blocking out the sound

The Conservative leadership thing is now set to drag on for months and I'm thinking of ways to block out the sound.

The marked difference between the two seldom seen together candidates is that one appears to be talking about results (a good thing) and the other is mainly shown talking about themselves (less operationally focused). I can't tell whether this is because of the press or because of their own disposition.

So some noise suppression required until things settle down. That's where my vintage etymotic EP4S headphones come in. For years they are my weapon of choice when travelling because they are a) amazingly high fidelity (does that term even exist nowadays?) and b)block out external sound.

I use them on flights because they pack down really small (same space as iPhone headset) but are brilliant for removing jet airplane sounds without needing noise cancelling gadgetry. Using just my BA miles, I've probably taken them to the moon and back.

But here's the thing. No surprise that the wires are now frayed and I really need to replace them. It turns out that I should send them back to the manufacturer in America to get this done and they re-calibrate the headphones at the same time.

It could seem like overkill for a pair of headphones (nowadays referred to as IEMs - In Ear Monitors!), but I'll probably do it. That way I might get some more decades of use from them.

And block the jet engine roar of bickering politicians.

Thursday Thirteen, with some redaction

1. Notebooks: It was fellow blogger Nikki-Ann who re-inforced that it's a good idea to keep notes for blog entries.
2. Evernote: I usually keep my notes in Evernote, which runs on just about everything. I can even talk to it via my watch and it seems to know what I'm saying. All a roundabout way to get to this rather random Thursday Thirteen.
3. Leaked memos and emails: Kind of ties in with the note-taking theme, although for a single politician to have two plausibly deniable leaks when trying for a leadership position, both aimed unerringly at opponents. Well. Too much co-incidence?

4. Knife tricks: I'll admit that I almost believed Penfold Gove when he was dispatching Boris.
5. Gone Gopher: But at least we won't have to listen to him trying to be a leader now, although there's new clouds around one of the remaining two candidates
6. Tax specialists: Why is it so difficult to find people with relatively clear back stories? I can understand the unreliable CVs. Its other things: No off-shore property trusts (*cough* Bandal), no specialist assistance from close relatives with taxation matters(*cough* de Putron)? Perhaps it comes with the turf?

7. Rearranging the UK: I finally understood the plan to re-arrange the UK post Brexit. South West trains have leaked the plan early. The whole country is to be pivoted around the Isle of Wight, which will become the closest point to France. The new South West rail map shows the revised configuration.
8. Containment It is quite difficult to stay on top of all the moving pieces now, with that oft uttered "It'll all work itself out".
9. General Sir John Hackett: Years ago, I read his novel, which was around the theme of containment, too many simultaneous events, which in his story led to outbreak of war.
10. Chilcot: The Iraq war doesn't have as many moving parts as the one in the novel. The report has just been released, some seven years after it was started. It reminds me of the old maxim about "I didn't have enough time to write you a short report, so I've written you a long one".
11. Forensic detailing vs Analysis: The challenge with the report is that the Executive summary is 186 pages long. It doesn't have a fast read introduction, but instead unpacks the series of events. Inevitably people look for the one liner. Whatever.
12. Girl on a Train: Was one of the best selling books of 2015, with probably about a million copies in the UK. Let's call it £10 million revenue. That's about the same amount of revenue that Chilcot and his merry band of consultants have turned over in the time that have been producing that report.
13. Crawford: I want to see the treatment of the Blair/Bush document from 2002 (preceding the Crawford, Texas meeting) which scripts their subsequent meeting and sets up the position of Blair in support of Bush. It was 15 months before the war was declared and seems to be somewhere in Volume 5.

Wordless Wednesday

My re-imagining of Marina Abramović at the Royal Academy during Summer Exhibition.

(Zatorski + Zatorski foreground, Gilbert and George background)

cute kittens and brexit revelations

Despite the internet being made of kittens, theres's still that strange gravitational pull to the ongoing Brexit saga. I'll keep it staccato today.

