The Trusted News Initiative

 It is good to see the BBC taking a leading role in the TNI. (It is a pity that the previous DG did not apply the same rebuttals of fake news to such as Nigel Farage.) In an article in the latest Radio Times, Tim Davie claims that TNI has already combatted harmful posts on political elections and on the roll-out of vaccines.

No-deal better than a bad deal?

 So the European Union (Future Relationship) Bill has received Royal Assent without the Liberal Democrat amendments which would have ensured something like the democratic conideration which the European Parliament has been granted. However, it surely sent out the wrong signal to vote against it. The trade deal which Johnson and company have negotiated is deficient in ways that have been noted prevously (more detail here), but it is surely illogical to accept not only those deficiencies but also the uncertainty of "WTO term" as well, which rejecting the only deal on the table would mean.

Do not get me wrong. I would welcome the chance to rejoin the EU but rejecting this Bill does nothing to achieve that. Surely a reasoned abstention, which Labou's Clive Lewis sought to achieve for Labour, would have been the right way to go.

More hopes and fears in Africa

It seems (cross fingers) that the first ever democratic hand-over of power since her independence is taking pace in Niger. 

Elections in the Central African Republic have not been so peaceful. The authorities claim that the majority of voters have been able to cast their ballots without interference, but it seems not much can be done about the armed groups aiming to subvert the state.

Reconstruction

Last year, and occasionally thereafter, I have pleaded for TV programmes about post-war reconstruction to balance all the war footage out there. There has been no let-up, even over Christmas, in dramas about both World Wars and documentaries about fighting men and machines from those conflicts. 

Lo and behold, Talking Pictures TV came up with the goods yesterday. However, it was not about the rebuilding of Germany physically and politically, but closer to home. The Way We Live Now (1946) was about the proposed rebuilding of Plymouth after the Blitz, written and directed by a clearly committed Jill Craigie. Three years later she was to do the same on Blue Scar, a film partly shot on location in and around Port Talbot. Locals today do not have a high opinion of this, so it was with some trepidation that I settled down to watch the Plymouth film.

It turned out to be a gently British-style agitprop affair, no worse than many movies produced in that optimistic period following the Labour landslide in 1945. Craigie was not the only writer or director fully committed to the brave new world of the welfare state and modern town planning. One wonders whether she would have developed to widen her film-making horizons as her contemporaries did if she had not met (and included in her film) a passionate Labour candidate in Plymouth by the name of Michael Foot and later married him. She was clearly technically well-equipped enough to pursue a film career standing alongside pioneers Wendy Toye and Betty Box.

A summary of the reconstruction (the Abercrombie-Watson plan) and an account of how much of it was realised is here. 

Hopes and Fears

 Although I left the Church of England many years ago, the words of her most popular hymns and carols still come back to me. "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was the work of Phillips Brooks, an American churchman but as an Episcopalian, part of the Anglicah family. Written after a visit to the Holy Land, the hymn links Christ with the ancient Jewish belief in a Messiah who will come to rule benignly over the whole world. The lines:

The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

clearly spring from that belief. Brooks lived through troubled times in the United States and must have hoped that the victory of Lincoln, whom he supported, in the Civil War would lead to better things. In the present century, there is hope that the US will again take the moral high ground when the reigh of a charlatan president comes to an end in January. 

The big stories here, bundling up both fears and hopes, are of course Brexit and SARS/CoV2. But two other news stories from recent days struck me.

Fears for continuing religious and tribal conflict were fuellled by news from Ethiopia, an early stronghold of Christianity. Hundreds of people have been killed or dispossessed in Tigray province.

The hopeful sign is the renaissance of Iraqi literature, helped along by a new generation of young female booksellers. This was noted by euronews last year and confirmed by an al-Jazeera film report yesterday. If the arts are reviving, and young people are participating, then Iraq is clearly emerging from the anarchy that followed dictatorship.

Good and black marks for the Welsh government

Gold star

 The Private Eye transport correspondent notes (in issue 1537) that the Department for Transport has taken no rail franchises in-house since the SARS/CoV2 epidemic made nonsense of every franchise deal. "Meanwhile, the Welsh government's response to the same problems is to take its kaput franchise in-house, minimising outsourcing 'management fees' and diverting effort from obsessing over contract terms and payments to running and upgrading trains."

The naughty step

In the same article, Hedgehog notes:

It's back to the future in Wales, where a new road-widening contract shows how Labour ministers are using complex private-finance deals to hide borrowing liabilities from their books, at enormous cost to taxpayers.

Most people have long since accepted that public private partnership (PPP) infrastructure schemes, many using the private finance initiative (PFI), saddled public bodies with ludicrous annual charges for decades. But the Labour-led Welsh government ha concocted a new called the "mutual investment model" (MIM). Ministers reckon PFI's pitfalls will be avoided because this time the public sector will have a small stake in each multinational consortium.

First up is the contract to widen a road near Merthyr Tydfil, adding one extra lane and a central reservation for 11 miles. Taxpayers will pay nothing until 2025 - but then cough up £38m a year for 30 years. That's a whopping £1.14bn in today's prices, before adding VAT and inflation, to cover the consortium's financing, road maintenance and profit.

That pay-back start date of 2025 raises suspicions. It just happens to be (emergencies aside) that of the next Welsh general election but one. Mark Drakeford and comrades may presumably look to be returned to power in 2021, taking advantage of the anti-Conservative feeling which is bound to persist as the consequences of Brexit and the SARS/CoV2 epidemic emerge. Are they then plannng to scuttle and run leaving a new lot to explain away the additional charge on the transport budget?

Johnson's Christmas "present"

 More substantial criticism of the EU trade deal will have to wait until the quality prints have unearthed the fine print in the 1,246 pages. However, ones first response to the extensive trailing and then the extensive delays in reporting the agreement was that the major stock and bond exchnnges had conveniently closed for the Christmas break by the time our prime minister came to the podium. The sticking points over fisheries, certificates of origin and adjudication of disputes had vanished remarkably quickly after the time when elected parliaments in Westminster and Brussels could debate the issues. One trusts that Johnson has not underestimated the readiness of rogue heads of government in the EU to veto the agreement, which requires unanimity on the part of the 27 governments for endorsement.

One disturbing detail which was revealed - at the EU's presentation, not the UK's - concerns crimianl intelligence, which is no longer to be shared by the UK's police forces and those of the EU.

Our young people will no longer be able to benefit from the Erasmus programme.  Non-tariff hurdles will be erected, though to what extent we will not know until the detailed analysis is carried out, in spite of Johnson's protestations to the contrary. Nor does any agreement seem to have been reached on service industries, including financial services. What will be the future of the "London Laundromat" on which so much of our apparent prosperity depends? Then there is our reduced effectiveness against multi-national companies, whose anti-competitive and exploitative behaviour the EU has proved notably able to curb.

