What Do You Think Today?

[Avatar]

At the moment, it's the transferring of that data. The US and the EU have different data protection laws, and the policy framework that used to tie them together, (Uh, EU-US SHIELD I think it was, no longer exists for some reason I can't remember.) The US protections are not as robust as the EU's GDPR and the consent required under GDPR does not transfer. So when they move the data of EU citizens to the US for processing, they no longer apply and that data (and the use thereof) is not protected as well as the EU requires.

Basically.

--A

[peter]

Sounds to me Av, that your handle on this stuff is way in advance of mine. Hardly surprising - if I recall correctly, you are involved with IT in your daily work, so data and its uses are clearly closer to your domain than mine. Until a brief while ago, data for me was a guy who worked on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise!

While ministers from the government go around sucking each others d***'s because the IMF has said we might avoid recession this year, and the right wing press is crowing that inflation seems to be slowing down so we can all sleep easy in our beds once more, the truth is that for the majority of the UK public the damage is already done.

I mean, what the fuck difference does it make to the average Joe if inflation is slowing, when the prices of the foodstuffs, the clothing and commodities he used to buy has already moved to a place beyond his means to afford? Deflation is the only thing that will bring him back to the place he was in two years ago, and the government's sure to be working to make sure that that isn't going to happen. Either deflation or a hefty wage increase, and again the government seems bent on ensuring this doesn't get onto the books.

Besides, none of it, if you read what the IMF actually said, has anything to do with what the government is doing. Falling energy prices is the key factor behind the fall in inflation, together with the easing of supply chain blockages. Stronger wage growth and fiscal support (that means fiat money printed up by the BofE and pushed out into the economy I'm guessing) are also having their effect.

None of which is indicative that the UK is developing its growth potential in any meaningful way in terms of future performance. The facts are that outside investment is tanking, we remain about as popular in terms of attractive qualities as treading on dog-shit, and we have no trade deals in the offing that will serve to change the growth picture in the near future whatsoever. We might avoid catastrophic recession (largely due to external influences), but we have little to offer as a place to do business with or within, and no amount of sugar coating around inflation and recession avoidance will change that.

And look at the futures that huge numbers of people in the country face. They can barely afford the houses they live in. The BofE has hiked interest rates to unprecedented levels with twelve or so rises in a row. There is no sign of these coming down any time soon and people in their tens of thousands face the prospect of their fixed rate mortgages coming to an end just as their mortgage payments are virtually at a point beyond their ability to pay and they are already facing the prospect of repossession shortly down the road. And those in the rental sector are faring no better. Their rents are through the roof as the property owners themselves struggle to meet the mortgage payments on their buy-to-let investments, and attempt to make their tenants pay the cost via huge rental hikes. The effect of this turbulence in the housing market is to raise the threat of an exodus from property ownership as people cut their losses, and a subsequent crash in property values. This often leaves people with debts around their necks even after they have unloaded the properties that were sinking them, because of the negative equity they must shoulder.

And this while carrying the burden of increasing prices due to the extended period of inflation that the BofE admits today, that it's modelling singularly failed to predict.

So no. This is not a time for back-slapping and sighs of relief. This is not a sign of the 'green shoots of recovery'. This is the sludge and the slurry of the aftermath. The place where we settle and carry out damage assessment before concluding that without a government that has some real ideas about what to do to clear up this mess (and not just run for the hills ala arch brexiteer Dominic Raab, who rather than stay and answer for the devastation his plans have wreaked upon the country, has decided to leave politics for the more comfortable confines of the board room table and the hefty sinecure in return for a couple of hours work a month) we are fucked.

The truth is that we haven't even experienced the full effects of Brexit on our economy yet. The pandemic and the international situation vis a vis Ukraine and the world economy has clouded the picture and skewed the situation beyond any normal measure of understanding. As things settle down on a global scale, then we shall see where our future prospects in the shadow of Brexit truly lie. As other countries gather themselves and begin to return to business as usual, we will finally begin to ascertain exactly where the 'landing zone' of the Johnson withdrawal agreement actually is. Just let me check the map and see where it is situated. Oh yes, here it is down in the bottom corner in a place called......hold on - let me see.....Ah yes, the arse end of nowhere! And Chancellor Hunt wants us to be optimistic? I've got a better name for him - Chancellor...... No. Let that go and settle for a more family friendly Twat!

