Westminstenders: Where are we now?

[RedToothBrush]

Twenty thousand people
Cross Bösebrücke
Fingers are crossed
Just in case
Walking the dead

Where are we now, where are we now?
The moment you know, you know, you know

Just that.

Don't really want to reflect more than that right now.

Remember the civil servant who said we didnt get the ventilators cos of pettiness over Brexit?

I am quite sure that was the truth - the story kept changing. We didn't need the EU, then we didn't get the email, and then the dog ate the computer or some such.

He's probably just completely had enough with Johnson, Cummings and all the others, and will get a decent pay off, so why not take the money and run?

Forgive me for this but holy fuck, it’s not even dark at 7pm in the springtime, what the issue with this. Get it sorted schools

Whether it's light or not, it's still the same number of hours between 7pm and 8.30am

Unless it's assumed that SMTs and teachers don't need to sleep and can then cope with a full day's work the following day I know teachers are superwomen and supermen but still.....

If Louise hadn't previously made sensible contributions, I'd assume it was a troll making mischief

Emilio casalicchio @ e_casalicchio
EXCLUSIVE: The U.K. will use "shock and awe" tactics based on behavioral science to spur businesses and the public to prepare for the end of the Brexit transition period.

The term, more often used to describe a military strategy of overwhelming force and closely associated with the Iraq war, is contained in a document setting out the government's communications plan.

The plan forms part of a £4.5 million advertising deal (unearthed through the @Tussell_UK government procurement database) with ad firm MullenLowe London - which has also been working on communications around the coronavirus pandemic.

Four publicity "bursts" are planned ...

July & August: "Nudge" or "shove" people to take action

September to November: "Shock and awe"

December & January: "Loss avoidance"

January 2021 onward: "new opportunities"

www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-preparing-shock-and-awe-brexit-media-campaign/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
UK government preparing ‘shock and awe’ Brexit media campaign
Military term features in plan to inform public about end of transition period.

What the actual fuck?

A little history about the use of the term 'shock and awe'.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe
Shock and awe (technically known as rapid dominance) is a tactic based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.

Erm. Who the hell is the 'enemy' here?

This is to be used on the British Public and Businesses. I'm not quite following this logic.

Rapid dominance is defined by its authors, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, as attempting

to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe.

Further, rapid dominance will, according to Ullman and Wade,

impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on ... [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.

Huh what?

Ullman and Wade identify four vital characteristics of rapid dominance:

1 near total or absolute knowledge and understanding of self, adversary, and environment;
2 rapidity and timeliness in application;
3 operational brilliance in execution; and
4 (near) total control and signature management of the entire operational environment.

Ah you mean just like our government has demonstrated during its management of the covid-19 crisis?

Christ. That's kinda terrifying.

Although Ullman and Wade claim that the need to "[m]inimize civilian casualties, loss of life, and collateral damage" is a "political sensitivity [which needs] to be understood up front", their doctrine of rapid dominance requires the capability to disrupt "means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure", and, in practice, "the appropriate balance of Shock and Awe must cause ... the threat and fear of action that may shut down all or part of the adversary's society or render his ability to fight useless short of complete physical destruction."

Erm. That's not really making me feel much better given no deal is very much still on the table...

Are they openly telling us what is going to happen and how fucked we are going to be? Is it openly stating the objectives of disaster capitalism?

Eek. Thus doesn't sound good.

And of course its a term which is really useful and uncontroversial.

"To some in the Arab and Muslim countries, Shock and Awe is terrorism by another name; to others, a crime that compares unfavourably with September 11."

Oh. No. That's... Erm... unfortunate (?)!

But the term has been used before to market something? Right?

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US, the term "shock and awe" has been used for commercial purposes.

Oh yes. Maybe it's not so bad then.

Sony registered the trademark the day after the beginning of the operation for use in a video game title but later withdrew the application and described it as "an exercise of regrettable bad judgment."

Oh.

Great.

That bodes well.

In an interview, Harlan Ullman stated that he believed that using the term to try to sell products was "probably a mistake," and "the marketing value will be somewhere between slim and none."

Oh god we are so fucked.

Unless it's assumed that SMTs and teachers don't need to sleep and can then cope with a full day's work the following day

Friend was telling tonight how her head was on the brink of cracking up. She was fortunately stopped from sending an email to parents. But she did send one internally to other parties.

Our head sent an email to parents this week. She's a great head teacher but you could tell how close to the edge she is too.

They really don't need this crap.

I'm half expecting it to be announced that schools are all going back as normal on 1st July as measures are brought forward with the announcement made the night before. And then the schools told they will all be open during the summer with a reduced holiday of just two weeks.

Just to make half the profession quit so they can purge the system of anyone who is actually any good.

I don't know of anyone working in a primary school who isn't close to burn out. It's dreadful.

"Shock and awe" is used against enemies, or at least adversaries

So that is how the govt regards British business and the British public ?

