Tories' Persistent Poll Lead: Two Theses

 There must be many a leftie tearing their hair at this:

It's rather bigger than some recent Tory poll leads, but by no means an outlier.

WTF?  Boris has screwed up the Covid / national economy challenge almost as badly as Trump (albeit with none of the FlatEarth numbskullery, so it's pure incompetence and bad judgement), putting the UK right up there with the worst performers.  It would be laughably easy to compile a list of colossal and very public mis-steps, ranging from the catastrophic, through the corrupt, to the comical.  Johnson hasn't put a foot right since the long-distant Greenwich speech.  How come polling like the above is even vaguely possible?

I think we may rule out any supposition that the populace is being swayed by some purposeful 'subliminal influence' media campaign of breathtaking subtlety and genius being mounted by Cummings who, original as he may be, is also plainly what my father's generation would have called a four-letter man.  Conversely, the Labour Party has not advocated a policy of Covid house arrest for obese BAME diabetes sufferers, nor otherwise lately perpetrated anything universally repugnant.  So - WTF?

I offer two broad theses and, being fairly puzzled meself, invite the C@W faithful to pitch in with others.

1.  Natural Loyalty In Time Of War

This one barely needs elaboration.  You stick together when the chips are down and, as in 1945, if you have reservations about the mob you've thereby lent support to, you can always heave them out.  When Starmer wants to sleep at night he'll be comforting himself with this one: let's face it, the evidence is, it's all he's got.  So pure is his strategy, he won't even risk tapping the ball occasionally into any of the gaping open goals Boris specialises in.  Hey - this is Strong Human Instinct we're talking about: let's not mess with that.  (Pipe down at the back there, Burnham.)

2.  The Labour Brand Is Utterly Trashed

All through the Blair years in power, long after the Bambi-fresh appeal of Blair had evaporated, the more innocent of my Tory friends were continually perplexed.  Whatever outrages the Blair/Brown regime came up with, and however well successive Hagues / Duncan Smiths / Howards / Camerons spoke to wrongness of what was being done, Blair sailed on regardless to electoral victory.  And I used to say to them:  that's a measure of how much people truly despise the memory of the Major and the later Thatcher years.  

So here's the polar-opposite Thesis #2.  In the 30 months following GE 2017, Corbyn so trashed not only his own reputation but the entire Labour brand, that the electorate will spurn the People's Party for a decade.

Yes; judging by what happened 1997-2015 (or indeed 1951-1964) it could be argued that the wasteland wilderness period could even be longer.  I suspect some of the more reflective lefties fear as much.

 We must all have been pondering on this one: what do we think?

 ND

IAG - BA part 2

Another day, another report of how badly things are going awry for the airline industry.

As discussed last week, I can really see huge changes afoot for the airline sector. Here is BA reducing its rather heroic 70% capacity next year forecasts in favour of a 30% capacity next year forecast. this is much more in-line with the rest of the industry. 

But it does show capacity overall in the sector being reduced by over 66% in total for the next six months at least - and which of us knows really how long this will last for?

BA have made a billion pound loss for the quarter, in reality they can sustain this for over a year in terms of pure financing. However, when do they press the button on permanently halving the size of the business? it is only but hugely cutting capacity that they can give up leases, reduce staff and other maintenance costs as well as slots at the airports where they operate. Reducing capacity will also allow them to charge more for the fewer flights that they are offering as it will bring back pricing pressure. 

A reason I am obsessing over this though for you, readers, is that this is a cast iron example of how things have changed in the world for a long time to come due to Covid-19. 

At this rate, no 3rd runway will be need at Heathrow or Gatwick - indeed, we may not even need all of Stansted, Luton and Gatwick airports with 50% reductions in capacity. Soon conversation will turn to mothballing one of these at this rate. 

There can be no swift return from here to what existed in travel infrastructure terms in January 2019 - lots of business case for travel has gone too - who among us wants to go to a 20,000 person trade show in Nice or Berlin in the next few years for example? The covid scars are going to run deep.

Burnham in "Blazing Saddles" Covid Revolt: What's Going On?

With a government as bad as Boris Johnson's, piecemeal stuff going badly wrong in random places is pretty inevitable.  But the whole Manchester fiasco is pretty strange.

What are we to make of Andy Burnham?  Compare and contrast with Sadiq Khan (always a 'transactional' politician) who has quite graciously praised the collaboration he's been getting from central government and is evidently in daily, and broadly constructive, dealings with HMG.  Burnham, though, is threatening the equivalent of a hunger strike and inviting the authorities to force-feed him.  Which they are doing.  He's an unlikely leftwing firebrand-hero, and comes across as just a sad, angry, frustrated individual which - given his responsibilities - he can be forgiven for on every count, at the purely human level, even if Not Very Statesmanlike.  But even some of his neighbouring council leaders seem to think he's gone too far in playing hostage games with his constituents' (short-term) well-being. 

And we're not hearing quite so much from Sturgeon just lately.  Maybe the rigours of winter will make everyone just retreat into a huddle of confusion, aimless resentment and slow economic disintegration.  

Of course, it all feeds into one of our current themes, namely, what next for bankrupt local authorities?  I can report another developent in my local Croydon saga: the (Labour) leader of the Council has gone the way of the Chief Exec and others.  The incomer is Sturgeon to his Salmond, as Sturgeon would have been viewed when she first took over, i.e. just an acolyte.  Is she any good?  We may find out quite rapidly.  The council has requested permission from the government to use capital resources to plug the gaping hole in the revenue account - the 'Northampton' solution - and there's an enquiry being held into the really outrageous conduct of the council's wholly-owned housebuilding company, a blatantly political and thoroughly incompetent project the details of which I won't bore you with.  Unhappily, the council's other vast "investments" are mostly in commercial property ...

Finally, what are we to make of Kier Starmer?  His '100% Sniper' strategy of never engaging with the enemy on the field of battle is strikingly clear and ruthlessly disciplined.  He is obviously betting everything on it.  Where is his support for Burnham and a general anti-government upsurge?  Will his sullen and increasingly rebellious troops stay in line?   Is Transactional Khan mapping out a clever central course of constructive engagement with reality that will serve his own long-term plans?  Is Angry Andy Burnham exactly the "everyman" leader Labour needs?  Questions, questions.

ND  

Sunday Humour

 

Saddam's Sortie (Pt 6) - President Bush the Greater

Reading a philosophy blog the other day, I found the following sentiment:  "George H. W. Bush was a temporary throwback to an earlier era of responsible conservatives".  Maybe not exactly how I'd have phrased it, but he was certainly the right man for the job in 1990, when Saddam Hussein made his land-grab for Kuwait.

