Trump and Li'l Kim show how it's done.

From the BBC:

A summit between Donald Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ended without agreement after the US refused North Korean demands for sanctions relief, the US president has said.

Yup, both sides make demands unacceptable to the other, that's it, call the whole thing off, no hard feelings and better luck next time.

Trump and Li'l Kim have thereby achieved more in two-and-a-half days than the EU and Theresa May have achieved in two-and-a-half years of grinding pettiness, without all the associated loss of goodwill.

Teresa May - Reader Poll

1. Trying to wreck Brexit?

2. Completely f*****g useless?

3. Just stupid?

4. Is absolutely lovely and fragrant and trying to do the Best for Britain?

Meaningless tautology/platitude of the week

From The Metro:

‘Anyone can succeed, given the opportunity,’ says May

Well duh, doesn't answer the question whether everybody is given the same opportunity (they aren't), and even if they were, not 'everybody' can succeed, most of us just bumble along*.

She then gives examples of a few Cabinet Ministers with 'humble' backgrounds and misses the point that by definition, only a few people will ever become Cabinet Ministers. It's a bit like the Lottery presenters on telly saying "Good luck, everybody!".

Also, the article uses two different spellings: "Barnado's" and "Barnardo's", only one of which is correct.

* For clarity, I have somehow hit the sweet spot by simply always taking the line of least resistance/doing the most obvious thing and have bumbled gently into a well above average job/lifestyle/home with mortgage long paid off etc. Some might actually consider me to be a 'success story'. If only Her Indoors hadn't decided to piss away half of it on private school fees...

Schrödinger's Prime Minister

From The Metro:

THERESA MAY said she was too busy ‘talking to voters’ to take part in last night’s TV leaders’ debate... adding that she wanted to talk to the public. She said: ‘He ought to be paying a little more attention to thinking about Brexit negotiations. That’s what I’m doing.’

The third possibility is that was she busy talking to voters (from 8 'til 9 in the evening) while thinking about Brexit negotiations. And presumably you can talk to more voters by knocking on doors for two hours than by appearing on the telly, which is Diane Abbot style maths.

Theresa May, making the same stupid mistakes as Jeremy Corbyn

We've looked at Jeremy Corbyn's waffle, now let's look at Mrs May's bizarre deliberate blurring of the fundamental difference between rent and earned income.

From The Soaraway Sun:

PM's pledge to help struggling Brits is part of a drive to shift the Tories to Left — and follows her pledge to cap energy bills.

THERESA May will vow to target fat cat railways bosses, phone firms, landlords and lawyers who are ripping off struggling families. The PM pledges to tackle a stunning range of rigged markets to ease the spiralling cost of living crisis...

The scale of Mrs May’s desire to use the power of the state to intervene in failing markets will stun some traditional Tories who want to shrink the government’s reach.

The people whom she claims to want to 'target' are basically all collecting rents and/or abusing a monopoly position. These are not "failing markets", that's how markets work when a supplier has a monopoly; his income is largely rent, and rents have nothing to do with the supplier's costs/efforts etc. The people she claims she wants to 'help' are the very people at the bottom of the ladder who are generating the rent and then being asked to pay for it

The obvious conclusion is that the government, acting as agent for society as a whole, is perfectly entitled to ensure a fairer distribution of these rents (by taxing them more and taxing earnings less, or rather more crudely by setting price caps).

(I'm not sure why she singled out mobile 'phone companies, for sure, some of their advertising is misleading, pricing confusing and they gamble on people being too lazy to change providers, but all in all, you can get pretty good deals, like sticking with an old Nokia on a SIM-only contract for £5 a month. And they also pay/paid full whack for the exclusive right to use certain frequencies for a limited duration, which is basically Land Value Tax, they have pre-paid the monopoly/rent element of their profits which they are now collecting, so fair play to them.)

We did energy bills a couple of days ago, nothing to add to that.

The issue with "fat cat railways bosses" is that railway companies have a monopoly position as far as many commuters are concerned, so they can charge pretty much what they like. And apparently, the so-called privatised railway operators receive twice as much in subsidies (net of franchise payments) as British Rail did (not doubt others will say it's half as much, who knows?).

You can't just go round capping train fares if trains are already over-crowded, that makes things worse, but at least you can stop subsidising them (which is halfway to taxing them properly). The "fat cat" salaries are a symptom of this malaise, not the cause. If you address the monopoly/subsidy issues head on, that all sorts itself out.

Unlike Corbyn, she actually mentioned landlords, that's is always top of the list if you are trying to distinguish between "rents" and "earned income", so we'll give her half a bonus point for that.

