Cry, the liberated (?) country

 South Africa is still suffering from the failures, post-Apartheid, in her major power supplier. Mis-management and corruption have resulted in a utility which is incapable of maintaining the electricity necessary for a major nation and has to resort to load-shedding (scheduled black-outs) to remain viable. The appointment of an Electricity Minister seems no more than a gesture, and one which may not improve matters as responsibility at government level becomes even more diffuse.

Now doubts have been raised about the probity of major South African banks, Al Jazeera, using a sting operation and the evidence of a confessed former member of a gang, charges that:

Several key officials at three major South African banks are helping a gold smuggling gang launder millions of dollars of dirty cash in exchange for regular bribes, an Al Jazeera investigation has found.

The officers at Standard Bank, ABSA Bank and Sasfin Bank have been on the payroll of Mohamed Khan, a money launderer working for cigarette magnate and smuggler Simon Rudland, thousands of documents and interviews with Khan’s former colleagues reveal.

These officers would enable dubious money transfers from Khan’s companies and remove evidence from the computer systems, all while getting monthly payments from Khan.

The revelation is part of Gold Mafia, a four-part investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit), which shows how multiple gangs smuggle gold from Zimbabwe and use it to launder vast amounts of money.

Democracy in itself has not been enough to bring social and economic justice to the majority of South Africa's people. A new force with clean hand to replace the tired and tarnished ANC government is needed, but it is difficult to see where it is to come from. 

Nuclear power is not renewable, Mr Shapps

 The announcement of the government's rehash of its revised "net zero" policy is careful to distinguish between renewable energy and nuclear power - perhaps civil servants are still in charge of one government office? However, Energy Security Secretary Grant Shapps is not so punctilious. He has declared that nuclear is a renewable source. 

Electricity generation by nuclear fission is dependent ultimately on mined uranium, of which there is a finite, if not precisely-known, amount. There are technologies for extracting more power from spent fuel, but they are not, to the best of my knowledge, used in the UK, and there is a limit on the lengths to which one can go. (On the other hand, lithium, cobalt and other elements required for today's high-performance electrical storage, are also derived from mining, but because they are not transmuted in use, can be recycled as a plant in Norway has shown. About 5% is lost in the process, but in future we may depend more and more on the process as there is less of the stuff in the ground.)

Presumably the minister has reclassified nuclear as "renewable" in order to exempt it, along with genuinely green technologies, from the energy price cap. I am a supporter of nuclear power and regret successive governments frittering away our lead in the field by burking development. However, misusing language a la Nineteen Eighty Four can only diminish public trust.

Updated 2023-03-31

Happy birthday, Eric Idle

 I find it hard to believe that he is 80 today.

What could the Welsh government have done with £155.5m?

 Peter Black's conjuring up of John Redwood refers. Last night's Sharp End interview with a Labour government minister revealed that large underspends were common in Cardiff Bay. The Welsh government had been habitually allowed to carry over the funds by the sloppy governments of Johnson and Truss. However, it was only a matter of time before a more rigorous administration in Whitehall applied the rules strictly and reclaimed the money left over at the end of this financial year. 

Finance minister Rebecca Evans has had over four years in the job. She should now have enough experience to spot where timetables are not being met and be able to switch funds accordingly. "Virement" is the term if I recall correctly and Neath Port Talbot officers were adept at it during my time as a councillor. I doubt that they are any less nimble now. If a local authority can do it, why not our national government?

Only a month ago, health minister Eluned Morgan claimed for her pay offer to the nurses:

It is important to be clear that this offer is the maximum we can afford to make for 22/23 pay offer and we have been open and transparent about our financial constraints with our social partners. Due to the constraints imposed by the fiscal framework within which the Welsh Government operates, the funding for the costs in the current financial year only remains available until the end of March. The reality is, that if this offer is rejected we will be unable to make any higher pay offer for 22/23. 

Now we know that there were a few millions more in the Welsh coffers. Even if they could not be included in regular pay, there could have been an increase in the one-off bonus in recognition of the work GIG workers had put in during the Covid-19 epidemic. Using the workforce figures from the Pay Review Body report, that would have meant an extra £1,400 per worker, or over £2,000 if restricted to front-line and technical staff.

The Iraq invasion: when US lost its all-powerful image

 The post-mortems started on the twentieth anniversary of George W Bush's decision to invade Iraq with British support and they look like continuing. The latest was Brian Clemons' analysis on Al-Jazeera last weekend, headlined "do we owe Iraq an apology?" Clemons agreed with his expert guests that the invasion was a mistake. There will be more from that programme later. 

