razzle dazzle

It's fascinating watching and listening to some of the politicians on telly at the moment. Some understand the nuances of the current situation. Whether one agrees with them or not, they can put forward reasoned arguments.

Others less so, reliant upon dogma and doing what they are told to do. I've also heard some of them interviewed and simply spout received viewpoints and opinions without anything to back them up.

Theresa May is still trying to bludgeon her Withdrawal Agreement through. Decoupling most of the material content means she might even succeed. It is a classic lack of planning coupled with overrun that we are witnessing.

By comparison, the EU drew up their plans, negotiating strategy and fall backs ages ago. I'm reminded of the slide that Michel Barnier presented back in December 2017. It listed the options of the day and the reasons that many of them transgressed Theresa May's Lancaster House red lines.

Barnier concluded that the only one of the options that didn't cross any of May's (framed as UK's) red lines was akin to a Canadian model. Failing that, it would be a fall into no deal/crash out with World Trade Organisation trading arrangements.

Fifteen months later, and already in extra time, the debate about these options has started, albeit with scarcely a reference to Barnier's chart.

The original basis of the Withdrawal Agreement agreement (before all the padding was added) was also drawn up in roughly the same December 2017 time-frame and even available ahead of Barnier's chart. It included the original 'back-stop' wording which has been modified back-and-forth since that time.

I can only reiterate that David Davis must have been asleep at the wheel through this entire period, or else there would have been time for some 'meaningful' discussions well before the road ran out.

I worked out that by around May 2018, the UK negotiation was a failing project with 'Game Over' lights lit all over the board.

It's the time when Barnier created another interesting diagram, illustrating a possible future Partnership Framework.

It talked about governance, level playing fields and a 'security of information' agreement. Specifically it added the EU legal basis for 3rd countries in EU programmes. That and the EU autonomous measures layers were two types of insulation that relegated UK to 3rd country status and quietly positioned that we'd be like anyone else trying to face off to the EU.

May eventually got rid of Davis, but didn't seem to like the replacement Raab's enthusiasm and sidelined him from the negotiation. Nowadays most people would be hard-pushed to even identify the current north-east Cambridgeshire based Brexit Secretary in a line-up.

By the time the Chequers variant of the Lancaster House red lines had been produced, the Department for EU Exit were faced with a huge economic conundrum. Most of the likely outcomes were disproportionately detrimental to the UK.

Crash out was the 8-9% GDP impact over even 15 years. Free Trade over the same time period was still 5%-7% worse off. The EEA option comes out less detrimental, but UK still loses its voice and vote over EU matters.

The chart also illustrates one of the topics that doesn't receive the prominence in much of the debate. That of worker migration. Even in the Referendum campaigning, the split between the leave parties meant that one could argue about migration blocks and another group could keep this out of their agenda. A variant of dog whistle politics where the person with the whistle is decoupled from the rest of the campaigners. It was another of the many distastetful elements of the Referendum campaigning.

Now we are watching more last minute scrabbling to get to an answer. The spectacle of Moulin Rouge, but where there's much about internal party politics. Events are being driven not for the 'will' of the people, certainly not for the good of the people but instead for personal gain.

What's left in the hopper? A few residual options including Barnier's original assertion. We can lose our EU Voting, lose our EU voice and achieve a locked down-trading relationship. It's worse than simply retaining the EU membership.

Here's a summary of the current UK-EU relationship models from the House of Commons library.

May has so far ignored what Parliament has been doing in their off-piste voting. I suspect she is keeping an opportunistic eye on these options, including the only one signalled green, which also happens to be Barnier's prediction from 2017.

Follow that route and we'll be using Barnier's governance chart as well. We can call the outcome Ineptitude Plus.

Oh yes, although yesterday's climate change protest from the gallery gives a bottom line that some other business is still being considered.

clowns to the left, jokers to the right

Usually I’d sift through the April Fool's jokes today, but I decided that the rebuttal of them in one of the newspapers was probably the most interesting.