Bush Snr was of course the consumate professional politician / administrator who'd done a string of top jobs before succeeding Ronald Reagan at the very top in 1989 - one helluva juncture in world history at which to take over.  I doubt if anyone would make a case for his having been a top-10 president overall: appointing Dan Quayle as VP, and losing (to Clinton) after one term, don't feel like qualifications for the shortlist.

But he had a couple of vital qualifications for the job in 1990: he'd been Ambassador to the UN; Director of the CIA; and he'd been on active combat service as a naval pilot in WW2 - 58 missions, DFC.  One way or the other, he'd learned some very significant lessons that were to prove extremely important for the conduct of the (First) Gulf War, both before and during the fighting.

The one that's relevant to our curent narrative on the build-up phase, 30 years ago today, is his enthusiam for building a substantial anti-Saddam coalition of nations.  We could all make the case as to why that would be a clever way to go, in terms of global politics - not least because, well, Middle East.  And then there was Russia, hovering to the north, with more than a passing interest in what was to transpire.

But it's not a no-brainer - particularly when his concept of the coalition extended to asking other countries to contribute troops on the ground.  Getting the UK onside was one thing - trusted ally, Security Council member, useful capabilities (Cyprus was vital, as we've discussed before; and all three services had plenty to offer in those days), on the same NATO doctrinal wavelength, part of the same intelligence community, fought alongside the USA in the Pacific theatre (inter alia) where Bush himself served.  But - as was later to be proved to be all too true - making use of, errr, Egyptian forces always seemed like a difficulty one could do without.  

Still, Bush insisted on it, and there was a motley feel to the eventual lineup in the desert.  We'll maybe get to that next year, when the 30th anniversary of the actual fighting falls.  Apparently he very much whipped in this coalition himself, making many a 'phonecall to monarchs and presidents around the world, doubtless making good use of the contacts he'd made over the preceeding decades.  And a strikingly large number of nations joined the party  - Wiki lists 34 - with additional players like Germany and Japan contributing $$$, on top of the huge financial contribution made by Saudi Arabia for obvious reasons of self-interest.

Bush also had a fine team to execute his orders (this does not include Quayle).  James Baker was a competent Secretary of State.  Colin Powell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was and is very well-regarded.  And the appointment of General Norman Schwarzkopf to lead the mighty alliance on the ground was an excellent choice.

Next time:  the geo-political context.

ND

We All Like A Good Explosion

 ... and this one looks like a corker - a WW2 'Tallboy' bomb, recently detonated where it was dropped by the RAF near Szczecin in Poland.

(Interesting how that plume of water describes what must be nearly a perfect Gaussian distribution:  anyone know the maths behind that?)

Szczecin (Stettin) is 600 miles as the crow flies - further from England than Berlin - and getting there in 1945 required overflight of a lot of German-controlled airspace.  To me, even more impressive than the bomber sorties were the pre- and post-bombing recce missions flown (to calibrate the damage with before-and-after photos).  Prior to introduction of the Mosquito, that meant an unarmed Spitfire with a solo pilot - doing all his own navigation.  Its theoretical maximum radius was 900 miles, but they'd never take the crows-flight course, and would generally photograph several targets in a single mission.  After a bombing run, the Germans knew the Spitfire would be coming along shortly ...   

That takes a certain type of cool courage.

ND

Can BA (or other airlines) survive in 2021?

I noticed over the weekend that IAG has no replaced its long-standing CEO, Willie Walsh and now also replaced the CEO of main subsidiary British Airways. 

Lots of commentary notes that the huge dispute with staff over the 13,000 job losses was hte root cause of the changes. I recall from day slong gone that Rod Eddington lost his job for the same reasons in the last decade and then Wille Wlash himself was booted upstairs because of staff disputes. Basically, fighting the unions at BA is the main job of any CEO. The company is stuck with a huge historic Union base in a way that competitors like Easyjet and Ryanair are not. It has always made BA a hardship to manage. 

However, the current  effect of covid-19 is having a massive impact. IAG has raised extra finances (€2.7 billion) to help them through the crisis, but the plans for next year are to have flying capacity at 70% of 2019 levels. That feels very optimisitc, with the pandemic accelerating across Europe, India and the US, international travel is going to remain limited well into next year. Plenty of people will have a fear of flying too caused by the pandemic. 

Overall, I would be surprised if they got to 70% by the end of next year, after some vaccines have begun to be rolled out. To make it that far is going to need some epic cost cutting to really slim the airlines down, I can only see many airlines really surviving if  Governments' steps in to help with the blalance sheets. 

Decline and Fall of Exxon

What a story.  Exxon, once the greatest corporation in the world, now struck out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and eclipsed in market cap by a wind-farmer!  OK, every traditional energy stock has received a smacking this year - some reckon that 2019 will prove to have been 'peak oil' - but Exxon stands out from the Shells, BPs, Chevrons and Totals as having been in slow and steady decline for years before that. 

This is the firm that was the triumphant main survivor of the anti-trust purges against the Rockefeller / Standard Oil empire; that for decades managed its stock price carefully through a strategic buyback scheme, so that every pension fund in the USA had more Exxon in it than anything else.  That was AAA rated long after that became a distant memory for industrials.  That was totally self-confident in its own strength and abilities; that would blithely flout US sanctions if it chose**; that had every bank in the world at its beck and call; that remained magisterially above the hurly-burly of politics, domestic and foreign (until Russia expropiated some of its stake in Sakhalin, to the company's utter amazement: that's the kind of thing that happens to the others, but not us!).

What happened?  

It certainly wan't a single bad decision.  I know Exxon well, having dealt with them at length in several different manifestations.   On the one hand, they were (let's start in the past tense) totally confident in their own abilities.  They never recruited from outside: everyone started at the bottom of the Exxon pyramid, and at each successive layer a few more would drop off.  Management were trained to be generalists in a laudable programme of assignments to widely varying divisions.  If you'd never worked in the corporate treasury, that was a very good reason for being given a role there for your next job.    For this to be feasible, numeracy was the primary requirement; and training needed to be superb.  In technical subjects, it was.  There was an Exxon way of doing things, in almost every sphere.  By dint of the 'no external recruiting' principle, nobody knew any different anyhow.   By its own lights (share price, credit rating, ability to take on global mega-projects only Shell could match), this all clearly worked superbly well.  If you liked being in a competent, well-resourced, confident, and hence relaxed environment, you could have a very happy career.    