First a quote from last Friday's Now Show. Steve Punt said that the Iraq war marked "the start of the fall in trust in experts" For once, he was wrong. It surely reinforced the standing of real  experts who quickly established that the two excuses for going to war, Saddam's supposed support for al-Qaida and development of nuclear and chemical weapons, were false. What it did do was to increase the mistrust of official government statements and the newspapers which backed them up. Sadly, the fake news, based largely on the word of a former Iraqi politician and others who stood to gain from régime change, was too easily accepted by the US public. As I recall, we were more sceptical over here, a view enhanced by expert David Kelly's leaking the findings of his UN inspection team that there no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (Later, it was revealed that aerial and satellite surveillance had been giving the CIA the same information, that any WMD programmes had been abandoned by Saddam. Either this advice was not passed on to the president, or he had ignored it.) In the States, only a small group of journalists working for the Knight Ridder group got it right.

That Bottom Line programme gave as the main reason for the invasion that America "wanted a war". The destruction of the Twin Towers in 2011 had been a humiliation and, from the president downwards, the nation wished to show that the US was still top dog in the world. There were also those hawks in the administration and Congress who saw an easy victory in Iraq as a path to Iran, enemy no. 1 to America's allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. I recall picking out some other factors on CIX in January 2003:

The motives behind such adventures are almost always complex.

There really are people who believe that Saddam is behind al-Qa'ida
(demonstrably untrue) and that he plans to launch atomic and
biological weapons against the West (he is evil, but not fanatic).

These must be the major motives of the American people. However, I
am sure that Bush is also being lobbied, quietly, by other Middle
Eastern regimes - and not just in Jerusalem - to impose a greater
measure of control on Iraq.

There may even be an understanding with bin Laden or his successors
that al-Qa'ida will lay off America if Saddam is toppled and a more
overtly Islamic regime installed in Baghdad.

The desire by the oil majors to have a more stable industry, and a
natural desire by a son to show that he is as good as his father,
are strong contributory factors IMO.

Further, US industrial activity is low at present. There is nothing
like a war to give a boost to manufacturing and electronics.

I would now discount the bin Laden connection and the commercial considerations. However, the roots of the Iraq invasion do go back to George Bush Snr's Desert Shield and Desert Storm of 1990-91, or rather their unsatisfactory conclusion. Having achieved the liberation of Kuwait, the allied forces were unwilling to go on to Baghdad. There was no formal surrender by Iraq, but instead an armistice was signed by the leaders of the opposing armies. It has been suggested that if Saddam had been compelled publicly to sign a surrender document, his position as head of state would have been untenable and that a junta more favourable to the US would have taken over. A "no-fly" zone was established as part of the peace deal, but critically it excluded helicopters. Saddam later used attack helicopters decisively against a rebellion, one supported only verbally by Bush.

Saddam's decision to take over Kuwait was clearly a result of misreading signals from the US. UPI recalled during the aftermath of the invasion that Saddam had long been a CIA asset:

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."

According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Saddam was part of a six-man squad tasked with assassinating Qasim. That initial attempt was botched, but the CIA took care of Saddam and eventually he got the top job in Iraq. So much was he "our man" in the Middle East that Margaret Thatcher felt compelled to dismiss initial reports of Saddam's poison-gas massacre of Kurds at Halabja in 1988 as "Iranian propaganda".  So Saddam probably felt assured of US support when he took over Kuwait. He underestimated Kuwait's influence in the West, particularly the power of the Kuwait investment arm, which had large interests in the New York stock market.

There is now no longer a strong man in Baghdad nor a strong government. As a result, Iran's position is ironically strengthened. An easy victory in Iraq was supposed to open up the "path to Tehran". Instead, in spite of subverting Iraq's Republican Guard, victory was anything but easy and at least a quarter of a million Iraqis paid the price with their lives. A further hundred thousand died in the Shi'a-Sunni clashes which followed the toppling of Saddam.

So Iraqis are due an apology. Not only has their built and artistic heritage been despoiled or looted, their utilities - electricity and water - are barely functional and intra-religious conflict is still rife. Professor (former General) Andrew Bacevich opined on The Bottom Line that America had a history of abandoning nations after fighting over them, citing Vietnam. He also claimed: "Iraq gave us Donald Trump". The slogan "make America great again" would not have had as much traction if it had not been for Iraq.

On the wider stage, the Iraq invasion was an affront to the United Nations, who had proscribed the action. This first major breach of the United Nations charter no doubt encouraged later invaders.

There is a moral for our government, too. We should not be stooges for another power, as Blair was for Bush, but analyse critically the reasons for joining a war, as Wilson did over Vietnam. There is a danger that we will be dragged into a US-Israeli-Saudi attack on Iran, whose consequences would be even more dire than those of that invasion twenty years ago.