• There's the sound of lawyers cranking up to make money from the Article 50 triggering/no triggering.
• Johnston is back today, shouting from the sidelines. By using Gove as a flimsy excuse to not stand, I suggest he has lost that voice.
• Gove keeps talking about morality, like he hasn't just betrayed at least two of his buddies.
• Speculation that Gove's moves are assisted by a) journo wife b) fine wine c)Dominic Cummings.
• The Osborne excuse: He's needed a way to get out of the austerity plan that didn't work. Now he is using it.
• Andrea Leadsom's Jersey buy-to-let and trust fund accounting is surfacing, manipulated by her same-party rivals.
• No Plan: They've given the next moves team to ex Mr 'Poll Tax' Letwin who has so much dodgy form it's laughable.
• The Opposition are on hold until after the disgustingly delayed Chilcot report, when Corbyn or his acolytes can speak about Blair.
• Post-Chilcot is when the Labour leadership challenge properly kicks in.
• Both Labour and Tory are adding membership in the lead-up to their elections. No 'cooling-in' period to prevent ballot stuffing?
• When Corbyn wins the Labour leadership vote the party will split into two.
• Farage completes the parade of quitters; easier now to work it from the sidelines?
• The No-plan Plan: no wonder there's increased talk of delaying the Article 50 button press.
• The trouble with a quick election is both voter fatigue and an open invitation for even the headless UKIP to gain large numbers of seats from Labour.

the next form of liars poker?

All the recent UK political twists and turns are being compared to the US Version of House of Cards and Game of Thrones.

In House of Cards Frank Underwood's revision of Francis Urquhart has that line 'Democracy is so overrated' and the U.S. show exposes the whole power trip politics of appearance. Then in Game of Thrones we get spoilt brats playing with power at the expense of their people.

Both have resonance although the multiple betrayals and instabilities in current UK events still manage a 'you couldn't make this up' quality.

There's a couple of interesting differences that I've noticed across a few of these American TV series compared with British behaviour.

The first is the way that 'hard-hitting' American series swear. They have a limited number of approved words which are inserted into the scripts. It somehow doesn't have the richness of Brits in a similar situation. I noticed it recently in Billions, when during the first 2-3 episodes, a small selection of four letter words seemed to have been reverse engineered symbolically into the script.

It struck me as along the lines of 'You are paying to watch this on expensive cable, so here's a way to differentiate this as hard hitting'. It came across as crowbarred in rather than edgy. It did't have the humour that, say, 'In the Thick of It' would use in similar situations.

The second difference is the way that passive-aggressive behaviour is used. It's there in spades in House of Cards, Billions and I've also recently been watching Damages, where it is used almost psychotically. It seems far more over-stated in these power-trippy American dramas, compared with the subtler way that the same effect plays out in Britain.

However, at the moment the British politicos may need to take a lesson from America.

The old Roosevelt saying was "Speak softly and carry a big stick" - the Brexit debate seems to be the other way around.

Everyone is shouting but there's nothing clear to use for the negotiation.

That Lisbon Treaty TEU Article 50 in full

I thought I'd take a peep at TEU Article 50, to see what was involved in a Brexit. Remarkably for EU paperwork, they have managed to keep this 'whole nation leaves' guidance short - around 268 words. Nowadays, I get more T&Cs for a toothbrush.

A key phrase is "setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union" - i.e. tell us how you want to get out but how you carry on afterwards is a separate framework.

I can hear professional services firms firing up their engines as we speak. Not just the ones to support the government, but the ones that will want to caringly support every business in the UK through the transition.

How can we help with (insert any topic here)? Oh yes, Commentary, Analysis, Guidance, Tools, Certification, Compliance, Monitoring, Implementation.

Ker-Ching.

Thursday Thirteen : the dog caught the car #GuardianLive

I usually spend about 10-15 minutes on a blog post, but this one has gone into extra time because I've been on a train journey. First things first - It's also a Thursday Thirteen!

TO KINGS CROSS FOR A DEBATE
I was at the Guardian offices yesterday, for their debate about Brexit. The debate was billed as 'what next?' but actually took significant time examining how we all got to the current position.

In a few words: disenfranchised electorate with nothing to lose sticking it to the establishment of Westminster village. Separate bubbles of the haves and have nots.

Remembering that this was at Guardian HQ in London, it wasn't too surprising that the vast majority (90+%) of those in attendance were Remain voters. The phrase 'Remain but reform' was heard several times.

If many expected the end result to be Remain, the Brexit has forced an examination of a non-party-based stratified Britain that probably wouldn't happen if the result had gone the other way. The disenfranchised who voted 'Leave' may(?) get a voice from this that wouldn't happen in the same way if it had ended with 'Remain'.

I'd naïvely expected the debate to be more about the future, strategy and tactics around the next steps, but I suppose it was inevitable that there were large swathes of therapy included in the discussion.

Instead of a blow-by-blow of that debate, I'll throw in a few of my own thoughts.

STRUCTURAL
The structural damage to the UK wasn't just created in the weeks of the referendum countdown. It had been going on for years as more of the UK economy was sold off and offshored as consequences of both government policies and private companies looking for ways to keep shareholders (not stakeholders) sweet.

Osborne's ongoing austerity didn't help, even when borrowing more money would have been a cheap option for the UK government.

