Something to Sell

How to Make Britain Prosper During and After Brexit

Food and Inflation

An immediate problem that will not go away easily is inflation caused by the rising price of imported food as the value of Sterling falls on the currency markets. This is being blamed on "Brexit" when in fact the real underlying cause is that no British government has actually cared about farming at the top level since Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister back in the seventies. Decades of wilful neglect and gross mismanagement means that domestic food production simply isn't there when the country needs it. The crisis bringing the matter to the fore could have been almost anything apart from Brexit, most especially a war with a major naval power such as Russia. Brexit just happens to be what's happened and remainers would be wise not to make too much of this, because it is behind a smokescreen of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy that the neglect has taken place.

The thing that exemplifies the government's attitude to farming is the fact that for planning purposes, food production has a "nil weight" as a land use. That means that any land use is preferred to growing food. So golf courses will generally get planning permission even where there is already an oversupply of golf course, and since property developers see golf courses as an ideal Trojan horse for building on greenfield sites, just about everywhere in Britain has an oversupply of golf courses. No more are needed, but at a time when every acre still under food production is helping to fight inflation (and we've grown unused to coping with inflation), more golf courses are sure to be built. It's much the same story with solar farms. You can't eat subsidised, daylight only, electricity. There has to be an immediate end to "nil weight" for planning purposes as far as food production is concerned.

Supposedly "green" agricultural policies such as "set aside" serve only to reduce food production in rich parts of the EU, and this is all they were designed to do. Any environmental labels were added later. We need to phase out set aside (swiftly) and consider some more genuinely environmentally friendly agricultural practices. Grants for "improving" upland grazing that involve the blanket removal of trees and scrub above 600M likewise need to go in favour of something that really helps. As it is, the expensive policy just increases the occurrence and severity of flash flooding.

There is a multiplicity of agricultural polices which all need a change of course: they can't all be listed here. What is needed is a change of attitude and emphasis so that all the policies that impact on food production and genuine conservation get amended in the right way without too much fuss and bother as an ongoing process.

NOTE added on 19/10/2016. The Daily Mail is trumpeting the fact that the latest inflation figures don't show any impact from Brexit. This is because the fall in Sterling is recent and the inflation figures do not reflect it yet. But with 30-40% of our food being imported, the fall in the value of sterling cannot help but make imported food more expensive sooner or later. The best way to mitigate the effect on overall inflation is to produce more of our own food and import less. It can be done: in the mid seventies (under the Callaghan government) Britain was a net exporter of food.  Callaghan was a naval officer at a time when Britain nearly starved as so many of the ships carrying imported food were being sunk by German U-Boats and maritime air strikes. He had a positive interest in making sure the country was fed.

Brexit means the end of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy as far as Britain is concerned. God be praised.

What can be done immediately on the end of CFP is an amendment to regulations and fishing net specifications so that fishing boats do not catch (and therefore kill) fish too small to be landed and sold. This is an obvious first step towards sustainable fisheries and it has been so for two decades or more, during which nothing effective has been done towards it. What cannot be done is a sudden expansion of the fishing quota assigned to British fishermen at the expense of those from former EU partner nations. Because all that would happen is a massive reflagging exercise where the Spanish fishing fleet started to fly the British flag, Gibraltar notwithstanding.

What should be done is a modest year by year expansion of the fishing quota for the British fleet, while most of the quotas previously assigned to foreign fleets get assigned to conservation for a finite period of years, allowing a genuine respite for fish stocks. The British quota can be slowly built up, with less chance of hostilities in the fishing grounds, in accordance with a verified increase in fish stocks. It should be noted that even a massive improvement in fish stocks will never duplicate the distribution of fish species before the stocks collapsed in the sixties and seventies: the map will be new and fish stocks will need to be treated gently as a resource for the foreseeable future. Furthermore a fisheries policy of any sort is possible only if the means exist to adequately enforce it.

The food processing industry for both fisheries and agricultural produce needs to be kept on British soil as far as possible. There's no sense in fighting political battles to make fish stocks sustainable if the profit in them is exported. This will require investment in mechanisation and outright automation rather than an habitual reliance on cheap migrant (or involuntary; eg: benefit claimant) labour. For precisely the same reason that the Confederacy lost the American Civil War: innovation wins over exploitation.