The downside?  Well, arrogance, natch.  And total insularity.  Exxon had no idea what it didn't know.  Like, absolutely none whatsoever.  This even included what else was going on in the oil industry, if Exxon didn't participate in a particular corner of it.  This extended to what were the lastest technical breakthroughs, if Exxon hadn't been involved.  (I was once set on, as an outsider, to conduct a formal enquiry into a vexed distortion in the UK oil taxation regime and the various ways most companies were finding to dodge around it: HMG wanted to straighten it all out.  I was invited to interview any executive in any company I chose and - on the strict basis of 'no names mentioned' - demand full candour from them.  This was forthcoming, and we bottomed out the loophole issue quite easily.  Exxon, naturally, insisted on being one of the interviewees (fair enough): they sat me down and earnestly assured me, with transparent good faith, that nobody in the industry was dodging anything at all, and the whole thing was a big misunderstanding.  Well, they certainly weren't dodging; they showed me their books.  They had absolutely no idea what the rest of the oil patch was up to.)

A subsidiary failing was their total lack of interest in entrepreneurial activity.  They made their money by being (as they saw it) the best engineers with the biggest balance-sheet, who could thereby command a monopoly on the biggest and most lucrative challenges / opportunities in energy.  Anyone piping up with a smart idea for making a few extra bucks was told to get back to their desks: too small to be of interest.  That's an attitude that corrodes the spirit of many of the brightest and best.   

Well, they've had a good run: but for years now it's become obvious this introspective giant was going to stumble really badly if the world moved on.  They'd never realise what was happening outside their frosted windows, for one thing.  And when the need came for nimbleness?  Forget it.  (There was once an Exxon CEO who said he was going to "teach the elephant to dance".  No chance.)  Two years ago they announced they were going to get seriously into trading - as had, for very many years past been Shell, BP, Chevron, Total ... et al, ad infinitum.  What: a massive oil company, not in trading?!  Yup.  Trading was evil.  If you give the toys to the boys, the boys will play with the toys; and then where would we be?  Nope, we'll be self-sufficient, thank you very much.  Well: try changing course in a volatile, fast-evolving commodity market without a good trading division.  Can't be done.  Needless to say, their new efforts have made no impact.

If the world moved on ... and so it has proved.  Exxon is now pretty paralysed, with most discretionary expenditure frozen while they figure out what the Hell to do next, as the rest of the western world heads along different paths towards Net Zero 2050.  (You can see them thinking:  the world will still need oil ... maybe there's a niche for just one unreconstructed old dinosaur ...) Their credit rating is still AA - albeit having been downgraded this year by both S&P and Moody's, and with negative outlook - so there's never any problem raising $$$.  They might still lash out on something left-field (like in the 1980s when they decided to beat IBM at office systems - sic ++).  

Chances of success?  Pretty low.  Still, it's a big corpse for many a vulture to feed off (see footnote) over the coming years.  My name is Ozymandias ...

ND

Update:  I found the "elephant dance" story online

_____________

**  yet again, a story for another day (perhaps when the corpse has been interred)

++ from wiki, the story of a highly instructive $1bn Exxon cockup of old: 

Under the guidance of its paid consultants at Boston Consulting Group, Exxon announced in the 1970s, that it would compete against IBM and Xerox. The mantra was ‘Information Is the Oil of the 21st Century’. It launched Exxon Office Systems, which predictably failed, since "the giant oil company failed to fully realize the subtleties of managing small high-tech companies." In the early 1980s, Exxon retailed its fax machines and software through Sears. Exxon announced the closure of the venture at the end of 1984.

And The Winner Is ...

And so to our Colonialist Capitalist Quiz.  The amount charged by the RAF to the Egyptian government for the 3rd aerial survey in 1922 was £1,583 13s 5d.  

By my reckoning, the odd change in decimal is £0.6708  (13 x 12 + 5 = 161 pennies, / 240); so in guineas, 1,583.6708 / (1+(1/20))  =  1,508.26 guineas

So the winner is Sobers, with his very realistic stab.  A free lifetime subscription to C@W for that person - plus the first pint on me next time Blog Drinks are permitted.

*   *   *   *   *

Incidentally, if a little schoolboy humour is allowed while we are in robust retro mood  - you gotta admire the QC who told the court this week that the idea children can safely opt for puberty-blocking drugs is "a fairy tale" ...

ND

How do we live with the virus over the winter?

This Covid-2019 is so hard to manage. After a six months it does not seem that much the Government do makes a lot of difference to managing the outbreak. Despite our breathless media, the same is true in some other countries like France and Spain. 

Heavy handed lockdowns have worked in March and April to reduce in the UK and other Countries, but only at a huge economic cost and also a big cost to wider health outcomes. Excess deaths is the real measure of how badly the epidemic is affecting a country and the UK in Europe (likely in part due to being honest about deaths) is the worst affected. This covers not just covid deaths, but also the more 'normal' killers like cancer and heart disease - both exacerbated by the refusal to treat people in hospital by the Heath Service and Government. 

But we are where we are and there are no silver bullets here to stop the pandemic short of a vaccine which at best must still be 6 months from any kind of roll-out that would have a real world impact. 

However, the Government to me has not got things badly wrong. In March they were unfairly criticised for taking the time to consider how long a lockdown could work. Here we are in October, willfully ignoring the evidence. Matt Hancock I saw yesterday basically threatening the population that increases in local covid cases will see the closure again of cancer treatments. To me, this is totally unacceptable - a punishment on the weak created by the (immune) strong and backed by the Government. It reflects the desperation of the Government to control a bored and frustrated population. 

If I had lost my job, the idea I am going to sit at home and starve is for the birds. Who cares about a virus that you are 99% likely to recover from as compared to losing your lifestyle, home and possibly family?  No chance. 

With the lack of compliance and new evidence showing lockdowns are no longer effective we need a change in how we deal with the virus and one guided by economics and wider health concerns than only covid. 

I would go for:

- End lockdowns of all types. 

- Rigorously enforce social distancing, wearing masks and basic hygiene

- Open all businesses and schools as long as they can create a socially distanced environment. Properly monitor and inspect establishments, with big fines for non-compliance. 

Only in an extreme case of say over 100,000 cases per day would be have a national lockdown and even then only for a couple of weeks to take the edge off the cases. 

The biggest challenge is around shielding, over 70's should be offered voluntary shielding by the Government for a long period, up to a year from now. This is the vulnerable group but they are also adults, if they want to take risks they should be allowed to do so, but if they want to shield they should be supported in that. 

I am no doctor, but I can see psychologically the impact of the pandemic and economically we are having a nightmare - something needs to change and the Government's science only led approach is not working in the wider interest. 

Tuesday Fun: Quick Capitalist Quiz

 Busy today, so here's a fun quick money question.

At the weekend I wrote of the problems of getting adequate military maps in WW2 for many areas in North Africa; but that a big swathe of Egypt had been covered by interwar surveys - "at the expense of the Egyptian government!".  Yes, the RAF charged the Egyptian government the cost of the aerial surveys.  Well, they were highly beneficial for irrigation planning, with a spin-off benefit of quite revelatory archaeological research.