However, we should be grateful for zero tariffs across (presumably) all traded goods. One of the potential drivers of inflation in 2021 has been removed. The extra bureaucracy will be substantial, but not as much as if we had left the single market without a deal. 

The EU stands for peace and prosperity. It is just a pity that England and Wales in the general election last year took their eye off the first of those pillars. But it could have been much worse.

A hale and hearty yule to all

 

Do the right thing, Mr Sunak

 http://aberavonneathlibdems.blogspot.com/2020/12/record-borrowing-must-not-be-excuse-for.html refers.

The people who suffered most from the poor management of the SARS/CoV2 emergency, health and social service workers - some of whom paid with their lives - and the over-60s should not have to pay for the financial mismangement of it. So nurses and others in the front line of combating the virus should receive pay rises at least corresponding to the rise in the cost of living, and faith with pensioners should not be broken.

e.on's paper green electricity

 E.on is making a big thing of its renewable electricity tariff in a well-crafted TV commercial which is difficult to get away from. However, e.on's electricity is not quite as green as it appears. Although it has increased its own renewable capacity and also buys directly from renewable generators, the company stll relies on certificates, known as REGOs, to make up the 100% green energy which it claims.

As Which? magazine explains, "Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origins (REGO) A REGO certificate is issued to a generator for every megawatt hour (MWh) of renewable power they put into the grid. A generator can sell them alongside renewable power, or separately. Energy firms buy them to show the proportion of renewable electricity they sell. Some buy them alongside renewable power directly from a generator, while others buy them separately – and after they have bought the electricity for their customers. Energy firms must use them to prove the source of their electricity each year, to energy regulator Ofgem."

That same article, highlights only two suppliers to subscribe to if you want to be confident you’re helping increase the amount of new renewable electricity generated. 

"Ecotricity uses customers’ bills to finance building new sources of renewable energy. Good Energy sets up contracts with small generators (eg farmers with fields of solar panels) who might otherwise struggle to get a good price for their power. Plus its high-tech forecasting ensures it knows exactly how much power its generators are feeding into the grid so it can buy enough to meet customers’ use.

"But tariffs from these suppliers can be among the most expensive. Energy regulator Ofgem recognised this when it gave both firms, plus Green Energy UK, an exemption from the price cap on standard tariffs. It found that their higher prices are directly due to the support they give to generating renewable electricity. 

"But ‘pale green’ firms selling 100% renewable power backed only by REGOs ‘give the illusion of greenness to customers which can be misleading’, says Dale Vince, Ecotricity’s founder. Good Energy’s regulation and compliance manager Tom Seward explained that their tariffs ‘look like something we spend a huge amount of time on [to try to] create a more renewable energy system’. 

"These firms aren’t doing anything wrong according to Ofgem rules, but the rules aren’t clear enough to help customers make an informed decision."

Exposing true ownership

Last week, the US Congress took the important step of passing legislation to require the true owners of companies to declare themselves.The Corporate Transparency Act requires U.S. companies to report their true owners to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN — largely ending anonymous shell companies in the country. The aim is to strike a blow at money-laundering particularly through the use of anonymous shell companies.

This is a measure which the UK should have adopted years ago. It would among other benefits have enabled many renters to obtain redress for poor maintenance of their properties and might even have reduced the flow of "hot" money into UK property developments. However, the chances of its happening under the current government, which clearly sees the furutre of the UK as the globe's foremost money launderer, are remote.

Presidential inauguration

 Surely it is time for our cousins to look at the date when a president of the United States is sworn in? The third week in January is often the worst period of the northern winter. Global warming at the same time has given extreme events, so one might expect heavier snowfalls in the north-eastern States, but also milder Decembers. Although the death of a president as a result of catching cold on inauguration day seems now to be an exaggeration, it cannot be pleasant for the new man or woman to be expected to stand in the open air to take the oath and then give a speech on one of the coldest days of the year. 

Besides, the establishment of internet tcchnology has made the  month's gap between the "meeting" of the electoral college and the swearing-in an unnecessary delay. (The gap between the national casting of votes and the election confirmation should surely remain, though, as being necessary to eliminate any challenges, as we have seen this year.) The January date itself was the result of a constitutional amendment in 1933, Congress having caught up with transcontinental rail travel and the telephone. No doubt Congress was still unsure of the significance of the Federal Highways system introduced in 1927 or of air travel which was still expensive and uncomfortable in the 1930s but even a decade later all that was to change. 

It would probably be necessary to bring forward the date of the new Congress (currently January 3rd) also.

One other benefit of bringing forward the inauguration has revealed itself in the controversial way president Trump has used his powers in the dying days of his presidency, speeding up federal executions being just one example. Reducing the "lame duck" (or "cornered rat"?) period must surely be a good thing.

Frogman VC

I still do not know why Ian Fraser chose to settle in Wallasey, where he became a JP and something of a local celebrity. Perhaps I will get round to reading his autobiography, Frogman VC some day and find out. Anyway, today is the centenary of his birth and an opportunity to celebrate one of the most daring and dangerous feats of the second world war.

Ella Roberta Kissi-Debrah

 Professor Stephen Holgate has likened Ella's death to that of the canaries taken down coal-mines to give early warning of toxic air. It seems a doubly appropriate comparison. Firstly, because before her lung capacity was destroyed, Ella was a lively, musical child; secondly, because what has now been legally recorded as a contribution to her death is an invisible killer - or rather a combination of killers contained in the air along our busiest roads.

It has taken the persistence of a professional, a former head teacher, in the shape of her mother to achieve this landmark ruling. Who knows how many other children have perished or been marked for life through being brought up alongside such roads as London's South Circular? It is to be hoped that government will look again at its road transport policy in view of the finding. Certainly local government, which is first in the line of fire over permitting pollution levels over legal limits, will have to act.

There must have been some complacency when the atmosphere cleared after the post-war Clean Air Acts became law. However, the visible components of coal-burning, the soot and sulphur, were replaced as motor traffic increased by invisible nitrogen oxides and microscopic particles. It was depressing to hear the Leader of the Commons yesterday trying to shift the blame for road pollution to a previous government's positive discrimination in favour of diesel engines over petrol. Admittedly, that was a silly policy in an area where the market could safely be left to decide, but the fact is that all IC and CI engines emit the gases and particles in question and diesel has cleaned up its act in recent years. Petrol and diesel are both guilty and while they may not create a huge hazard on the open road, the cumulative effect in builit-up aress, or where temperature inversion is a feature, is now shown to be toxic. Even electric vehicles are not entirely blameless as some of the dangerous particles are abraded from tyres and braking. One trusts that research will eliminate even this minor contribution to pollution.