Protectionism bad, self-sufficiency good

 Last week, Melvyn Bragg and his guests on Radio 4's In Our Time discussed the mercantile system. This was the term coined by Adam Smith to describe the philosophy that nations should restrict imports and encourage exports in order to build up wealth. All three economists present were of one mind, that mercantilism was a Bad Thing, although it was conceded that a degree of protectionism could help a developing country get on the trading ladder.

This primer explains further:

Adam Smith refuted the idea that the wealth of a nation is measured by the size of the treasury in his famous treatise The Wealth of Nations, a book considered to be the foundation of modern economic theory. Smith made a number of important criticisms of mercantilist doctrine. First, he demonstrated that trade, when freely initiated, benefits both parties. Second, he argued that specialization in production allows for economies of scale, which improves efficiency and growth. Finally, Smith argued that the collusive relationship between government and industry was harmful to the general population. While the mercantilist policies were designed to benefit the government and the commercial class, the doctrines of laissez-faire, or free markets, which originated with Smith, interpreted economic welfare in a far wider sense of encompassing the entire population.

The logic is impeccable and seems to have been confirmed by the success of international trading in and around the First World, benefiting virtually all participants. However, it seems to me that this does depend on Good Chaps, the sort who built up GATT followed by the WTO, remaining in charge. It needs only one head of a nation, which has control or decisive influence over a key resource, to seek to take advantage for the whole global economy to come under threat. Such happened with wheat, sunflower oil and artificial fertiliser thanks to Vladimir Putin. 

So in the Commons session on Thursday arising from the Urgent Question on food price inflation, Tory MP Bob Blackman was not howled down when he asked: 

The Government’s short-term measures are of course welcome, but we also need a long-term food security plan to encourage farmers to grow more and to ensure that more of our food is produced in this country rather than our relying on expensive imports. What action is my right hon. Friend taking to ensure that that long-term plan is implemented?

It is highly unlikely that we shall ever be totally self-sufficient in food (turnips are nice, but they contain little Vitamin C) or key minerals for that matter. Striving for complete self-sufficiency may be vain and ultimately self-destructive.  However, successive governments have failed to prepare plans which can be implemented in the event of such emergencies as the Ukraine invasion.

OFSTED in the line of fire

 Dissatisfaction with Ofsted and its methods has reached a peak in England. BBC reports:

Teachers and head teachers handed a petition to the government on Thursday, calling for Ofsted to be replaced.

The petition was started before head teacher Ruth Perry took her own life while waiting for an Ofsted report.

Ms Perry's family have blamed her death on the "intolerable pressure" of the inspection, which downgraded her primary school to "inadequate"

The Department and Ofsted show no sign of budging at present, though there is acceptance of the criticism of the grading structure.

By contrast

Estyn, which looks after inspections in Wales, has replaced a single overall grade with an overview of findings focusing on a school's strengths and areas for development and a separate report summary for parents.

Progressing from a crude system of classification, which could often be seen as arbitrary, to a more scientific analysis of a school's strengths and weaknesses was clearly welcome. However, I must admit that in my short experience as a primary school governor, I did find the tables and tables of stats. difficult to absorb. One wonders also about the additional burden it placed on head teachers and staff.

Ofsted was established by John Major as this apologia explains. What this does not say is that there was an element of social Darwinism in the Thatcher-Major-Blair approach to public services, introducing competition, setting school against school, hospital against hospital and so on. It is significant that only a year before Ofsted was launched, the far from socialist Education Minister Kenneth Baker replied to a question in the House:

Her Majesty's Inspector's central concern has always been with standards of teaching and learning, and it reports regularly to me on those and other such matters. The senior chief inspector is directly responsible for the performance of the inspectorate, but I study carefully the reports that are submitted to me, which are also open to public scrutiny. I am satisfied that HMI already carries out its functions effectively and diligently.

No sign of dissatisfaction with the performance or impartiality of HMI there. 

My guess is that the government will avoid another bruising contest with the teachers. They will look for a compromise. However, they will not want to abandon altogether one of the totems of the Thatcher-Major years. 

Who is encircling whom?

 When an authoritarian regime with a poor rep. abroad accuses others of crimes and misdemeanours, one can be pretty certain that the former perpetrated them first. Thus Goebbels accused Jews of "the big lie" when he had presided over the most productive generation of "fake news" up until his time. Putin accuses NATO and the EU of unprovoked aggression against Mother Russia after years of undermining Georgia, Moldova and Serbia, culminating in an all-out war against democratic Ukraine. 