Here's what happened on the 3rd such survey, conducted in 1922: based, unsurprisingly, on the Nile, it was split into a North survey from the Delta Barrage to the sea, carried out by No. 208 Squadron (Bristol Fighters), and a South survey by No. 47 Squadron (D.H.9s) from Aswan to the Delta Barrage, a total of 850 miles.  So: our colonialist capitalist quiz question -

What was the cost that was passed through to the Egyptians for the 3rd survey?  

Answer in Pounds Sterling, money of the day (1922 pounds, shillings & pence).

Small prize for the closest estimate ... (editor's decision final)

ND

Saddam's Sortie (Pt 5) - Where Are We Going?

30 years ago, the USA having determined that Saddam was to be booted out of Kuwait, Drew had rejoined the Colours and was busily participating in the effort to bone up on two areas of lamentable ignorance on the part of the Staff:  (a) the surprisingly impressive Iraqi Army (see the last three episodes); and  (b) the likely battlezone itself.  

So: break out the maps!  - the "Going Maps", the ones showing all the obstacles and bridges and tracks; and which of them were unsuitable for tanks etc etc; i.e. the state of the "going".   

Hmm.  There were none.  The MoD had none.  How come??

It's interesting.  From the very start of WW2 this became a major issue for the British Army across much of North Africa where Britain found itself heavily engaged, first against the Italians and then of course the Afrika Corps.  The situation was more-or-less OK in a large swathe of Egypt where extensive aerial photo-surveys and subsequent detailed ordnance mapping had been conducted during the interwar years (at the expense of the Egyptian government!) for the twin puposes of irrigation planning and, as a simple subsidiary task, archaeological exploration.  But other areas gave a lot of grief - all the way across Libya, Tunisia - where French pre-war mapping proved inadequate - AND (amazingly) much of Sicily and Italy!  The requisite high-grade mapping needed to be done almost from scratch in many areas of that conflict, which necessitated a highly unwelcome diversion of aerial recce resources from their primary purpose of intelligence-gathering.

AND: there had been almost no WW2 fighting in and around Kuwait, or even the Persian Gulf at all.  Britain had invaded, firstly Iraq and then (in combo with Russia from the north) Iran, for the triple aims of (a) securing oil; (b) establishing a safe route for supplying war materials to Russia;  (c) both Iraq and Iran were deemed to be Axis-leaning.  But both these actions were rather to the north of Kuwait, and were all over in just a few days.  So there hadn't been any need to conduct military-grade mapping of the area we were now interested in.  Just a couple of years later (1992, from memory), the military forerunner of a Google-Maps type system came into use.  But in 1990 we were stuck.

Fortunately, the cavalry was at hand: the CIA came up with excellent Going Maps of the entire area for us - I think they had the entire planet covered.  

Amusingly, for those of an historical bent, there was in fact a precedent in the shape of some earlier military maps that could be laid alongside the modern American ones for comparison.  From somewhere in the depths of the archives the MoD did turn up British maps of the area - dating back to the 19th Century, the work of intrepid explorers of what was then known as the Great Sandy Desert** of what we now call Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. 

In those C19 volumes were to be found Going Maps of a different era:  "Track, ten miles, almost straight but soft going and gravel, passable for pack mules but not wagons or artillery ... bridge, suitable only for crossing on foot".  The modern version would make equivalent comments - but for trucks and tanks ...

Fortunately we had several months to lay our plans.  And the Royal Engineers are very good at preparing maps.

ND  

Next time:   the coalition of George (HW) Bush

__________________

**There is another desert region that goes by the same name nowadays - it's in Australia.  

Map: Jeff Dahl / wikimedia

The Mask Slips

To make you fume this weekend (or laugh, according to taste): a regulation Graun article on divesting portfolios of their involvement with fossil fuels etc.  It's full of the usual communistic claptrap: "A vast amount of the financial system is deeply undemocratic...", with entertaining followup exchanges BTL - "Are you presenting that as a bad thing? Should people get a vote on how you spend or invest your money?" / "Above the level of personal expenditure: yes".  

And, as ever, more participating CiF-ers are hostile to this dictatorial crap than support it.  Recall the saying of Nietzsche cited a couple of weeks ago: "You preachers of equality - from you the tyrannical madness of impotence cries out for 'equality': thus your secret desire to be tyrants disguises itself in words of virtue."  Not everyone warms to tyrannical instructions. 

Midway through, the mask slips well and truly as the writer bemoans:

there is a limit to the number of endowments and funds that represent beneficiaries who can be readily organised and are willing to submit to these demands, such as student bodies, religious communities and the constituents of progressive councils and cities

"Submit to demands" might be a form of words to be regretted after due consideration.  And as a student of these things, I can unpack "organise" for you.  It means "give instructions that will be obeyed".  As in: "our problem is, we are good at mobilising the youth, but we are bad at organising them", a plaint made variously by (e.g.) Momentum in the wake of GE2019, and the mobilisers of the Occupy movement.  

Ahh, the frustrating limitations of anarchy ...

ND

Trump Friday!

The man can alwasy steal the scene. This time, he did not even mean it. 

But given he had the debate with Biden on Wednesday I am looking out for Joe Biden to tweet he is negative. 

Imagine if Hope Hicks, pictured, who likely gave the virus to Trump somehow manages to incapacitate both the President and the soon-to-be President elect. 

Whilst personally tragic, from a political point of view it would be pure popcorn. The US consitution can't really handle making changes on the fly given the rigours of the tripartite approach to Government. 

We would end up with Crazy Mike Pence as President, then likely into either Nancy Pelosi or Kamala Harris as, um, unelected female Presidents. Wow.

It won't happen, but then again this is 2020 and stranger things have never happened than this year. 

The 'new normal' economy and the unknowable future

After a lifetime of being interested in and studying macroeconomics and also participating in the coal-face end of Capitalism, I have been unprepared for the loss of insight that I have suffered through the covid pandemic. 

Long time readers will know, I could see the credit crunch coming, before that I knew 9/11 would wreck parts of the economy, I could see QE becoming the chosen too to manage the economy in the West in to 2010's. Whilst seeing the austerity recovery spilling over into more recessions and perhaps underestimating the euro's hardiness, overall I feel I have had good feel for macro conditions for a long time (just don't get me to stock pick, if only I were talented at that...).