Innovation and High Technology

One of the things that is worth studying if one wants to understand what must be done to make Britain viable as an independent trading nation, is what the Prime Minister at the time, Edward Heath, did to make Britain a subservient part of a monolithic trading bloc in the first place. Heath was coldly fanatical about stopping Britain having any future as an independent nation and Margaret Thatcher had too many of Heath's proteges in her cabinet to have any chance of genuinely changing the course that had been set in industrial policy, had she even perceived the need, which she didn't.

Heath set out to eliminate any product or project that gave Britain a technological lead over her new European partners. If everyone is making equivalent products, then competition means a race to the bottom for the lowest price and there are no real winners until someone establishes a monopoly. The EEC/EU is all about establishing monopolies, generally under the control of the "core" countries like Germany and France. If someone has a higher technology than the designated monopoly holder, they can upset the applecart by offering something that gives the customer more for his money without being price-cut to the bone (this is capitalism actually working as it should). You can see the EU still trying to bring about monopolies by the way that new regulations on the testing and licensing of medicines are designed not to work for any company much smaller than the German giant, Bayer.

At the time that Britain was joining the EEC, she had something of a lead over European countries in the matter of space launchers. There was nothing of immediate worry to the Americans, but the Blue Streak missile programme had spun off into the Black Knight satellite launcher and it was working. Geoffery Pardoe stated that for the price of eleven miles of motorway a year, he could keep Britain in the space race. Heath said that he wanted the eleven miles of motorway. The suppression of innovation means the suppression of great and gifted men like Geoffery Pardoe and Heath delighted in suppressing Pardoe. The technology of the Black Knight programme was simply donated to the new European Space Agency and was eventually rebranded as Ariane 1. 

The proposed BAC Three-Eleven airliner was sacrificed for the sake of the nascent Airbus company and the A300. (The British component of Airbus at the time was Hawker Siddley; BAC was a separate enterprise). The Concorde and Jaguar programmes were allowed to continue: both were collaborative programmes involving a significant transfer of technology from Britain to France, especially where the respective engine programmes were concerned. The Jaguar's Adour engine is still in production for the Hawk trainer and is used on the experimental Tanaris ummanned combat aircraft. The Jaguar was a technically highly successful aircraft, but the French government wanted to export Mirages and Super Etendards rather than Jaguars, so the only major export customer was India. After the Jaguar, the British aerospace sector would have to exist on collaborative European programmes like the Tornado and Typhoon, or Anglo-American programmes like the Harrier. British only projects were not counternanced. A not very well publicised MoD study has shown that such multinational projects can be up to 60% more expensive per aircraft than national projects.

The armoured car company Alvis found itself working with a Belgian partner to produce the Spartan range of armoured fighting vehicles, and so it went, right across British industry, but especially where the technology levels were at their highest.

After a brief respite during the Wilson/Callaghan government in the mid seventies, the Thatcher government acted as a wicket keeper, catching and destroying those high technology programmes which had somehow slipped past the Heath government. It's impossible to tell if Mrs Thatcher understood what was being done or not. At least one of these programmes was potentially very important:

The computer company ICL had what in the Heath years was just an idea, for a new form of computer architecture called "Contents Addressable Storage". It wasn't an idea that would have leapt out at Heath and his minions as important, but by the late seventies demonstration hardware had been built and CAS was beginning to attract attention. At a time when the Americans and Japanese were competing to see who could do the biggest number of "megaflops" per second, CAS offered a way of getting computing tasks done for a much smaller number of operations per task, therefore quicker without using bucketloads of electricity and generating lots of waste heat. It was suited to database and datahandling applications, which is where the emphasis in mainstream computing has been ever since the launch of the internet. Had CAS been developed during the eighties the technology would have been nicely mature in time for the internet boom of the nineties and beyond. Server farms would have been less energy hungry places, and database servers would have answered queries much more quickly than they do today, even ten years ago. 

Under the Thatcher government CAS was dropped and ICL disposed of with a sale to the Japanese firm Fujitsu. There has been no obvious innovation from the British arm of Fujitsu since ICL was assimilated. The present day high technology company ARM Holdings has just been sold to the heavily indebted Japanese firm "Soft Bank" and the story seems set to repeat itself. 