Fun Online Polls: Speeding fines & picking winners

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

In the last ten years, have you ever had a speeding ticket for exceeding the speed limit by… Choose the lowest which applies.

Up to 10 mph - 19%
10 to 20 mph - 7%
20 to 30 mph - 7%
I haven't had a speeding ticket for ten years - 67%

Hmm. Where I live (south east England) everybody seems to merrily exceed the speed limit by up to 10 mph as a matter of course. It strikes me that - ignoring legal speed limits on any particular stretch of road - the most sensible speed is "roughly the same speed as everybody else" so I have grown accustomed to it - unless it is a clearly marked residential area with a 20 mph limit, where you aren't just risking a ding or a scratch, you might actually injure a pedestrian or generally wind up people in their homes, so I stick to that religiously. I didn't realise that this many people got speeding tickets for doing a few miles over. Bugger.
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And lo, our PM has spoken!

From gov.uk:

The new Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, overseen by UK Research and Innovation, will back projects covering a number of priority technologies and help Britain build on existing strengths in research and development. Despite its strengths in science, Britain has until now been relatively weak on commercialisation, meaning that all too often ideas developed in this country end up being commercialised elsewhere.

Government will consult on how the fund can best support emerging fields such as robotics and artificial intelligence, industrial biotechnology and medical technology, satellites, advanced materials manufacturing and other areas where the UK has a proven scientific strength and there is a significant economic opportunity for commercialisation.

So a nice list of buzzwords plucked out of the air then?

That's this week's Fun Online Poll, which of these do you think are worthy of subsidies?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Theresa May: hopes raised, hopes dashed.

Via DBC Reed, from the FT, hopes raised...

On to housing. The wealth of some pensioners has expanded by more in retirement than it did in work simply because the value of their homes, which they tend to own outright, has risen so rapidly. That price expansion is largely due to repeated shortfalls in home construction and the increasing use of housing as a financial asset. Neither is directly the fault of baby boomers, but it means younger people are spending greater proportions of their net income on housing and taking on debt for longer periods — the Council of Mortgage Lenders reports that almost three-fifths of first-time buyers take a loan of more than 25 years.

Mrs May acknowledged this is an undesirable outcome: “Unless we deal with the housing deficit, we will see house prices keep on rising. Young people will find it even harder to afford their own home,” she said at her campaign launch [a fortnight ago]. “The divide between those who inherit wealth and those who don’t will become more pronounced.”

[The 'increased supply' thing is ineffective in itself, it has to be done together with a whole bundle of other things as the UK did pre-1980s to keep prices down. It fell far short of proper LVT but did the particular job on a rough and ready basis].

From The Evening Standard today (I can't find the link), hopes dashed...

Responding to the Labour leader calling for an end to austerity, she snapped "He calls it austerity, I call it living within our means."

(As background, the Tory government is running and historically they have always run, larger deficits than Labour governments. Weird but true.)

The brief exchange set out her battle lines against Labour on spending and home ownership. Mr Corbyn attacked the upper limit for [government subsidised loans to encourage first time buyers to pay more for housing] set out in government policies, saying it was too high.

But Mrs May pointed out that it reflected everyday life for people in bis Islington constituency.

All right, sod her, she's an evil Homey witch like the rest of them who has abandoned any principles she held a fortnight ago.

FFS, if the government wastes taxpayers'  money on encouraging first time buyers (a sub-set of taxpayers) to get even deeper into debt in order to pay even more for overpriced housing, how does she square that with the worthy idea of "living within our means"???

RE: T May

Usual caveat, for me the EU is preferable to Westminster. Possibly it is a Scottish thing in that it's not much different having being 13/1 out voted by our rowdy southern cousins to being 27/1 outvoted in Europe over a policy that we would probably enact in Edinburgh anyways.  

Teresa May has promptly forgotten that she is allegedly in the Bremain camp and gone on her usual hate rant against the Human Rights convention (which is not the same thing as the EU but it is broadly intertwined with it). This is always quite reassuring since the Home Secretary is exactly the person that the convention is meant to put the brakes on. 

And helpfully up pops Patrick Stewart to do a little skit on human rights. 



Which is basically spot on, even if you are a frothing Conservative who is utterly wed to the idea of democracy, so long as that democracy means picking a king twice a decade who is unencumbered by things like a written constitution which he has to abide by, the sort of thing that literally almost every other country in the world has to protect them. 

"Chief Constable condemns lack of black members of Conservative cabinet"

From the BBC:

The Conservative cabinet does not represent the country it serves and must increase ethnic diversity, a chief constable has said.