Covid world is just mental though:

- Stock prices down less in percentage terms and GDP (utterly insane and unpredictable)

- Government spending slightly higher than during 2008, but no impact on the currency

- Huge increase in unemployment but a huge boost to house prices (in my area, where I am dealing with agents currently who are true sons and daughters of satan, at least 5% in the last 3 months)

- Also huge unemployment but the highest ever savings rate since records began 

- Tourism and trade hugely down, but deflation setting into retail purchase

- Some parts of the economy smashed by the Virus; travel and leisure, retail, but then others like digital and logistics hugely boosted. 

None of the above makes any sense in general economic terms. Asset prices maybe I can see rising as savings increase and need deploying, however the huge unemployment should undermine house prices and rents - but the opposite is happening. 

The Government is busy shellacking the public finance with a second 100-year black swan event in the space of 12 years. Yet relatively the Government remains popular and the pound stable as the same rate as the past years post-Brexit. 

So, with all the above, I have lost all sense of where this is going economically. The world is changing at hyper-speed and 2021 will see a big denouement - but I honestly can't say whether this will be a bounce back to a new level of stability or a 2009 style crisis. The issue with the markets is they are driven by people and investors too and I sense nobody knows what to do or where things are going. This would suggest a huge shakeout when people and markets figure it out eventually - I just can't make out how it will be resolved yet. 

Dissolution of the Monasteries, 2020-style

What is going to happen when the wave of local authority bankruptcies hits? 

... as, in the coming months, must surely be highly likely.  We've raised this before, and I remain extremely interested in it.   As well as serious general political interest there's a local angle for me: after 6 years of Labour excesses, mismanagement and all-round failure, my borough (Croydon) is well up there with the most indebted, over-extended councils in the land.  Others said to be near the brink are Luton, Oxford, Birmingham (!), Woking and Peterborough: and that's by no means the end of the watch-list.

There are a couple of clues as to what happens next.  This month the government imposed a new Chief Executive  - a turnaround specialist - on Croydon as the price for being willing to continue in dialogue with the Labour leadership.  There must, though, surely be a very finite pool of genuinely competent *turnaround* merchants available at short notice.  (I'd offer myself but I don't think t'unions would relish my management style ...)

The other massive clue is what happened in Northants, where the fateful day of the Section 114 Notice has come and gone.  As well as the government dividing up the old responsibilities into newly-minted authorities with revised boundaries (which sounds like doing something radical just to make the point), rather than bailing them out the government gave them approval to sell capital assets until they'd filled the hole in the ordinary accounts.  Generally speaking, a council's ability to do that is very heavily circumscribed, for obvious reasons.

So here's the vision.  Council after council goes bust.  If they couldn't contemplate rescuing Northants (Tory-held) in 2018, there's no way on earth the government is going to bail them all out: so massive, nationwide asset sales are mandated.  There's been nothing like this since the Dissolution of the Monasteries, supervised by that outright genius of an administrator, Thomas Cromwell.  And before that, the shakeout of labour relations following the Black Death.

This might actually be a major component in the dynamics of a post-Brexit, ongoing-Covid UK.  Sadly, there's no obvious likelihood of a latter-day Cromwell to execute the same highly diligent job he made of the 16th Century version.  (Cummings?  Don't make us laugh.)  Mostly, Cromwell ensured Henry got top dollar for the assets seized.  Even under his distinctly hands-on guidance, however, there was plenty of dubious cronyism involved.  We may be sure all manner of *bargains* will fall into undeserving hands at ridiculous prices - less Henry VIII, more Boris Yeltsin, I'm guessing.  Which will be depressing.

If anyone truly relishes the idea of all the pieces being thrown up into the air ... I know what you mean, but be careful what you wish for.  If Brum goes under, that'll be quite a crash.

ND

There is no vaccine for Manflu - apologies for the interruption to service

 

Centrica: Decline of an Old Friend

 Picture ... thousand words ... etc

I've always had a soft spot for Centrica, ever since they got off on exactly the right foot back in the 1990s when British Gas was triumphantly de-merged.  Maybe it's to do with the mighty relief of the break-up of that ghastly, brutal monopoly.   Newly-liberated Centrica did an awful lot right; and as the years progressed, they were clear-sighted, objective and flexible enough to recalibrate their strategies in the face of changing market circumstances (including cutting their losses decisively when called for).  Not least, they've staved off being gobbled up.

You'll find we've written about them, on and off, for years - and not always in complimentary tones because they haven't been beyond reproach at all.  Worst of all has been their nuclear gamble, when they got hopelessly carried away by their stonking coup of buying a heap of electricity from the old British Energy at the absolute bottom of the market, when Gordon Brown (remember him ...) was engineering a bail-out.  That was very good business (one of several such opportunistic bottom-of-the-market coups - almost as good as John Browne / BP in 1998), but it wasn't to last.  Participating as a more-or-less passive partner (OK, patsy) in EDF's outright purchase of BE in 2009 was crass, and they've regretted it from the day they agreed it, probably even before the ink was dry.  And they've never found a way of severing the ties, despite committing to do so by the end of this year.

Still, it's sad to see them the way they are now, cancellation of dividend and all - even if they are by no means alone among broadly competent energy companies out of favour right now.  Earlier in the year we said there needed to be some meaningful asset sales and that remains the case, IMHO.  But it seems we have to wait for developments on the nuclear front ... 

Centrica still plans to exit both E&P and Nuclear, but divestment programmes have been paused until the financial and commodity markets have settled.  

Yeah, right - doesn't sound much like any time soon.  Which must mean selling something more conventional than a part-share in EDF's mouldering, cracking-up UK nukes (with the associated energy-sapping politics that EDF wages all the time against HMG).  

Still, they remain a competent lot.  How much of that former clear-sightedness and objectivity do they retain?  The sale of Direct Energy (their big North American supply company) is a start, and must be a wrench: they bought it in 2000 as part of their Enron wannabe strategy, and grew it to #2 position in North America.  So maybe they really are up for it.

ND

Watch the markets - 2020

We all know that September is the time for big market crashes.

 1929, 1987, 2008 - All the doom was in September and October.

This year to date, despite the huge Covid-19 crisis, the markets have been quite resilient, down around 15-20% despite the GDP also being down at that level in a historic reset. 

This has been explained all year by those in the know as due to the the free money printing of the Fed and other central banks, plus the low interest rates meaning stocks with dividends have still proved popular. 

However, today has been a big hit in the markets, the FTSE is down 3.6% today alone. It could be the start of a long week or a re-bound tomorrow. 

With the Covid situation across Europe moving from good to bad though, the idea of a V-Shape recovery and the markets seeing through the downturn maybe over. Instead this could be a rocky time indeed and the start of the deep recession long-predicted. 

I guess we will know soon enough. 

