Slingshot Channel: Reuploaded

The video which caused the Mail on Sunday to (somewhat foolishly and with gross misrepresentation) attack the Slingshot Channel, has been lightly re-edited on the advice of You Tube officials and re-uploaded. See this link for this blog's original article on that subject.

The main body of the video hasn't been changed, however, and it is clear from watching it, that it was always intended to be a consumer test of a "stab vest" that was being sold via Amazon to the general public, and that actual police stab vests are probably an order of magnitude tougher. It is also obvious that the aluminium plates which are the vest's main form of protection, are not hardened in any way. The vest is priced at around e70 and very cheaply made.

It was an outright and deliberate lie that "it was the same type of vest that PC Palmer wore when he was murdered." It is also the case that Adrian Elms made no attempt to penetrate the vest that PC Palmer wore: he stabbed PC Palmer in places where the vest offered no protection in the first place. It is further worth noting that a lot of bladed weapon murders have been carried out with a stab to the groin to sever the femoral artery (one such was the murder of someone the blog author knew) and almost no police or civilian body armour in widespread use protects against that.

About the only body armour that does protect the femoral artery to some extent is the sort that the late Princess Diana wore in the famous "minefield" photographs taken in Angola. It has a separate plate hanging down to protect the groin area. (From landmine shrapnel in this instance, but the hardened plate would deflect a blade.)

Picture Credit: Reuters

This kind of protection is essential where anti-personnel mines are concerned, because many of them are designed to direct shrapnel at the groin area precisely in order to attack the femoral artery, but there's very little point in "stab-proof" armour that doesn't protect against the sort of wound that killed, for example: Stephen Lawrence, Frank Cox and Damilola Taylor. (In both the Cox and Taylor cases, defendants were able to successfully argue that the directly fatal wound was "accidental", something which simply isn't believed by either victim's families. Vocational criminals, even teenage ones, generally do know to stab for the femoral artery in order to kill. It was a move well known to 18th century duelists.)

The Slingshot Channel Isn't Terrorism

On Sunday 2/4/2017, The Mail on Sunday Newspaper (editorially independent from the Daily Mail) published a very lurid front page article using emotive terms like "blood money", complaining about a video by Joerg Sprave on You Tube's "Slingshot Channel" in which Mr Sprave demonstrated the weaknesses of a kind of stab vest which is being sold to private citizens in Germany who are concerned about being attacked, whether by muggers or terrorists.

The article also appeared on the "Daily Mail" website, which is a third editorially independent entity, which publishes material from both Mail newspapers as well as many unique articles which are biased towards American readers. When the author of this blog searched the site this afternoon, it produced a list of several articles mentioning Mr Sprave in a non-defamatory way, but Sunday's article was not on the list.

The text of the article was highly biased and defamatory and accused Mr Sprave of deliberately helping terrorists. It claimed that the stab proof vest he tested was the same type as worn by the late PC Palmer, who was murdered at the Palace of Westminster by Adrian Elms. Mr Sprave was astonished by this claim, as his object in making the video had been to establish whether the stab vest being sold to the general public, actually offered any protection against being stabbed, and his findings were that it was useless. He refused to believe "that Her Majesty issues this crap to policemen." The claim does not, in fact, appear to be true: the two stab vests are different. Someone at the Home Office would deserve to be sacked if they proved to be the same! It is obvious from PC Palmer's death, however, that the stab vest he was actually wearing was equally ineffective, but in a different way, and that hard questions do indeed need to be asked of Home Office officials and very senior police officers. The Mail on Sunday's article could fairly be seen as an attempt to divert the public's attention from asking such questions.

The Mail on Sunday also filed a "Community Standards Strike" against Mr Sprave, which resulted in You Tube taking down his video and threatening his right to post any more. You Tube did this without apparently examining the video in any depth at all, or they would have realized that the Mail on Sunday were lying.

Mr Sprave tested the stab vest by stabbing it, not at a weak point, but in the middle of the chest, where the protection includes a flat aluminium plate, using a dagger which he had made himself. Making an effort, as if he were a terrorist seriously trying to hurt somebody, he was able to pierce the aluminium plate three times. A previous video had shown Mr Sprave testing various weapons against a polycarbonate riot shield and visor, as used by the German police, and he found that these successfully resisted all the weapons, including a very powerful Russian crossbow, that he had been able to buy without a firearms licence in Germany. He was able to pierce the riot shield and visor only by using an improvised airgun of ridiculous power which he had built himself. He concluded that German police riot gear was pretty good and would protect officers from any distance weapon that rioters could readily lay their hands on. 