While on the subject of asthma, my mind turns to the sad loss earlier this year of much-loved party colleague, Jacqui Gasson. The last communication of hers on Facebook was a desperate plea for information about the availability of the drug she needed to control her condition. Most of us sufferers find that the standard combination of beclamethasone to damp down the inflammation of the airways and salbutamol to relieve the symptoms when they occur are sufficient. However, there are those for whom those do not work and who need more specialised treatment. The import of drugs has become more constrained in the last year or so for a variety of reasons, but Brexit has been an aggravating factor in recent months and is likely to loom large as the EU withdrawal date passes. The treatment of a large number of chronic conditions depends on a regular supply of drugs virtually all of which are manufactured outside the UK. It is worrying that the UK Health minister seems not to be concerned. Questioned in the House yesterday, he seemed to be satisfied that Covid-19 vaccine supplies were guaranteed and no more.

2021 The European Year Of Rail

 EU nations generally recognise the contribution modern railways make to a greener future, even if our current government does not. The European Parliamentary Research Service blogs:

As it has done every year since 1983, the EU selects a specific topic on which to raise awareness and encourage public debate throughout the year. 2021 is to be the European Year of Rail. A wide range of events will be organised to highlight rail’s challenges and opportunities and its contribution to a greener environment. During the December plenary session, Parliament is expected to vote on a legislative proposal on this topic, to promote rail as a sustainable, innovative and safe mode of transport.

Background

In December 2019, the European Commission adopted a new development strategy, the Green Deal, to answer environmental challenges and address climate change. It aims to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 and a more resource-efficient economy. To achieve this, it will be necessary to reduce transport emissions by 90 % by that date. Rail is an environmentally friendly transport mode in terms of CO2 emissions and energy efficiency, and during the coronavirus pandemic, it played a key role in transporting passengers and essential goods. Over time, however, its modal share has decreased for freight and stagnated for passengers. The European Year of Rail aims to give the rail sector additional support and increase its attractiveness.

European Commission proposal

On 4 March 2020, the Commission adopted a proposal for a decision to designate 2021 European Year of Rail (EYR) to promote this transport mode and boost its share of passengers and goods. With dedicated events, debates and promotional activities, the EYR is also intended to highlight rail’s contribution to EU cohesion, the economy and industry. Among other topics, it will cover those related to regional development, industrial competitiveness, sustainable tourism, employment, innovation, education, youth and culture, not forgetting improving accessibility for persons with disabilities and reduced mobility. With an estimated budget allocation of €8 million, the EYR will rely on national coordinators and an EU steering group. The EYR will coincide with the international arts festival Europalia, whose 2021 edition will be devoted to rail’s influence on the arts and its contribution to social, economic and industrial change.

European Parliament position

During the presentation of the draft report to Parliament’s Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN) in June 2020, the rapporteur underlined EYR benefits such as giving visibility to rail as an attractive and sustainable transport mode. In its report adopted on 12 October 2020, the Committee advocated for EYR to inform passengers better on their rights and increase support for regional cross-border rail connections. It called for action to promote completion of the trans-European transport network (TEN-T). It also endorsed recommendations made by the Committee on Regional Development aimed at improving accessibility for the elderly, disadvantaged groups and to promote night trains. On 24 June 2020, Council agreed a common position for a negotiating mandate on the proposal. It asked the Commission to consider launching a feasibility study on an EU label to promote goods transported by rail. On 12 November 2020, despite budget uncertainties, a provisional agreement was reached, endorsed by the Council’s Permanent Representatives Committee on 18 November and approved by TRAN on 1 December. Parliament is expected to vote on the proposal during the December plenary session.

Aid to industry from public funds

 So the UK unilaterally withdrew from EU's struggle against the US over support for Boeing? All our government has had in return is the possibility of restoring tariffs on Scotch to their normal level in a possible future mini-deal. There is no guarantee that the "lame duck" Trump presidency will do this without significant further concessions by the UK, or that the Biden presidency will be in any hurry to pick up the baton should those negotiations stall. The focus of the incoming presidency is predicted to shift from London to Strasbourg and Brussels.

It should be pointed out that the EU took its case to the WTO for imposing tariffs on the US on behalf of all its members, which then included the UK. Improper aid, in the form of preferential purchasing or exemption from State or municipal taxes, helped Boeing in competition with Airbus. Airbus is a European multi-national with, it must be remembered, a large investment in north Wales and the west of England. 

The UK concession to Trump must have soured negotiations with the EU over a beneficial trade deal. It may also be seen as a betrayal by Airbus, with all the implications that has for future investment.

Pythagoras Day

16^2 + 12^2 = 20^2

The Lark Ascending

 The romantic story of haw Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote one of the most popular pieces of music (conceived in 1914 as the British fleet massed in the Channel, put on hold as RVW served as an ambulance driver in the Great War and retrieved and completed two years after it) is topped by that of the work's dedicatee, Marie Hall. Leading up to the premiere performance of The Lark on 15th December 1920, is a story of a wandering life as part of an indigent musical family who had to resort to playing in the streets for pennies. Rescued from this life of drudgery by discerning musicians and rich patrons, by the time she met RVW, and assisted him with the final version of the piece, she was already an internationally-renowned soloist. 

BBC Four's celebratory programme of 2012 not only tells the story and recreates that first violin and piano performance (uninterrupted, thank goodness)  but is also a happy reminder of Diana Rigg who presented the programme and Peter Sallis who contributed.

Towards A European Magnitsky Act

 Not everybody sees incorporating into terms of trade a proviso that a signatory should not undercut the other party by unfair labour or environmental practices as an infringment of sovereignty. There seems to be little concern, however, in sanctioning individuals for actions carried out in their own country. There is a case for dissuading governments from attacks on human rights which are condemned by all civilised countries, but one must not let trade power be used gratuitously. Anyway, here is the EU's take:

Sanctions are a key part of the EU’s human rights toolbox. The EU adopts restrictive measures – mostly in the form of travel bans and asset freezes – against individuals and organisations responsible for some of the worst human rights violations. Until now, the EU has mostly adopted sanctions targeted at individual countries. Responding to violations from countries not already covered by EU sanctions means adopting a completely new framework for each country. However, the EU is now shifting to a more thematic approach, under which sanctions focus on a particular type of problem rather than a country. For example, the EU already has sanctions on chemical weapons and cyber-attacks that can be flexibly applied to offenders from any country in the world, and it has now added thematic human rights sanctions. The United States’ 2016 Global Magnitsky Act, named after Sergey Magnitsky, a Russian whistleblower who died in jail after exposing corruption by high-level officials, gives some idea of how future EU human rights sanctions will work. Under the act, the US government has adopted sanctions against over 100 human rights violators from a wide range of countries. The proposal for the EU’s new sanctions regime was tabled by the Netherlands in 2018. The necessary legislation was adopted by the Council of the EU on 7 December 2020, in time for UN Human Rights Day on 10 December 2020.