Saddam's Sortie (Pt 4): More Iraqi Military Innovations

Back this weekend to the situation where thirty years ago, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and the US-led, NATO-based effort to evict him was only just starting.  First things first; and we needed to acquaint ourselves with the military doctrine of the numerically strong and highly exerienced Iraqi army that we'd never before given a second thought to.  We'd quickly established they had incorporated quite a lot from the Soviets, as well as being largely equipped by Russia; and there were even some faint echoes of British influence (see below) dating to the 1950s.  In our arrogance and ignorance, though, we weren't expecting them to have developed some home-grown innovations, that had been amply tried and tested in a decade of all-out conflict with Iran.

Last time we described one of these - switching between specialist generals to lead different phases of the same operation.  This weekend we look at two more: one of less novelty but notable for its very extreme manifestation; the other of genuine, eye-popping novelty and not a little ghastliness.

The first was, as just suggested, really only an extreme implementation of a well-known principle, namely, that you don't ask tanks to drive very far on made-up roads.  (a) They ain't designed to run on hard flat surfaces, resulting in more maintenance outages; (b) they are not very fast; (c) their fuel consumption is truly appalling, particularly if you do take them up to full speed; and (d) they don't leave the road behind them in very good condition for any other purpose - e.g. bringing up troops and supplies by truck, a rather important consideration in a campaign.

Additionally, tanks are capital assets and not to be wasted - even if the Iraqis had quite a lot, and the Iranians not so many.  This final consideration led to the Iraqis seeing a powerful requirement for being able to switch their tanks rapidly from one front to another:  use them for a breakthrough operation at point A, then switch them swiftly to point B for further service.   Bottom-line?  You need a vast fleet of tank transporters.      

And that's what they'd acquired: by some estimates, the world's largest - to go with the world's largest combat-experienced army!  It thereby facilitated a major part of their operational doctrine: switching the location of tank forces in a trice between different phases of the same operation - rather like switching generals, in fact.

This was not wholly unprecedented in military logistical thinking, of course.  We could note:

• WW1, where the Germans planned a lightning-fast knockout blow against France, to be followed by rapid redeployment across the entire continent for an assault on Russia by the same forces  (even if it didn't quite work out that way, of course).   In that case it was the railway network that needed to be carefully developed in preparation.
• Israel's strategy for dealing with its equivalent frontal duality, Egypt to the west and Syria et al to the east.  Israel, too, has a large fleet of tank transporters to achieve the same effect. 

Nevertheless, the Iraqi version was impressive.  It was also more tactical in its nature than the two parallels I've offered above: both Germany and Israel saw their use of the same thinking essentially as being for a one-off, one-two combination punch of the highest strategic import - not really for day-to-day tactical deployment, which is what the Iraqis were capable of.  

*   *   *   *   *   *

I've kept you waiting for the gruesome one ...

Saddam's intended lightning strike against Iran in 1980 had, in the finest military traditions, become bogged down into a costly war of attrition.  The Iranians had resorted to human-wave tactics using the berserker-fanatics of the Revolutionary Guard, and Saddam didn't have any intention of trading numbers in that fashion.  So, unsurprisingly given what we know about the man, his mind turned to chemical warfare.  (Russian antecedents here, of course, and equipment also.)   

But there's a problem, as anyone who's ever donned a 'noddy suit' and/or respirator will know.  It ain't half hot, Mum.  And in temperatures of 40 degrees plus?  Not just uncomfortable: actually and literally unbearable for more than a very short while.  And Saddam was on the offensive; so he wasn't just going to use the chemicals for area-denial, he was intending to have his troops fight through the chemicals directly following their deployment, to capture the ground.  They had to be fully kitted-up.

Solution?  Big blocks of ice (and all the logistics required to make and distribute them).  In a front-line tent, a platoon of noddy-suited men would all huddle around a block to keep cool, until the last moment when, thus refreshed, they would be hurled into short, sharp action through the contaminated area, their ability to function fully-suited for at least a short while thereby greatly enhanced.  Clever, huh?

The gruesome bit?  Iraqi losses in some of these operations were very considerable  (Really? - ed).  Now, stemming from their pre 1960's British influences, they raised infantry regiments on a territorial basis; and so from time to time, as for the Brits in WW1, they stood to lose a very large number of young men all from the same town or region, all at the same time.  Iraqi tradition, as with many nations since time immemorial, is to recover bodies from the battlefield for burial at home.  So they'd potentially be in the awkward position of returning hundreds of bodies for hundreds of funerals to the same town, all at the same time - and Saddam was by no means wholly secure in his political grip on the country.  Not a happy political prospect.

So they used the ice on the return journey, so to speak, to preserve the bodies in order to get them back into morgues, whence they could drip-fed them back into their towns and villages over a prolonged period.

And the precedents for that?  I rather doubt it ...

ND 

Friday Fun - Covid Conspiracy plans

If there is one thing that has kept me going over the past few months it is the endless litany of more and more outrageous conspiracy stories about Covid-19.

In many ways Covid is THE perfect conspiracy platform. After all, China really did do a massive job covering up how it started (and then started in its national newspapers claiming it was from a USA lab - classic maskirovka). And the virus is scary, out of control and affecting the whole world.

But, the anti-mask fanatics, the lunatics who claim it is all a hoax, the anti-vaxxers, the people who call it a plandemic and also those who claim Bill Gates wants to kill us all. 

It is amazing, a rich and deep seem on human "intelligence" and nonsense. And really entertaining, I mean check this one out for example:

"Recently, Chandra Wickramasinghe, known for his work in astronomy and astrobiology, spread the idea that the virus was living on a comet and a piece of that space rock may have fallen to Earth during a brief fireball event over China in October 2019. He further implied that comets carrying viruses may have caused outbreaks in the past as well."

Anyway, they are funny is even they help to further the idea that much of humanity is made up of nut-jobs. So what is your favourite one for the comments? Or indeed, which to you actually believe?

Nietzsche on Woke Identity Politics

We've had cause to mention Nietzsche over the weekend.  He is not to everyone's taste:  content-wise; stylistically; difficulty (or all three).  Nevertherless his insight into humanity is the most consistently penetrating I know, along with other tremendous contributions to philosophy, psychology and even wider still.  

And nothing changes.  This is from his famous Also Sprach Zarathustra (1884) - widely viewed as the most poetic expression of his thought, and extraordinarily influential in 20th century European literature, but (frankly) no easier read than his more conventional expositions.  Nevertheless, some passages need no contextual explanation for their force and astuteness to jump out at us.  His coinage for the woke warriors and 'intersectionalists' of his time is the tarantulas.  He wouldn't have been surprised by Edinburgh University's treatment of David Hume ...

   

"That the world may become full of the storms of our revenge, let precisely that be what we call justice"  -  thus the tarantulas speak to each other.   "We will wreak vengeance and abuse on all those who are not as we are"  -  thus the tarantula-hearts promise themselves.   "And 'will to equality'  -  that shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and we shall raise outcry against everything that currently has power!" 