Yet something else the govt have been spending time on thinking about, instead of COVID or Brexit No Deal

iirc Digby Jones was also raving about this spiffing wheeze to impress foreigners with Royalty

This govt obviously think power is all about putting on a flash show,
not actually doing anything boringly mundane like sorting out schools, testing data, or contact tracing

So a new paintjob for BJ's RAF-One and build a Royal Yacht

Spend the aid budget on a successor to HMY Britannia, Penny Mordaunt tells Boris Johnson

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/17/spend-aid-budget-successor-hmy-britannia-penny-mordaunt-tells/

Supporters of a new royal yacht for the Queen have for years been calling for a replacement to the retired HNY Brittania.

Faisal Islam@faisalislam

US Trade Representative Lighthizer tells Ways and Means Committee .....

its “almost impossible” any UK-US trade deal could be brought for Congressional approval before the US election in Nov
... and possible though unlikely that there would be any agreement in that time
.....
US Trade Rep: Some agricultural issues
“the US & US Congress would not accept in a trade deal & if they [the UK] insist on those then we will have to push this off until they don’t”...
“one thing for sure we’re not going to be in a position where our farmers aren’t treated fairly”
*
Which is the US Trade Rep pretty clearly saying that whatever is current on table in private negotiations as regards UK safeguards on US farm imports is enough to delay a trade deal indefinitely,
and will have to be dropped, if a deal is to be done...
.....
V Significantly
US Trade representative doesnt seem to believe his UK counterparts that they are willing to “go with us without going with Europe”
& while he’ll act on that basis
“the reality” is UK has “more than twice as big a relationship” with the EU than the US...
.....
Good Friday Agreement/ Irish land border “not something on which we are going to have a negotiation”
says US Trade Rep Lighthizer,
says President and Congress agrees,

and tho primarily EU-UK issue, suggests might touch UK-US negotiations.
(Rep asked for it to be a condition)

First time I’ve heard that President Trump would not allow a UK-US trade deal if it somehow interfered with the GFA or led to an Irish land border...
not sure in practice what this refers to
- perhaps a fear UK might renege on NI protocol in a no trade deal situation.

If my employer contacted me at 7pm to organise something for 8am the next day I would ... get on with making dinner and ignore it.

What a fucking joke your government is.

Have people seen the thread full of NHS workers off the brink of burnout/resigning/going off sick?

To be fair, that's not unknown in Commercial circles. It's called pulling an All Nighter.
It's a common enough occurrence in contractual law.
But I do agree that concerning a nationwide initiative, that suggests more a question of bad planning than any true sense of reality.

> is he removing a plane from RAF duty?
He most definitely is - the grey is camouflage - these things fly high and slow - red white and blue stripes or whatever make the thing unusable on ops. (the grey paint also has some militarily useful properties.)

..and "Gulf War Pink"?

There's a world of difference between camouflage requirements for fast pointy things rushing around at high or level and a pseudo airliner strolling around to all intents flying straight and level at 25000 feet or more, probably contrailing...and with radar and umpteen other sensors that are available these days the paint job isn't going to save a "Voyager" if the bad guys get that close..

On an historic point a Voyager aircraft operated on Ops with the rather hi viz RAF 100 anniversary tail on full display.

All the above said I'm not a fan of the idea, I think it's expensive frippery, but the PM is not removing an aircraft from the operational inventory or making an aircraft impossible to use on Op.;

These days if the "bad guys" get close enough to a tanker

...and I wish we had an edit function....

I just don't think I can stand six months of a £4.5 million prepare for a shit no deal campaign. Presumably this been commissioned by Cummings who is too busy or out of ideas to plan this next media onslaught ?

At the end of the day, Cummings was originally brought in as a spin merchant to sell Brexit.Is there no Tory politician who says that a chief government advisor should be knowledgable about substantive things like policy and skilled statesmanship. Why is top level politics now only spin designed to shock and awe the [-enemy-]electorate..

I would have thought that any true old school Tories that are left ( if any?) find £5.5 mill on ad campaigns and 1980's branded planes rather new money and naff?

This sums it up.

" With companies already battered by coronavirus and the U.K. economy heading for its deepest recession in centuries, Prime Minister Boris Johnson can ill-afford adding a man-made economic shock with its largest trading partner to the natural disaster of the pandemic, which has left Britain with one of the highest death tolls in the world."

https://apple.news/AvSfQj-fPQVaLrb8LeDeCUgg_

To be fair, that's not unknown in Commercial circles. It's called pulling an All Nighter.

But even highly paid lawyers are not on-call all the time, which is what Louise was implying schools should be.

Tbh in any well-managed organisation this should be extremely rare and only for genuinely urgent situations. I've done all nighters myself but only in badly managed companies.

