I write this on the day of the announcement about a trade deal between the EU and the UK. This post explores the twin themes: Thick and Fast and Thick and Slow. I will explain.

Thick and Fast

Now that we appear to have some sort of deal, we can expect one sure-fire thing: the lies will keep coming thick and fast. Johnson and his gang of no-hopers will try to convince us that it is a great deal, one which has been hard-fought and won thanks to the skills of the UK negotiating team. And it will all be bollocks.

The timing of the announcement is interesting, with no newspapers tomorrow (Christmas Day). But be assured that the usual suspects (Sun, Mail, Telegraph, Times, Express) will find space in their Boxing Day editions to spread even bigger lies than the government itself will do. Obviously, Johnson and co. will feed much of the stuff to the friendly media outlets.

The lunatic fringe on the Tory backbenchers (Master Francois and his ilk) are speaking of “star chambers” of tame lawyers who will check the “purity” of the agreement: to see if the small print accords with their delusional thoughts. And the big unknown will be Labour’s response. Worrying signals from Keir Starmer’s office in recent days seem to echo the phrase “a deal is better than no deal”. The honourable position for all Labour MPs is to abstain in the required Parliamentary vote.

One thing has been abundantly clear for four and a half years or more. Any deal with the EU will be worse for the country than EU membership. We must not allow the government to hide behind the smokescreen of the pandemic. Leaving the EU will make all of us poorer, slowly, year by year, estimated at a permanent loss of 2% a year off GDP growth. Certainly, the effects of gross mismanagement, procrastination and poor policies will continue to make Covid the bigger short-term shock. But the lasting, slow-burn damage will be leaving the European Union.

So, prepare to be inundated with an avalanche of lies from our elected leaders: they’ll be coming thick and fast.

Thick and Slow

By way of contrast, if you were to look for an epithet to describe every member of the UK Government, “thick and slow” would be a good one. Historians will one day look back in amazement and disbelief at our misfortune: to have the most incompetent government of modern times at a time of our greatest need for at least 75 years.

Thick: it would be invidious to try to rank the members of the Cabinet in order of stupidity. For sure, Stupid Boy Pike, a.k.a. one Gavin Williamson and Little Miss Pretty Petrifying, a.k.a. Priti Patel would rank near the bottom of the pile: “rank” being the operative word.

There are those who believe that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, somehow stands above the pack. I disagree. Sunak is one of the country’s biggest problems. His failure to understand the impact of the pandemic on the poorest people – after all, his wife is richer than the Queen – or to implement consistent financial support for those losing their incomes cuts directly across attempts to control the spread of the virus. Millions of people are in such poorly paid and insecure jobs that they simply cannot afford to self-isolate when required. Sunak’s resistance to improving benefit payments to something closer to the European norm further compounds the problem.

Slow: We are in this mess now because of one of Johnson’s personality faults. He has a Trump-like desire to be liked and so has a pathological problem with decision making, particularly when it means being the bearer of bad news. Hence the last-minute U-turn on Christmas, the last of many – far too many – examples of delayed decision making.

But perhaps the most damning indictment of Johnson and his gang is their collective slow learning. It’s generally understood that the UK government was too slow in March imposing a lockdown, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. The same mistake was repeated in September, when scientists and Keir Starmer all urged the Prime Minister to impose a 2-week circuit breaker. Johnson failed to do so and we had a 4-week lockdown – with only partial success – 6 weeks later. And now we’ve just had the third repeat of the same basic “too late” decision making and ruining millions of people’s plans for Christmas into the bargain.

So the unmerited trumpet-blowing we can now expect over the EU trade deal also acts as a convenient distraction from the government’s continuing serious mishandling of the pandemic crisis.  

I guess you need to be above a certain age to remember Victor Sylvester, bandleader and erstwhile king of ballroom dancing on British TV and radio. But fans of Strictly Come Dancing will no doubt also be familiar with the foxtrot pattern Slow, Slow, Quick Quick Slow.  Change “quick” to “thick” and there you have it. That’s your government, that is.

Next slide, please…

With acknowledgement to Rob Newman and David Baddiel

Our electric oven is not ready. It’s not working. Rather like the British government: not ready for anything. Pandemic wave two. EU trade deal. Test and trace. Anything more taxing than a three-word slogan: cook my dinner!

Oven and Out

Last week, our kitchen oven stopped working. Or, to be more precise, it stopped working properly. Our dinner was cooking nicely in a hot oven: 200 degrees. The only trouble was it didn’t stop at 200 degrees: it kept on getting hotter and hotter. By the time we had noticed, our meal was burnt. Black. Charcoal. Not at all the way we like it.