You preachers of equality  -  from you the tyrannical madness of impotence cries out for "equality":  thus your secret desire to be tyrants disguises itself in words of virtue.

 

Nothing changes.

ND

 

Labour suggest furlough replacement and to fight the last war, again

Quite interesting to read the news out today and the predictably stupid and vain responses from MP's. 

The news I refer too is the predictions for half a million jobs ro so to go this quarter as the furlough scheme ends. Labour of course want the scheme extended and improve upon - with more free money to pretend to keep people employed and also permanent schemes to help sectors of the economy that need it, in their view.

The Government too has its kickstarter scheme and some others, but in the round is interfering a bit less and looking at the costs a bit more. 

The Government is better here, although now is probably the time to look at the benefits system in the round and move to something more on the Swiss model. In Switzerland the Government pay you for up to a year after redundancy 80% of your wages until you find a new job - very generous indeed.

In the UK this could be a lower amount but with a credit towards re-training, which is desperately needed. 

Keir Starmer's usual vacuous soundbite is to help sectors that need support like retail and airlines. How is this of any use? We will need a lot less airline capacity for many years to come and already need far fewer shops than we used to. Plus retail is unskilled work anyway, those people in retail need some skills that maybe useful to help them earn a better living, otherwise they are going to be unemployed a long time.

Quite the worst thing to do at the moment is to try to resurrect the old economy. 10 years of cultural transformation has happened in 6 months. Offices won't be the same, working from home will be more normal and online purchasing even more of a trend. Plus staycations and home improvements. These changes are schumpeterian ones, the chaos of the recession and pandemic. Really they should be embraced to channel the changes we need into progress rather than fought against like the closure of the mining pits etc a generation ago that achieved nothing. 

Both left and right now agree with analysis that it would be have been better to close the pits and try to retrain everybody with genuine new skills rather than leave them to fester in long-term unemployment. 

So maybe let's not do that again, for example technology means we need less retail workers but far more logistics workers, why not prepare the workforce for the economy now emerging rather than the one the sun has set on?

China in Iran: In Whose Dreams?

Several days ago, one of our Anons alerted us to this in a BTL comment on the "Chairman Xi" post.  Astonishing stuff ... if true.  Everyone's worst nightmare.

a large-scale roll-out of electronic espionage and warfare capabilities focussed around the port of Chabahar ... and the concomitant build-out of mass surveillance and monitoring of the Iranian population ... Iran will be an irreplaceable geographical and geopolitical foundation stone in Beijing’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ project, as well as providing a large pool of young, well-educated, relatively cheap labor for Chinese industry. The mass surveillance, monitoring, and control systems to cover Iran’s population is to begin its full roll-out as from the second week of November ... 10 million extra CCTV cameras to be placed in Iran’s seven most populous cities, to begin with, plus another five million or so pinhole surveillance cameras to be placed at the same time in another 21 cities, with all of these being directly linked in to China’s main state surveillance and monitoring systems ... will enable the full integration of Iran into the next generation of China’s algorithmic surveillance system that allows for the targeting of behavior down to the level of the individual ...

China plans to build one of the biggest intelligence gathering listening stations in the world, in Chabahar. “It will have a staff of nearly 1,000 with a very small number of Iranians chosen from the top ranks of the IRGC in training, and will have a near-5,000 kilometer radius range ... to intercept, monitor, and neutralize the C4ISR systems used by NATO and associate members, including ... Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel”...   [allowing] Beijing to extend its reach in monitoring and disrupting the communications of its perceived enemies ... from the edge of Austria in the West, to Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya in the south, and back to the East across all of Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Thailand.

So what do we know?  Well, this much is indisputable: the Chinese are certainly engaging purposefully with Iran - and why wouldn't they?  The Belt-and-Road (westwards branch) pretty much requires it.  And troublemaking for the USA is troublemaking for the USA.  So a lot of what is confirmed public knowledge makes perfect sense and, who knows, may even be carried through - though many a grandiose plan never really works out as envisaged, and one can imagine no end of practical difficulties, cultural frictions, misunderstandings etc to contribute to the dampening of the squib.

However, the source (apparently single-source) of the more alarming prospect summarised above is clearly a self-serving Iranian briefing.  

How to assess it?  Well, the content (if not the briefing) all makes perfect sense - for China.  Why wouldn't they just love all those putative intelligence facilities in that central, pivotal, troubled region, the very cockpit of the world? (- US shale oil or not.)   That's global-major-league stuff - the reason why NATO has tolerated Turkey all these years; why the UK's sovereign bases on Cyprus are sacrosanct; why Israel always has something to offer; why several Gulf states are always able to make themselves useful; why Russia wants Syria. 

That said, the whole account (on the intelligence aspects) reads rather like an Iranian pimp-pitch to China.  Hey, fellahs, we've really thought this one through!  Have a look at this brochure!  We can offer you your ultimate wet dream!!   And I'm sure the Chinese can put it all in context for their strategic decision-making.  Doesn't quite have the air of a done deal: for one thing, what eejit would brief all that stuff if it was China's actual, treaty-bound Plan A for the next few years?  Don't we imagine there'd be a few pages of, errr, NDA in the documentation (with blood-curdling default provisions)?

In fact, given the background to the briefing, it's even more likely to be at still one more remove from any done deals.  Rather than being even an Iranian pitch-pack to the Chinese, it's probably a preview for the USA et al on what such a pitch-pack might contain.  Not so much an eastwards-facing: look what we can offer you, as a westwards-facing look what we might offer them! 

Indeed.  Everyone has the same dreams on these matters.

*   *   *   *   *

Equally interesting, though, is the other stuff:  the "offer" of (request for?) installation in Iran of all that ultra-invasive Chinese population-micro-control techology for directing every waking muscle-twitch of every citizen (and probably their dream-patterns too).  The mullahs want that stuff, too?

That also makes perfect sense.  The whole Chinese "social credit" thing has quite clear parallels with the way the Catholic Church operated across Europe in its pernicious heyday (and how the EC federasts, and the greens, and the Putinistas, would like to operate - if they could, or dared).  It's religious, through and through.  God is watching your every movement, knows your every thought, requires your total obedience in everything, as instructed by this vast body of totally,* ahem*, incorruptible priests ...   

Rather ideal, then, for the mullahs.  This moves my thinking on the 'Chinese Century' forward by a rather unwelcome step.  I'd tended to subscribe to the view that Soft Power intrinsically resides with the West, because everyone in the world (it seems) wants FB and Pepsi and Apple stuff and Range Rovers and freedom and etc.  Who, aside from Putin, actually wants anything Chinese (except their money and cheap labour)?

