Hello Folks,

Goodness. What a week. Whilst going through the news from the last week, you have to conclude, there has been a lot going on. And not much of it good.  It’s hard to know where to start, but I suppose I may as well get it out of the way with now. Let’s start with our old friend Brexit.

Brexit Latest

I hate talking about Brexit. It just annoys me.  But the big shock of the week is the Ruling by the Supreme Court Judges that BoJo’s Proroguement  of Parliament was unlawful. By implication, this means the advice he offered the Queen was unlawful and a big bag of lies. To the none-UK readers, this is bad. It’s very bad, as Prime Ministers are not supposed to lie to the monarch. I am sure they spin things a little,  after all, they are politicians. But they are not supposed to tell great big whoppers to get what they want.

Then again, the Judiciary has never been asked to rule on anything like this before. In the normal course, the Judiciary work under the order of Law, avoiding all things political.  It is the government or Legislature that have set these laws.   In this case, the two seem to have overlapped, with the judiciary ruling on the validity or lawfulness of a political decision. There is no precedent for this.   In short, we are rewriting the Constitution, making it up as we go along.

The Judgement

I am not a lawyer. I don’t really understand what on earth is going on. But as a layman, there are two aspects that concern me.   Firstly, the judgement seems to me to be based on an interpretation of what BoJo was thinking when he offered his advice to the Queen. He claims Prorogation is a normal parliamentary procedure, setting up a new Queens Speech.  The parties objecting to this and who brought the legal proceedings claim that’s a great big lie and he just wanted to pull a fast one to stop Parliament scuppering his No Deal Brexit.

Subjective

This is where I struggle. I don’t believe there is an actual Law that says. “Thou shalt not Prorogue Parliament for more than a few days without a jolly good reason, thank you very much.” So, their Lordships were not ruling on a legal requirement or stipulation.  It seems instead to be a subjective evaluation of the motive behind the Prorogation. They have decided, without actually saying so, that Mr BoJo was lying through his back teeth with the aim of avoiding MP’s giving his Brexit Plans a good kicking. That may be right. To be honest, they probably are right. But I don’t see how, without an actual law having been broken, they can declare it unlawful.  Morally reprehensible perhaps, but unlawful?

Democratic?

The second problem I have is with how this came about.  An alliance of Remain MP’s didn’t like the prorogation as they thought it might give BoJo an advantage to push through his Brexit plans. Of course, they are desperate to thwart Brexit. At the same time, a wealthy businesswoman, Gina Miller also brought about an action to challenge the prorogation.  She too is an ardent Remainer. Both Ms Miller and the Remain Alliance claim to be defenders of Parliamentary Sovereignty and of Democracy.  This despite the fact their ultimate aim is to overturn the democratic decision of the 2016 Referendum. Remember that? When a majority of 17.4 million voted for leaving the EU?    I struggle to understand how preventing a government that is trying to fulfil the mandate provided by a  majority of their countrymen is in any way,  shape or form, democratic?

In any event, its a real humiliation for BoJo and his government. There has been the expected cacophony of cries for his resignation. He isn’t going anywhere. At least not yet. As for Brexit. We are still no clearer on what is going to happen.  There is one thing we can be fairly sure of, however. We won’t be leaving on October 31st.

The Labour Party Conference

Elsewhere, it was the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. And what a basket case it was. It started badly and seemed to be going downhill. Until the Supreme Court came along wth their judgement. That seemed to cheer everyone up.

So what were the highlights? Tom Watson, the deputy leader survived a botched attempt to oust him from his position. He isn’t popular and is a thorn in the side of Comrade Corbyn.   Hence the Corbyn hit squad, Momentum tried to do away with the deputy leaders position. They couldn’t even manage that properly and this seemed to have worsened the divisions within the party.

The Policies

There were some truly wonderful policies passed that will be in the next Labour manifesto.  The essential abolition of Private Schools. That was a popular one. Introduction of a 4-day working week, whilst maintaining the same salary. That one was even more popular. Abolishing NHS prescription charges. Seizing pharmaceutical patents to give to a State-owned pharmaceutical company to produce cheaper drugs for the NHS.  A return to collective bargaining after overturning the trades union laws.  Re Nationalising the Postal Service, the Railways, plus the Water and Electricity utilities.  They were dancing in the aisles at these ones.

Brexit Ambiguity

On Brexit, it wasn’t so clear.  They are going to wait to decide what their actual position is. Their policy of Constructive Ambiguity. It might be more properly called Cynical Opportunism, or is that just me being unfair?