The pattern was very clear: innovation which threatened to put Britain ahead in any field was either arbitarily cancelled or made to fail. The purpose was twofold: to give Britain no choice but to be in the EEC/EU, and to make sure that Britain didn't impose the wrong sort of capitalism on the EEC/EU from within. Everything in the EU is destined to be monopoly based in the long run. 

George Osborne's Contribution to the Solution

Mr Osborne is loathed by many Brexiteers for being the main architect of "Project Fear:" the barrage of negative and highly dubious propaganda designed to make the British people afraid to leave the EU. However, throughout all the years of austerity, as Chancellor, he found the money to fund the SABRE engine project intended for hypersonic aircraft and a highly fuel efficient reusable satellite launcher. The sort of project that Edward Heath would have gone all out to kill unless it could be given to the French. Actually, you couldn't give SABRE to the French because they have invested so much money and prestige in the Ariane series of conventional rockets!

This is precisely what we need to do: keep a sharp eye out for the genuinely promising high technology idea and nurture it, and not let it be given away or dropped. We need to do this lots, in every field possible. There is no future trying to compete with equivalent technologies with erstwhile European partners who can just draft in migrant labour and keep dropping the price until we go bust. We need to have technological leads and compete on technology not price. Devaluing Sterling helps us compete on price for a while, but only until markets and our competitors adjust. We need to get ahead in the technology race and stay ahead.

Cats Are An Important Defence Against Vermin

A family in Northern Ireland only found out what their cat had been doing to protect the household when they put the cat in a cattery while they went on holiday. Upon their return, the father found that wiring had been chewed and he caught nineteen rats in a twenty four hour period. The cat had been quietly holding the line for them up till then.Once the wiring has been attacked, it is safest to vacate the property until the infestation is dealt with and renovations made. Some drastic pest control measures are only possible with a vacant property.

Madmen and the Threat to Cats

According to the Daily Express, Peter Marra, a "leading scientist," thinks that cats should be culled on a global scale, and any allowed to live should be banned from going outside. There have been similar views expressed, though in a less obviously madman voice, by some conservationists in the United Kingdom, including Chris Packham. (And now Stephen Moss.)

Thing is, over the past fifty years or so, around the world there have been a number of determined anti-cat pogoms, usually launched by local governments in authoritarian communist countries, and the result has been a plague of rats and/or mice every time. Voles, too, are capable of staging spectacular plagues in rural areas; this is usually a sign that foxes have been suppressed as well as cats. Cats are indeed efficient hunters, and human civilization might have fallen long ago if they weren't. Control of rodents by poisons and traps is expensive and simply doesn't work. Rodents become immune to the poisons and the traps have to be laid in unrealistic numbers and it takes a huge amount of man hours to keep checking and resetting the traps. 

The last flat the blog author lived in had rats in the basement (where all the electricity meters were) and despite months of fiddling about blocking holes and laying poison, the professional human pest controller had completely failed to eradicate them, even though they were chewing on wiring and posing a lethal fire hazard thereby to the people living in the flats. There were no cats allowed in the building. The landlord eventually put the flats up for auction because he couldn't get on top of the rat problem and obviously piously hoped that someone else would have better luck! 

In parts of Southern England, Ring Necked Parakeet populations are also reaching plague levels, so we need to be suspicious of cat haters claiming that they are just trying to protect the birds.

Further on the same topic:
The RSPB has stated that responsible cat ownership is not a conservation issue in the United Kingdom.
It has also been established, for example, that what caused the huge drop in Nightingale numbers in England was not predation but a big increase in the number of Muntjac deer selectively eating the Nightingale's habitat of low woodland undergrowth. Other species have suffered badly from changes in the countries that they have to cross to reach the British Isles, making migration more difficult. This includes deserts spreading, water holes drying up, increased cultivation and development of former woodlands after (arson initiated) forest fires. Migration often proceeds as if along a chain of islands, between water sources and woodland across North Africa and Southern Europe. Small bird species, such as Great Tits, tend to disappear when Ring Necked Parakeets are present in large numbers. This isn't predation so much as the smaller birds simply been driven away from their food sources and nest sites by the larger, noisier and more aggressive birds.