[This both] the year's, and the day's deep midnight is

 John Donne's poem marking the old winter solstice comes to mind every year. St  Lucy's Day often coincides with a crisis, but around the time I started this post, it was announced that the one scheduled for today, over the EU/UK trade agreement talks, has been deferred. If it were not for the imminence of 1st January when the transition period definitely ends, I would have said that the talks seem likely to go on longer than a Frank Sinatra farewell tour.

On a happier note, Britannica tells us that St Lucy's Day is the traditional start of Christmas in many northern countries. It is a "festival of lights celebrated in Sweden, Norway, and the Swedish-speaking areas of Finland on December 13 in honour of St. Lucia. One of the earliest Christian martyrs, St. Lucia was killed by the Romans in AD 304 because of her religious beliefs. 

 "In Scandinavian countries each town elects its own St. Lucia. The festival begins with a procession led by the St. Lucia designee, who is followed by young girls dressed in white and wearing lighted wreaths on their heads and boys dressed in white pajama-like costume singing traditional songs. The festival marks the beginning of the Christmas season in Scandinavia, and it is meant to bring hope and light during the long winter days. Schools generally close around noon on the day of the festival so that families can prepare for the holiday. Families observe St. Lucia's Day in their homes by having one of their daughters (traditionally the eldest) dress in white and serve coffee and baked goods, such as saffron bread (lussekatter) and ginger biscuits, to the other members of the family. These traditional foods are also given to visitors during the day."

From today's World This Weekend, one learned that some bright spark on the Nobel committee had the idea of visiting the custom on those prize-winners who stayed over after the awards ceremony. Not all were overjoyed to be woken in their hotel rooms by blonde maidens bearing coffee and saffron buns, but it seems that literature laureate Dario Fo was delighted and even insisted on dancing with St Lucia's acolytes.

However, Donne's poem - clearly written before he forswore his philandering ways and turned to religion - is dedicated to lovers and looks forward to the renewal of love in the spring and summer. Things are bad now. Brexit will set us back, deal or no deal, and SARS/CoV2 no doubt has still a nasty surprise or two to temper our vaccine-driven optimism. But love will return, as it always does.

Carney on the credit crisis

 It is worth listening to Dr Mark Carney's second Reith Lecture if you want an introduction to the 2007/8 credit credibility crash. I would suggest reading Dr Cable's "The Storm" for a fuller account, though.

Unfortunately, Dr Carney tells the story of the 2008 crash from the centre of the transatantic financial system. He does not point out that those nations whose major banks (including those of his native Canada) had not invested in the inverted pyramid of dodgy assets which brought down so many institutions emerged relatively unscathed. The further away a banking system was from Wall Street, the sounder it was. Well might a finance minister from Singapore ask: "What global financial crisis?".

He was right to point to a widespread mistrust of experts as a result of the crash. However, there are experts and experts. Vince Cable was more than a theoretical economist; he had experience of managing the treasury of a multi-national oil company and of an African republic. Gillian Tett may not have known about the movement of money, but as an anthropologist she knew about the behaviour of tribes, including the tribe of Wall Street financiers. Both, together with a few economists from outside the classical pale, warned of what was to come. 

In his proposed solution Dr Carney frequently uses the words "we" and "ours" without explaining who "we" are. Clearly, it would need a combination of the international regulatory bodies, national governments and federations like the EU to agree on a plan of action. One fears that the US-dominated interenational money transfer system would find it against its interests to adopt Dr Carney's solutions, good for the financial security of all of us though they may be.

These you have loved ... and occasionally cursed

 Nowadays most folk seem to access the Web through their smartphones. It does not seem so long ago that we switched to connecting via a router plugged in to the terrestrial telephone network (as I still do). This is now robust enough for me to throw out some old friends: a modem powered from the mains (who remembers the days of 75baud up and 1200 down which was BT's initial offering to the public?), and its first replacement, a modem card (on the left). Note the nominally 25-pin connection via serial cable on the right. USB saved a lot of messing about.

The BioNTech vaccine and ultra-nationalism

 I trust that A. Libdem Spokesman has publicly condemned the ludicrous chauvinism of the Westminster Education Secretary in asserting that an anti-SARS/Cov2 vaccine is approved for use in this country before anyone else because we are better than anyone else. One can imagine Williamson singing Flanders & Swann's anthem of Patriotic Prejudice with a straight face, unaware that it was a satire.

It has already been pointed out elsewhere that the design of what is known as the "Pfizer" vaccine was conceived by a dedicated Turkish husband-and-wife team welcomed into the German Federal Republic, and that the US pharma giant was brought on board because BioNTech did not have the scale of operation to manufacture and market the breakthrough vaccine. As I understand it, the innovation can be applied to the production of vaccines to combat other infectious diseases, known and as-yet unknown,  

As to the speed of our medicines regulator approving the use of the BioNTech vaccine, I have no doubts about its safety. If there were the slightest risk, news from the multi-thousand person, multi-national trials would have leaked out even if BioNTech and Pfizer wished to suppress it, which I do not believe they would. Witness the slight hiccup in the progress of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine trials.

Where there has to be a slight suspicion is over the effectiveness of the vaccine. As Dr Fauci said in his original response to the news of the MHRA approval, the government agency seems to have taken completely on trust the trials data submitted by the companies. Normally, the MHRA would comb through the data in fine detail. In this case, they seem to have taken the view that the companies would, in view of the significance of this particular product, have triple-checked their own findings and not dared to fudge any of the figures. 

Medical devices and drugs regulation is not a devolved matter, by the way, not even to Scotland. Therefore, the MHRA decision automatically permits the vaccine to be used throughout the UK. Wales also has to abide by the rulings of NICE, for which Scotland has her own equivalent.

Rail expenditure cut exposes Johnson's greenwash for what it was

 It did not take long for a drenching (albeit not a much-publicised one) from chancellor Rishi Sunak to wash away the transient coating on Boris Johnson's programme announced at the start of the week. Almost ten per cent is to be cut from Network Rail's current five-year budget. Although it seems that the Northern Powerhouse and planned railway re-openings are thankfully to be protected, at the PM's insistence, there must now be a doubt about electrification. Even restoring the coalition's programme, so savagely cut when the Conservatives took sole power, with its benefit of reducing road traffic and therefore also greenhouse gas emissions plus urban pollution, looks doubtful. 

Meanwhile, the road programme goes ahead and the prime minister has not rowed back from his campaign to force through the M4 diversion across the Gwent Leverls.

