"Overview of Northern Ireland Trade"

From the BBC:

A No 10 source says a Brexit deal is "essentially impossible" after a call between the PM and Angela Merkel... They also claimed she said a deal would never be possible unless Northern Ireland stayed in a customs union.

I'm all in favour of a (re)united Ireland and NI remaining in the EU customs union is a step in that direction. I'm not sure why the EU is so adamant, but it's not necessarily A Bad Thing.

It depends largely on whether NI trades more with RoI or more with GB? It makes sense to be in a customs union with your largest trading partner.

NISRA says that NI-GB trade is about four times as much as NI-RoI trade (or twice as much as combined NI-RoI and NI-rEU trade). GB is further away, but fifteen times as big as RoI, so that looks about right. Which means that NI would be better off (or less worse off) in the UK customs union and not in the EU customs union (which is not the answer I wanted).

Ho hum.

Well, duh.

From The Guardian:

The drought and water resources minister, David Littleproud, has acknowledged he “totally” accepts that worsening droughts are linked to climate change, as he signalled more taxpayer support for regional communities was coming as Australia’s big dry “escalates”.

Littleproud, who stumbled last month by first telling Guardian Australia he did not know if climate change was manmade, then later clarifying he had always accepted the science on the role humans play in the climate changing, told the ABC on Sunday he understood the link between global warming and drought because “I live it”.

The Guardinistas don't do subtlety or nuance.

Australia as a whole doesn't get much rain, and it appears to have had even less rain in recent years. Which is indisputably a "significant change in weather patterns which might or might not be long-term" or "climate change" for short.

But the article equates "climate change" with "man-made climate change" and so assumes that "minister accepts that climate change exists" to automatically mean "minister accepts that climate change is man-made" (which he was bullied into saying recently, but that's a separate topic), which is one heck of a leap of logic.

Well there's a surprise!

SpareRoom’s Rental Index Q3 2019

Data Summary

- Rents remain steady across the UK, up just 1% over the last year. This indicates that the recent tenancy fees ban hasn’t resulted in rental increases
- Northern Ireland is the cheapest place to rent in the UK, with average rents of £352
- The UK’s cheapest town is Galashiels in Scotland, with average rents coming in at £303 – followed by Northern Ireland’s Bangor (£318) and Craigavon (£320)
- Guernsey continues to outrank London as the most expensive place to live in the UK with rents of £796, compared to London’s average of £782

from here

The surprise is, of course, the last point. All the others are exactly what we would expect, despite all the wailing from letting agents.

Nobody move or [something extremely yucky] will happen!

From iNews:

Officials preparing Britain for a no-deal Brexit have encountered a new roadblock: a rise in dogging.

A cabinet minister confessed at the Conservative Party conference last week that long tailbacks near the port of Dover could mean lorry drivers visiting voyeuristic sex sites, according to The Sunday Times.

“One of the things we talk about in these no-deal meetings concerns hauliers and their activities,” the minister said. “The main thing is whether they will turn up at the Channel ports with the right paperwork. But there are also dogging hotspots all over the place.”

Good luck to them, consenting adults and all that. As long as local councils clearly sign-post dogging sites (to save embarrassment and misunderstandings) it isn't a problem.

Slightly more concerning is that all those involved will be spreading super-gonorrhoea, a disease which is widespread in non-EU countries such as Norway or Switzerland.

Brexit negotiations. Questions, questions...

1. In the pub on Friday, BenJamin' reminded us that the Benn Act is borderline insane. If somebody has no choice but to agree a deal, any deal, then that more or less negates that person's ability to haggle. The almost inevitable outcome of this would be, by default, for the UK to remain in the EU for another few months. Suitably heartened, MPs can then keep doing the same thing over an over forever. He asked, rhetorically, whether he had understood that properly and we all concurred.

2. My follow-up point was, our PM has made a compromise offer re Northern Ireland, which is some sort of fudge whereby Northern Ireland remains part of the EU for regulatory purposes (food and product safety standards etc) but remains part of the UK for customs purposes. I'm not sure if this is even workable, but you do get weird things like this, like the German enclave in Switzerland and they seem to manage somehow.

But never mind, superficially this is a compromise between:

a) the EU demanding that the whole of the UK remain in the EU for regulatory purposes and/or that the regulatory and customs border would be 'in the Irish Sea'.

b) the extreme (on both sides) idea that there should be a 'hard' border between Ireland and Northern Ireland (the EU appear to be pushing for this more than the UK or Ireland itself).

My question is, from the UK negotiators' point of view, this is a compromise (however insincerely meant) - so what compromise did they demand from the EU in return? Nobody talks about that, maybe they didn't ask for anything. Or is the counter-compromise that the EU no longer insists on 'the backstop' (which is too gruesome to even describe)?

Nice to see somebody sneak this into City AM...