No wonder then, that many UK people looked around for things to blame. The same people also read the ever-lurid front page suggestions of the tabloid press.

We didn't help ourselves by having electoral representation in the EU that no-one really understood, most people can't name and where 39% of the UK MEPs are from UKIP with the folded arms agenda of exit.

LIES, DAMN LIES AND STATISTICS
Much of the campaign was fought on personalities, reductionism and piffle. Everyone lied and people pretended to only hear the fibs that suited their mindset. Many key players treated the whole thing as a game. Schoolboy japes in their privileged playground.

There seemed to be a conspiracy to keep to limited topics and confuse wherever possible. "The sky is blue/green/yellow/red/above/below."

Once the lies reached a certain level, people switched off from taking the campaign seriously.

LEADERSHIP
In the post referendum climate, the UK has been put on auto-pilot. The pound has dropped, shares spark at the behest of the gamblers and hedge fund profiteers and major companies reach to that shelf where they've stored their contingency plan.

The politicians have decided to look inward rather than towards the need to do anything. A placeholder Etonian ex merchant banker who wants to privatise everything has been put in charge of the Brexit planning. The one that threw confidential government papers away in a park bin.

Both of the so-called main parties are squabbling amongst themselves about who should be the next king-pin.

CONSERVATIVES
For a short time we had ex-journalist Gove as well as journalist Johnston stepping forward as possible next Conservative leaders. It illustrated just how disunited even the Brexit camp was. Let alone that slippery well-expensed Brussels wine drinker.

It's already changed with Boris removing himself from leadership consideration. He'd realised as soon as the result came in that the Brexit negotiation could be damaging. The Gove 'backstab' was quite handy and gives them both a way out.

Boris wasn't satisfied playing with Boris bikes, although upgrading from Boris Island as an airport to Boris Island = UK might have been one step too far.

Theresa May is probably leadership favourite at the moment, but there's all the secret corners in Portcullis House where the deals get struck.

And then the secret circles, that elite structure of the 330 Conservatives MPs to downselect to the two final contenders, then finally balloted by post to the around 160,000 members of the party.

LABOUR
Corbyn may have been a good choice once. It's hard to tell because of the nefarious deeds around the time of his election. Toby Young wrote that Telegraph piece urging Tories to spend £3, join the Labour Party and to vote for Corbyn.

There was then a sudden surge of around 100,000 extra members to the party just before Corbyn was elected, and a further 56,000 applicants who were turned down.

Back at the PLP nomination stage the story was 1 Andy Burnham(29%), 2 Yvette Cooper(25%), 3 Liz Kendall(18%), 4 Jeremy Corbyn (16%). At the result stage it was 1 Corbyn(60%) 2 Burnham(19%) 3 Cooper(17%) and 4 Kendall(5%). How things change.

Now it's a waiting game as the Labour party slides further into meltdown and discredit instead of running a contrarian debate like an 'opposition'.

Corbyn is hanging in there and desperately wants to be around for next week's appallingly delayed 2.6 million word £10 million Chilcot report.

Still, the situation is good for Labour membership as so far another 60,000 have just spent their £3 for the next round of voting .

NEW PROGRESSIVE PARTY
I've just made up that name, based on some things that John Harris said at the debate yesterday. It's a placeholder name for a new grouping which could attempt to wrest control from the two main failing organisations. It won't work if there's all the smaller parties being separate, but a smattering of good sense people from some of the current elected could conceivably mount some sort of attempt to gain control and set a direction out of the current mess.

CLINGING ON
Instead, what we get is the current group of people who have between them crashed the country and created years of sorting out, will now be given a new set of lives like some sort of video game.

It is also strange that these people retain control of when to hold the next election. Understandably any new leaders and their freshly appointed teams won't want to immediately go to the country. And if they did, the electorate may again decide they've had enough and do something akin to keeping that X-factor 'Wagner' in for the final. Except we'd get UKIP instead of a bad singer.

DEMOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY
Intriguingly, if the UK is still a constitutional monarchy, perhaps the monarch could exceptionally intervene and request a new election?

Also, if the democratic process is deliberative, then it does still give whoever is in charge a chance to use the aggregative directives of the people for guidance rather then blindly following them. Although, I suppose, that would be seen as playing to the metropolitan 'remain' agenda.

NEXT STEPS
There's no real news on nest steps yet. People burble about the Norway model which is really a code for keeping an EFTA/EEA style trade agreement. During yesterday's session Paul Mason talked about the second trench in a battle and knowing when to withdraw to it. The second trench for UK is an EFTA/EEA agreement which is the bundle of trade agreements on pragmatically the same terms as EU membership. I wrote a similar view a few days ago when I talked about BREFTA.

