere, living in Wiltshire, but legally domiciled in France for tax purposes, holds the Daily Mail and General Trust through off-shore holdings in Bermuda. The owners of the Daily Telegraph, the rather sinister Barclay Brothers, domiciled off-shore in Sark, control their empire though the Channel Islands. The pornographer Richard Desmond controls the Express group through a series of off-shore holdings, as does the Russian Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Evening Standard and the Independent. Bluntly, the off-shore ownership of media assets is quite legitimately a matter of public concern, especially given the occasionally important business relationships that their owners have with anti-democratic regimes, such as Russia or China.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Neither is there any doubt that off-shore holdings are routinely used by criminal organisations to hide the sources of wealth acquired by crime. Mind you the fact is that <u style="font-style: italic;">all</u> jurisdictions are used by criminals- there is no single crime-free jurisdiction in the world, not even the Vatican. There is no doubt that some of the tax avoidance schemes operated in certain jurisdictions, even if they may be perfectly legal, are nevertheless extremely questionable on ethical grounds.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The fact is that the overwhelming amount of money and the overwhelming proportion of transactions are undertaken in off-shore tax jurisdictions for entirely legitimate reasons. These could, for example, include the establishment of a single neutral jurisdiction for a corporation which has conflicting tax or compliance requirements in different countries where they operate, or to hold assets that are involved in international M&A.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nevertheless there is no doubt that the off-shore world exists because of tax, and that is a scandal. However it is not the scandal that the public imagination believes. The scandal, especially in the UK, is not the off-shore tax code but the on-shore one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The United Kingdom now has a tax code that is 27,000 pages long. In the past two decades the standard political solution has been to promote certain policies through tax incentives. The result is a massive and unwieldy tax code which is literally impossible to understand, let alone to comply with. Last night I had a small dinner with a UK government Minister and the subject of export support came up, and with it the suggestion of... you guessed it... tax incentives. Yet at every further release of off-shore data the asinine politicians demand tougher regulation and more tax inspectors.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The result is not merely the longest tax code in the world: as a result HMRC is one of the largest tax bureaucracies in the world with over 120,000 employees. The cost of administration of the Revenue is over 3% <i>per annum,</i> which is over </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">£21 billion every year, and that does not count the tax credit system, which is a further cost.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Neither does it count the cost of compliance in the economy at large: the massive number of tax accountants that are needed to submit a return for even the most basic tax matter. The fact is that tax collection and administration is one of the biggest businesses in Britain and it adds exactly nothing to our national wealth. The annual budget never simplifies, it only complicates.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The scale of this failure is what has created the need for off shore holdings. The fact is that the very offices that HMRC works from are owned by funds who are legally based in off-shore jurisdictions. The HM in HMRC also invests using off-shore holdings: she, like most of the rest of us, is compelled to do so by the drastic negative effect on investment returns if she does not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So when you see more blazingly hypocritical headlines in our off-shore owned press about the iniquity of holding assets off-shore, spare a thought for the real scandal. The fact that politicians have given up any idea of real tax reform. This utter failure of leadership is yet another example of the UK at its very worst. Off course it is "difficult", but unless it is tackled, all value-added businesses will end up off-shore and all that will be left will be estate agents and tax inspectors: not a recipe for the dynamic post-Brexit future that the off-shore, hypocritical, extreme right-wing, verminous British press insists is the coming future, against all evidence to the contrary. </span>Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15037609.post-55872480169243494242017-11-13T09:47:00.000+00:002018-09-10T14:29:06.921+01:00Putin over reaches himself- but the West must respond.<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In espionage the standard of proof is a variable measure. There are very few times that information can be said to be "beyond reasonable doubt". Nuances and circumstances acquire great significance and it requires an analyst with a deep sense of intuition to piece together an accurate narrative from small pieces of partial information. There may be much data, but to find the information it contains is like putting together a shattered mirror, where you do not know whether you have all the pieces. Thus intelligence can be a double-edged sword, and it is dangerous to rely purely on secret intelligence without bringing one's own sceptical biases into the equation. Spies are much given to using two quotes from Sherlock Holmes: the first dictum is about positive truth: "once you eliminate the impossible, what ever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth". The second is "the curious incident of the dog in the night time" "the dog did nothing in the night time" "that was the curious incident". This second refers to how positive information can be determined by things missing or absent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I point these things out because the growing awareness of Russian subversion and propaganda in the democratic world is being played out against a very strong background of secret services involvement. Yet the Russian secret services are rather different from their rivals in the West. As we have seen from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier">Steele dossie</a>r, the primary purpose of MI6 is to acquire secret information from a variety of sources in order to build up an understanding of the direction of Russian actions. The document is written in the fairly standard format of MI6 reports, with as much cross referencing as may be available. By definition it is not a document intended to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Nevertheless the emergence of other source material has substantially corroborated the dossier. By the standards of secret intelligence the dossier is very strong evidence indeed. Where there are faults, they have tended to be the result of caution. For example, Steele writes of a five year business relationship between the Trump organisation and Russian money, the evidence now suggests that the relationship is both deeper and longer -as long as fifteen years- than first alleged.