Westministers: Happy New Year?

[RedToothBrush]

And so we enter a New Year full of hope that things might just be about to recover from our national nervous breakdown... or perhaps not.

As we have Damien Green ejected from his role as Deputy PM over allegations of inappropriate conduct towards woman and use of porn at the end of last year, 2018 sees a bright new progressive dawn with the appointment to the role of universities regulator of Toby Young. A man who has deleted 20,000 tweets including many which are inappropriate and offensive to women, is a fan of eugenics and hates the working class and disabled.

Meanwhile the NHS is facing a crisis which is totally unexpected to the government and couldn't possibly have been planned for by a man who has over seen it for over five years. Which naturally bodes really well for Brexit planning.

We are apparently planning to join the TPP. Never mind geopolitics we can move the UK to the Pacific region.

We still are not ready for trade talks because the Cabinet can not agree on anything. Not that it sounds like they have actually discussed anything along these lines yet.

Rumours are that the Cabinet - including arch leavers such as Gove - are leaning towards supporting May and a softer option, despite the disgust of Johnson, who once again is the subject of malicious chatter about his sacking in a forthcoming Cabinet Reshuffle.

There is talk of further Tory Party war with the revelation that membership of the party has dropped to a core of just 70,000 hardline authoritarian men, most of whom are over 60. Tory HQ now wants to (perhaps with some good reason to prevent the loons) rewrite the constitution and limit the power of local associations to select candidates. The Tory party is now lining up to be a power struggle between internal authoritarians, who don't like democracy voices or structure.

Meanwhile the Labour Party membership now apparently overwhelmingly looks upon staying in the customs union and single market favourably and is in favour of a second referendum. In opposition to the leadership who are utterly committed to Hard Brexit. Much to the annoyance of Lord Adonis who is pitching a fit about government corruption and incompetence and being accused of being elite because he going skiing. Unlike of prominent Leavers who are in touch with the working class.

And finally Nigel Farage has got a meeting with Barnier. Farage, unlike Clegg, Clarke and Adonis, will not be accused by the Right Wing Press of undermining the government's negotiating position because...

It appears that we are in for another year of Brexit nonsense then.

We've not even heard mention of Gibraltar yet.

IT / data issues have hardly been mentioned in the UK, but I see that business & govt in Germany - and I think also the EU Commision - are planning for this.

May’s intention – as far as anyone can guess ! – of leaving the Single Market
would also mean leaving EU Digital Single Market,
i.e. impacting telecoms, cyber security, cloud services, digital trade etc.

Post-Brexit transition, these issues won't magically sort themselves out
just because the PM waves her wand and proclaims "Behold, Brexit !"

In fact there was one particular project where we had funding from central government to pay for it, but management and councillors spent so much time arguing about miniscule details the deadline for claiming the money past before they signed off the project.

I worked for a GEC company that managed to turn away several millions in contracts because the morons in charge had no idea what their staff were capable of. One of the projects (with a London authority) had a guaranteed follow up of 10 UK local authorities and several European ones.

Younger readers might twig what happened, as GEC are no longer around*

*Yes I know ....

Farage has his MEP salary docked ...

www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/12/nigel-farage-eu-salary-docked-claim-misspent-public-funds

Nigel Farage is being docked half his monthly MEP salary after a European parliament investigation alleged he had misspent public funds intended for staffing his office.

The former Ukip leader, who recently bemoaned being “53, separated and skint”, will lose €40,000 (£35,507) in total, the Guardian has learned, after European parliament auditors concluded he had misspent that amount of EU funds.

Financial controllers have been investigating the role of Christopher Adams, who was hired by Farage to work in the European parliament as his assistant.

EU has just gone up in my estimation.

BigChoc - I've posted before about my telecoms lawyer friend (used to work with him - now he provides outsourced telecom legal expertise for a large telco)

He says the Government doesn't have a fucking clue He says they got a few more intelligent questions from one of the Select Committee and/or representatives from the HoL - but they're not the ones who need to do the work and make the appropriate preparations or address the issues in negotiations.

Oh dear, pretty I keep hoping come 1 Jan 2021 that we'll all be pleasantly surprised that cicil servants in various deep cellars dotted around Westminster have been preparing for all the important issues.

Don't know why, at 61, I still have a few childish illusions left about our rulers

I'm not yet 52 (!) and I'm already aware that I will most likely not be able to see the effects of Brexit reversed in my lifetime. The UK has already trashed any reputation it had, which will cost it dear in the future.

Why do business with, or in a country that can't decide what it wants ?

Pascal Lamy, former Director of the World Trade Organization (WTO), warns that a UK-EU free trade agreement will take 5 -6 years

I wonder if that estimate might be assuming competence & stability in UK govt

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/pascal-lamy-brexit-trade-deal-not-possible-two-years

BUT afaik

• if the UK govt is competent & sensible – it can slide into this in stages, to reduce disruption:

• First, declare the intention of having an FTA with the EU

• Then work on each stage in turn, keeping the existing EEA arrangements until each is superseded.