So when President Xi declares that "Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China" it is confirmation that encirclement has been China's policy for a long time. China has built up the world's largest navy. The aim clearly is to turn the western Pacific into China's private lake, as the latest incident in which the US is belatedly asserting freedom of navigation in international waters has shown. China uses infrastructure projects, such as the Belt and Road Initiative in Eurasia, railway building in Africa and  a container terminal (among other schemes) in Sri Lanka, to increase its presence and economic power abroad. The projects are financed by loans at interest rates which are detrimental to the recipient, as Sri Lanka has recently discovered. Cambodia and Myanmar are practically Chinese client states, while Iran is viewed by some commentators as being on the way there.

This accounts in part for India's support for Russia at the UN. India fears China, with whom she shares a long land border and sees Russia as a bulwark against China. (One wonders whether the recent mutual grooming in Moscow has altered this view.) 

It would not be surprising if China turned out to behind the bail-out of the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank by HSBC, which has good relations with the Chinese administration. Xi is now posing as the broker of world peace with his nebulous promise of a settlement to the Ukraine war and his restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Israel is rightly worried about this last, but it may signal the beginning of the end of the proxy civil war in Yemen. 

America and Tory Britain see the answer to the threat in purely military terms, but we need to catch up in soft power, too. Third party states need to be wooed for liberal democracy, not merely threatened. One hopes that we have not lost India and Iran permanently, but there is a risk that Afghanistan, with her strategic untapped mineral wealth and key geographic position, could yet fall. So far, China's suppression of organised religion, particularly that of the Muslim Uyghurs, seems to have made the Taliban government wary, but that may change.

But the big contest between Western values and the dictatorships is building up in Africa, as the Biden administration has recognised. With our unique position on the continent, Britain and the Commonwealth should be prominent in the argument but, apart from the recently-signed agreement with Rwanda, there is little obvious sign of the necessary engagement.

The rejection of wisdom

 On the recommendation of a recent Radio 4 programme, I bought Handheld Press's reissue of Rose Macaulay's "What Not". The author prefaces her text with a quotation from Jesus (or Joshua - the names are essentially the same), son of Sirach. He turns out to be the subject of the book which used to be known only as Ecclesiasticus and part of the Apocrypha. The passage quoted personifies and extols Wisdom:

6:20 She is very unpleasant to the unlearned: he that is without understanding will not remain with her.

6:21 She will lie upon him as a mighty stone of trial; and he will cast her from him ere it be long.

6:22 For wisdom is according to her name, and she is not manifest unto many.

6:23 Give ear, my son, receive my advice, and refuse not my counsel,

6:24 And put thy feet into her fetters, and thy neck into her chain.

6:25 Bow down thy shoulder, and bear her, and be not grieved with her bonds.

6:26 Come unto her with thy whole heart, and keep her ways with all thy power.

6:27 Search, and seek, and she shall be made known unto thee: and when thou hast got hold of her, let her not go.

6:28 For at the last thou shalt find her rest, and that shall be turned to thy joy.

6:29 Then shall her fetters be a strong defence for thee, and her chains a robe of glory.

Latterly, "the unlearned" have been played by unscrupulous politicians like Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot all the way down to Michael Gove. In December 2019, the anti-intellectualism of Gove and Johnson was successful in the UK. Unfettered by wisdom, knowledge and experience we suffered the worst of Covid-19, divorce from the continent of Europe and from defying a significant part of international human rights law. The extent to which we will be able to recover is a moot point.

It will be interesting to see how Macaulay developed the theme.

Shh!

 Marcel Marceau would have been 100 today.

How much longer can Briton Ferry hold out?

 https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2023/march/flood-risk.html refers

What can be done? See what volunteers in Yorkshire are doing.

There was nothing about this in Wednesday's budget

 The Independent Consortium of Investigative Journalist (ICIJ) reports;

From the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago, many countries and authorities around the world have sought to economically punish Russia — and President Vladimir Putin — by seizing bank accounts, yachts and other assets linked to the country’s powerful elite.

But there might be another, more efficient way to throttle Russian oligarchs’ access to their wealth, according to a new research paper that used ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks Database to analyze how these billionaires were moving their money.

Researchers have suggested that targeting the financial enablers — the bankers, lawyers, accountants and others — would cut off the “expertise pipeline,” which would be far more effective than targeting individuals or their assets.

This is particularly true for the Russian oligarchs, the report’s authors claim, because they often concentrate their business through a relatively small group of financial advisers and wealth management firms.

“It is a consequence of needing to keep secrets within the smallest group possible,” Brooke Harrington, a sociology professor at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the study, told ICIJ.