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Does anyone remember the actor Brian Murphy?

He's the guy who used to play the character George in the series George and Mildred, a popular sitcom from the (what) 1980's.

George was a rather weak character, dominated by his sexualy voracious wife (in a way that only a lady of late maturity, shall we say, can be so) and constantly addressed in tones of contempt (to which he replied in whining complaint) in respect of his failure to 'perform'. A thin, balding man in his late fifties, Murphy played the role to perfection...some might say even too well.

Like many a sitcom star, his period of ascendancy was brief if bright, and he disappeared from the mainstream television without much attention being given to his absence or regret at his (metaphorical) passing.

So it was with some small pleasure to hear a guy on the radio some decade or so later recounting the following story.

He had, for whatever reason, recently found himself staying overnight at a Travel Lodge or Premier Inn - one of those soulless travel hotels on the peripheries of cities or near airports - on the outskirts of London. He'd been having a quiet drink in the bar when of a sudden, the door blew open and in rolled a gaggle of late middle aged women, in high spirits and laughing mood. In the centre of the group, was none other than Brian Murphy, he of George fame, who was clearly, despite his no longer frequent appearance on UK television, still enjoying the friuts of his celebrity.

He was (despite it's being a decade and a half later and fashions having moved thankfully on) dressed in the standard attire of a seventies celebrity icon - brown bry-nylon suit and shirt with large rounded collar open at the neck- and was clearly entirely happy with his position as cynosure of all those middle-age eyes. The group proceeded to the bar, where Brian held the floor with a stream of anecdotes that had his adoring group of followers in stitches.

And there we must leave him in happy circumstance, and I for one would wish him the best of it. Being George can't have been easy, and I was just pleased that being Brian seemed to have had its compensations in result. The story is mundane, certainly, and not without a degree of pathos, but in the round it's a happy one and leaves one feeling that the world is not such a bad place. So my take is, More power to your elbow Brian. Rock on and thanks for the memories!

[peter]

The economy is worse than you think it is and Kier Stamer has a 'cunning plan' to deal with escalating legal immigration numbers.

That about sums up the leading stories on yesterday's television news coverage, so turning to the first, you will no doubt recall that yesterday I posted on the stories on the front pages implying that things were looking up with respect to the UK economy. I expressed my reservations based on what I saw as nothing happening that was going to stimulate growth by addressing the ongoing problems created by Brexit. The newspaper coverage in the Tory supporting press was concentrated however on two different things. Firstly, the IMF had made some passing comments that they approved of Chancellor Hunt's high tax, low spend policies (before going on to warn about the ongoing problems with the economy, which of course the tabloids chose to ignore), and secondly, there had been a fall in inflation from its previously dangerously high level to a marginally less dangerous one.

Rishi Sunak, at PM's questions yesterday in the House also chose to blow hard on the upside of this, but the Chancellor himself was, in interview, less sanguine. He said there were still underlying issues that had to be addressed, not least that inflation, while down, was still much higher than the two percent target figure, and was proving to be stubbornly high despite the measures being taken to reduce it.

The tv pundits,in their analysis of the figures agreed. The rate, they said, was still way above what the Bank of England's forecast predicted it should be and serious questions remained as to why this was the case. They forecast (the pundits) that the BofE would have to introduce further interest rate rises to exert yet stronger downward pressure on the inflation rate, if they were to stand any chance of achieving the two percent goal. This in turn would add yet more pain to families struggling with their mortgage costs and an inflation rate of food bills (taken separately) running at around twenty plus percent.

So not so good at all.

Moving on to the immigration situation, Kier (Keith) Stamer, knowing that there was some really difficult figures for legal immigration in the offing had made some inclusion of the situation in his questions to the PM, and Sunak had responded with the broadside that Stamer had no plans (contrary to the government of course) to deal with it, because underneath the bluster he (Stamer) wanted unlimited free movement of immigrants (both workers and students etc) into the country.

Enter Stamer's cunning plan. (C'm here - there's more, in the words of seventies Irish comedian Jimmy Cricket) Here's how we do it. You know those five million or so people who are sitting doing nothing and drawing benefits since the pandemic? Here's the good bit - run with me - saying we......put them back to work! Then we wouldn't need to be dishing out all of those work visas as we do at the minute! Great eh?