It’s getting fixed tomorrow: new circuit board: 200 quid. Cheaper than a new oven, we think. Anyway, the oven-as-charcoal-burner reminded me of something.

Oven At ‘Em

Those of you with attention spans longer than our Prime Minister (which is nearly everyone) will remember a phrase from the election campaign last year. “Oven ready”. Following the election, Johnson quickly caved in to the EU’s concerns about preserving the integrity of the Single Market by agreeing to customs checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This was quickly pushed through Parliament following the election and voted on by Johnson’s New Model Army of compliant MPs. It seems that neither Johnson nor those MPs had really understood what they were voting for. Certainly we know Johnson doesn’t bother himself with detail: how many of his MPs, I wonder, knew they were helping to set things up for a no deal crash out of the EU?

Now, eight months later, the CCJ (see last blog post) is bringing before Parliament legislation which breaks international law: Minister Bandon Lewis admitted as much today in the Commons. A senior government lawyer has quit his post because of this. And a senior diplomat compared the UK government to a “rogue state”. Even Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May condemned the move as leading to other countries not trusting the UK in any future trade negotiations.

 We Just Don’t Kerr

Oh, and a bit more about the “senior diplomat” mentioned above. He is none other than John Kerr, now a member of the House of Lords. He is a former British Ambassador to the USA and a former member of the European Convention which drafted Article 50, the procedure agreed by all 28 EU states at the time (including UK) for any member wishing to leave the EU. So not just any old “senior diplomat”, then.

You Have to Laugh

… even when crying, screaming and kicking the dog (no offence) might come more naturally.

It’s the following morning when I’m finishing this piece off. The oven repair engineer hasn’t shown up yet. So here we are: England, September 2020. The country you will never trust again. Break international treaties by all means, but don’t gather in groups of 7. Unless you’re at school. Or a premier league footballer. Or you’ve bred like a rabbit and got loads of kids – one for the Rees-Moggs there, I feel. Simples.

I’d like to end with some good news. I’d like to, but there isn’t any. So instead, here’s a few things that made me smile in today’s Guardian:

“Frosty the No Man”: thanks Marina Hyde, good value as ever, describing the UK’s chief negotiator with the EU.

And a few extracts from letters from readers, witty as ever: “our PM would have us waive the rules as well as rule the waves”, “perfidious Albion is living up to its name” and “Johnson’s ‘oven-ready’ deal was a turkey”. Thank you all.

Now, where’s that repair man?

Has the UK entered the final death spiral of some ironic self-referential spin into a black hole of incompetence? Quite possibly. I had never thought it logically possible to include the words “intelligence” and “Chris Grayling” in the same sentence. But the gods of surrealism have now made it possible.

Chris Grayling has been nominated by the UK government to be Chair of the parliamentary Subcommittee on Intelligence and Security.

There. I’ve typed those actual words.

Failing

There’s stupid. And then there’s Chris Grayling. There’s incompetent. And then there’s Chris Grayling. There’s failing. And then… you know the rest.

The media is awash with lists of the man’s failures. The Daily Mirror found eighteen. Perhaps the most notorious are:

• The disastrous part-privatisation of the probation service, now recently reversed;
• The contract with the ferry company with no ferries;
• The unlawful ban on prisoners receiving books from their visitors;
• The nightmarish new timetable for Thameslink and Northern Rail.

You can read the full list at the link above.

In 1967, the Hollies released a single “King Midas in Reverse”.

Could’ve been written for Grayling.

Taking the Piss

The report into alleged Russian government interference in UK politics was presented to the Intelligence and Security Subcommittee last autumn. Its publication was delayed on the pretext of the upcoming election. Johnson then delayed the Tory nominations to the Committee for over six months. And then, in an act of breathtaking surrealism, the government has nominated as Chair one Chris Grayling, serial failure.

To which there is really only one response. You’re totally taking the piss, Prime Minister.

Cherry on the Cake

Another Tory nomination to the Committee runs Grayling a close second in uselessness and incompetence: Theresa Villiers. Quite posh too, it seems.

Here’s a few highlights of her incompetence:

• When Northern Ireland Secretary, talking bollocks over the impact of the UK leaving the UK in its effect on the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic
• Talking bollocks to farmers on food standards
• Upsetting both unionists and nationalists when Northern Ireland Secretary

So, expect the best possible scrutiny of the Russia Report when it makes the light of day – not.

My advice: buy shares in the manufacturers of carpet sweepers= the types that sweep under carpets.

It’s hard to keep going in shielding “lockdown” without going bananas to some degree. Here are my thoughts on some recent (and one very old) news items, loosely connected to the theme of bananas.

Straight Bananas

This one’s a bit of a classic – but worth repeating here.