The proportion of blacks and Asians at the most senior government level is "simply not good enough", Durham Chief Constable Terry March said, adding that welfare cuts and lifting the inheritance tax threshold "must continue".

David Cameron disputed figures quoted by Mr March, pointing out that the Business Secretary was "a darkie, which is one more darkie than Labour ever had in the Cabinet. He makes an excellent tea..." Mr March hit back, pointing out that Sajid Javid was actually "a coconut".

Equalities Minister Julia Mulligan explained that it was difficult for the Conservatives to promote many black MPs to the cabinet because they only had one or two in the first place, none of whom had gone to Eton.

Theresa may have a point,

From the BBC:

[Theresa May] also said high migration made a "cohesive society" impossible.

Fair enough, you might think. That is just simply a statement of fact. We could argue about the word 'impossible' or point out that 'cohesiveness' is not an either-or thing i.e. high immigration merely reduces cohesiveness by a few per cent on some arbitrary scale, but hey.

(And as a Home Secretary, she is probably just as useless as most of the Home Secretaries we've had before, but that is irrelevant here.)

There was the inevitable outpouring of wailing about this. But why? You might not like it, you might wish it were not so, you might say that this is only because British people are racist (they're not). I am not aware that Theresa May said she liked this state of affairs. But that doesn't stop it being true.

Taking a longer passage from the article, you can see that she even threw in a bit of the usual PC crap:

Mrs May also said refugees should not be "conflated" with economic migrants.

Why not? A refugee is somebody fleeing a war or disaster zone to the nearest safe country, not somebody who has made the decision to travel half way across the world to somewhere that's considerably wealthier than the nearest safe country.
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Disclaimer: I like foreigners. I'm half German and my wife is from a distant Commonwealth country. Many of our friends are mixed-race or mixed-nationality couples/families. But I like individual foreigners, those who try and fit in, you can have all sorts of interesting conversations with them, but I do not particularly like large groups of foreigners walking round like they owned the place and trying to impose their rules on us.

"Theresa May promises speedier service from Chinese"

From The Evening Standard:

Home Secretary Theresa May has agreed to do more to improve the system to speed up service at Chinese takeaways in Britain.

In a briefing to the Cabinet last week, she is said to have pledged to ensure a "faster service" is brought in to make it quicker for business executives and tourists to pick up their food in the UK. She is also reported to have promised to work to develop a more welcoming image for Chinese fast food outlets to encourage customers.

The Border Agency website already has menus and guidance translated into English — and customers have access to a Chinese language phone and email service. From later this year, telephone orders will be translated into Chinese.

A special service is also coming in this spring for some restaurants by which visa officials will go and pick up your order and deliver it straight to your home, to help speed up the system. Businesses will also benefit from a dedicated network of staff for their order collections.

A government source today said: "We'd like a 124, two 117s and chips with curry sauce to take away."

"Euro crisis: UK plans for rise in immigrants"

From the BBC:

The Home Office is drawing up contingency plans to cope with a possible large increase in immigration from Greece if the euro collapses. Home Secretary Theresa May told the Daily Telegraph "work is ongoing"and "trends" were being examined to see whether immigration was rising from countries with stricken economies.

EU nationals are largely entitled to work anywhere in the single market. If the single currency breaks up, people looking for work abroad may see Britain as an attractive alternative as it is a non-eurozone country.

Asked whether emergency immigration controls were being considered, Mrs May explained that the government's main concerns were providing new arrivals with accommodation and National Insurance number cards and ensuring that there was a sufficient supply of leaflets in Greek and Spanish explaining their entitlements under the UK welfare system.

Copper makes good point: shock

On Channel 4 News last night there was a head-to-head between Paul McKeever, chairman of the policemen's 'trade union' and some smart alec from Policy Exchange.

Mr K made the point that the police budget was the last place the government should be looking to make cuts. He pointed out, see also report in The Telegraph, that our budget for foreign aid is set to rise to about £12 billion a year, all of which is wasted and no business of the government anyway, and the police budget is set to be cut to about £12 billion a year (see page 2 of this), so whatever niggles we might have with policing - and we have many - it is incredibly good value for money and one of the core and irreducible functions of the state. Our net contributions to the EU are also something in the order of £12 billion a year as it happens.

Policy wonk chatted merrily about the Winsor Report, whatever that is, and his best shot was to point out that £1 in £7 of the police budget was spent on police pensions.

So what?

If you have a budget of £12 billion, and three-quarters is spent on wages, you can either pay it all out as current salaries without a service pension, or you can pay lower current salaries to serving police officers but promise (and pay) them a pension as well, as a kind of deferred pay. While police pensions, at about 50% of average salary after thirty years service, seem incredibly generous, that is balanced out by the fact that starting salaries are pretty low.