FAW makes strange appointment

 BBC Wales is reporting that the nation's Football Association has appointed Angela van den Boigerd as "head of people". Quite apart from the nebulous job description (is it the same as a personnel director or head of HR?), there must be questions about installing a person who was at best heavily implicated in a programme at the Post Office which illegally destroyed the livings - in some cases the lives - of countless sub-postmasters and -mistresses. 

The news comes a day after ITV Wales revealed a lack of diversity throughout the administration of Welsh sport. If the FAW really did want a new people person on the board, they should have been looking to the likes of Nathan Blake.

Reminiscent of the plague years

 Just as those with the means to do so escaped the great plagues which ravaged European towns until the age of science by decamping to country estates, Italian "city slickers" are moving to less populated areas. However, it seems from this report that they are as keen to circumvent urban lock-downs as to avoid infectioous contacts.

We must not fall into the trap of opposition for opposition's sake

This is from one of my better leaflets, though I must give due acknowledgement to the then LD HQ for the Punch-and-Judy illustration. The slimline "Libby" at the head gives away its origin in the days of Paddy Ashdown, but merely substituting the visages of Johnson & Starmer for Major & Blair would make it relevant today. The irony is that there was little to choose in terms of practical philosophy between Thatcher-Major and Blair-Brown. Today, Starmer is closer to Johnson that he is to Corbyn.

My experience of those days was that, come election time, the average voter wanted to know what candidates and their parties stood for, what their real differences were. Between elections, he or she expected the best interests of the country to be served and that MPs should work together to achieve those aims. 

The Labour opposition and the Lib Dems in Westminster were clearly right to abstain over the latest anti-virus measures in England, but the government needs to be challenged on the facts, not on personalities. In particular, the reasons for targeting the hospitality sector need to be dragged out of this government (this applies to Wales as well). People in the business need to be assured that there is sound scientific evidence, not just that they are an easy target. The apparent corruption of awarding Covid-19 contracts without tender also needs to be pursued. Otherwise, the opposition should be seen to be cooperating in bringing an end to the epidemic - not to mention ensuring that Brexit, inevitable as it now is,  proceeds with the least disruption to traders and travellers.

---

The aims of the 1997 campaign still hold good. Post-devolution, the concerns about the NHS (GIG) now need to be directed to Cardiff, rather than Westminster,  but the suspicion continues that the strategy for hospital trusts benefits senior health service professionals rather than their users, or locally-recruited staffs. If anything, police presence is even lower in 2020 than it was in the late 1990s. This is something we can surely improve on it policing were also devolved.

 

It's not just halal meat: Dubai's thriving economy

Although as this article explains, the halal food businees is part of the success of the Islamic economy of the Emirates.

The UAE has been ranked amongst the top three Islamic economy countries in the world, according to the 2020 State of the Global Islamic Economy report. Malaysia continues to hold the lead, followed by Saudi Arabia. Put simply, the Islamic economy is a category for businesses, finances and investments that are compliant with Islamic principles and values.nbsp;

The Qu'ran forbids lending at interest, so Islamic banks find ingenious ways of making money from financing business which obey the letter of the law. They are clearly successful.

Tom Lubbock

 In clearing out old papers, I came across reminders of how great a newspaper the Independent used to be. They were a set of double-sided full-colour posters dedicated to great artists. One side consisted of a reproduction of a key work of art by the painter concerned and the other comprised what we would now call thumbnails illustrating a pen-portrait of the artist and his work. These were practically all by Tom Lubbock, the writer and illustrator, who died far too early in January 2011. He was often outspoken - for and against - but always informative and readable. His critique of van Gogh's Chair began: 

Self-portraits have adopted many guises. Duerer painted himself as Jesus. Rembrandt painted himself as the apostle Paul. Courbet painted himself as a madman jumping off a cliff. But no one before Van Gogh had painted a self-portrait as a chair.

If you were a chair, what kind of chair would you be> That's the playful question to which this picture is a serious answer. It's staged like a portrait, the chair by itself centred, filling the frame.

He did not hold back of Rembrandt:

If just one painter had to be beamed out into the universe, to advertise to the alien empires what a deeply admirable life-form we humans are, who should it be? Leonardo? Michelangelo? Van Gogh? Picasso? No, there can be only one candidate: Rembrandt  Harmenszoon van Rijn. It might have surprised him. But this moderately successful  17th-century Dutch painter has matured, over the centuries, into the artist who represents the very best of us. Supremely humane, but only human, Rembraddt  is pretty well M Humanity, a kind of mortal god.

Over ,the years, I should have refreshed my knowledge of this part of our civilisation. Instead, they were stashed away when I moved to Skewen and now they will all have to go to recycling. However, it was good to renew my acquaintance with this marvellous series and the man behind it.

Two thoughts on the Sunak financial statement

 Presumably to anticipate objections to the high level of borrowing that he proposes, chancellor Rishi Sunak has thrown red meat to his more isolationist colleagues on the government benches and to the "red wall" voters who turned against Labour as well as the EU in the form of a cut in the proportion of international aid mandated by law. What he did not point out was that our overseas development fund would automatically fall as our national income falls. So the 0.5% is a cut upon a cut. Perhaps he did not want to draw attention to the impact which Brexit will have on out national finances next yeas and for a few years to come.

Sunak did not as had been trailed announce a cut or a pause in the application of the pensions triple lock which is probably the last remaining bequest of the Liberal Democrats in coalition. However, he is proposing a reformulation of the RPI (the retail prices index, though it now covers much more than retails). Commentators predict that this will result in the annual up-rating of company and other institutional pensions resulting in lower outcomes. Mathematicians tell me that RPI is flawed - there is apparently a built-in bug which exaggerates slight rises - and that the CPI (consumer prices index) is more robust. However, the latter does not include house prices. So, some overhaul is clearly necessary but against an inflation rate which will surely climb steeply next year, whether or not there is to be a deal with the EU, many pensioners are going to cry "foul!".

Is Johnson seriously green?

 http://aberavonneathlibdems.blogspot.com/2020/11/johnson-plan-for-green-industrial.html refers.

Do not forget that Johnson's predecessors cancelled the electrification of main-line railways which would have reducd our dependence on polluting diesel and sold off the Green Investment Bank - both Liberal Democrat initiatives. Johnson himself wants to overrule the Senedd's concern for the environment by building a new stretch of the M4 over the Gwent levels, a scheme which would encouage more motor traffic.

Some have suggested that the apparent change of heart is down to Carrie Symonds, Johnaon's partner who appears to be exercising more control in 10 Downing Street. I incline to the more cynical view that this is just greenwash in advance of the Glasgow COP26 conference and will disappear as soon as green issues are no longer in the headlines.

Interruption

 Posting will be intermittent until early December because of building work at my home.

Margam fatalities: Railways inspectorate report damns Network Rail

 The Railways Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) has issued a report which blames Network Rail for a decade of failure to apply obvious safety measures which led up to the deaths of two track maintenance workers near Margam last year.