We start today with the famous Euromyth about straight bananas. Undoubtedly just one of many lies written by Boris Johnson to fend off boredom when he was Brussels correspondent at the Daily Telegraph. The Wikipedia link in the sentence above contains several other myths. My memory is long enough to remember an actual Daily Express headline from before we joined the “Common Market” in 1973. It was warning the Great British public that joining the EEC would lead to the banning of the traditional British kipper. Well, we can all work out for ourselves that that prediction turned out to be decidedly fishy.

Beach Bananas

And so from fish to the seaside.

A great many people, me included, were horrified at the sight of the crowds on Bournemouth beach last week, with no respect at all for proper physical distancing. Local council workers collected 50 tonnes of rubbish from the beach on just one day: the average for a June weekday is about 5 tonnes apparently. It seems that there is a section of the British population who, as temperatures climb towards 30 degrees, “go bananas”. They find it essential to travel in their thousands to beaches and beauty spots, even in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic.

I am sure that a major contributory factor was the rule breaking by Dominic Cummings and the lamentable speech by Johnson in his support when the truth was revealed by the Guardian and Daily Mirror. If ever it was a case of “one rule for us, another for the rich and their friends”, this was it. This was a watershed moment: the day the UK government lost control of the public health message.

Johnson has compounded this major error of judgement with his announcements on easing lockdown restrictions in recent days. Johnson’s whole tone and body language result in a strong message that everything is being relaxed; the message of caution is sotto voce at best.

I for one expect to see coronavirus cases and deaths start to rise again soon. The USA is a warning to us all about what happens when a country is badly led.

Without a Trace

Finally, I turn to three examples all illustrating Britain’s descent into the status of a banana republic. They all stem from the gross incompetence and hubris of the “Leave EU” mind set running (ruining?) the country.

In early May, we were promised a “world beating” app after rejecting the Google / Apple version adopted successfully in other countries. This was “global Britain’s” very own version of a Track and Trace app, now sadly abandoned adding months of delay.

Here’s a technical account of what went wrong. An article for more general reading can be found here on the Metro website. What a pitiful shambles of a country this makes us appear to the rest of the world. But it gets worse: read on.

Taking a Pounding

Our currency, the pound sterling, is another factor moving the UK towards the status of a banana republic. A Financial Times article from a few days ago uses the term “emerging market currency” because of the erratic behaviour of the pound’s exchange rate on currency markets.

This may all seem like esoteric stuff, only of interest to finance people and exchange rate obsessives. There is a very basic real world effect, which anyone travelling abroad from the UK will shortly find out. That is in the so-called “spread” of exchange rates: the difference between the buying and selling rates. Broadly speaking, the higher the reputation of a country’s economy, the narrower is the spread between buying and selling rates. The “official” exchange rate – the one usually quoted in the media – is the mid-point in the range between these two.

So the rate that holidaymakers get at an exchange bureau, the number of euros or dollars that they actually get when they exchange pounds, will be further below this middle figure if the spread is wider. In short, people will feel even more ripped off than usual. And the blame lies with the country’s plummeting reputation caused by the government’s incompetence.

Where on Earth?

And just when you thought it couldn’t get more stupid, here’s another tale of Br*xit hubris and idiocy by our government.

Remember Galileo? No, not the famous scientist of old – no, Galileo, the EU’s joint project to have a GPS system that was not dependent on the US military. (Sometimes, the US military turns off GPS, usually when they’re up to no good somewhere in the Middle East. Then all the satnavs in cars and smartphones stop working until GPS is turned on again.) The UK has spent £1.2 billion as its share of Galileo but is walking away from the project to devise our own system, as part of the government’s stance on EU negotiations. The estimated cost to the UK of this decision is somewhere between £3 and 5 billion.

Our plans for yet another “world leading” go-it-alone project looks like it will be as big a fiasco as all the other deluded dreams. The government has invested in a 20% stake in a company called OneWeb. They are designing a completely different network of satellites designed to serve a completely different purpose from Global Positioning. All the developed GPS systems use satellites in orbit 20,000km above the Earth. The OneWeb system uses satellites only 1200km up, designed to provide internet access, not GPS.

How long will we have to wait until – just like Track and Trace – it’s back to the drawing board, following months of wasted effort?

The “Lollipop” Plane

Still, we can console ourselves that our Prime Minister now has a vanity jet aircraft repainted from camouflage grey with £900,000 quids’ worth of red, white and blue paint.  Critics say it looks like a lollipop; it’s more conspicuous appearance will handicap its previous use for fighter jet refuelling when not needed by the PM. An easy target in hostile airspace!

It’s hard to imagine anything more designed to place the UK in utter contempt with other world leaders – apart, of course, from the world’s autocratic rulers who revel in such tat. Banana, anyone?