• WTO rules allow the UK to keep replacing interim FT's like this, right until the final one is in place and all UK-EU trade is under the new FTA

• This could also work for existing EU FTAs with non-EU countries, IFF they are prepared to carry over very similar terms - but that's not a foregone conclusion at all

I've come across Parkinson's Law many many times. To be fair, in clubs and societies as well as government (too many PTA meetings spent discussing whether to have a bottle tombola or a lucky dip, rather than whether to continue raising money for the new playground equipment at all given the planned expansion of the school, requiring the playground being completely remodelled....)

BigChoc - the civil servants were specifically told NOT to prepare for a Leave vote ahead of the referendum, reducing the precious time available to conduct the necessary analysis and modelling. And even now, there is so little clear direction from on high about what sort of Brexit we are trying to achieve, that it must be nigh impossible to think clearly about what is likely to happen

I've seen Parkinson's law of triviality many times too. But it seems so brexit right now.

if the UK govt is competent & sensible – it can slide into this in stages, to reduce disruption

Nothing contentious there. Perfectly sensible.

The problem is that the UK government simply doesn't know what it wants as a collective whole. Hammond wants this, Johnson wants that, Davies wants some of this a little of that but none of the other. Meanwhile Liam Fox wants something else (nobody really knows what, because he doesn't).

And that's before we let other members of the government in on the action. Rudd might insist we can't do without something we hadn't thought of.

As a teenager, I laughed at the hairdressers and telephone sanitisers arguing over what colour the wheel thingy should be. I would have laughed a lot less if I had realised it would be made real in my lifetime, in my country.

In a way the past 18 months have been a testament as to how long the body of a country can keep on after the brain has been shut down.

US ambassador to UK has resigned

Are you sure that's the UK, MrsR ?

A few mins ago ...

US ambassador to Panama resigns because he can 'no longer work for Trump'

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-ambassador-panama-resigns-donald-trump-john-feeley-not-work-president-a8156116.html

Rather late to the placemarking but wanted to catch you before the next thread

Carillion - The company that "runs Britain" is near to collapse. Watch and worry

Govt ministers held a crisis meeting yesterday over this.
HS2, schools, hospitals, libraries, broadband rollout, MOD barracks ..... Carillion are the contractor for all these and they are about to crash

Letting one supplier become so vital is a separate matter
Now what - Nationalise ? Bail out ?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/12/building-company-carillion-collapse-schools-roads-hospitals-hs2-taxpayers-bill

Speaking of US ambassadors, have you seen the clip of the press conference with the new US ambassador to the Netherlands? They won't let him evade answering questions about questionable comments he has previously made. Great stuff

Sorry bigly you are correct

Carillion are the contractor for all these and they are about to crash

Be rather tuneful, no ?

Bailout in 3...2...1

Letting one supplier become so vital is

Fucking bonkers.

(Apparently I'm "weird" because I "remember stuff".)

I certainly remember when the Inland Revenue (pre HMRC) had to promise to pay rivals bid costs when it was obvious that the incumbent (was it EDS then) was a shoe-in ? Bids were submitted and ... EDS won.

I think recently Capita have been in a similar position. Why waste a lot of money preparing a tender to be ignored ?

Funny, in the real world of industry, companies do their utmost to ensure a spread of suppliers (Intel and AMD, given recent news). Especially in the motor trade. (Back in the 70s, a neighbours car was off the road for months because of a strike at Lucas - the only company that made headlights for BL).

Im not sure what else they can do other than a bail out for Carillon. Way too much depends on them.

Lucky no one depends on the NHS then ....

Faisal Islam @faisalislam
This is the Calais hospital with NHS logo now conducting surgery for NHS England in France ... Opposition say it’s “very worrying” that patients are “forced to cross Channel” for care ...

Look what David Cameron's selling:
There's a pun in there.

Perhaps we didn't really give up Calais in 1558, we were just biding our time until we could restore it to being under English control. Perhaps this is what "taking back control" meant all along?

What a surprise _ Carillion bosses have bonuses protected_

http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2017/09/13/carillion-bosses-had-bonuses-protected/

Carillion introduced new rules to protect bonuses paid to bosses just months before an £845m profit warning sparked a nosedive in its share price.
…
Carillion’s pay policy wording was changed to make it harder for investors to claw back bonuses paid to directors.

Previously, bosses could have been forced to hand back their annual bonus and share awards in ‘circumstances of corporate failure’.

But in the 2016 annual report the claw back rules were tightened to two circumstances – if results have been misstated or the participant is guilty of gross misconduct.