Home-Grown British Bananas

The descent of the United Kingdom in the league table of banana republics continues apace.

The Mail on Sunday tells us that Mrs May is tempted to undertake a U-turn on student fees ahead of the anticipated election that is at present expected to deliver a Corbyn government, perhaps even this year. If the Tories plan to buy back any significant proportion of the student vote, plus the votes of people who are repaying student fees, plus those of parents who have made sacrifices to spare their children the full burden of potential debt incurred in higher education, they are going to have to throw billions of pounds a year into the pot. Since it is problematic whether students and ex-students will be conned so simply, it will be necessary to recover lost ground with the old: so guaranteed real-terms pensions and free transport will have to be retained, even if the winter fuel allowance is to be means tested.

Ministers are openly talking and writing, lobbying and leaking about the imperative need to retain some votes from the 25-60 age group by ending the arbitrary 1% cap on public sector pay increases in the face of rising inflation of the goods in the shops. Relaxation of that cap is inevitable if the National Health Service is to survive and the forces of law and order are to be maintained. As the probability of Mr Corbyn going to Downing Street is proclaimed more and more, so the potential that some self-appointed 'patriot' will attempt to assassinate Corbyn [whose record justifies extreme hostility to him in some quarters] increases. The level of protection allocated to Corbyn needs to be at least as much as the serving prime minister, regardless of cost: the nation could not afford another Jo Cox type of tragedy if some aide to Labour leader were to be struck down in an attempt on his life. So more millions of pounds will have to be found, whether Corbyn wants it or not.

Meanwhile the chaotic wanton self-destruction of the government continues. It is now announced that they intend to abrogate the 1964 London Convention by which fishermen from some European countries, including France and Germany, can fish within British waters up to six miles from the coast. The Convention was signed a decade before Britain's accession to the Treaty of Rome, so it cannot be construed as any part of our membership of the EU. But the government announces the intention to repudiate it now, carefully souring the attitude of the Continental members of the EU ahead of the Brexit negotiations. It will be interesting to see what other irritants and insults the government will be able to find, to ensure that the 27 remaining countries in the EU feel that they are well rid of us; and that they owe us no concessions at all.

It is increasingly painful to try to keep up with the News.

British Bananas

The media have made fewer references to 'banana republics' in recent years than they used to do, and I wonder whether this is because Britain itself is taking on more of the character of such a state as the imperial past fades from memory.

Popular reaction to Mrs May since the fire in Kensington justly reflects the anger and incomprehension that her deadpan, delayed response to the incident has stimulated. It is notable that the 'victims' of the incident are almost all immigrants: I have just seen reports of two white British occupants of the Grenfell Tower, both elderly people of the sort who are left behind when the rest of the originally-indigenous population remove themselves as a block or a district becomes a focus for migrant settlement. To put it simply [albeit crudely] less-potent, mostly alien people were dumped in that building; and treated accordingly. The building was cladded to improve its appearance in proximity to multi-million-pound properties; but at the risk that was summarised in this blog yesterday. Mrs May is learning - all-too-slowly - that a sop of £5 million is received as an insult.

It is tragic that the mostly-immigrant people who have lost everything in the fire simply do not understand - and now they will not accept - that it takes many months to identify charred fragments of bones as people rather than dogs or cats, and then to attempt DNA analysis of the human remains. Of course, most of the dead who are yet to be found will be identified within a few weeks, from their location in the building and because their bodies will have been less completely consumed in the flames that the extreme cases mentioned in the previous sentence. In the vacuum, a head of steam is being stimulated: by genuine grief and anger, and by agitators who are gathering from the whole of the home counties. The government is so gloriously inept in its responses, in the face of glib repetition of carefully adapted Marxist slogans by Messers McDonnell and Corbyn, that control of the situation is moving away from them.

At the very least, there needs to be an immediate national programme to remove all flammable panels from tall buildings, which will leave a massive mess of ugly exteriors which will need to be patched to make them temporarily weatherproof. Simultaneously, sprinklers must be installed; at first in circulation areas: and the doors of supposedly-compartmentalised flats need to be validated as fire resistant, or replaced. Such a programme needs to be effected in a very tight time frame: not more than two years; after which the residual eyesores will have to be refurbished properly and safely. That will be a ten-year programme, and its cost will necessarily override Osbornian austerity. Thus it will make necessary a massive release of funding, both by the government and within the private sector, to drive forward the real economic growth that is required to make such schemes affordable from future national income. The many dozens of references in this blog to the need for productiveness to enhance productivity show the only way towards achieving this.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been put at increased risk as a consequence of cheapened cosmetic processes undertaken by cash-strapped local authorities and spun-off housing management companies who have been constrained by capped council tax revenues and diminished government grants. The whole direction of policy since the fake 'prosperity' promoted b the Thatcher regime must be reversed: though not down the dark alley to which Corbyn and McDonnell are pointing us.