It described how British April Fool's jokes have been banned this year under an archaic parliamentary order, amid warnings the public can no longer tell the difference between reality and farce.

It went on to say that a statute from 1653 imposed by Oliver Cromwell forbade the telling of porky pies. Of course, our recent constitutional twists and turns are borrowing from similar sources.

I’m somehow reminded of those Magic Eye tuning/recording indicators, where the indicated gap would decrease as the signal strength increased.

For the referendum’s aftermath the true signal strength still leaves a large gap.

The fibs, the funding discrepancies, the original vote only being advisory, the denials of knowledge from some of those now seeking power, the information hiding, and so it goes on.

The spinners use current circumstances to illustrate that ‘democracy itself is in jeopardy’. These arguments are self-serving and conveniently forget the things that don’t help their ongoing case (which is to gain power). The realisation that it was impossible to keep a lid on all the original reality distortions for two-and-a-half years. There is a huge hypocrisy in claiming the will of the people when it is all about grubby personal agendas.

There’s bound to be more about this later, after the next set of indicative votes. I see the PM has instructed the Cabinet to boycott them - which anyway skews the percentages. Theresa May is operating in a contrived parallel universe in any case. Her dissociative behaviour ignores the marches, the petitions, the push-back, the lost votes. The dream reality confusion spreads wider creating personality disorders across key parts of Parliament.

I realise these indicative votes are mostly an attempt to make the unpalatable seem better. If something emerges as a better option it will be clutched at like a straw. As an obvious example, a drift towards a variation of a Customs Union or Common Market 2 - I could imagine Labour going with it to create more chaos. It's still a poor choice when it would have the UK on the outside of EU’s decision-making.

What does it amount to? No Vote, No Voice, No Exit.

Better to stay where we are and pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened.

Keep our votes, keep our voice and remain. #revoke, #remain, #reform

My favourite banner from the recent protests:

messing about on the river

Clear the head with a simple stroll along the riverbank today.

Most of the boats are still ashore, in the car park, ready to be lifted back into the water during the next month. There's a few further upstream, but it will soon be much busier.

Two of the black swans from Dawlish seem to like it across on this side of the river, and are frequently by the quayside. Here's an iPhone snap.

Yesterday I noticed egrets, herons, a swooping marsh harrier and some kind of pretty red headed ducks, when I was along the nearby River Clyst.

That is when my iPhone isn't quite powerful enough to take a usable photo. Instead, this picture shows couple of cormorants sitting on one of the boats that has remained in the water.

Here's some of the reeds which could make a good subject for a painting.

Across on the other bank there's a couple of other boats that seem to have been in the water a long time.

thoughts on UK +++ #revoke #remain #reform

It's all so much clearer today. Almost impossible to think back to those heady days before the Referendum. The days when UK had negotiated its concessions to its EU membership.

Before the last two years, I thought of our agreement as Germany +++.

Better branding might be UK +++. I think it's still far better than any of the current offers on the table. Even now we might be better served with 'revoke, remain, reform'.

The UK formally pays in circa £14bn per annum to the EU but with rebates the resultant amount is closer to £8.6bn. That’s £165m per week. Or £130 per head of UK population, or £252 per year per taxpayer.

It’s less than the amount the UK gives to foreign aid and around 1% of the government’s spending bill.

In return (and as fifth largest global economy) UK gets access, membership and influence of one of the three biggest trading blocs and economies in the world. Kind of AAA status, notwithstanding some of the duff Farrige- style representatives we've fielded.

UK +++
Let’s recap some of the special things already available to UK:

• The UK has an opt out of the Euro.
• The UK has an opt out of Schengen.
• The UK has a veto over new members of the EU.
• The UK has a veto over Treaty change.
• The UK has a veto over proposed EU army.

Then, a few more agreements secured by UK and to be written into EU treaties.