Well okay Keith. But isn't it possible that a good proportion of those five million might have good reasons for not being in work? Like they are actually retired, or sick, or disabled, or suffering from long-covid (or doesn't that one exist anymore?). But okay, ten out of ten for effort, not so much for originality.

But in fairness Keith did score one good hit on Sunak during PMQ's when he observed that he was aware that the Home Secretary had a problem with points systems (referring of course to her recent speeding ticket trials), but that he saw the PM clearly had one as well. This refers to the much vaunted points system for legal immigration that was introduced by Boris Johnson (having been much vaunted by the Leave campaign and Farage etc, prior to the referendum) which, upon introduction, had set the bar so low for qualification for entry that it had effectively thrown open the doors to anyone who wanted to come. Thus Boris Johnson, who stood absolutely on the ticket of reducing immigration as per the Conservative manifesto's of repeated election campaigns, became in his indolence and misunderstanding, the architect of the single biggest influx of immigrants since Tony Blair's catastrophic underestimate of the numbers of Eastern Europeans that would want to come here in the nineties.

So there you have it. Not so good on either front, so let's go and see what the papers have to say this morning.

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"Simply The Best" is the headline on three of the tabloids. No need to say more on that one except God speed Tina. In your own way you were indeed.

Baroness Hallet, leader of the ongoing covid inquiry team, is proving to be a nuisance to the Downing St HQ by actually wanting to see the information she needs to in order to do her job. This includes the emails and WhatsApp messages that passed between Johnson and Sunak and the rest of them as the crisis unfolded,and clearly there is some embarrassing stuff in there that Sunak and Co would rather remained private. It's threatening to turn nasty, because Hallet (who we will be hearing much more of in the news in the months to come) has bridled at being given heavily redacted and censored records, when she clearly wants the lot. Downing St says that she has been given all that she needs and requires to do the job, and all the law requires them to provide. She begs to differ and is considering going to the courts to challenge it. Could be interesting. I'm betting we'd see exactly what Boris Johnson thought of the whole situation early in the affair (as if we don't already know - he didn't bother to go to the first five Cobra meetings at all) if she gets her way. (Johnson himself, incidentally, is threatening to sue the government because the Cabinet Office has referred his personal diaries to the police because he appears to admit to having meetings with friends at Chequers during lockdown. Johnson says these were private diaries and they had no right to do this. Anyway, they were "work events" he claims. Now haven't we heard that one before somewhere?)

What else?

Today's FT is going on about the economy (well, it is the FT isn't it?) and saying how badly the BofE got it wrong. Apparently gilt markets are soaring up near levels that only occurred last when Liz Truss released her tsunami mini-budget on the economy and this is very concerning indeed. The whole system is starting to look very wobbly. BofE chairman Andrew Bailey has admitted that food prices had not really factored that much in their forecasts last year and this was a mistake. To right it was mate! There you were telling us that inflation was running at eleven percent when I, a mere shop assistant could see on a daily basis our prices rising and rising, and yet you guys seemed unaware of it. Perhaps I should have a stint as Governor instead for a while? One commentator has suggested that the inflation situation is so bad that only a substantial recession will contain it. Now there's a thought; actually using a recession to control inflation. Haven't heard that one before (though I'm not sure that that is what he means). I suppose a recession shrinks the economy and exerts a deflationary pressure on prices as everyone stops spending and demand falls to zilch.

Rising gilt prices means increased costs of government borrowing and are reflective of decreasing confidence in the economy, but all the same, reliance on recession to control inflation seems a bit 'scorched earth' to me. But hey, what do I know.

[peter]

Yesterday I learned that my dentist was to shortly cease seeing national health patients and become a fully private practice. If I wish to remain registered with them, I will either have to pay a monthly dental plan of some kind or pay full costs each time I visit or am in need of treatment. Needless to say, the costs associated with such treatment as my aging teeth might require are likely to be horrendous.

This means that my town in Cornwall, which has a population of around twenty three thousand inhabitants, has no remaining national health dental practices whatsoever. Further to this, it effectively removes all cover from any individuals not in a position to either take out a plan or spring the cost at the time of treatment.

What will the consequences of this be.