His speculation about the stab vest, was that perhaps it could be improved by using a polycarbonate plate rather than an aluminium one. On this point it is important to note that when polycarbonate is used in armour type applications, it is specially toughened, using a process first devised by ICI during the troubles in Ulster. The sheets of stock polycarbonate sold by industrial suppliers like RS Components have not been toughened: partly to keep them cheap, but mainly to make it possible for users to actually bend and form the sheet into whatever it is they are trying to make. For everyday uses, the virtue of polycarbonate is that it bends.

The same may kind of thing may be true of the aluminium plate in the stab vest that Mr Sprave consumer tested: stock aluminium plate is often supplied in an untreated or even annealed form, to make it easier to shape it into a product. Heat treating it for hardness is best done when all the cutting and shaping is finished. The plate in the stab vest was very shiny and betrayed no obvious signs of heat treatment. The toughness of aluminium can be roughly doubled by a pressure treatment process, where shaped and otherwise finished objects are placed in an argon-filled pressure vessel and heated to near the melting point of aluminium whilst being subjected to very high pressure. This is how aluminium turbofan-engine fan-blades are made tough enough to actually work! 

The US Army's new Advanced Combat Helmet Generation II is made of a toughened form of high density polyethylene, which is lighter than Kevlar but just as strong, and which can be moulded into fairly complex shapes, as in the helmet. This material might enable a new generation of stab vests to be made, which offer protection to body joints and other places where flat aluminium plates offer no protection at all. The key question about the Advanced Combat Helmet is "what happens when troops come under artillery fire using white phosphorus ammunition?" which could be very pertinent in combat with with the forces of North Korea or even Russia, which are likely to bombard US Army rear areas with white phosphorus shells by the trainload. Chunks of burning phosphorus are likely to burn through any helmet made of toughened polyethylene; indeed, they can burn through car roofs, so they might even burn through old fashioned steel helmets.  

What should Mr Sprave do now? 

Firstly, he should use the You Tube appeal process, such as it is, to challenge the Community Standards Strike, which threatens his right to make and post videos on subjects which will entertain, inform and in some cases protect, his viewers.

He should resist well meant advice to sue for libel, as this is an expensive and unwieldy instrument. Success in a libel court doesn't actually prove that the defamatory material was untrue, either, and it is therefore completely useless for clearing your name in the public eye. "Reform" of the libel laws means that a libel claim can now only be heard at the High Court, where costs are astronomical.

A claim of "Malicious Falsehood", while being harder to prove (though perhaps not in this case!) would, if successful, establish for the record that the Mail on Sunday article was actually untrue and designed to harm Mr Sprave. The Sun newspaper was successfully sued for Malicious Falsehood a few years ago: it can be done. (The Plaintiff couldn't afford the cost of a libel claim.) The blog author believes that this kind of claim can still be dealt with in the County Court, where costs are more reasonable and cases dealt with faster. It is worth taking legal advice on this, though, because the Cameron government tampered, heavily, with this area of the law, mainly to please the billionaire Max Mosley.

Perhaps the best course of action would be a complaint, which does not need expensive legal representation, to the press standards body which the Mail group newspapers have agreed to be bound by, which is the Independent Press Standards Organisation or IPSO.

IPSO only accepts complaints from the injured party, not third parties, but the process is designed to be reasonably swift and fair. Pertinently, its rulings, unlike a libel ruling, will generally say whether an offending article was true or untrue! They can fine the offending newspaper up to a million pounds, which should sting adequately.

There is another press regulator extant, "Impress" which is solely funded by Max Mosley and which is boycotted by nearly all British newspapers. There is no point whatsoever in complaining to Impress, when there is an independent regulator that the newspapers all recognize and have signed up to and have agreed to be bound by. Impress will probably be wound up soon.

Update:
While this article was being written, You Tube agreed to remove the Community Standards Strike against Mr Sprave and he is going to lightly edit and re-upload the video which The Mail on Sunday objected to. That leaves the matter of the false and defamatory Mail on Sunday article to be resolved.

Just Looking For An Excuse: Adrian Elms aka Khalid Masood, The Westminster Killer.