• UK, under Cameron, secured an opt out from ‘ever closer union’.
• The UK secured the proposal that if 55% of EU member states agreed they could block a legislative proposal from the European Commission.
• The UK secured recognition that the Euro is not the only currency in the EU and that non- euro countries would not have to fund eurozone bailouts and they would be reimbursed from central EU funds that support the Euro.
• There's more, but this gives enough of a flavour.

Now, I suppose if I ignore all of that above information, we have to start to think of the alternative UK outside of the EU.

An off-Europe deregulated tax-haven, run by Bojo, perhaps?

throwing dice along the wharf

Latest chicanery is tomorrow's blind brexit vote. Theresa May certainly has a lot of dice.

This attempt is for MPs to vote for the Withdrawal Agreement without taking account of the Political Declaration. It's unbundling and side-stepping MV3, trying to be a Speaker-proof third attempt at an unchanged Withdrawal Agreement.

It's a subterfuge because the EU extensions until 12 April/22 May are already validated under EU law. Theresa May needs to look as if she's tried something new, to get past the 12 April date. This isn't new, but passing the Withdrawal Agreement would locks down the exit date to 22 May. Better get the cheque book ready.

Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General says it is perfectly lawful. I reckon it attempts to bypass much of what is happening in the Parliamentary discussion over the next few days.

Game Over if this desperate deception gets passed.

Is it just me or is Ticketmaster Platinum ticketing just like scalping? @itvmlshow

A few interesting recent gig ticket buying exploits. A few days ago, I bought some tickets for one popular artist's gig via dice.fm. Totally fair. I paid the right kind of price for just released tickets without any hassle, in minutes.

Today I tried to buy a different artist via Ticketmaster. I had a pre-sales code for the relevant shows, logged in and was offered seats. Limited choices of so-called Platinum seats. It may sound good, but I wonder whether Platinum could be code for 'rip-off'.

It simply means the seats are dynamically priced by Ticketmaster. If you are fortunate enough to be a pre-sales person then Ticketmaster know you are probably keen to see the artist and they can mark the ticketing up. 100% or more.

I took three attempts to get some decent seats via the Ticketmaster site but the pricing increased even whilst I was doing this. First time £126, then £135, then £145. Ouch.

In the UK, touts are now forbidden from bulk buying. Ticketmaster had to stop its secondary market web-sites like Seatwave and GetMeIn and the support it provided to secondary ticket sellers through programs such as TradeDesk. It looks to me as if they now do the price hiking at source.

Here's how: Release tickets slowly on pre-sales at so-called demand-driven prices - which can be multiples of the underlying seat price. Don't declare a formal 'seat price' - after all they are 'Platinum'. There is nothing else special about Platinum seats. It's scalping, pure and simple. I wonder whether the artist or the venue gets any of the surplus cash generated in these 2x and 3x seat pricing scams?

The gov.uk site has a section about stopping touting, but it doesn't cover the original ticketing agency running this kind of rip-off. After all, Ticketmaster must have detailed experience to know what 'fair' seat prices are for a given artist and venue?'

My third attempt to buy tickets was via another card that I hold. It offered the same pre-sales for the same artist as the rip-off Ticketmaster, but far more fairly priced. Faster access, wider choice of seats and no hidden mark-ups. The seats were roughly one third of the price of Ticketmaster - same gig and similar seats. I didn't just try one venue, I tried three.

The UK Government attempt to fix the mark-up behaviour is documented on the gov.uk website. It doesn't work.

Here's some of Ticketmaster's own small print:

Tricky when they run a near-monopoly on some ticketing.

the security of this entire universe is in jeopardy

Maybe Buzz has the right idea. "To infinity, and beyond"? It's an option to just keep on voting now. "Suffragii ad aeternum"?

Some commentators seem surprised that there wasn't 'an answer' from that 8-way vote. It didn't occur to me that there would be a single result. More that it would indicate some direction.

My own predictions were off in scale, although the lack of any MP vote on many of the options reduced the percentages. With between 87 and 208 non-voters (including May's so-called Cabinet), it is not surprising that none of the votes cleared a 50% threshold. I can understand there's be a number of non-voters, but why did it vary so dramatically?