Harrington said that using ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks database made it possible for her to show — with data — that wealth managers are the big “secret keepers” maintaining the offshore system.

“It took all these years and the leaks had to happen for me to prove it,” she said.

A Chancellor who is proud of the City's lack of regulation is unlikely to follow this promising lead.

A disgraceful genocide

 

Tunisia in the Commons yesterday

 It was good to see that at least one honourable member was concerned about the situation in Tunisia. There was also a positive response to her question from Foreign Office minister David Rutley. It is reassuring that the government shares our concerns.

He's 90 today; not a lot of people know that

Or perhaps they do. 

Sir Michael Caine is still working. I wonder if he will go on to beat the longevity of Lilian Gish (76 years before the film camera) or Norman Lloyd (77). His first cinema screen credit came in 1956 with "A Hill in Korea", though he made an uncredited appearance in "Sailor, Beware" that same year. If one counts TV drama, he is already there. In the days of live broadcasting of plays, BBC showed in 1946 a studio recreation of a successful West End drama, "Morning Departure". In this, a young Maurice Micklewhite played, uncredited, a teaboy. 

One of the great film producers

 The US papers of record and over here The Guardian recognised the passing of Walter Mirisch at the end of last month, but there was barely a ripple on our broadcast media. I only found out by accident (I shall start taking the Guardian again when they stop firing journalists and paying their leading execs. Lineker-style sums of money). To quote from the IMDb:

He was a visionary who, in the declining years of the Hollywood studio system, could see that the future lay with the independent producers. 

He set up in business with his older brothers Harold and Marvin as the Mirisch Company.

 Operating out of rented office space at the old Samuel Goldwyn lot in Hollywood, the Mirisches kept their overhead low by such tactics as renting studio stages and facilities only when needed. Whereas the major studios were still burdened by high overhead and salaries, the brothers were in a position to attract top talent and offer high fees and flexible control to up-and-coming directors

Among those he worked with were Norman Jewison (director of the first "Thomas Crown Affair" and of "In the Heat of the Night"), Don Siegel ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and several Clint Eastwood pictures) and Blake Edwards. Not only did the Mirisches produce the Pink Panther movie series, they also produced the cartoon spin-offs. He enabled Hal Ashby ("Shampoo") to make his directorial debut with "The Landlord", a personal favourite which put racial prejudice in perspective, with a light touch.

 The full list of the movies he was behind, not always credited, is here.

Asymmetric censorship

 I remain dismissive of the significance of Tweets. However, if the BBC places so much importance on them, why have they suspended Gary Lineker over an emotional response to misdirected legislation, when they allowed Nigel Farage free rein on the network, even after a succession of lying and occasionally defamatory Tweets about our membership of the European Union?

I am not old enough to remember what Goebbels and company said about racial minorities, but then neither is Lineker. It is unlikely that the rhetoric of Braverman, Patel and Sunak was of the same nature, let alone the extent, of the Nazi propaganda. What a pity Lineker did not know a little bit more history, or he could have unearthed the following:

We are still of opinion that great evils have followed in the train of unrestricted alien immigration, the gravity of which it is impossible to deny, and that in certain contingencies, by no means impossible, the dangers and inconveniences attending that immigration might suddenly and rapidly increase. We think it is anomalous that in this country, almost alone I think among civilised countries, no power should exist of excluding or expelling any alien or class of aliens, however injurious their presence may be to the community, and we remain of opinion that that anomaly is not one which can be allowed permanently to continue. 

There is more in the same vein, not from ministers in a fascist state, but from Conservative ministers and back-benchers in the UK parliament at the turn of the last century. The excerpt is from a 1902 speech by Gerald Balfour, President of the Board of Trade and the prime minister's brother. The main target of the hostility was the enormous number of Jews who were victims of Russian pogroms and who were seeking refuge throughout the Western world. (One should also remember that the initial response of a later Conservative government to Jewish immigration - as a result of Nazi persecution - was to send the refugees to the Isle of Man in a kind of concentration camp.) The hostile environment culminated in the Aliens Act of 1904. The populism did the government no good. The Liberals swept to power in 1906.

But the fact that the presenter overstated his case does not justify the action that the corporation has taken. They should remember that Lineker made his comment on a personal account in a personal capacity. He did not use a BBC programme as a platform for his views. 