The most revealing things that have been published about Adrian Elms, so far, are that his former friends say that he expressed a strong desire to kill people at about age nineteen, years before he became a Muslim under the name Khalid Masood, and that his behavioural pattern centred on massive drugs binges. The latter fits the pattern of nearly all known Jihadee killers in the West: massive drugs use (usually but not exclusively skunk, sometimes amphetamine or cocaine) is always found: actual religious observance much less so. 

People who are pre-disposed to kill and who use massive amounts of drugs before going out to kill someone largely at random, are not exclusively or even mainly Jihadees: the majority of them are simply mentally ill: their drug-aggravated psychosis either not diagnosed or inadequately treated, and they are usually given hospital orders and quietly put away indefinitely, without ever making national front page headlines. Because they are entitled to privacy, as patients rather than suspects, there is rarely much public examination of evidence, and the inevitable "safeguarding" inquiry always says the same things and never leads to any reduction in the likelihood of a similar event occurring in the future. None of them is labelled as a Jihadee, because they aren't, but they were only ever a website click away from potentially becoming one.

Most human beings, even highly trained soldiers, find it very difficult to kill another human being, and statistics from World War Two show that only a minority of soldiers ever aimed their weapons to intentionally kill in combat. Not even when fighting the evil SS! Psychopaths, however, often have no difficulty killing and even find it difficult to understand how others would have a problem with it. The US Army, not wishing to rely on psychopaths for its combat efficiency, has spent billions of dollars devising elaborate training programmes to make ordinary non-psychopathic recruits into instinctive killers when they are presented with a clear-cut combat situation. (It's less effective when things are more muddled.) The policeman who unhesitatingly shot Adrian Elms dead last week probably benefited from a variant of this training.

The leaders of ISIS, like the leaders of the ALF before them, have less money, less time and fewer behavioural psychologists with which to break down the natural barriers against killing in the minds of their supporters, than the US Army had. The erstwhile leaders of the ALF used to urge their supporters to "knife researchers to death on their own doorsteps" but it never actually happened for them. None of their supporters was ill enough, though some of them were quite unwell by any normal standard. The leaders of ISIS, however, had the advice of at least one competent but unethical psychiatrist, who devised a recruitment strategy and materials that circumvented the problem by targeting and attracting those who were already disposed to kill. This is why their supposedly "Islamic" doctrine makes no attempt to discourage the use of strong mind altering drugs by their "soldiers", because heavy drug abusers are probably the best bet for ruthless killing.

ISIS are not, actually, guilty of a plot to radicalise Western or even Muslim youth in general. They are only really interested in the psychopaths, because they are the only ones where the investment of time and money pays off. ISIS have internet access to thousands of young people in the United Kingdom and many of these will express extreme opinions, when asked. But only a handful of them will actually go out and kill someone as an act of Jihad. Only the ones who already have a drug aggravated psychosis, in fact.

The appearance of "brainwashing" is simply because it is fairly difficult to make a very disturbed mind accept a new obsession, and repetition is required. The aim is to select, exploit, guide and "empower" the disturbed person, firstly to commit violence as an act of Jihad rather than simply at random, and secondly to make some sort of effort at targeting victims who fit the ISIS demonology. Thousands of non-psychopaths dabble with the material intended to do this, without actually leaving their computer screens and doing anything in the real world. They form extreme opinions, but take no action. Because they would find it very hard to do. What ISIS are after, are the tiny minority who cannot see what the problem is. 

To actually deal with Jihadeeism, it is necessary to reduce the pool of drug-aggravated psychopaths available to terrorist groups. That means much better mental healthcare, and in particular much better follow-up when somebody's Mum or Dad goes to the doctor and says that their offspring is in a dangerous state of mind. Hardly ever does the medical profession react as if relatives of an emerging psychopath know what they are talking about! When the relatives are always the first ones to know! And people who do have a relative who is showing signs of emerging as a psychopath, need to persist, even if nobody listens at first.

Secondly, the psychosis is practically always aggravated by drugs, at a time when many top policemen are surrendering in the war on drugs and campaigning for legalization. Make no mistake: legal Skunk, for that's what it will be, and legal Cocaine, because that's what the Luvvies will lobby for, will make many more killers for ISIS or something like it to recruit. We need to actually fight the war on drugs, and this has never actually been done before. It has all been a pretence by politicians who had something to gain (either directly or indirectly) from the trade in dangerous drugs.