Well.  perhaps the answer is: every dictatorial regime in the world. 

Hmm.  The mullahs may fancy all that micro-control tech, as a big advance on what their network of Revolutionary Guards and onside imams can offer.  But the Iranian people themselves?  I've seen first-hand what Africans think of their Chinese "business partners".  And the Iranians are a pretty stroppy lot, with serious depth of education and culture and tradition.  Yes, of course, they've knuckled under to the mullahs for nearly 40 years now - after a fashion.  (Khomeini did something very clever when he took over in 1979-80: at first, he did nothing - except cancel the Shah's vast defence outlays and plough the money straight back into the pockets of Mr & Mrs Average Iranian.  Hey, this ain't so bad!   Thus mollified, they complacently gave him a couple of years to gather his forces for the Big Clampdown.) 

But are the Iranians, all 80 million of them, with easy access to guns and long porous borders and hostile neighbours and banditry and fanatics of all hues, ready to be shepherded into a Uighur-like existence in their own country?  The mullahs may need a bit more than their own outpost of the Great Firewall to achieve that.

ND

Weekend Reading: 3 Heavyweight Offerings

A break from Saddam Hussein this weekend, and back to the future.  A couple of excellent reads here (a couple of which, if you get the same BTL google-prompts as I do, you may have already seen, if not opened).  They feed into all manner of those frivolous themes we often visit hereabouts:  the future of capitalism, the rise of China, the decline of liberal democracy ...

A.  Why Fukuyama was right all along: an essay by someone called Aris Roussinos

Everyone remembers The End of History, right?  Well -

nearly thirty years later, reading what Fukuyama actually wrote as opposed to the dismissive précis of his ideas, we see that he was right all along. Where Huntington and Kaplan predicted the threat to the Western liberal order coming from outside its cultural borders, Fukuyama discerned the weak points from within, predicting, with startling accuracy, our current moment. In The Last Man, the under-discussed addendum to The End of History, Fukuyama took his intellectual cues from Nietzsche rather than Hegel ... With all his demands met and material wants assuaged, will the last man be content at last, pausing the endless revolving wheel of history? “Left to themselves,” Fukuyama asks, “can those stable, long-standing liberal democracies of Europe and America be indefinitely self-sustaining, or will they one day collapse from some kind of internal rot, much as communism has done?” Beyond the demands for absolute equality, freedom from want and overarching authority which underlie the politics of liberalism, Fukuyama contends, “lies the question of whether there are other deeper sources of discontent within liberal democracy - whether life there is truly satisfying...

Anyone leveraging intelligently off the penetrating analyses of Nietzsche is going to get attention from me.  Having thus far only read this essay, and not the book, I'm lazily depending on secondary stuff.  But it's certainly interesting, including some points that Chairman Xi may wish to ponder.   

Fukuyama's Nietzsche-prompted ideas include, on the one hand - vis-à-vis external threats - “perhaps most critically, [liberal democracy] would be unable to defend itself from civilizations that were infused with a greater spirit of megalothymia, [the need to be recognized as superior to others - a Fukuyama coinage] whose citizens were ready to forsake comfort and safety and who were not afraid to risk their lives for the sake of dominion”. 

On the other - threats from within - “modern thought raises no barriers to a future nihilistic war against liberal democracy on the part of those brought up in its bosom.”  Fukuyama predicts, “if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and pros­perity, and against democracy.”

Heavy stuff.  And no less weighty is

B. Why Growth Will Fail: another book review

The book, Rise and Fall, is by Robert Gordon ("handsomely produced, at nearly eight hundred pages it weighs as much as a small dog"): the sub-heading of the review reads: 

For most of human history, economic progress moved at a crawl. Then, according to standard calculations, the world economy took off.

The centrepiece is a review of  the “special century” from 1870 to 1970—in which living standards increased more rapidly than at any time before or after - "unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once ... A central aspect of Gordon’s thesis is that the conventional measures of economic growth omit some of the largest gains in living standards and therefore underestimate economic progress. A point that is little appreciated is that the standard measures of economic progress do not include gains in health and life expectancy. Nor do they include the impact of revolutionary technological improvements such as the introduction of electricity or telephones or automobiles".

We do all need to understand the detail behind these points, and the review usefully does that for us.  Why do we need to understand?  Because, as many a green will say, we have become utterly addicted to growth as the basic remedy for all ills: whatever's wrong, we expect eventually to grow our way past it, as we've become accustomed to.  You don't need to be Malthus to find that in need of revisiting.  History doesn't move, Whiggishly, only in one direction, as the thousand-year hiatus in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire shows us.  

Oh, and apparently Gordon has no time for the thesis that super-intelligent computers will just take off into the distance and leave us quite differently situated (though the reviewer thinks we ought to be a bit more open-minded on that).   Finally:

C.  Meritocracy Has Betrayed The Working Classes; a book-related interview

The third book is The Tyranny of Merit  by philosopher Michael Sandel.  I found it rather easier going than the two reviews and I reckon many will enjoy his insights on corrosive leftwing individualism. 

By championing an “age of merit” as the solution to the challenges of globalisation, inequality and deindustrialisation, the Democratic party and its European equivalents, Sandel argues, hung the western working-class and its values out to dry … “Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic ‘equality of condition’ that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture. My book comes out of that tradition.” 

(So, incidentally, does the British Army.)

*   *   *   *   *

There you go, that's social-distancing Sunday fixed for you.

ND

Brexit mess, part 998

 And so it continues. 

The divorce of the UK from the EU is getting very messy. I am concerned the Brexiteers believed their own hype when they were saying things like easiest deal in history. 

The EU were always going to make this painful, to make sure no one else followed us out of the door. The issue for the UK being even when optimistic brexiteers like Michael Gove took over planning, they soon realised no-deal was an economic disaster in the making and the kind of economic self-harm no good government could ever sign up to. 

The EU know this too, which is why at the end of the day it was always going to be a very tough negotiation. 

The latest tactics, trying to unilaterally undo the withdrawal agreement in small parts, really is not cricket. The EU have spotted yet another chance to grandstand and make out how they are the injured party when in fact they are being equally, if not more, intransigent than the UK. 

Overall, what a mess. I never wanted a no deal brexit, together with Covid-19 it will be a economic bloodbath for the UK if this comes to pass in January. 

Boris needs to earn his corn here, in reality he can sign any deal with an 80-seat majority and as the leader of brexit if he says it is the right choice most Brexiteers will go along with him. But actually letting the country fall into a no-deal scenario will be the end of him and with it any right-wing Government at the next election. Instead, Remainer leader Starmer will be banging the drum for rejoin at that point.

An unending political mess awaits if Boris cannot lead.