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Russian security <i>apperat</i>: Internal FSB, external SVR, military GRU and SigInt SSSR, has two mandates. The first is the gathering of secret intelligence. The second is the active disruption and subversion of critical targets. Of course, Western agencies have attempted to disrupt certain targets: terrorist cells, for example, but the difference is that Russia has devoted substantial resources to the disruption of western democracy. This is no longer a matter of opinion: as the evidence grows of Russian government support for an army or information trolls, including millions for false<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/1/16593346/house-russia-facebook-ads"> Facebook posts</a>, and the direct financial support for <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2017/05/why_russia_cultivates_fringe_groups_on_the_far_right_and_far_left.html">far-right political parties</a>, this is not even a matter of reasonable doubt, it is a matter of fact. Russia is actively campaigning to undermine Western democratic values and norms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There is now substantial evidence of Russian support for the election of Donald Trump. The fact that Donald Trump says that Vladimir Putin told him that there was no such collusion can be safely put into the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRDA_(slang)"> "he would say that, wouldn't he"</a> box of political scandals. In intelligence terms the evidence is extremely strong that Donald Trump's campaign self consciously accepted substantial Russian support and that he did this because a large part of his supposed wealth is in fact Russian money and the Russian intelligence services hold <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat" style="font-style: italic;">kompromat</a> including personally and sexually compromising material on Mr Trump himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, it grows increasingly clear that the election of Donald Trump was not the only campaign waged from the Kremlin in the last two years. It is a matter of proven public record that Russian finance supported the election campaign of the far right <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/010eec62-30b5-11e7-9555-23ef563ecf9a">Marine LePen</a> in France. The other, far more successful, Russian intervention in European politics was the British referendum vote of June 23rd 2016. Although there is some evidence that Russian money was involved in the Scottish referendum vote of September 2014, the evidence for the EU vote is much stronger. As with the US Presidential election an army or twitter-bots and <a href="https://www.thenational.ae/world/europe/russian-involvement-in-brexit-vote-revealed-by-twitter-data-analysis-1.674897">Facebook propaganda was deployed in support</a> of the Leave campaign. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Nor was the support simply external to the UK. As we now beginning to understand about the Russian subversion campaign against the US, there were several agents of influence who provided secret back channels of communication and of finance. One of the leading financial backers of the Leave campaign, Arron Banks, has a Russian wife and has publicly praised the Putinist government in Moscow. More to the point, the sources of his apparent wealth are not transparent. <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/brexitinc/adam-ramsay/how-did-arron-banks-afford-brexit">Insurance is a business where changing actuarial assumptions can allow significant changes in the financial position of the company</a>. Were Russia to wish to launder large sums into British politics, it could be a fairly easy way to do it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Although poo-pooed by the Brexit camp, the connections between Nigel Farage and Julian Assange, and his partner, suspected Russian agent, Edward Snowdon, are clearly <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/28/trump-assange-bannon-farage-bound-together-in-unholy-alliance">suspicious in intelligence terms</a>. The inquiries now underway on both sides of the Atlantic have already proven the intent of the Kremlin to subvert the US and the UK. There is substantial circumstantial evidence that suggests they succeeded in their attempts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So what now? Putin played and he won.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Not so fast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are material differences between the shallow and weak rule of law in Russia and the entrenched strength of wealthy and powerful western democracies. The appointment of Bob Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the Presidential election not only brings one of the world's leading figures in counter espionage to the inquiry; it also brings one of the straightest arrows in US law enforcement. Mr. Mueller believes in the government of law, not of men, and he clearly considers it is patriotic duty to uncover the whole plot and clean the stables, no matter what. Although Mr. Mueller is working to the highest standards of proof: "beyond reasonable doubt", it is becoming clear that, as with the substantial corroboration of the Steele dossier, such proofs do indeed exist, as the guilty plea by <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/papadopoulos-lied-to-fbi-about-russia-to-protect-trump">George Papadopoulos</a> indicates.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The wheels of justice may grind slow, but they do grind fine and eventually, if Bob Mueller has his way, the truth will prevail.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What then? Russia is already exposed as a hostile power, attacking the West directly or by proxy in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria and any other place they can. Russia has been waging a war directly on Western democracy, largely without the notice of all but those most closely involved. However, as with Japan in 1941, it is very dangerous to launch a surprise attack. The election of Donald Trump and the subversion of the British referendum are, in my view, the equivalent of the burning battleships of Pearl Harbor. However, Russia is weak and poor, and getting poorer. Even China is cautious about accepting such an unstable and disruptive ally. In Chinese eyes the model is not the Second World War, but the First, with Russia playing the role of Austria Hungary. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Putin will not survive a determined push back from the West. He has drastically overplayed the hand of a weak, corrupt, poor and divided country: Nigeria with nuclear weapons.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The recent release of the Kennedy papers has shown one critical thing. That Lee Harvey Oswald kept in touch with his KGB handlers, and that the <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/papadopoulos-lied-to-fbi-about-russia-to-protect-trump">CIA hid this information</a> in order to avoid emotional demands that the Soviet Union be punished, which in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis could have led to nuclear confrontation. It maybe that certain circles in Washington would like to avoid revealing the full scale of the possible involvement of the Trump organisation in what is, after all the most heinous of crimes: treason. This could be for reasons of national prestige or to avoid the threat of a similar nuclear confrontation as might have occurred in 1963.Nevertheless, it is clear that the much of America now clearly understands the direct threat of Putinism to Democracy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The United Kingdom must now also understand what has been done to them and to respond accordingly. <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/ben-bradshaw-calls-for-judge-led-inquiry-on-russias-role-in-brexit-2017-10">Ben Bradshaw's</a> request for an enquiry is only the beginning of a process that needs to clean the British stables of corrupt money and Russian influence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The circumstantial evidence that secret intelligence relies on already points to something a lot bigger than covert Russian funding of the Leave campaign. There are significant issues of intelligence interest that demand answers even from serving ministers. We cannot exclude collusion by figures well beyond the names that are in the public domain. </span></div>
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Cicerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14671679612728589403noreply@blogger.com0