Meanwhile, the BBC has denied allegations that it dropped one episode of the upcoming new David Attenborough series as a result of pressure from politicians and fossil-fuel lobbyists. Auntie claims that Wild Isles was always intended to be a five-programme series and that the iPlayer episode in question was an extra. That is plausible, given that two major Attenborough series, Planet Earth and Life in Cold Blood, were 5-episode productions. and that the composition of other series has not been consistent, varying from 2 episodes to 10. However, the Guardian understands from unnamed sources at the BBC that the decision to restrict the broadcast series was taken in order to forestall political criticism.

It will surely be some time before we hear again the blue parrot-cry that the BBC is the mouthpiece of socialism.

Do Conservative party donors have links to the illegal timber trade?

 It is surprising that this government with "global reach" has barely whispered criticism of the junta which has taken over Myanmar and locked up Nobel winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Has the ICIJ highlighted the reason?

Myanmar’s teak is sometimes called the “King of Woods.” It’s dense, weather-resistant, and prized by luxury yacht builders and high-end furniture makers.

In recent years, it has also become a vital revenue source for the brutal military regime that took power in Myanmar in 2021.

Our latest investigation, Deforestation Inc., has uncovered how the trade in this valuable timber continues, despite sanctions and bans put in place by governments around the world attempting to economically throttle the junta.

Shipments of teak have been sold through intermediaries and wound up in places as far afield as Europe, New Zealand and the United States. Some of the companies involved in this trade boast green labels certifying their operations or products.

What’s more, our reporting shows that authorities are often failing to enforce rules that would stop the trade.

The upshot: a brutal military regime raises cash through dealings with Myanmar teak traders, and Western firms continue to market themselves as “sustainable” while selling products made with Myanmar teak.

“Forest exploitation is still going on,” said Win Myo Thu, a environmentalist and forestry expert from Myanmar who assisted the ousted democratic government as a forestry consultant. Meanwhile, he said, the military regime is using teak profits “to crush democratic forces.”

When will they ever listen?

 Such a disaster as last week's head-on fatal collision in the Vale of Tempe should never happen on a first-world railway system. On the day after, Greek trade union leaders were quick to point out that they had been warning of the dangers. That reminded me of another March accident waiting to happen, the Ro-Ro ferry in Zeebrugge. The Wikipedia article on the 1987 Herald of Free Enterprise capsize does not go into prior events but I distinctly remember that the relevant unions had warned the operating company about unsafe practices. 

It has later transpired that the Greek authorities were being warned from above as well as below. Euronews reports:

The European Union agency responsible for rail safety warned the Greek authorities on multiple occasions over the past few years, according to the head of the organisation who spoke to Euronews following an accident last week that killed 57 people.

Josef Doppelbauer, the Executive-Director of the EU Railway Agency said that Greece did not react in time to secure its railway system, despite its warning. Even its latest report in 2022 revealed a gloomy picture.

"During the last few years, we have always seen that Greece has ranked amongst the 'bad pupils'," he explained.

"So, with a rather low performance in terms of safety — safety (is) measured in the number of fatal accidents in comparison to the length of the network and the number of passenger kilometres [...]
we have never received any report of an investigation."

We do not need to go far back in history to note similarly unheeded warnings resulting in catastrophe.  From the Twin Towers to Grenfell Tower, destruction and loss of life could have been averted if warnings had been heeded. And, while there are stumbling efforts to remove flammable cladding of tower blocks round the country, the government has not moved to restore the pre-Thatcher fire safety checks on planned multi-storey dwellings.

BBC: the barbarians are not just at the gates, they are in the hall

 A Facebook friend posted this last night:

From Rob Johnston and Jonathan Manners, Acting Co-Directors of the BBC Singers

Dear all,

Rob and I are writing to you with the devastatingly sad news that we have been informed that the BBC has made the decision to close the BBC Singers, making the singers and its management team redundant. This will take place over the summer, and the group will play no part in the 2023 BBC Proms. Our last activity is likely to be in the first half of July this year, just six months before our centenary year.

Since the restructure of the BBC Orchestras and Choirs last year, Rob and I have gone to great lengths to champion the many virtues of the BBC Singers as the professional choir of the corporation. We believe that the group is at the heart of music-making in the UK and internationally, and is vital to performance and education work at all levels of choral music. The group has a huge responsibility in engaging with the future of choral music in this country, for composers, conductors, singers, collaborators, students and audiences alike. At every stage of discussions - which were instigated at our request - we acknowledged the need to adapt our working model to fit the BBC’s future and offered numerous suggestions as to how we could keep the group working to create exciting new content.

Sadly, the BBC has decided to proceed without the BBC Singers, and will concentrate on working with its five professional orchestras, their associated amateur choirs and external professional groups. We have been told that this BBC decision has no reflection on the quality of our work, but that it is taken out of financial necessity at this time.