Firstly it should be understood that dental emergencies are not trivial. People who remain untreated for dental abscesses and the like can die. In the light of this, health centers, ours included, tend to offer limited dental services for those who find themselves in serious straits with acute dental emergencies. So the first consequence of there being no national health cover within dental practices will be that dental caries (ie holes in your teeth caused by decay) that could be treated via filling in their early stages, will progress into emergency situations requiring full medical intervention and tooth extraction under emergency conditions. People presenting in hospital emergency departments and health parks with dental emergencies will rise exponentially. If they remain untreated a proportion will die. Other individuals, driven mad with pain, will attempt self carried out extractions, and will injur themselves seriously in their botched attempts to perform these. These cases appearing in hospitals will also rise exponentially.

People on benefits and low incomes already stretched to the absolute limits of their financial resources will point blank not be able to afford the necessary cover to protect them from such scenarios. End of. What of them?

We are talking of a return to virtually pre NHS existence for a huge number of people in our society, in respect of the single most common source of medical emergency that we humans experience.

Now what of the actual cover for those who can afford to take up some kind of premium.

My wife, who was informed yesterday of our practitioner's intention to no longer see national health patients, was given some information on this. The plan she was offered at a cost of twenty two pounds a month would, she was informed, give her two checkups a year, and one hygienist appointment. Of actual coverage of treatment costs, the lions share of cost in any dental or indeed other medical situation, there was no mention. Another policy did include ten percent coverage of subsequent costs, she thought.

I mean, what the fuck? What is this?

It's like taking out insurance on your car for it to only cover the damage assessment report after you have had an accident. Who wants that! What you want (and get in the case of every other type of insurance cover I have ever heard of) is coverage of the repairs themselves, not the investigation to establish what they are. This is bullshit. Do you insure your pets to have no coverage of the cost of treatment when they get sick? Of course you don't. You take out coverage of the cost of putting them right. No doubt, if you are carrying the burden of treatment costs, the dentists want to get you in for examination as often as possible to ensure their money stream keeps flowing. The bastards should do the checkups free of charge like the opticians do, in the knowledge of the bunce they will take if you are found wanting of treatment (which, in ever increasing proportions, you will be).

This is the American health care situation in its entirety, writ over our dental care. This is what medical coverage is like across the whole of the gamut in the States, and it's coming to a town near you. And how has this nonsensical situation developed - entirely deliberately that's how. The NHS payment levels to dental practitioners has been eroded and eroded and eroded, simply by not increasing payments in line with costs, until the cost of seeing NHS patients simply cannot be covered by the receipts of the monies payed for seeing them. And this has quietly and cynically been done, until the NHS dental service has collapsed in its entirety.

This is the 'safe in their hands' Tories at work at their best. Doing their fifth columnist stuff from the inside, making sure their buddies in the insurance and business sectors get their hands on the pot of gold that is peoples personal wealth, never more available than when they are in pain. Well thanks a bunch you cunts. You've just ensured that no tooth of mine that could ever be saved will be. That my only recourse when faced with a dental problem will be to kiss the tooth goodbye, either by waiting until I'm in agony and presenting at a hospital, or at an earlier stage when in a dentist and informed that work on a tooth is needed.

What a ludicrous, ridiculous, abominable state we find ourselves in. Like a fucking third world country, not one of the richest in the world, with the state of the nation's teeth heading back to where it was in the nineteen thirties. You could barely make it up. And the people of this country just sit and watch it happen. And fuck me, they even vote for the cunts that are doing it!

Jesus give me strength! Give me fucking strength!

[peter]

Ex Labour mp Diane Abbot is not a person it is easy to feel sympathy for, but I do think her recent loss of the whip in the Labour Party over a controversial letter she wrote to the Oserver was a bit harsh.

Abbot wrote a letter to the paper in which she suggested that Jews did not experience racism in the same way that black people did and that their experience was more a form of prejudice than the overt racism which black people encountered on a daily basis.

Now this was perhaps unsubtle (she compounded her 'crime' by speaking of the treatment that people with ginger hair experience) but there was an undeniable grain of truth buried within her ill judged comments. In addition, I believe that the subsequent backlash against her within the Labour party and across the media had itself an element of that very particular form of racism directed toward people with black skin, she was referring to.

