Staying on

It is all very well to dream of an automatic improvement in the employability of Welsh youngsters by keeping them in education or training until age 18, as a think-tank proposes, but where are the extra teachers? Where are the trainers?

Beef

Fishing (0.1%) and agriculture (0.51%)  contribute minuscule amounts to the UK national economy, yet they have an emotional pull out of all proportion to their economic significance. The proposition that both would thrive outside the bureaucratic EU must have swayed more voters than were actually engaged in those activities to vote Leave in 2016.

Prime minister Johnson has declared himself prepared to make fishing rights a sticking point in free trade talks with the EU. Yet there is a strong sense among farmers, especially livestock farmers, that the Tory government is about to sell them out. Dominic Raab is in trade talks in Australia, keen to reduce its dependence on Asia for a major export, beef. Forty per cent of Australian cattle are hormone-treated to accelerate their fattening, a practice banned within the EU.

Worse is hinted at by an article in the current Private Eye:

At the recent UK-Africa investment summit in London, PM Boris Johnson declared that "Uganda beef will have an honoured place on the tables of Britain" after Brexit. [...] farm organisations have been deriding the environmental and food safety credentials of Ugandan beef, pointing out that no Ugandan slaughterhouse is yet licensed to export to the EU.

Tariff barriers depress the price to farmers from LED countries such as Uganda.
In turn, this prevents them earning enough to upgrade production methods and improve traceability and environmental standards to levels acceptable to consumers and regulators in higher income countries like the UK.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), especially the way it benefits German and French farmers, is probably the least defensible of EU mechanisms and was always high on the list of improvements to be sought by a Liberal Democrat administration in our manifestos. (CAP currently also benefits large landowners disproportionately, which could account for the lack of pressure for reform from Tories on the Council of Ministers.) However, there is an obvious solution for the UK which would encourage free trade while maintaining standards and supporting a farming industry at home. I quote from a former Conservative correspondent, a land agent in the days before accession to the CAP:

Pre CAP the UK had a most excellent system called Guaranteed Prices.

The UK food market was freely available (with the proviso of quality 
controls) to the entire world and UK farmers agreed minimum prices with 
MAFF [the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food] annually on most items 
(but on a 2 yearly basis for beef.) 

If the world price exceeded the guaranteed price, the farmers sold their 
produce and HMG paid farmers nothing but if world price fell to less than 
the guaranteed price, the farmer would sell his produce, send his receipts 
to MAFF and get a cheque for the deficit.

The system was simple, cheap to run and resulted in cheap food for 
consumers.

One wonders why Johnson does not adopt it.

Lib Dems should support a decriminalisation

I cannot go along with the knee-jerk opposition by Daisy Cooper to removing an offence from the list of those for which ordinary people can be sent to prison. Receiving television pictures without a licence is hardly a crime for which offenders need to be taken off the streets. (See a previous post.)

I take Ms Cooper's point about the consequences of not repaying a civil debt but surely these are not as degrading as being sent to one of our drug-ridden, over-crowded gaols.

We should rather be fighting for a fairer means of funding a national broadcaster.The flat-rate licence fee is regressive, bearing down more on us poorer members of society while hardly being noticed by the richest.

Commonwealth crisis: Westminster was warned about Scotland

There were numerous warnings about Patricia Scotland's propensity to milk the public purse when she was appointed Commonwealth secretary-general in 2015. She had been proposed by Dominica, the country of her birth. However, she had spent most of her life since the age of two in the UK and it is clear that the new majority Conservative government raised no objection; indeed, Cameron and company may actually have promoted the candidacy of Gordon Brown's favourite lawyer. If Cameron and then Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond paid no attention to the occasional negative reports from Private Eye magazine, they should have heeded the frequent warnings from a former UK ambassador, Craig Murray.

The BBC news website reports:

The questions about Lady Scotland's future leadership of the Commonwealth come after she was criticised by internal auditors last November for awarding a lucrative consultancy contract to a company run by a friend.