It's also when the code words start to come out. Angela Merkel has been using one which I suspect will become more prevalent as others pick up on its true meaning in this context. Obligations.

And the Article 50 is being positioned as 'Exit/Sunset' terms rather than 'Ongoing terms' by the Brussels bureaucrats. Another code word used in outsourcing and implying two separate projects. Sunset and Ongoing.

OBLIGATIONS
Yes, the exit needs something to base negotiations upon. UK says it wants Out.

Merkel and others are already signalling that there has to be settlement of some kind to give UK any revised position. It will amount to settlement of 'obligations' (otherwise known as money).

I'll translate. "If you want to trade with us, how much will you give us?"

The answer will be a signifiant proportion of the current annual payment to the EU, ongoing forever and linked in some way to GDP, population or another similar figure.

NEGOTIATION TACTICS
A clever negotiation would be to link it to a reciprocal of the migration proportion, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The point will be to have something that can be used to create scuffle and eventual endgame without completely throwing the game board away.

That's the irony in all of this. UK is already quite different from many EU members. No Euro, still has its own border control. Won't increase sovereignty. Even drives on the other side of the road.

So it becomes about how much we pay to formally show we are separate, but really we are still playing in the European game.

BIG LOSSES?
We could still lose more from all of this. We could lose the UK financial sector, which sounds boring, but is a big piece of GDP and prestige. We could lose the market agreements and have to renegotiate dozens of separate arrangements, taking years.

We could lose (if we haven't already) the confidence of the marketplace and see further downgrades of UK status. France is 6th largest economy and we are becoming closer ins size to it as the pound diminishes against the dollar. Then it's Brazil and then Italy. We only have to move down one place and we drop from being in the top five to being in the top ten.

THE CARD DECK
A major dilemma in all of this is the way that a negotiation would be handled.

If this was in private enterprise, there would be a small expert force set up and a silent running regime would be established to keep the negotiation position under wraps. A few head honchos would be updated or provide some inputs, but it wouldn't be widely known about because of the commercial sensitivity.

Parts of the negotiation could well include bluffs about position and there would be playbooks for the main moves, gains and losses. So far there's no evidence that anything like this is being planned whilst everyone plays the London personality games. Farage buffoons around in Brussels doing everything to wreck any chance of professionalism in the negotiations.

Gary Younge made a great point yesterday about dogs chasing cars. The point was they were not supposed to catch the car. They can't drive.

We now have startled politicians who chased the red Article 50 button. But, at present, apart from raving lunatics, no one wants to press it.

Wordless Wednesday: New Border Controls

Yesterday, Canada geese created a new border in the park.

security breach etonian privatisation champion to plan Brexit?

So we have an Etonian ex-Rothschild banker and champion of privatisation put in charge of the secret Brexit plans.

He's the guy that threw sensitive parliamentary papers away in a bin in St James Park.

The Mirror took some snapshots at the time.

Ironically he'll probably get some new sales of his book as the media move in to look for quotes.

The same guy that was condemned for racist views when he published an advisory document to Thatcher.

Oh, and caught out as an MP for expensing repairs to the plumbing of his Tennis Court.

Good choice, Dave.

#Brefta : starter plan for a #Brexit because no one else has one

No-one in charge is doing it, so I thought I'd have a crack at a Brexit Plan.

I was going to call it the UK-EU plan but decided that Brefta is more catchy and a bit less sweary.

I'm more interested in the shopping list of main negotiation points rather than whether Boris gets a bigger throne.

Breaking down the few bigger items:

1) Europe will want UK to pay. They will want the funds that UK has been providing and need to signal to everyone else that it's not a good idea to leave.

2) Migration is now being fudged now by the Brexiteers, but will need to be fixed somehow. I'll convert it into a monetary equation. I know morally it's far more than that, but somehow a mechanism has to be established. Money talks etc.

3) Services passports Not really being talked about, but the passport from London is a reason that many foreign Financial Services Institutions use it as their centre. Germany and France would both like a piece of the action, so we'll probably have to pay to get this.

4) Red Tape can be used to stop everything and create years of piffle. I'll assume that UK will continue to need to follow relevant agreements for borderless trade and uphold workers' rights. I don't care about busy-bee stuff like bendy courgettes.

5) Seats at tables EFTA zone tables only - ironically UK used to be in EFTA anyway. For trade this is probably OK and similar to the other EFTA members (Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein). Although, I notice beer is far more expensive in both Norway and Switzerland.