Iran continues to enrich uranium beyond treaty limit

It was reported last month that Iran now had ten times the nuclear stockpile allowed under a 2015 treaty. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, was agreed by Iran with the US, Germany, France, the UK, China and Russia. Until President Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions, Iran passed all inspections by the IAEA. Al-jazeera is now reporting that Iran has twelve times that agrred stockpile according to the IAEA.

President Biden is expected to re-join the JCPOA, but will no doubt set the condition that the excess enriched uranium is disposed of before freeing the world banking system to deal with Iran again. I have previously suggested that the new President also opens talks with the Islamic Republic about its support for Shi'ite militias abroad, including that which is a party to the civil war in Yemen. But people are starving in Iran, so some relief is necessary immediately Biden takes office.

Germany, 1945 on

 It is good to see a series about World War Two that deals with the aftermath for not only the people of Germany but also the liberating forces. In the case of the Soviet forces, the nature of that "liberation" promises to be exposed by BBC 4's Berlin 1945.

It will be a necessary corrective to the jingoism of so much of the continuing programming of WWII footage - I see there is yet another "how we won the war" programme on Channel 5 tonight. However, we have yet to see a series on how Germany dragged herself out of Nazi subjugation and the wreckage of war to become one of the world's most liberal societies and also one of world's five leading economies. 

US authorities tougher on financial criminals ... somewhat

 ICIJ (the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) reported last week that .

Late last month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a landmark settlement with banking giant Goldman Sachs over its participation in a massive bribery scheme that syphoned hundreds of millions from Malaysian public coffers. As a part of a deal with prosecutors, the Wall Street firm agreed to pay nearly $3 billion to authorities in multiple countries, and agreed to have its Malaysian subsidiary plead guilty in a Brooklyn court to conspiring to violate U.S. bribery laws. The fine, the largest ever under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act followed the indictment of two Goldman executives who U.S. authorities alleged pushed the bribery ring. The scandal focused on a multi-billion dollar fund known as 1MDB, which was ostensibly devoted to developing the Malaysian economy. Instead, billions were illicitly syphoned from the fund, often via offshore accounts, to wealthy elites, politicians and Goldman bankers. Some of the looted money is suspected to have financed the film production of “Wolf of Wall Street,” the Hollywood feature starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

While the writer refers to prosecutorial timidity, it is notable that the US authorities have gone further than the UK financial invigilators have over our scandals of the last decade.

Biden/Harris day one

 The presidential team-elect has already signalled that protecting fellow-Americans from SARS/CoV-2 is top of their agenda for 21st January 2021 and their team has already started to be assembled. There are many other reversals of Trump policy expected. He will start to reverse the tax cuts introduced by Trump, though it will need all Biden's networking skills to get this through Congress.  He will almost certainly remove the restrictions on incomers from mostly Muslim nations. 

Slightly more concerning from the international point of view is the manifesto pledge to force federal agencies to buy only US-sourced goods and services. That will be more than made up for by returning to the World Health Organisation and the Paris agreement on climate change. 

Return to the negotiation table with Iran may take longer. Although Iran kept her side of the uranium enrichment bargain, and was independently certified as having done so in spite of Trump's fake reports to the contrary, there must be concern about the Islamic Republic's continuing subsidy of terrorist organisations abroad. One would hope that Biden will accompany the olive branch with conditions.

But there is one other urgent job to repair the damage from Trump: restore confidence in international trade. The World Trade Organisation is in stasis as a result of Trump's refusal to cooperate on the international stage. As the New York Times reported last year:

Over the past two years, Washington has blocked the W.T.O. from appointing new members to a crucial panel that hears appeals in trade disputes. Only three members are left on the seven-member body, the minimum needed to hear a case, and two members’ terms expire on Tuesday. With the administration blocking any new replacements, there will be no official resolution for many international trade disputes

This is of particular concern to the UK as the Johnson government lets the EU trade negotiations wither, throwing us back on WTO trading terms in 2021. It is essential that a WTO disputes procedure is in place. However, we are not the only nation affected and in the absence of a strong international body, it is clearly the weakest who will suffer. Surely Biden and Harris will not want that on their conscience, however concerned they are about US employment.

Yemen's ancient clay city under threat

 Climate change has another victim in the form of devastating floods which threaten an ancient city, including what is said to be the world's oldest skyscraper. 

Why, the person in the street asks, should funds be directed at saving buildings when what is needed is to save lives in the humanitarian disaster which is Yemen today? The answer is that we can, and should, do both. The needless proxy war, fuelled by weaponry and ammunition from the UK among others, should be brought to an end in order for reconstruction - social and physical - to begin.

 

Swansea Council election results May 1992

 Sorting old papers, I came across the Evening Post's local election report for 1992. In the hope that they might be useful (there does not seem to be another online record) I have entered their summary of results here. Names in bold are those of successful candidates.

BISHOPSTON

Fred Hughes (Lib Dem)*                  949

Mabel Matthews (Con)                      486

Maj. 463. Turnout 52%

BONYMAEN

David Watkins (Lab) *                     884

Trevor Warden (Lib Dem)                 224

Maj 660.  Turnout 20.5%

CASTLE

Dereck Roberts (Lab) *                1,365

Robert Simmonds (Con)                   590

Bob Taylor (Lib Dem)                      110

Ben Grigg (Green)                            119

Maj 775. Turnout 24%.

COCKETT (three seats)

David Anthony (Lab) *               1,432

Walter Dyer (Lab) *                    1,365

Glenn Draisey (Lab)                    1,336

Mary Davies (Con)                          631

Phyllis Goulding (Lib Dem)            371

Ted Spooner (Lib Dem)                   336

Ken John (Lib Dem)                        326

Turnout 22.5%

CWMBWRLA

Peter Black (Lib Dem)  *              2,065

Bernard Pitson (Lab)                         507

Maj 1558. Turnout 40%

FAIRWOOD

Jim Kelleher (Lib Dem)                600

Gerald Davies (Con)                       365

Wayne Beard (Lab)                         175

Maj 235. Turnout 50%

GOWER

Richard Lewis (Con)                     836

Shirley Osborn (Lib Dem)              638

Maj 198. Turnout 51%

KILLAY NORTH

George Gunn (Con) *                   432

Shirley Davies (Lab)                      144

Stephen Evans (Lib Dem)              144

Maj 288. Turnout 30%

KILLAY SOUTH

Peter Williams (Con)                   390

John Bushell (Lib Dem)                324

Maureen Mahoney (Lab)               154

Maj 66. Turnout 42%.