The BBC revealed last week that the Commonwealth's Audit Committee accused her of "circumventing" usual competitive tendering rules by awarding a £250,000 commission to a firm owned by fellow Labour peer, Lord Patel of Bradford.

Lady Scotland's lawyers insisted the decision to award the contract was fully justified. But New Zealand has since confirmed it put its £1.5m annual contribution to the Commonwealth Secretariat on hold as a result of the "significant weaknesses" in managing procurement identified in the KPMG auditors' report.

Commonwealth high commissioners in London are due to meet on Thursday [today] to discuss the challenges currently facing the Commonwealth Secretariat, including the KPMG report.

Diplomatic sources suggested some developing countries could shift their support to an alternative candidate if they fear they could lose Commonwealth revenue streams under the current leadership of the Secretariat.

It is to be hoped that the Commonwealth ambassadors will agree on a person who can restore the standing of the secretary-general's office. Now that we are officially outside the EU, we need the support of the Commonwealth more than ever. This message needs to be drummed into the ears of the Prime Minister, who should be active in helping to find a successor of substance to take the Commonwealth forward.

Putin puts himself above the law

Most London media, when reporting the constitutional changes in Russia, concentrated on the personalities of Putin, and, to a lesser extent, Medvedev. There was also some interest in the new PM, Mikhail Mishustin.

More dangerous for the future, though, would appear to be changes to legal institutions. As the chairman of the liberal Yabloko party pointed out last month:

The greatest concern is the rejection of the priority of international law and the actual liquidation of the Constitutional Court, which mean the final legalisation of repressive legislation, strengthening of an authoritarian state and isolation of Russia.

There is more of his speech here.

South London stabbings: Johnson follows Sir Humphrey

Do nothing until there is a crisis, then manage the crisis. That is the supposed tradition of the British civil service. What prime minister Johnson and Robert Buckland are proposing is a cheap gesture. Without the radical improvement in the chronic understaffing of gaols in England and Wales, which has led to a vicious spiral of worsening conditions, there will be little effect on home-grown terrorism. What efforts there are at de-radicalisation in prisons will be diluted as the convict population swells yet again.

The liberal solution - increase the number of prison officers and reduce the number of "crimes" for which people can be imprisoned - may be costly in the short term but will save money in the long term, as the Netherlands have shown. Of course, this would incense the likes of the Express, Mail and Sun who would rather stoke the fires of violence for the sake of money-making headlines. We should at least be thankful that Johnson has not followed the Nazi programme in this respect by demonising Islam and encouraging violent reprisals against innocent Muslim.

The Cardiff Giant

Not in Cardiff, South Wales, but in Cardiff, New York State, an alleged petrified ten-foot-high figure was dug up, supposedly proving that giants once walked the earth. Both it, and a copy made by PT Barnum, were legally confirmed as fakes on 2nd February, 1920.

What now?

While most other dailies were triumphalist and others despondent over the formal break with the EU, the i addressed the practical implications of the schism. What are the next steps to make it work for all the people of the UK, not just the financial speculators who funded the successful Leave campaigns and drove the Europhiles from the Conservative party?

Remainers on social media seem to be drawing too much comfort from messages from leading friends in the EU, like Guy Verhofstadt, Donald Tusk, Emanuel Macron and Jan Timmermans. We have not heard from opponents and it should be noted that Tusk and Macron do not reflect the general feeling in Poland and France respectively. It requires only one nation to veto our re-entry and we have upset too many nations in the EU.

Do not misunderstand. If a real opportunity to rejoin the EU offered itself, I would be in like a shot. But any government which did so must take the majority of the British people with it, and it is clear from the December general election result - not to mention the evidence on social media - that their attitude is hardening. Therefore it seems sensible not to invest too much time in attempting to turn the clock back but rather to ensure that things do not get worse. In particular, our resistance to a failure to reach a free trade agreement with the EU must be clear and unremitting.