There can be no denying that the racism experienced by those with black skin has a special kind of 'stamp' to it that puts it in a class of its own and is inherently different to the racism encountered by those whose appearance does not immediately mark them out for categorising as 'different', by those with a mind to think this way.

I'll give the example of a job interview. There are those whose immediate response to seeing a person of color sitting opposite them as candidate for an advertised position, will be to reject them with immediate effect. The darker the skin colour, the more strength will be given to this reaction (for it is a reaction rather than a thought out response). This is in some way qualitatively different from the response experienced by those of different ethnicity, but not marked out by the different colour of their skin, and Abbot was merely in her own unsubtle way, trying to point this out. That she should have been subject to such across the board venting of fury, culminating in her having the Labour whip withdrawn is telling of itself of the manner in which our society deals out 'justice' to those with a black skin.

Abbot alas has other factors working against her in addition to her skin colour. She is not beautiful and she has a tendency to say things in a clumsy fashion that makes her appear less accomplished an individual than she really is. She was the first black female mp and has not only a distinguished career in Law behind her, but has also been a strong advocate of both black and womens rights over the course of her subsequent parliamentary career. In addition to this, her perhaps poorly expressed letter to the Observer handed Kier Stamer a perfect excuse to target one of the few remaining allies of Jeremy Corbyn still sitting on the Labour benches of the House. That he immediately seized upon this opportunity to extract a political end from her indiscretion cannot be doubted - his hatred of Corbyn in particular and the left wing of his party in general is openly evidenced for all to see - but quite possibly also reveals an underlying tendency towards the very racism that he would pretend to condemn in others. In fact, if his actions in the last few months in his purging from the Labour ranks anything and anyone who does not tow the exact same line as he does are taken in the round, a very different picture from that of the 'one hundred percent commited to rooting out all forms of racism from the Party' individual that he would claim to be, seems to emerge. A startling number of those proscribed from standing for Labour candidacy in the next election, ot indeed thrown out of the party for being members of proscribed groups, seem to be individuals of either Jewish or coloured background (if background is the right word).

So yes, Diane Abbot can be silly and unsubtle, but her intent with this letter was not to diminish the importance or malign influence of antisemitism in our society, but rather to contribute to the debate on how racism, in all its forms, pernicious and overt, can be combated.

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Quick return to the economy with the news that Chancellor Hunt and the Bank of England are coming under increasing pressure over their failure to get to grips with inflation, and the consequential effects of this on gilt prices.

News yesterday that insurance giant Legal and General are pulling out of the gilt markets because of worries about the security of investments therein, caused a flurry of activities amongst smaller lenders and banks/building societies pushing up interest rates. The cost of borrowing for the UK government is currently higher than that for Italy (which is traditionally held up as the basket case of the European economies) - an unprecedented situation for those who watch such things, and a measure of just how serious things are. Hunt has been lambasted for being sanguine about the idea of going into recession, and this morning is actively being touted as deliberately allowing this to happen as a means of getting inflation under control. It has been suggested that the Tories will have to face going into an election with the economy in recession - a circumstance that Sunak's backbenchers will not be at all happy about and not one that any political party close to an election would relish. It would take a better spinmeister than either Sunak or Hunt to sell that one to the British public, especially as the interest hikes getting ever larger and larger in the BofE's desperate attempts to get a handle on inflation start to drive more and more families into defaulting on their mortgage payments. It's like all of the Tories nightmares come together and Kier Stamer must be absolutely loving it.

And the government's woes are coming thick and fast from other directions as well.

The atrocious immigration figures (if you see it that way which I don't) are crucifying them with their own membership, and even normally trusted stalwarts like Telegraph pundit Fraser Nelson are suggesting that the Tories don't actually want to limit immigration, despite all their rhetoric to the contrary. The media are pilling in against them from all sides, and were the prospect of a general election not coming ever closer over the horizon (and the fact that they've had two unelected leaders on the trot already) then Sunak would be toast. As it is, if things get much worse and they don't get the gilt markets back under control with some alacrity......well, anything could happen. To be perfectly frank, I haven't the faintest where this will all end politically. Socially the picture is more clear. In fact, were it a picture taken from the common cultural iconography that we all recognise, I'd say Munch's The Scream would about sum it up.