6) Other stuff There's probably years of trailing edge stuff to sort out. Being entwined with the paper mill of the EU for 40 years means there's a job for all those MEPs forever to hesitantly untangle the rest.

My point is to select a few key items and know how to handle them. Of course, there's other options like unilateral agreements with everyone, not wanting to pay for anything and so on, and the next three months could easily be spent by expensive and busy consultants drawing up all the variations. Plans of plans and so on.

What this really needs is someone with some leadership to drive the vital few things through.

Here's my costings:

A) THE COST TO THE UK
This won't be free and the cost of using EFTA will be some proportion of the current EU payment. I decided to use the UK GDP as the basis for the calculation (other big numbers are also available). That's £1,476 billion. Then the amount we pay into the EU after the initial £5 billion rebate. That's £13 billion.

I'll declare that as a percentage and use it as the ceiling figure in an EFTA discussion. In Table 1 I use the pragmatic cost of EU membership to drive an EFTA entry cost calculation.

I also discount the value of EFTA compared with EU, using 70% for this example. i.e. EFTA is 'less' than the full EU.

In Table 2 I replay the Table 1 based upon the rebates we get from EU. The revised starting figure is £9 billion. The rest of the calculation is the same.

In 'Landing Zone' terms, I'd put the EFTA membership cost somewhere between £5-9 billion. That should fix the trade agreements aspect, except for those passport things.

B) COSTING MIGRATION CHANGES
The Brexiteers want to set a new number for EU migrants. This was the biggest plank of their argument, although they are now distancing from it.

I decided to convert it to a calculation, where EU gets reciprocal benefit from any reduced influx to UK. It's a crude form of spreadsheeting but essentially I've costed each migrant at the equivalent of their theoretical economic value based upon an average UK salary (£26,500).

Whilst morally dubious, it gives a way to adjust the numbers in terms that the EU will understand (i.e. money).

Seeding the calculation with the current influx number of 180,000 gives a range of between £1bn and £3.9 bn as a charge to pay to the EU. My method here is really to try to find a basis for the negotiation, which will inevitably come down to money in the end.

Of course, the start number, the economic value of an individual and many discounting would all affect this, as coulee any reciprocity built into the calculation.

C) SERVICES PASSPORTS
That's the thing needed to allow the UK to operate as if a member of the EU for certain businesses, particularly virtualised ones such as Financial Services.

Instead of a calculation for this, I'd suggest that the EFTA arrangement includes certain areas as Free Trade Zones, so that, say, London or SCOTLOND could operate under special privileges. It could also weaken the need for Scotland to break away, if they enjoy special concessions as part of the UK.

D) THE REST
Most of the rest amounts to arguing about the bike shed instead of the power station. The longer the braying and scuffling is allowed to persist, the more real power stations and steel plants will come under new question.

Many would admit that the aftermath of the Referendum has been fairly iconoclastic. We are now in a hazy game with not one, but two busted flushes and need some proper players to get us out.

everything's fine right now

The political spokespeople are telling us that there is nothing to worry about.

So there's nothing to worry about at RBS...

And nothing to worry about at Lloyds Bank.

Definitely nothing to worry about at Barclays.

And absolutely nothing to worry about at Barrett Homes.

Nothing to worry about at easyjet,

and certainly nothing to worry about at British Airways.

And nothing to worry about with the pound

That's all right then.

Just a few market corrections. Everything is fine right now?

reflex politics without a plan

Cameron was still saying 'stability' as he made that hospital pass to his successor PM.

No wonder Johnston and Gove looked ashen as they realised they would actually have to make Brexit achievable.

Careerist Boris doesn't really care and has been busy phoning to get support for his next step. Don't worry, he can leave the implementation details to his operarios.

Meanwhile the usually hi-viz Osborne has gone missing, leaving Mark Carney to stabilise the plunging market.

Corbyn is sputtering along whilst his cabinet break formation forcing his wingman to return from the silent disco at Glastonbury. Bliar's reappearance on TV spots can't have helped and we now see the Labour party nobbling itself at the exact time that the Tories are in disarray.

If Nicola Sturgeon does rename the SNP as the EUP then with a few recruits from elsewhere perhaps it becomes the next opposition?

In Brussels the now UK-hostile EU suits are picking through their collateral damage as they try to force-start the Brexit process and already uninviting Cameron from their huddles.

By Tuesday that could all get rather messy with the Punch and Judy show both onshore with opposition leadership doubts and offshore with Cameron in EU talks.

Beyond the market collapses (maybe Italian or Spanish Stock market suspension on Monday?) someone should be adding up the cost to date of the decision.

Aside from all the lies told to the voters ahead of the Referendum, the biggest deceit of all was that there was no plan.