Assassination: Who Would Want to Kill Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen?

At the time of writing, neither Nigel Farage nor Marine Le Pen has been assassinated, though Mr Farage's car was sabotaged, in France, in a clear attempt to kill him. A blog on this subject is always in danger of being overtaken by events, though. Whoever was trying to kill Mr Farage wasn't a lone nutter doing it for notoriety, because they chose a method: loosening ALL the wheel nuts, which allowed them to escape unseen and unsuspected. More of an organised attempt than a deranged man's try for glory. It most probably took more than one person to loosen so many bolts in the available time window.

The purpose of this article isn't to recite methods of assassination, but to explore who might want to do it. In Britain, political assassination has mainly been the goal of dissident Irish Republicans rather than any of the main political parties, with one (possibly two) important exception(s). The Conservative party has no history of actual (rather than figurative) political assassination, and pending a full and fully public inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly, backed up by appropriate scientific investigation including as suggested here,  neither has the Labour party. The one mainstream British political party which does have a history of hiring hit men is the Liberal Democrats (in their former incarnation as the Liberal party) and that is also the party which is the most unreservedly pro-EU. None of the mainstream political parties in France has a recent history of assassination, though there were several plots to kill General De Gaulle some decades ago. The plots to kill De Gaulle seem to have engendered a lasting distaste for assassination amongst French politicians.

It is obvious why Mr Farage's British enemies want him dead: he is the figurehead of British opposition to EU membership, and none of the other "Brexiteers", including Boris Johnson, have Mr Farage's level of political talent and dedication. The likely payoff for the assassination of Mr Farage would be a divided and ineffective pro Brexit campaign, which would fail to successfully resist the plan by the former Labour leader, Tony Blair, and the former Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, to reverse the referendum result and have Britain stay in the EU despite the democratic vote to leave. When Pin Fortuyn, the nearest equivalent to Nigel Farage, was murdered in Holland, there was a national outcry, but nothing very much in the way of violent political backlash and the country's political elite were not seriously threatened. The British public is no more skilled in flaying politicians than the Dutch public: Mr Farage's death would cause an outcry but the political elite would probably be able to ride out the storm. There would have to be a scapegoat though!

It is less obvious that French opponents of Marine Le Pen, a popular Joan of Arc figure, would want her dead, because there would be a tremendous public backlash if she were assassinated or if it even just seemed that she was. The French public is skilled in taking to the streets and flaying politicians. Nobody living in France would want to risk the consequences. But Ms Le Pen poses a problem for anyone in Britain wanting to do away with Nigel Farage and reverse the democratic vote to leave the EU: if she is elected president of the republic next year, France will leave the EU and that means that the show, and the Brussels gravy train, is over. There would be nothing left to coerce Britain into continued membership of. 

Someone is trying to kill Mr Farage and that someone is capable of arranging an attempted hit in France. There is no payoff for any likely conspirator in assassinating Mr Farage unless something is also done to neutralise the existential threat to the EU posed by Ms Le Pen. Whoever is responsible for Ms Le Pen's security needs to be very much on top of his game. Her security people need to be alert to threats from outside France, too.

Footnote: The Murder of Jo Cox MP

Jo Cox MP was not killed on the orders of Nigel Farage or any other Brexit leader: they had barely heard of her before her death. She was killed by her constituent, Thomas Mair, who subscribed to a lot of very right wing and racist material but who made no response when invited to actually join an extreme right wing group that held a recruitment meeting in his locality. Despite what Mair said at the time of the murder, his biggest grievance seems to be largely personal in that he was being asked by the local council to leave the house he had lived in since childhood. He saw that as being thrown out of house and home to make room for immigrants, and there might even have been a tiny grain of truth in that: he was being thrown out to make room for someone else who would make full use of a three bedroomed house. But the root cause of his misery was a faceless bureaucracy that he couldn't do anything to hurt, so he turned on his MP, who was identifiable and much more accessible, and had championed the cause of refugees, which in his mind became associated with losing his home. Authorities need to be more aware generally that losing a home produces a big emotional reaction in most people, let alone the mentally disordered. Mair now has a home in prison for life, which may actually be what he intended. He certainly made no attempt to avoid arrest whatsoever.