Then the results - I've used the IfG graphic as a clear representation of who did what.

'Confirmatory public vote' had a much higher score than I expected. The rest were fairly in line with my expectations, subject to scaled back numbers.

Customs union is still a grudging top choice, with the Labour plan getting its whipped bloc vote into second position, although there's almost nothing between Customs Union and Labour Plan. The Common Market 2.0 drops away. Tribal logic dictates that only the 237 Labour MPs would vote for their option in any case. Any of the 'adjustment of terms' options are anyway dependent upon a combination of the Withdrawal Agreement and the Political Declaration.

Revoke Article 50 slightly got more than I expected, but still isn't really in play.

I notice the magician's art of deliberate mis-direction. Some MPs biasing the public away from some of the ideas on the table. Keeping the main debate about WA vs No Deal. Everyone in the well-publicised mug shot about future Prime Minister candidates has that agenda. Power and Party over People. Pah.

Time for some Nirvana (the original 60s group) - Rainbow Chaser, complete with the phased orchestra. Phased, now there's a thought.

choosing the pinkest, fluffiest unicorn of them all

Bercow's down selection from 16 to 8 isn't so different from my prior guesses.

I'll use my original prediction percentages again, with a couple of adjustments for the smaller set. Labour has whipped 3 of the votes, too, which defeats one of the objectives of a free vote from Parliament.

1. There's flavours of Customs Union (81%), EEA/EFTA (69%), Common Market 2.0 (61%), and the Labour Plan (47%), which are all variations of the same continuum, but has tactical voting from Labour, to skew the outcome. Some of these are also linked to the Political Declaration, which is post Withdrawal Agreement.
2. The first set of options play against No Deal (64%) and Revoke Article 50 (I up its chances to a still lowish 42% in this new line-up). The big loss is removal of Revocation to replace No Deal, which could have changed the outcome. Without it, there's really very little change to the overall picture.
3. Then there is a confirmatory public vote (24%). In other words No Second Referendum.

At this rate the first round of votes won't really do anything, but the subsequent time-line based down selection might.

By my reckoning, if the chicanery continues, its chances of winning are actually increasing.

down selecting brexit voting options and simulating the outcome

I feel a bit sorry for the renegade masters trying to work out the down-selection to be used in the next round of Brexit vote.

Just for fun I set up a simple model of the 16 options and then added some voting columns so that I could simulate possible outcomes.

Instead of Conservative and Labour, I used reduced numbers based upon removing the ERG and TIG and creating them as separate entities. I then used a lossy version of the votes from the remaining two main parties (for example 249 Conservatives *0.7 as a voting bloc for one of the outcomes). This is weird voting because it is effectively unconstrained except where whips are used.

After sorting the results, which are purely based upon my own shaky modelling, I get:

1. A deal with a Customs Union (81%), or and EEA/EFTA without customs union (75%) or Common Market 2.0 (61%). These three results were akin to the Labour Plan, although the actual votes for Labour Plan in my model were only around 47%. It's all a bit late now though, isn't it - although I suppose it will be quoted as an example of something for the Political Declaration. That's the next stage, and one that Guy Verhofstadt is already suggesting could be ratcheted into something more binding.
2. To respect the referendum result (69%), even at the expense of a No Deal (64%). To keep Theresa May's bluff to prevent Brexit from sliding off the table. I personally don't agree with this outcome.
3. A unilateral right of exit from the backstop (47%). Not sure how this could really work? Wishful thinking?
4. Revocation instead of No Deal would be stopped by Labour whip (31%). Otherwise it would be around 57%. Same problem withe the entirety of Revoke, which could be stopped by a Labour whip, purely to add to chaos. Revoke is the position being requested by those who have petitioned (5.8 million) and/or marched (1 million last Saturday), but it isn't being given much headspace with the hardcore parties - who ignore the 2 year delta since the lied-to will of the people decision.
5. Second Referendum gets a low score(24%)

Now my quickly created POV model isn't much, compared to the pre-vote modelling by the strategists in the various camps. But they also want to get ahead of the outcomes, to plan the next moves.