This news comes less than a week after the Royal Philharmonic Awards, where the BBC Singers were the only BBC ensemble to be nominated for an award. The BBC Singers were recognised for our diversity of programming and collaboration, the championing of women composers and for our education work. The BBC Singers has never been in a better position to fulfil its remit and purpose to public service broadcasting.

We wanted you to hear this terrible news directly from us, and to ask for your understanding over the coming weeks and months. Whilst we would want to be able to speak to you all individually, our immediate and primary concern must be for the incredible members of the BBC Singers and its management team as we all come to terms with this tragic news.

For us both, it continues to be a privilege to lead the BBC Singers, and we are exceptionally proud of the numerous achievements of the group. Today’s announcement is a devastating blow for us all.

Migration: government priorities

 The legislation which Sunak and Braverman are tabling today punishes refugees and economic migrants indiscriminately - yet again. Yet again, the government has refused to address the real questions: why are they not tackling the people-smugglers directly? Why are they not arresting and putting on trial the rotten apples in the police (both sides of the channel) who, for money, turn a blind eye to the trade? Why are they not doing more to reduce the need for people to leave their homelands - the push factor? And why are not doing anything about the pull factor, employers especially in the building and catering trades who take on undocumented workers at below National Wage levels?

Estonia continues to be Liberal

 

Last weekend's poll in Estonia was topped by the Reform Party (Liberal International affiliated) led by Kaja Kallas. Reform, which strongly supports Ukraine and retaining Estonia's membership of the EU, has increased its representation in parliament. The PM-apparent has vowed that any coalition will not feature the ultra-nationalist EKRE party, which finished second. 

More from Deutsche Welle.

 

Arab Spring: the recoil

 Tunisia was the country in which the Arab Spring started. The Tunisian "Jasmine Revolution" was a revolt against the long-time rule of president Zine ben Ali, and the corruption, abatement of civil liberty and poor living conditions that were seen to flow from it. A period of democratic government resulted, but this has now been swept aside by Kais Saied who has seized power as president. So the nation is now back to square one but with added racism. Saied has closed Tunisia's borders to immigration from the south and has created a hostile environment for Tunisian residents with a sub-Saharan origin. (This matters to the UK because Tunisia has been a waystation for refugees and other Africans seeking to reach Europe. Saied's actions must throw an extra burden on Calais.)

Egypt was another nation in which a brief period of democracy as a result of the Spring was snuffed out, in that case reverting to rule by the military establishment. President Sisi's regime has detained without trial tens of thousands (Human Rights Watch estimate) of people including foreigners. Admittedly, the Muslim Brotherhood government which was overthrown also used detention without trial but the numbers detained seem not to have exceeded 12,000. The regime has not (yet) allowed the killing of prisoners, which was a major charge against previous dictator Mubarak, but Egypt is still a long way from the democracy which the Tahir Square protesters envisaged. 

Of the nations most affected by the wave of revolts as named in the article cited earlier, (Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain), only Bahrain is relatively peaceful. Armed conflict, aggravated by the great powers to a greater of lesser extent, continues in Syria and Yemen. The revolt failed in the constitutional monarchy of Bahrain, where there has been a gradual move towards civilised norms, in particular the enfranchisement of women. 

If there is a conclusion to be drawn, it is that it is difficult to make democracy stick in a country unused to it, especially as a result of abrupt change. European history, however, suggests that progress will be made. Both Germany and France suffered reversion to autocratic rule after brief attempts at rule by the people. Both are now established democracies. There are signs in Tunisia at least that the people are not going to submit quietly to another dictatorship.

Some Jews are more equal than others

 This week, there have been mass demonstrations by Jews, in their great tradition of upholding the rule of law. They were protesting the move by the state to emasculate its Supreme Court. They also protested the failure to take action against illegal squatters committing murder and arson against their neighbours. The state responded with violence, sending in police cavalry and firing tear gas at the protestors.

This all took place not in a military dictatorship, but in democratic Israel. One has to wonder whether prime minister Netanyahu and security minister Ben-Gvir are in fact Jew-hating Jews.

 

London Stock Exchange in decline

 BBC Business this morning reported an exodus of companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) to trading floors new. The LSE was overtaken last year by the Paris Bourse as the largest stock exchange in Europe. CRH, a major building materials firm, has already announced its decision to move to New York. Today, ARM Holdings, once an icon of UK electronic logic development, said that it was following suit. There is more detail in Simon Jack's briefing here.

London's FTSE All-Share index (.FTAS) is worth $2.8 trillion, according to Refinitiv data [Reuters]. The corresponding figure in 2007 was $4.7tn. There were further peaks of a touch over $4.5tn in 2016 and 2021, and the post credit-crunch trough of $2.6tn has yet to be reached, but the trend seems to be relentlessly downward. 