Quite what people's time preferences are, we do not know, but it is likely that it is as broad as long - if the police pensions were stopped for new recruits, then as like as not, they'd demand higher current salaries instead, so it would all even out.

It's £250,000 for dinner plus 40p per unit of alcohol.

"Teenagers more at risk online than at the 'bus stop, says Theresa May"

From The Metro:

Teenagers are increasingly the victims of cyber crime, which causes more losses than being stabbed on a bus or at a bus stop, Theresa May said. A new National Crime Agency will help tackle this and make people feel safer, she said.

Mrs May said: "Increasingly, the biggest criminal losses do not come from gangs of feral youths of whatever skin colour who attack and stab members of rival gangs or people of a different race, but from the cyber criminals who say hurtful things online. A teenager can now be at greater risk sat [sic] in their bedroom [sic] on their computer [sic] than waiting for the 'bus.

"That’s why we need a new crime-fighting force that works across different police forces and agencies, defending our borders, coordinating action on economic crime, protecting children and vulnerable people, and active in cyber space."

In a speech on police reform in London, Mrs May outlined plans to offer more protection from antisocial behaviour to stop the ‘horror stories’ of victims being ignored despite making repeat complaints. HM Inspectorate of Constabulary said last week few crimes were recorded from anti-social behaviour cases and the identification of repeat and intimidated victims was ‘poor’.

A police spokesman said: "Look at it this way, if it's a choice between pounding the beat at night to make people feel safe and possibly having to chase after knife wielding maniacs; or simply sitting in the station mucking about on the internet, then it's pretty much a no-brainer. You wouldn't imagine how upset these kids get when even we ignore them, it's hilarious."

It's reassuring to know that somebody is going to restore law and order to our inner cities

... Of The Day

Euphemism Of The Day: "variable graduate contributions tied to earnings". Vince Cable announcing plans for a 'graduate tax'.

Special Pleading Of The Day: “Why should the next generation of young people pay for the crunch?” Nick Starr, executive director of the National Theatre, on why subsidies for [whatever it is that he does] should keep rolling in.

Libertarian Idea Of The Day: "Wife beaters could face random police visit to discourage reoffending" says Theresa May.

One out, one in.

Stupid rule kicked out via the front door: Child abuse vetting scheme cancelled as 'draconian'. The original vetting plans covered one in four of the adult population. Home Secretary Theresa May has announced that registration, due to begin next month, has been put on hold. There will be a review of the entire vetting and barring scheme, with a scaling back to "common-sense levels"... The government says the vetting scheme would have been "disproportionate and overly burdensome"...*

Ah... but look what's trying to sneak in via the back door: Clearer and tougher rules are needed to help protect people visting children's farms, experts say. The recommendations were made by an investigation into the biggest ever farm E. coli outbreak. More than 90 people were struck down by the potentially fatal 0157 strain of the bug at Surrey's Godstone Farm last year... The assessment of risk by the farm was inadequate as it primarily relied on visitors washing their hands**, the inquiry said...

* I trust that the ContactPoint database will be scrapped as well, it's not entirely clear.

** How about putting up a couple of big signs saying "Now wash your hands"? Job done. And while this strain may well be 'potentially fatal', none of those 'more than 90 people' appear to have died.

Theresa May. There again, she may not.

Potentially Libellous Shite Of The Week

Yesterday's Evening Standard accompanied this article with an inset headed "Revealed: Losers under new 60-minute travel rule".

I can't find the inset online, so I've scanned it in for you below. It continues:

Under new rules, MPs living within an hour's commute by train from London will be barred from having a second home... there are likely to be just 12 MPs affected. The Standard has estimated who the 'commuter dozen' will be..." and then lists Theresa May, Chris Grayling, Anne Milton, Michael Fallon, Ian Taylor, Peter Lilley, Michael Gove, Barbara Follett, Fiona McTaggart, Humfrey Malins, Kelvin Hopkins and Margaret Moran.

Now, I haven't paid much attention to the whole MPs' expenses 'scandal', but even I remember clearly that Kelvin Hopkins MP (Lab, Luton North) is one of the few who didn't claim for a second home, having claimed the princely sum of £1,242 for 'Cost of staying away from main home' in 2007-08. (Sure, he filled his boots on 'Office running costs' and 'Staffing costs', but that's not the topic here).

In other words, he is one of the few who won't lose out, so to say that he would is a malicious distortion. The funny thing is, t'was the self same Evening Standard which listed Kelvin Hopkins as a saint five months ago, with the summary "Travels with commuters on the Thameslink to London each morning, shunning a second home."