The idea that because cats catch things, cats must die, is what Psychiatrists call "an overvalued idea". Like going from the idea that it's immodest of young women to wear shorts, to needing to stab young women to death if they are wearing shorts. Overvalued ideas are behind a lot of extremist positions.

The value of cats is most obvious when they are removed (temporarily one hopes) from the situation.

The Clean and Cheap Alternative to the £18bn+ Hinkley Point

In its bid to secure Chinese funding for the massive French technology nuclear power station to be built at Hinkley Point, for which the government has agreed to guarantee electricity prices at nearly double the going rate, it seems that a wholly British advanced technology alternative is being ignored. This is the sort of casual contempt for the national interest that one associates with George Osborne and the fallen Cameron government, but for some reason the May government is unable to break free of its predecessor's perverse decision.

The Electron Model of Many Applications promises small, cheap and clean nuclear reactors that are never "critical" and therefore simply cannot runaway or meltdown if damaged. They just stop. They need only be fuelled with a ton of unenriched fuel at a time, whereas the behmoth being built in Somerset will contain hundreds of tons of expensively enriched fuel. It's like comparing the technology in the latest Star Trek movie with that of a 1930s Science Fiction B movie.

Read the article on the link and be amazed that you never even heard of this technology when Hinkley Point was being discussed. 

This, by the way, is not the "Thorium Technology" being developed in India: that is just a Hinkley-like reactor that uses uranium 233 fuel bred from Thorium. The Indian technology isn't actually very advanced at all, it just offers a way round the enrichment of natural uranium. It saves a bit of money, but isn't a game changer as regards cleaness or safety. But when tackled on the issue of why "EMMA" is being ignored by the British government, Tory politicians will start talking about the Indian technology and muddle the issue as much as they can.

Britain urgently needs politicians capable of seeing the national interest when it is in front of their face.

Potted Index of Book and Screenplay Extracts

Here are some links to writings on this blog that may be of interest to the reader. There's a lot more on the blog than I have linked to here, but a lot of the topical current affairs articles were topical at the time they were written and may baffle now. You can still browse through them if you're keen.





Protegée (Forest series) extract from a completed Science Fiction novel.

Crushed Fennel, opening scenes from a completed screenplay.

Pilgrim Process, links to e-published dystopia.

The Promise of the Child, book review.

Dystopian Spin and Brexit. Op Ed article.

Buy to Rot. Op Ed article.

Laura Hoerster, about the illustrator of Pilgrim Process.

Hinkley Point: about the advanced technology British alternative.

Cats: about lunatic proposals to cull cats worldwide.

Something to Sell: how to make Britain prosper during and after Brexit.

Assassination:  Who would want to kill Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen.

Book Review: The Promise of the Child by Tom Toner

The Promise of the Child, Volume One of the Amaranthine Spectrum by Tom Toner, Gollancz.
(I have received an advance copy of this novel from Orion Books to allow me to review it ready for publication of the paperback edition on the 13th of October 2016.)

A province where silver really does grow on trees is just one of the places which Tom Toner takes the reader to in this rich novel. (The local currency is made of silk.) There is also a civilization where artificial bees made with gold airframes are a sign of ostentation. Tom Toner isn't lacking in imagination.

After a Prologue set in fourteenth century Bohemia, the novel is set roughly twelve thousand years in the future, where humanity (or at least the semi immortal Amaranthine) have colonised a "firmament" within about twenty light years of the "Old World" (Earth). They have found planets with breathable atmospheres, (composition like that of the young Earth) but no sign of any life originating other than on Earth. An incredibly ancient spacecraft found frozen in the rings of Saturn turns out to have been crewed by Dinosaurs, also from Earth. The Amaranthine (divide and) rule over a number of races however: the dozen or so "PRISM" species of intelligent (and generally small) primates living on various planets and habitable moons, and the giant Melius, who are supposedly the genetically engineered offspring of the Amaranthine themselves.The Melius mostly live on the Old World. Many Melius are servants of the Amaranthine. The Melius also share the Old World with intelligent birds, who are servants of the Melius.

The novel is composed of several separate plot threads seen from the point of view of various individuals of various species, including Corphuso, a PRISM scientist and inventor of a mysterious machine known as the Soul Engine. Several parties plot to gain possession of the Soul Engine and its hapless inventor, not stopping short of large scale military actions and simple skullduggery in their efforts.