D4 damager, with the ill behaviour, as some might say.

who owns the board?

This 'Parliament takes control' twist is most likely to revert to gaming the outcome again.

If some strategising is applied then the moves become more obvious, particularly when some of the sixteen vote options really apply to the Political Declaration, rather than the Withdrawal Agreement.

Keeping No Deal (crash out) as the default option (even after it was voted down) means that the non-binding multi-vote outcomes by Parliament can be overruled. Most of the options amount to a grey rainbow.

Listen now for the phrases like 'It's a bad deal but I will reluctantly support it,' and 'The law of the land' linked with 'The will of the people'.

It's a simple move by the power seekers to reposition 'The one thing I will demand' to something less significant, as a way to go from 'have cake and eat it' to 'half a loaf better than no bread at all.'

Labour may decide to impose a whip on the supposedly free-votes, which can keep the full greyness in play, creating an ongoing unresolved chaos. That's more about their leadership's stress-behaviour driven cavalier desire not to solve Brexit but to force a resource-squandering General Election.

The seven or so votes to be selected from 16 are additionally a mix of cardinal and ordinal preferences, (i.e. utility choices creating value mixed with time sequencing options) so there can still be much confusion even as the votes take place.

It's because the planned vote choices create dynamic inconsistency. That's the situation where a voter's/MP's best plan for some future period will not be optimal when that future period arrives.

It creates a conundrum for those trying to vote with the agreed choices, because they are interrelated, include implicit hooks, and some have knock-on effects, all which influence the downstream outcomes.

Such a dynamically inconsistent game/vote is 'subgame imperfect'.

It presents a most likely scenario that by chicanery, the 'MV3 WA May deal vs Crash Out' will persist. It could be levelled up by changing the default from 'Crash Out' to 'Revoke', although Department for Exiting the EU said tonight : 'It remains the Government’s firm policy not to revoke Article 50.'

Instead, through brinkmanship it becomes increasingly likely that the Withdrawal Agreement gets accepted and we get have another minimum five years of Political Declaration negotiations.

Let's call the whole thing off

We seem to be entering the tap-dancing-on-roller-skates phase now.

Only very few can do it successfully.

The rest (such as the flagrant time squanderers) may get an eventual comeuppance, via a Public inquiry, which will probably conclude in about 2027.

In the meantime, here's a some skilful song and dance featuring potatoes and tomatoes and almost no edits.

and with a single bound

Ignoring any brazen, pathological mendacity from the so-called US President, I see he tweeted that he was (in capitals) exonerated from the Mueller findings. Interesting choice of word, actually.

Mueller's 22 month investigation included 19 lawyers and a team of 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants and professional staff. The team interviewed 500 witnesses, executed more than 500 search warrants, 13 requests to foreign governments, issued 2,800 subpoenas and 50 wiretaps.

Mueller brought charges against 34 people, including Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

Trump has always referred to the whole thing as a witch hunt. Recently he appointed a new friendly Attorney General, Bill Barr, ahead of Mueller completing the report.

Mueller was required to pass the report and summary to Barr, before any of it could go public.

Barr summarises it all into about three paragraphs: Yes, the Russians interfered with the elections. Yes, they hacked the Democrats. No, Mr Trump and anyone associated with him was not involved.

Barr's summary letter unilaterally reached a finding that the legal threshold for obstruction of justice would not be met even despite Mueller deciding after two years, not to do that.

Then there's a bit in the letter quoting some chapter and verse. "The relevant regulations contemplate that the Special Counsel's report will be a confidential report to the Attorney General. See Office of Special Counsel, 64 Fed. Reg. 37,038,"

I 'contemplated' the relevant section and those immediately around it. Despite the House voting 420-0 on March 14 that the report should be made public, the Attorney General could shutter the main report and close down all aspects of Mueller's investigations (64 Fed. Reg. 37,041).