These are very populist policies. Its freebies for the masses. But there is no such thing as a free lunch. It will require huge levels of borrowing. It will also require massive tax hikes. So far so bad, but history has shown they won’t work.  The NHS is already underfunded and struggling. (See my article on the NHS)  Prescription charges only represent a small % of total NHS funding. <2%, but that’s still in excess of a billion pounds. That shortfall will have to be found elsewhere.

Renationalising the utilities and services will require hundreds of billions of pounds. This will have to be borrowed. So the country returns to a huge deficit, in hock to World Lenders and we all pay more income tax to finance the interest.

32 hr Working Week

4 day weeks have been tried before and have always failed. For it to succeed requires increased productivity. If you think about it logically,  it requires at least a 25% increase in productivity. (Making 100 widgets in a 5 day week, means 20 widgets/day. To achieve the same output in a 4 day week requires 25 widgets a day. A 25% increase in productivity) I don’t think this is possible, so companies will start to lose money.   And this on top of increased business rates and corporate taxation.  Companies will move away. Investment will dry up and the country will return to being the Basket Case of Europe as it was back in the bad old days of the 1970s.

Education

As for getting rid of Private Education. Give me strength.  It’s a typical totalitarian tactic. How’s that for a spot of alliteration.  They justify the policy by claiming private education is the preserve of the Privileged and the Elitist and they want to provide a level playing field for all children.

Well, first of all, not all parents who send their children to private school are elitist or privileged.  My daughter goes to a private school. I work hard to ensure she can and our reason for sending her is because she was unhappy and failing in her local state school. She is now thriving.

I know other parents who want the best for their kids and so do by forgoing holidays, driving old cars,   scrimping and saving to be able to pay the fees. They are far from privileged. Oddly, lots of the Labour Party worthies went to private schools, as did many of  their children. Diane Abbott, Shadow Home Secretary was whooping along with the crowd at the announcement. And yet she sent her son to a private school, because her local schools were underperforming. When asked about this apparent hypocracy, she used the argument that it was a long time ago.

Improvements

Now if the standard of the State schools was improved, perhaps parents wouldn’t have to send their offspring to a private school. But this isn’t the case. In fact, Labour wants to abolish Ofsted, the body responsible for assessing schools performance. I can’t for the life of me understand why this is a good thing. Other than to suppose, if a school isn’t assessed, it cant be shown to be failing. It’s a bit like closing your eyes and saying something isn’t there because you can’t see it.    It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. They want to get rid of very successful institutions, removing parental choice and lowering standards rather than raising them up. Its the politics of spite. Anti-choice, anti aspirational and classic class war.   If these people ever get elected, God help us all.

Thomas Cook

Finally, this week saw the collapse of one of the oldest Travel Firms in the world. Thomas Cook.    The company has been in business for over 178  years. It has been struggling with massive levels of debt, over 1.6billion pounds worth. That’s a lot.  A 900 million pound rescue package had been agreed, but its creditors wanted a further 200 million and that proved too big a challenge. Hence, on Monday the company ceased to trade and went into administration.  It seems likely that we will discover astounding management incompetence when the administrators try to figure out what went wrong.  This doesn’t seem to have stopped the senior company executive awarding themselves huge salaries and bonuses. Although the incumbent CEO lost over 3 million pounds in shares when the company tanked.

You have to feel sorry for the staff, over 20,000 of them, nearly half of which are UK based.  For the stranded holidaymakers, it’s not pleasant and a huge disappointment.  For the staff, its a tradgedy as they suddenly find themselves out of work.

Operation Matterhorn

It’s estimated that it is going to cost the tax payer over 100 million to repatriate those folks stranded abroad. For customers with holidays who haven’t travelled yet, provided they were ATOL covered, they should get a refund. If you only bought flights, you will not be covered. In this case, you may need to rely on your credit card company to get a refund.  Click here to see the latest instructions if it affects you.

Wifey, Smalldaughter and I booked a holiday with Thomas Cook back in January. Our first ever package holiday. We were due to fly in a couple of weeks to Mexico on an all-inclusive deal.  Not now.

Ireland

Fortunately, we should hopefully get most of our cost back via ATOL.    I hope.    Still, on the bright side, I have instead organised a trip to the Emerald Isle. Yes, we are going to Ireland. County Galway since you ask. I think it will be fun. Besides, Ireland is very like Mexico in no possible way I can think of. I’ll pack a sombrero and it’ll be grand.

Graham 25th September 2019