The Tom Sawyer Principle (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

A new low has just been reached in 'talking heads' news reporting. Al-Jazeera was running a story about the EU's latest attempts to solve the migrant crisis (they decided to double down on the policies that had created the migrant crisis) and the Al-Jazeera newscaster announced we were to hear from 'Amnesty's advocate at the EU' to comment on this. "Oh no," we all thought, "we know exactly what she'll be saying and anyway what qualifies Amnesty to talk about migration issues?"

She said all the usual things, no surprise there. What was surprising was the way she said it. She was reading from a prepared script while pretending not to. What kind of a talking head is that? The Al-Jazeera bloke asked her a follow-up question. "Ah-ha," we said, "she can't have a prepared answer for that." And sure enough, she started answering the question off the cuff (quite fluently). But after a very short while she said, "But that is to ignore..." and started reading from another prepared script while pretending not to be.

The Al-Jazeera anchor looked very pleased with her efforts. She had, after all, said all the right things and delivered the message very well indeed.

[Mick Harper]

There's not much foreign news around at the moment partly because it's holiday season, mainly because of Gaza. But one thing that's going on is a general election in the DRC, the largest country in Africa so not unimportant. The news is that the sitting president won comfortably. So no surprise there. The opposition is crying foul, no surprise there. What's new is that a 'Coalition of Congolese Churches' has, sort of, weighed in on the side of the opposition, calling for fresh elections.

Anyway, I leaned forward to hear their evidence. It was a bogus list! The ballot boxes arrived late here, they were taken away by government dudes there, the opposition observers were denied access somewhere else, it's unconstitutional to keep the ballots open after the official closing time. What makes it bogus? Well, these are the sorts of things that happen anywhere. It could be Britain! So the moral of the story is that the president won a fair election comfortably. And we have the Congolese Coalition of Churches to thank for confirming it.

[Mick Harper]

The Australians are (unusually) striking out into new areas of health fascism. They have decided vapes are the New Evil. They are, said their Chief Heath Official, 'hurting people' and are 'harmful to the environment'. The government is rushing all sorts of anti-vaping measures through Parliament while Australians are rushing out to buy vapes like there's no tomorrow in case there are no vapes tomorrow.

When asked what evidence there is that vapes are harmful to either people or the environment, the Chief Spokesman said, "Pass us another tinnie, cobber, while I put more crushed coral on the barbie."

[Mick Harper]

Don't expect fairness if you're one of the little league lassies recruited by Jeffrey & Ghislaine. You get twelve million dollars if you're paired up with Prince Andrew but only the going rate if it's Stephen Hawking.

[Mick Harper]

I'm a collector of 'collectivist follies', the weird things that happen in economies that are not run, however imperfectly, according to the dictates of supply and demand. I keep on thinking I've reached the ultimate but there's always another, crazier, example coming over the horizon. (No pun intended.)

This one concerns that fine old collectivist economy, Cuba. For reasons lost in the mists of time, cooking gas is absurdly cheap there. Practically everything else is absurdly expensive, if it is available at all. Al-Jazeera, who love Cuba to bits, are interviewing a Havana housewife in her kitchen ostensibly about the problems she is having because the monthly rice ration is getting later and later (they are also a news organisation).

[Mick Harper]

An all-too-typical Newsnight exposé last night. It concerned the bloke married to that Scotch woman who lost her peerage over PPE and Covid. He originally made his money apparently by flogging tax avoidance schemes to wealthy but not uber-rich self-employed people.

To make the shock/horror piece work, the victims had to be... er... victims. We were supposed to be in floods because these people, who were transparently trying to avoid paying tax the rest of us self-employed folk have to pay, had to pay their taxes after all. How could they when they were down to their (it looked from the footage) last detached house with manicured gardens. Boo-hoo.

Next we were asked to join in the fierce condemnation of the dude himself. He had been... wait for it... flogging tax avoidance schemes that were perfectly legal until the Revenue decided they weren't. Took your time, guys, even Philip Green could have seen they weren't likely to hold up, so a round robin to accountants might have been in order, doncha think? While you were asleep on the job is it any wonder that sharpies are going to be selling these schemes to other less sharp sharpies?

But then Newsnight rose to a climaxio furioso. The cad started sending out a further scheme so the self-employed twats could avoid paying back their tax liabilities accruing from the first scheme. Well, 'buyer beware' is all I could muster.

Being a crumbum chancer isn't a crime in this country, is it? But anyway I can commend my own self-employed tax avoidance scheme. Not earning enough even to have to fill in the form.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

A hilarious piece on Newsnight about the backwash to the proposed but abandoned Stradey House immigration centre in Llanelli. For those who don't remember it, this was a simple tale of locals protesting about having migrants in their midst with sufficient vehemence for the Home Office to pull the plug on the entire project, after much expense, and go off to look for more amenable souls.