From City AM/Opinion, :

How business rates reform can thwart the retail apocalypse

... Some have suggested a digital sales tax – in essence penalising tech firms for carving out a more efficient business model, one from which consumers benefit in the form of lower prices and added convenience. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, wants to forcibly seize property from landlords and hand it to community projects and coops. Both are wrong-headed...

Retailers face myriad challenges and we at The Entrepreneurs Network have long called for business rates reform. Blanket cuts will only benefit the biggest landowners like the Duke of Westminster rather than high street shops or their customers. Instead we need to reassess rateable values upon the underlying land value of a commercial site.

As research from Centre for Cities highlights, not all high streets are struggling. In Brighton, vacancy rates are as low as seven per cent.

Online sales currently make up just 17 per cent of the total British retail spend, and tech giants are themselves moving into physical retailing: Apple has stores across the world, and in June Amazon began opening pop-up shops across the UK.

Yay! Go John Lewis!

From the BBC:

John Lewis is seeking discounts from its landlords to cut costs, in a highly unusual move that highlights the huge pressures on retailers.

The BBC has learned that the retail giant has been telling landlords in some locations that it will withhold 20% of this quarter's service charge. These are the fees retailers pay on top of rent for services such as heating and security. John Lewis said the charges had become too high and urged landlords to help...

Debenhams has managed to slash its rent bill with reductions of up to 50% after securing a restructuring deal with its creditors. Struggling retailers have been turning to these so-called company voluntary arrangements as a way to cut costs. House of Fraser was bought out of administration by Mike Ashley's Sports Direct and many of these stores are currently paying little if any rent.

John Lewis are just nibbling at the edges here, the service charge is only a fraction of the rent, and they are only withholding a fraction of the service charge, but it's a start, and hopefully every other tenant will follow suit. And once landlords have reduced their rent expectations, there'll be fewer vacant shops.
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I tweeted this article, some drone from Conservative head office promptly started wailing on about pension funds etc. They are very efficient, it must be said.

Rocket and Feather

Crude oil price over the last month:

Heating oil price over the last month:

Just sayin'.

"Everyone suddenly an expert on Northern Ireland"

From Newsthump:

Absolutely everyone on the British mainland is suddenly an expert on Northern Irish politics, it has emerged today.

Irish politics have proven a nigh-intractable problem for centuries, but all of a sudden everyone on the Internet has a depth of knowledge on the best possible solution for Brexit and the Irish border, which has eluded the world’s finest minds to date.

As one of the UK's top experts on Irish politics (definitely in the top 60 or 70 million or so), all I can say is, stop fannying about.

Just hand Northern Ireland back to the Republic of Ireland. Don't bother with a referendum (as vaguely planned in Good Friday Agreement), that's asking for trouble, just do it, schedule it for midnight 31 October/1 November 2019 for simplicity.

Withdraw any UK troops we might still have there, shut the Northern Ireland department, cancel all government payments to Northern Ireland, tell Westminster MPs from Northern Ireland that they are sacked, the lot.

The DUP and their ilk will be pretty miffed... but what are they going to do about it after the event? Then tell the EU they can shove their back stop up their collective arses.

Climate change solely due to CO2 changes. Unless we say it isn't.

From Watts Up With That:

The relative proportions of carbon dioxide and oxygen have varied very widely over the geological ages. It will be seen that there is no correlation whatsoever between carbon dioxide concentration and the temperature at the earth’s surface.

The alarmist rebuttal from Skeptical Science does not appear to dispute the actual facts from the first article, but:

Atmospheric CO2 levels have reached spectacular values in the deep past, possibly topping over 5000 ppm in the late Ordovician around 440 million years ago. However, solar activity also falls as you go further back. In the early Phanerozoic, solar output was about 4% less than current levels...

What about times closer to home? The last time CO2 was similar to current levels was around 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene. Back then, CO2 levels remained at around 365 to 410 ppm for thousands of years. Arctic temperatures were 11 to 16°C warmer (Csank 2011). Global temperatures over this period is estimated to be 3 to 4°C warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. Sea levels were around 25 metres higher than current sea level (Dwyer 2008).

If anything, that disproves a CO2-temperature link. If there were one, then it would be 3C warmer than it actually is. And why was there no 'runaway global warming caused by feedback effects' last time CO2 levels were this high? Because there is no such thing, it is a physical impossibility, like a perpetual motion machine.

If climate scientists were claiming CO2 was the only driver of climate, then high CO2 during glacial periods would be problematic.

That is exactly what they are claiming and it is problematic.

But any climate scientist will tell you CO2 is not the only driver of climate... Past periods of higher CO2 do not contradict the notion that CO2 warms global temperatures. On the contrary, they confirm the close coupling between CO2 and climate.

DoubleThink at its best. CO2 is main driver unless it's something else. Lack of correlation confirms correlation. There is a close coupling unless there isn't. They are truly making it up as they go along.

Read the articles, the first one might well be all lies and propaganda funded by Big Oil, but it is internally consistent, coherent and plausible. The second article ties itself in knots, leaving the reader none the wiser but with the impression that it's a load of rubbish.