Most Amaranthine live in "Vaulted Lands" that is, planets hollowed out with an artificial sun at their centre to act as small Dyson Spheres. One of these habitats is deliberately destroyed, and the Amaranthine face a real threat to their power and even existence. The Amaranthine are traditionally ruled by their oldest individuals, and because they are only semi immortal this means that their rulers tend to be dangerously close to senility. However, there is one, Aaron, seen in the fourteenth century prologue, who not only appears to be older than any of the "Perennials" but also seems to be unaffected by any form of senility. After centuries of his standing near to those who rule, it seems to be time for Aaron to take over the reins himself and save the Amaranthine, but this doesn't seem to be his chosen course. He still prefers to chose someone else and help them. There are also rumours that Aaron does not have a shadow.

A Melius "Lycaste" lives a fairly blameless life by the sea, but is inveigled into going on a disastrous shark hunt by his friends and then finds himself apparently murdering a government official. He goes on the run and ends up, through a nightmare adventure and drumhead trial, in the Melius second city of Vilnius just as a Melius warlord prepares to attack it in the latest phase of a long running civil war. Aaron is also in Vilnius, and the plot threads, like the novel's characters, converge on the city. There is a huge battle as PRISM armies invade from spaceships even as the Melius fight each other, but the Soul Engine may prove more significant than that.

The Promise of the Child is an absorbing and accomplished novel, and it argurs well for the rest of the Amaranthine Spectrum when it appears.


The link at the top of this review goes to the Net Gallery page for the novel. This one goes to the Amazon page for the novel.

PS:
While you are here, feel free to look around the blog.

Dystopian Spin Against Brexit

The author's dystopia "Pilgrim Process" features a  tactic used by the would-be dystopian regime when it wants to make abrupt and profound changes to society, such as the introduction of multifunction ID cards and capital punishment. (The political consensus is against capital punishment until one day it strangely isn't.) There is an orchestrated outpouring of spin, not just from those one might expect to campaign for a change, but also from those whom the public might trust never to do so. Politicians suddenly reverse a position they have held to all their life, newspapers change allegiance and not only is there an overwhelming volume of spin all of a sudden, but it is all coordinated and dozens of apparently unconnected commentators and organizations speak as one. This may ring a bell with anyone who's experienced the current barrage of anti-Brexit spin put out by David Cameron's "Remain" campaign and its many unexpected friends around the world. Newspapers suddenly backing a position at odds with their reader's habitual preferences may strike a chord with anyone who has seen a copy of the Mail on Sunday recently, with its increasingly fanatical pro EU slant so totally at odds with its mainly Eurosceptic readership and the weakly proBrexit stance of its weekday sister paper, the Daily Mail.

In the nineteen forties, George Orwell wrote of "words falling on the issues like snow". This is more like a violent hailstorm, but the truth and the real issues are still apt to get buried.

This hailstorm of propaganda is not a panic reaction, because it was David Cameron and nobody else who decided that there would be a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union in the first place. Mr Cameron went out of his way to court a debate, upon which he has poured out spin like a biblical plague. What's being decided here is not whether or not the UK will leave the EU, but whether or not any important issue will ever again see a civilized and reasoned debate. It is nearly impossible for anyone but the government to win a "debate" conducted in this manner. The number of individuals and organizations which are orchestrated into a perfect storm of propaganda is too great for anyone less than a government to pull it off. The opposition are left trying to wave banners in the teeth of a hurricane. 

PS:

Pro Brexit campaigners have tried to raise the issue of Turkey joining the European Union, only to be slapped down with the line that Turkish membership is "probably" decades away. This is revealing, because it's certainly not being said that Turkey will not join. Until recently it was German policy that Turkey should not join, but certain difficulties with Russia may have made the powerful Turkish army suddenly welcome in the peace loving EU.

PPS: The vote was for Brexit, of course. However, the dystopian spin hasn't gone away and Tony Blair, for example, has repeatedly declared that the electorate will change their minds and be given another vote, where they will of course vote to remain in the European Union and sign up for any and all of its new schemes and wheezes. It's extraordinary.