In the post mortem blaming all and sundry this wasn't mentioned, Welsh people being 'on the protected list'.

[Mick Harper]

An Indian spokesperson boasted they were the fastest growing of all the major economies thanks to Narendra Modi's free market reforms. When challenged about social casualties that have been a by-product of the reforms, she said that India's poorest people were in receipt of subsidised food programmes courtesy of the government. Asked how many poor people, she said eight hundred million.

[Mick Harper]

Business News from Around The World

The El Salvador experiment of making Bitcoin legal tender has not been a success. "Nobody uses it since we went over to the US dollar," a spokesman commented. "For Venezuela and Argentina, maybe, but not us." The economy is in a bit of trouble as a whole and the president responsible for all this is facing an election next month. With some equanimity, he has an 82% approval rating.

Why so? Because he cracked down on the gangs so hard that currently one in forty-five El Salvadorian adult males is in prison and relative peace reigns in the streets. A re-affirmation of the AE principle: human rights are strictly for liberals when the chips are down.

In Argentina meanwhile the new right wing new broom has got his programme (largely) through Congress despite members of Congress thinking they are completely fruitcake. Thus reaffirming the AE principle: when all else fails, go fruitcake.

In Malaysia, the ex-Prime Minister who looted the sovereign wealth fund of 4.5 billion dollars has had his twelve-year sentence halved without explanation. His unindicted co-conspirator (and the money) is still at large. Malaysia itself has still not recovered. This is an application of AE's Mayor Daley syndrome... er... sort of.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

I agree with all this. Dollarisation is practical in a small state like El Salvador, especially one that has American forbearance. It is large ones like Argentina where it is impossible and which would benefit from a Bitcoin injection (if not necessarily Bitcoin itself).

The medium of exchange ought to be something that nobody need give a thought to. And e-currency is fine for that since its value is not going to change significantly in the short time required to buy and sell goods. It is only when people start treating it a store of value that problems arise. But people also need a store of value for their savings, so where do they go then? You are right about credit cards, they are ideal for that. Now those you can dollarise. American Express doesn't care where its customers live.

But of course central banks hate all this since it means the currency they do control, and mess around with to their heart's content, are rendered immaterial. And central banks along with it.

[Mick Harper]

Indonesia has gone down the British route by building a high speed train between its two biggest cities, in their case Djakarta and Bandung. And for the same reason, it didn't want to look left behind. All the evidence is that it will also be a complete white elephant, not just because the fares are quite out of reach of ordinary Indonesians, but because they have followed our example and built a railway to nowhere. For Old Oak Common read a boggy field outside Bandung that may or may not one day be an industrialised suburb.

Indonesia went one step ahead of us (or behind us) by asking the Chinese to build it for them, as part of the Road & Belt initiative. The BBC's man reporting on it all has taken an ultra-modern approach to Indonesian/Chinese relations by remarking

[Mick Harper]

Last night there was one of the most breathtakingly ignorant interviews I have witnessed on Newsnight, and that's saying something. Victoria Derbyshire thought she was going to skewer Lord Houchen, the Tory redeveloper of the Teesside steel works (and a spit, by the way, of the eldest son of one of our foremost contributors).

Poor old Vicky didn't have a clue how these things work and had convinced herself that a pair of local shysters had taken forty-five million pounds out and put nothing back in. No matter how often Lord H quoted from the official report that they had put in zillions, the more our Vicks quoted from the same report that 'committing to', 'putting it in an escrow account' etc was not 'putting in money'. Even handing over fifty million pounds for a plot of land didn't count for some reason.

Doesn't she know that property developers never use their own money? They use other people's, notably banks. Notably their investors'. Notably leverage from their other schemes. That's why they're called developers. Not builders. I expect Vicky is living in an owner-occupied house even if she didn't build it herself and hasn't paid for it yet. She used her credit to get other people to do all that. And no doubt she'll walk away with a stinking profit when the time comes.

[Mick Harper]

Good grief, there are more oldie Labour voters than Tory ones. What's the country coming to? The elderly have been reactionary farts ever since they were given the vote in... well, I forget -- the old brainbox isn't what it used to be -- but it was a very long time ago. If you can't rely on people who have spent their lives being the the Golden Generation and then rewarded with the Triple Lock now they're the Silver Generation, who can you rely on?

Well, there's me for a start. Being a Tory is getting so rare at any time of life, I might give it a whirl myself. Someone safe but I'm open to offers from Liz, Jacob and those foreign ex-Home Secretaries. Boris and Nigel need not apply. For now.