LANDORE

Alan Ayres (Lab)  *                      871

Mervyn Williams (Lib Dem)         219

Peter Jones (Green)                         59

Maj 652. Turnout 23%

LLANSAMLET

Laurence Bailey (Lab)  *           1,004

Alec Boothroyd (Con)                  351

Kevin Parry (Lib Dem)                131

Maj 653. Turnout 19%

MORRISTON

Bob Lloyd (Lab)  *                    1,772

Bob Morgan (Lab) *                 1,741

Micha Cunningham (Lib Dem)     897

Janine Vaughan (Lib Dem)           518

Jonathan Bidmead (Con)            492             

Turnout 23.5%.

MYNYDDBACH

Audrey Clement (Res. Ass.) * 1,553

John James (Lab)                       1,025

Barbara Phillips ('Labour')             38

Maj 528. Turnout 33.5%

PENCLAWDD

Howard Morgan (Ind)  *        1,077

Tyssul James (Lab)                     408

Michael Taylor (Chr. Soc. Dem)  23

Maj 669. Turnout 50.5%

PENDERRY

June Burtonshaw (Lab)  *    1, 157

Byron Owen (Lab)  *              1,003

Phillip Gilasbey (Lib Dem)      317

Turnout 16.5%

SKETTY

June Stanton (Ind)  *            2,272

Huw Rees (Con)                    1,354

Brian Cainen (Lab)                   905

Janet Evans (Green)                   99

Maj 918. Turnout 41%

UPLANDS

Dick Phllips (Con)  *          1,910

Sonya Morris (Con)           1,716

David Phillips (Lab)            1,471

Jon Townley (Lab)              1,419

Kellan Scott (Lib Dem)         317

Alan Webb (Green)               302

David V Phillips ('Labour')   199

Turnout 35.5%

WEST CROSS

Martin Caton (Lab)  *     1,119

Mark Cainen (Con)           1,111

Eric Scargill (Green)           120

Maj 8. Turnout 41%

*asterisked names are those of existing councillors successfully re-elected

SARS/CoV2: what to do next?

The UK has the worst of both worlds. We did not stop the virus entering the country and the two crude attempts to contain it have damaged the economy, not to mention social and family life. Those Conservative MPs and members of the Senedd who opposed all restrictions do not seem to have an alternative, apart from the Swedish model. This, as I understand it, involved minimal legal restrictions but plenty of public health advice and an appeal to civic responsibility. But Sweden, faced with a death toll higher than in neighbouring Norway, has had to back-track.

Is it too late? Phil Hammond, in the article cited yesterday, opines:

Taiwan has a third the population of the UK so copying its suppression strategies would be more complex. However, Great Britain and Ireland are islands, and so could enforce Taiwan style border quarantines but have chosen not to do. New Zealand and Australia have much stricter border conrols which allow citizens far more freedom within them. Local outbreaks still happend, but [the State of] Victoria managed to suppress 700 new cases a day to less than a case a day. As they go into summer, the virus should be easier to control. 

The UK let the virus simmer over summer, rather than suppress it, with patch testing and poor public compliance. So the second wave is much bigger than it needed to be. Hence the fears of NHS winter overload and another lockdown. But lockdown is like doing urgent heart surgery with a chainsaw. Don't do it and the patient dies quickly; do it and the patient still dies, but a little more slowly. [...]

Suppressing a highly infectious virus that spreads without symptom in sudden waves is extremely hard, and probably not possible without border quarantines to keep new outbreaks at a traceable level. Across Europe, [track and trace] systems have failed to suppress a second wave. In the UK, £12bn has been spent on a largely outsourced system, but the message that local tracing gets better results is filtering through.

More that 100 local authorities in England now have "tracing partnerships" with Public Health England. Blackburn with Darwen went live at the start of August and reached nine out of ten cases that the national system couldn't get through to; Calderdale council reached 86 percent of cases that otherwise wouldn't have had their close contacts identified.

These partnerships should help provide financial and social support, and access to food or medicines. Local authorities know where their pockets of hunger and poverty are and urgently need the resources to tackle them. 

Local tracing is funded from a share of £300m government funding plus £8 per head of enhanced tracing and enforcement in areas in higher-tier restrictions.  But it's a fraction of what the private sector has been given. Local authorities must be fully funded to trace and support, with the help of local NHS and GPs, so when the numbers come down to a manageable level, we can keep them there. Next time, we have to suppress, not simmer.

And there will be a next time. Chancellor Rishi Sunak, in his announcement about extending the furlough scheme, referred to a "once in a century event". He is profoundly mistaken. He has not learned from the warnings issued by experts before SARS/CoV2 emerged, that zoonoses will become more common. There is time to rebuild the community health and contaact tracing structures, so short-sightedly run down by recent governments, which successfully suppressed traditional infections like TB, so that they are primed for the next SARS if it should evade our hopefully more efficient border controls.

Taiwan, a SARS/CoV-2 success story

 Buy, borrow or steal a copy of the current Private Eye magazine. You may not care for the way it attacks politicians (of all stripes) and institutions, but you can throw away the rest of the magazine if you wish. It is worth it just for page 8 which contains Phil Hammond MD's rounded portrait of what I have merely touched on in previous posts: the success of Taiwan in overcoming Covid-19. He details the "route map out of the pandemic" which avoided "lockdowns, excess deaths and economic carnage".

The Sars-Cov-2 virus may be rising again across Europe and America, but Taiwan hasn't had a locally transmitted infection for more than 200 days. This is all the more surprising givn it's a crowded democratic island of 23m people off the coast of China, with direct flights to Wuhan and many densely populated cities. Many residents live close together in apartments. In Sars 2003, it was the third worst affected country; yet in 2020, it has had only 555 confirmed cases and seven deaths, with no lockdowns and no second wave.

Equally impressive, GDP is predicted to rise by 1.56 per cent in 2020 and life is near to normal.

Nor is Taiwan run by a totalitarian or even a socialist government. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party is a full member of Liberal International.

Hammond lays out how Taiwan achieved its enviable figures with the active compliance of the population and confidence in the health system overall. "Citizens do not live in fear of accessing medical care in case they pick up Covid," he writes. Perhaps he had a certain Welsh group of hospitals in mind?

An iconic computer design

 

The Grid Compass

Nearly forty years on, Brit Bill Moggridge's design for what must be the world's first lap-top has been recognised as a classic. At a fraction of the original selling price and with umpteen times the memory and processing power, your smartphone may be more convenient, but will it withstand being dropped from a helicopter over a military invasion area?

US general election

At the time of writing, the only thing that is certain is uncertainty. The presidential race is too close to call and will almost certainly come down to the count of postal votes, possibly lasting until Friday. Media have assumed that the postal poll in Pennsylvania will favour Biden, but results  on the day so far suggest that the proportion of Democrat votes there may not be enough to put the state in Biden's pocket. 

I am disappointed that there has not been enough UK broadcast coverage of the Congressional races. However, it seems that the Senate will remain Republican and the House of Representatives Democrat, so whoever is in the White House, US government is in for at least two more years of "co-habitation".