So far, as the Reuter report says, other aspects of London's financial business continue to thrive. However, to this naïve observer, it seems that the old saying that "a fish rots from the head" must apply. Certainly, the hopes of some extreme economists, that a 21st century boom in financial services would mean that a proudly independent UK would never need to manufacture or grow anything again, recede further.

There is a plaintive cry from some quarters that cutting LSE regulation will bring the big stocks back. I would point out the fate of the least-regulated stock exchange in North America, that of Vancouver. Once described as a trading Wild West, it closed in 1999.

Happy birthday, Time magazine!

 

100 years old today

Have we turned our back on South Africa?

 During the last week of February, the navies of Russia, China, and South Africa conducted maritime exercises in the Indian Ocean off the port of Durban. The exercise, named Exercise Mosi-2, was the second such instance when the navies of Russia, China, and South Africa came together in the Indian Ocean. Previously, in November 2019, the three countries had conducted naval exercises off the coast of Cape Town (South Africa).

That is the opening of a report from https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/ It echoes reports from other media such as the i and other newspapers. It is a worrying thought that the parties intend to make them a regular event. Worrying, because the South African polity is fragile at present. Electricity generation has been in trouble for years and hit a new low last year, due to historic mismanagement and corruption. Corruption has affected other parts of the economy and on top of it all came the Covid-19 pandemic, which South Africa was ill-equipped to deal with. She is therefore vulnerable to approaches from China, which has been grooming other African states for years, and from Russia which has just started to take a similar interest, though an occasionally more violent one, in Africa. 

Given the close ties between the UK and South Africa (a Commonwealth country, one should remember), MPs seem remarkably relaxed about the situation. There has been no question to the FCO about it so far as I can tell, let alone a request for an urgent statement from the Department. I can recall that we used to have a defence interest in South Africa such that we tolerated the apartheid regime for the sake of a naval base at Simonstown. Will any MP raise the subject at the next Foreign Questions?

Even Sir Ed ignores the obvious pachyderm

Enter "cartoon elephant Brexit" into a search engine and you will be rewarded with a swathe of images such as this from Riddell in The Guardian. In Monday's Commons session dealing with prime minister Sunak's statement on the Windsor Framework, only one of the main parties dared breathe the Br**** word, and that was the SNP. The Nationalists' leader in the Commons, Stephen Flynn, stated the obvious:

we cannot and should not forget the damage that has been done by leaving the European Union. Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster —[Interruption.] Conservative Members do not have to believe me; what they should do is read the reports of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which outlined that there would be a 4% hit to GDP as a result of Brexit. Or perhaps they should reflect on the fact that the trade deficit between the UK and the EU is at its highest level on record. Perhaps they could listen to the private sector and to those businesses that are unable to trade, unable to get the workforce they require and unable to get the goods they need. Or perhaps they could listen to the public sector, which is facing severe problems as well, many of which are driven by workforce shortages. Indeed, many of problems that face all our NHSs across these isles come from the fact that we have significant staff shortages in social care. Each and every one of those points is a result of the disaster that has been leaving the European Union, and I find it astonishing that we have a situation where the leader of the Labour party and the leader of the Conservative party are hand in glove when it comes to their position on Brexit.

The fact is that, while Rishi Sunak and his team achieved a remarkable diplomatic success and potentially* put the UK back on the legal side of the Belfast Agreement, they were making the best of a bad job - a bad job that had been botched as a result of the 2019 general election. The Johnson administration was ideologically opposed to any cooperation with foreigners (except Russian donors, it appears) so neglected to at least negotiate our remaining in the European Single Market. Ironically, this is just what self-proclaimed Brexiteer Sunak has achieved for Northern Ireland, a fact which was with some bitterness hammered home at Prime Minister's Question Time today. If access to both the UK and the Single Market was good enough for Northern Ireland, why not for Scotland - or Wales, for that matter?

I do not expect Sir Ed to labour the point that we were better off in the EU than we are out of it, but I do expect him to acknowledge party policy on the matter in his public utterances. However, he did at least name-check our sister party Alliance (Northern Ireland's best hope, in my opinion) in his otherwise innocuous question.

*the Framework has yet to be ratified by the UK and EU parliaments. One should not put it past certain prominent UK politicians to find a way to wreck it.   

Hovenweep centennial

 Hovenweep in the state of Utah is a group of habitations of various ages but all dating to pre-colonial days. It was declared a national monument one hundred years ago, a fact which it is now celebrating.