Forgive me for this but holy fuck, it’s not even dark at 7pm in the springtime, what the issue with this. Get it sorted schools

Must admit I read this as sarcasm? Given that many guidance changes have involved communication with parents this isn't a viable scenario

Thousands put in quarantine in Germany after 650 people working in an abatoir tested positive for Covid in Gutersloh. Doesn't do to become complacent with this deadly disease😮☹️

To be fair, that's not unknown in Commercial circles. It's called pulling an All Nighter. It's a common enough occurrence in contractual law.

I agree that I've done that sort of thing mainly because I work better when I have deadlines but it is at the detriment of the following day's work, is a short term one-off and not when I'm required to have full-on days immediately after.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/britain-ready-to-seek-membership-of-pacific-trade-bloc-truss-reveals-3zp82nvqf

Member of a Pacific trade block?

Isn't that a) recycled news and we were already turned down once b) not very useful cos geography?

How ignorant can a US president be about the UK ?
His interest is limited to what he and his gang can loot:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/17/john-bolton-book-trump-china-accusations-dictators

Bolton’s book also goes through a litany of what Trump does not know about the world

• that Britain had nuclear weapons of its own, for example

Geography / proximity matters a lot in trade

Maybe Cummings plans to tow the UK into the Pacific

It's one thing gaining membership of a bloc, if they govt manage that by EOY

Quite another for UK exporters to actually manage to get significant amounts of business from the members

You mean tow as in kowtow?

(paywall) Britain gets a glimpse of life after Brexit

https://www.ft.com/content/147a1989-6f9e-44b3-8d6b-b56f2d5f680d?

for Mr Johnson the pandemic was a chance for the UK to show its strengths and demonstrate what it could do in its new guise as a truly “sovereign” nation reborn as “Global Britain”.
This explains perhaps his confidence when the outbreak began to take hold in early March.
Back then, remember, Mr Johnson boasted of shaking hands with doctors during a hospital visit.

The bullish message from Downing Street recalled that Britain is home to some of the very best epidemiological scientists and research institutes:
the prime minister called them “world-leading”, in a variation on the habitual “world-beating” theme.

No government was better prepared.
Britain had rehearsed for such an emergency in 2016 and stockpiled supplies. Exercise Cygnus, it was called.
Of course, there also was the “fantastic” NHS. Britain would show the world how it was done.

Unhappily, Covid-19 does not pay attention to theoretical notions of sovereignty or to national borders
Far from the best, Britain’s performance fighting the virus has been dismal, leaving it at the bottom of the league of comparable European states.

At 64,200, excess deaths in the UK have been nearly eight times higher than in Germany, and two-and-a-half times the level in France.
Spain and Italy also have significantly better records.

Nor has the UK fared well economically.
The Paris-based OECD predicts it will suffer among the largest falls in national income this year.

The explanations and excuses circulating in Whitehall are already familiar.

The overconfident Mr Johnson resisted an early move to lockdown;
the scientists initially misread the speed with which the virus was spreading;
far too little was done to expand testing.
The NHS carried the scars and shortages after a decade of austerity;
the stockpiles had not been maintained;
top civil servants are better at making policy than management and logistics.

In the description of several insiders, Downing Street’s leadership through the crisis was a “shambles”.
....
The problem is the yawning gap between assumed superiority and actual performance.

Mr Johnson and his colleagues promote an image of Britain’s capabilities that is steeped in nostalgia for past greatness rather than shaped by contemporary appraisal.

As one British diplomat puts it: “There is just an assumption that we do these things so much better than our European neighbours.”

The other lesson has been that sovereignty may provide the notional freedom to act, but that is not the same as the capacity to achieve national goals.

Working outside the EU did not take Britain to the front of the queue in the scramble to secure medical supplies from China and India.
So it will prove with post-Brexit trade deals.

The sovereignty that allows Britain to negotiate a bilateral trade deal with the US will not prevent Washington from using its economic weight to set the terms.

Any substantive agreement will oblige the UK to lower its animal welfare standards, permit the transfer of personal data to the US, and allow US companies to bid for NHS contracts.

These are facts that the government should have learnt from its still-stalled negotiations with the EU.

Sovereignty will become another way of saying that Britain is on its own when attempting to cut deals with more powerful partners.
.....
All this leaves Mr Johnson’s grandiloquent rhetoric about “Global Britain” as empty as ever.

The best Downing Street aides can offer is that a promised strategic review of foreign, defence and security will celebrate Britain as a “leading force for good in the world”

• as if previous governments somehow imagined it was something else.

Lords are hearing (again) that the UKs security is at risk if they can't get a deal.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/16/failure-of-brexit-talks-could-lead-to-terrorism-intelligence-delays-say-lords

Of course, like the single market, we were promised that Brexit would not affect the safety of our subjects.

A fractured international relationship with foreign agencies might be a disaster for parents with children from non-UK relationships.

Peter Foster @pmdfoster

The @NFUtweets online petition on food standards after #Brexit has topped 1m signatures.

www.campaigns.nfuonline.com/page/56262/petition/1?