Stock markets do not like uncertainty. So the recent surge in exchanges round the world, based on opinion polling that there would be a decisive result today, is going to be checked. I would also expect the currency market to be volatile for the next three days.

[Update at 8:50 GMT: BBC World Service has just come through with an update on both Congressional results so far and on a few interesting propositions. It seems that language in the Nebraska Constitution permitting slavery as a punishment will be removed.]

Wales again a victim of flawed privatisation

 The National Grid for electricity was privatised under John Major in the mid-1990s. There was never any public interest in privatising natural monopolies, as many of us complained at the time. There was no market pressure to raise efficiency, the major justification for removing consumer-facing bodies from public control.  This also made it more difficult for the power distributors to be compelled to take account of sensitive environments, for instance by undergroundng power lines in AONBs.

Now another drawback, which could have been foreseen, has come to light. There has been a failure to develop the grid network to match the growing generation capacity  of Wales, in particular of renewable energy. There has clearly been poor coordination between the several different private generators in Wales, the plc controlling the grid and Western Power Distribution. If still in public hands, the grid could have been directed to achieve that. The Welsh Government has stepped in to the gap, though with little power it seems to me to force matters. (What are the UK's Department for Business and Ofgem doing about it?)

This is not a problem for the rest of Britain where the reduction of economic activtiy due to Brexit will reduce pressure on the electricity supply. It is a pity that one of the few growth areas in Wales, rebalancing the electricity supply because of renewables, should be hampered.

Robert Fisk

 I have just learned from BBC World Service that Robert Fisk has died at the age of 74. 

He was one of the cadre of great journalists which made the original Independent newspaper such a pleasure to read. As time went on, one realised that he had his obsessions, though, contrary to the impression that the hard-liners in the Israel government and their supporters in the West put about, he was not anti-Semitic. Rather he was anti-colonial and anti-imperial, the American empire being a prime target. He never let his sympathies get in the way of the facts, though. Latterly he backed up his reports with his  own photographs. He was particularly keen on collecting physical evidence in the form of spent munitions of the assistance which the US gave to client states committing war crimes. 

Frost/Biden

This is an edited version of a David Frost/Joe Biden interview in 1987 which was nearly lost. As explained by Wilfred, one of David's sons who took over their father's company, the original was nearly lost. In 1987 David Frost had set about interviewing all the probable contenders for the presidency for a TV series. In the event, Biden had dropped out of the Democrat race before the series was broadcast. Much material was discarded by the brothers in rationalising Paradine after their father's death but later out of the blue came a message from a hitherto unknown resource that they had, among other things, the master - and sole surviving - tape of over two hours' worth of Biden interviews.

The headline moment comes towards the end, when Biden quotes Neil Kinnock - by name - approvingly for his "first Kinnock in a thousand years" speech. If he had been as honest in his later platform speech about the source of his text (which he clearly sympathised with) Biden might not have been driven out of that year's presidential race for his plagiarism. On the other hand, the pause allowed him to have diagnosed and remedied the brain aneurysms which might have killed him.

Current TV portraits of Biden mention his record of achieving cross-party consensus as a young senator. His pride in doing so comes across in these interviews. In 1987, he also aspired to bring America together as a community. A generation on and after four years of Trumpism, that is going to be more difficult to achieve.

One revelation was that Biden took pride in his attention to detail in preparing papers for the Senate and in his earlier legal career. He would not like to have been thought of as a technocrat, but, while inevitably losing that fierce concentration one has when younger, one would expect him to become as expert as he need be in dealing with the problems which face a president. 

There were touching personal moments, too, as Frost probed Biden's feelings about recovering from the death of his first wife. His second wife, Jill, joined him for these.

The podcast is well worth listening to.

Government communications: more applesauce* than soy

 Peter Black has laid out in detail what was factually incorrect about government's gloss on the Japan trade deal and also on its attempted correction. Alex Thomas of the Institute for Government draws a general conclusion from this and other incidents:

The civil servant responsible for the Department for International Trade’s twitter account might in future pause before mixing baking and government messaging. As many trade experts rapidly pointed out, the department’s claim on Twitter, sent out during an episode of The Great British Bake Off, that soy sauce “will be made cheaper thanks to our trade deal with Japan” was not accurate. The following day, DIT issued a convoluted clarification that it “will be cheaper than it otherwise would be under WTO terms, on which we would be trading with Japan from 1 Jan if we had not secured the UK-Japan trade deal”.

The soya social media flurry was a trivial incident in itself, but it was the latest in a line of misleading messages from departmental twitter accounts. In August Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, publicly accepted that the description of “activist lawyers” who were trying to “delay and disrupt returns” of migrants should not have been tweeted from the Home Office account. The Northern Ireland Office, meanwhile, continues to maintain its assertion that “there will be no border in the Irish Sea between GB & NI”, convincing no-one of anything except an ability to dance on semantic pinheads, and despite officials on both sides of the Irish Sea working hard to implement an array of the checks necessary to cross what becomes a trade border between GB and the EU.

This increasing abuse of official communications is a problem which needs to be addressed.

One wonders whether it was a civil servant who tweeted the spin, or whether it was one of the centralised group of special advisers under Dominic Cummings. Either way, standards of honesty in government have fallen disastrously.

* noun

Slang. nonsense; bunk. Thanks to dictionary.com for confirming my memory of the term from US films and paperbacks of the last century

Varied media reporting of the Corbyn suspension

I posted my worries about a Starmer dictatorship yesterday based on the early reports on radio bulletins and the occasional Facebook message. Journalists are trained to personalise their reports so it was understandable that the reaction of the newspapers online was to ascribe the suspension to Starmer alone. Since then, Labour party sources were at pains on Radio 4's PM programme and on Channel 4 News to stress that the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from membership was not ordered by the new leader but by a disciplinary panel. One has to wonder about the quick turn-round time - was the panel selected, primed and ready to respond to a reaction to the ECHR report on the very day of publication? - but must take the party's word for it.

 However, even after the Labour briefings to the contrary during the afternoon, BBC TV News was in no doubt that the initiative was Starmer's. Why the difference? I can only surmise. The radio reporting was led by Chris Mason of the BBC's political staff and someone who is said to be close to the Labour party. The corporation's political editor, Laura Kuenssberg was clearly in charge of the TV reportage and may have had a different take on events or access to sources at a higher level. 

A further thought: who is next for the chop? Several Labour dissidents have in public either implicitly or explicitly shared Corbyn's view of the ECHR report. Will they be suspended? How about Shami Chakrabarti whose inquiry in 2016 was largely seen as a whitewash? One thing is certain: Keir Starmer's governance of the Labour party is not going to be all sweetness and light.