The element of conspiracy exists because the police don't believe that he stole and modified the gun used in the murder himself. It is hard to know what the person who did modify the gun was thinking of, because the barrel of the .22" rifle was cut down so short that it would only function as a weapon at point blank range. The only likely possibility that the blog author can think of is that the rifle was sawn off to make it effectively a humane killer for use on trapped large animals such as deer. That would make it a bit of poacher's kit. How Mair would have obtained it is a matter for speculation, but anyone knowingly equipping him for a murder wouldn't have clipped the barrel quite so short, and would most likely have supplied a different firearm altogether. Mair seems to have been aware of the gun's deficiencies because he tried to research whether a .22" bullet to the head would be fatal, and he took a knife with him as well, and made a point of using it.

Book Review: The Bad Boys of Brexit

The Bad Boys of Brexit by Arron Banks. 
Biteback Publishing. Hardback and E-book editions.

These are the diaries of Arron Banks, the leader of the "Leave.EU" campaign, from September 2015 to June 23 2016, with an epilogue to cover Banks and Farage being guests of the Trump campaign in America.

The author Arron Banks presents entries as if written when they happened and he has resisted the temptation to edit them with the gift of hindsight to make himself look better. Although controversial, his campaign drew on his marketing skills as a businessman and was quite scientifically designed in that context.

A long battle is depicted, not just with the Remain campaign (which is not presented as a very competent threat to hopes for Brexit) but also with the largely Tory "Vote Leave" campaign. Banks becomes convinced that many in Vote Leave don't actually want to leave the EU: they just want to use the threat of Brexit (or a second referendum) to extract a few comforting reforms. It is obvious that the EU isn't actually going to concede any reform at all, and this is proven with the debacle of David Cameron's non-existent "deal". Banks also complains that Vote Leave sees things from an almost completely Tory point of view, when in his view the most important group of voters the Leave campaign needs to reach out to are Labour voters whose voice is being ignored by their own party. Vote Leave became the officially designated (by the Electoral Commission) campaign despite missing the first deadline for submitting its application and submitting a cobbled up application just in time for the extended deadline they were granted. Banks had been told to expect this by Mrs Thatcher's former private secretary, who knew that the Electoral Commission was always going to choose the establishment option.

Banks made several attempts to merge the campaigns, but Vote Leave weren't really interested in that. He also begged them not to use falsehoods in their campaign, such as the £345M extra figure for the NHS, which Vote Leave stuck to even when it was discredited. Banks's own Leave.EU campaign was extremely blunt, sometimes rude, but also sought to be truthful. 

Leave.EU have a close relationship with Nigel Farage, who likewise deplored the use of falsehoods by Vote Leave, but several times Farage thinks that Banks and his colleagues have gone too far. Banks works on the principle of always saying exactly what he thinks. Leave.EU amassed many more members than the other campaigns and it is noteworthy that this was always the priority for Banks: he was determined to invoke "people power" rather than having just another meaningless battle between elite politicians.

Superior American polling and data analysis techniques, which Banks paid for largely out of his own money, allowed him to predict the narrow Leave win in the referendum when others, including Nigel Farage, thought that Leave had lost. 

There are also some diversions, as Banks goes rallying in East Africa and visits Belize. He also conveys some of the enthusiasm he has for finding diamonds in the output of the mines he owns in South Africa: he's thrilled to find an 8 carat diamond with his own hands when the price of this is small compared to the income from his main businesses in the UK.

Banks does describe (largely in passing) some dirty tricks by the Remain campaign, as well as scandalous treatment of Labour pro-Leave politicians by the "official" Vote Leave campaign, which was determined to favour Tory has beens rather than current Labour politicians who could reach out to the Labour voters needed in order to win! In particular, the HMRC accuse one of his (studiously upright) colleagues of tax fiddling. The colleague, suspecting that Downing Street put HMRC up to this, demands to see his file under the freedom of information act, but this is bitterly resisted by HMRC. 

This book is important and will remain so as the Brexit saga moves on to the courts and probably Parliament, because it documents a campaign based on articulating what the public thinks, instead of smugly telling the public what it ought to think. Leave.EU did much more polling and analysis than the other Leave and Remain campaigns precisely because it was concerned to know what the public actually wanted!

There was one unmitigated disaster for Banks: the seductive idea of a pop concert which never got off the ground and which was finally scuppered by the Electoral Commission. If he was going to edit any of the story to make himself look better, that would be it, but he doesn't.

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.