Posts by I ain't Spartacus

I think the point was to save money, by persuading kids to only poo at home...

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

The thing often forgotten about the Good Friday Agreement is that it's supposed to be symmetrical. So it offers closer ties to Ireland and cross community (and cross-border) institutions. But it also has to protect the border with the rest of the UK. Trying to pretend that putting up a border between the rest of the UK and NI is fine, while one between NI and Ireland is bad - is utterly ludicrous. In order to protect peace, both communities had to be reassured. And the EU deliberately forgot this in order to pursue a negotiating advantage.

Johnson sailed close to the wind with the agreement he made, but by agreeing that NI would be in the UK market and (to some extent) the EU Single Market we've created a fudge that could bridge the negotiating gulf. If the EU continue to insist that "they won" and that all compromise must be on the UK side - then the process will break down and we'll have to negotiate something else. Or a majority in the Northern Ireland Assembly will vote to leave the agreement.

Compromise is a two way street. We voted to leave the EU, and that causes problems. We should therefore have to do more of the compromising. But not all of it.

I'm sure the EU don't like what they signed up to in October any more than Johnson did. But that's tough shit. You can't always get what you want. There is no perfection in the Single Market as it exists, and a bit more realism and a bit less childish rhetoric is needed from both sides.

Re: ECJ as JCPC?

Yes, the Privy Council has ruled on death sentence appeals in Jamaica. Not that I remember the details any more, and it was before we'd passed the Human Rights Act that outlaws the death penalty in this country - so I've no idea what the situation would be now.

There's a bit in Richard Crossman's diaries where he said he was summoned to a PC meeting (late 60s perhaps?) because someone had buggered up and the Council had failed to renew the legal code of somewhere like the British Virgin Islands. My copy is at home and a quick Google for details doesn't help...

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

Killing Time,

Negotiation is a two-way street. The EU are now negotiating with Boris Johnson because they repeatedly and continuously shat on Theresa May. She was the one being restrained and careful in her language - they were the ones doing the megaphone diplomacy. Obviously there were Tory backbenchers making rude comments from the sidelines, but in general her government was reasonably disciplined as to it's message - at least for the first 18 months.

May offered a deal with level-playing-field terms in exchange for a limited tarriff/quota free trade deal. This was the so-called multiple trade baskets deal - which meant close alignement retained for areas of complex joint supply chains and less but some access to us into the market for services. It got round the Northern Ireland problem by having the kind of zero border infrastructure and checking scheme that Barnier at the time said was "literally impossible". And then they agreed it with Johnson in October last year. The EU have since admitted they didn't even do studies of this deal before rejecting it. It's like the sectoral deals that the EU has already agreed with Switzerland - which is why May selected it as a model. They rejected it.

So May suggested the so-called Chequers deal. Which split her cabinet. But again solved the Northern Ireland problem by basing a deal on the EU's existing deal that they'd already agreed with Turkey. So we would be a partial member of the customs union - but have much less freedom to trade in services. The EU rejected this. They didn't say what they'd prefer in its place, simply telling May to go and think again and offer them something else they might like better. While also saying that there was always the worse option of the free trade deal like Canada - if NI alone stayed in the Single Market.

So Johnson said, OK, we'll take the Canada deal on offer. We'll agree a deal where Northern Ireland stays in both the Single Market and the UK market - with processes yet to be agreed to make this possible. But with the Northern Ireland assembly able to withdraw at 2 years' notice - and NI able to benefit from UK trade deals.

And now the EU are saying that no, the Canada deal was never really on offer. When we said that we didn't quite mean it, for "reasons". Even though NI is now permanently in an arrangement similar to the famous backstop - it's just that now it's not permanent - and the NI agreement is totally not nailed down because the EU refused to negotiate on it until literally the last month - and then agreed something that's going to be impossible to implement in the year left of the transition period.

So the UK government has offered to take 3 different versions of what the EU has agreed with other third parties, in descending order of closeness of relationship - Switzerland, then Turkey and now Canada. And each time the EU has said no, given few reasons or alternatives and acted as if they've been insulted by the very suggestion!

And now the EU, who openly laughed at the non legally binding political declaration to the Withdrawal Agreement, are saying we must stick to that political declaration. The thing they stressed noisily and repeatedly was non-binding when they tried to use it to reassure May on the Norther Ireland backstop she couldn't get through Parliament. Well now the fucking chickens are coming home to roost aren't they! Now it's the EU who are demanding that we should do a new custom deal and that the UK can't select the off-the-peg deals the EU have already done with others. Despite the fact that basing their offers on stuff the EU have already agreed with others was the basis of May's negotiating strategy!

So no, I'm no fan of Johnson. He's a mouthy git, and negotiation needs level-headed people who guard their words. But hey! The fucking EU haven't been adhering to that, and being sensible and moderate destroyed May's political career. So why don't they expect the UK government to learn from the way they've behaved and do the same?

Statesmanship is often required on both sides, because both sides are under considerably political pressure. But May's government bent over backwards to try and accommodate the demands of the EU - even when they didn't actually make any. They simply rejected all offers she made and tried to make out that it was only them that were being grown-up and sensible.

Well now they reap the consequences. Because now even a shallow trade deal that's in both our interests looks almost impossible. Even though the UK are ready to agree it. And remember it's us who have a £90bn trade deficit in goods - and we're not even asking for much access for our services exports to them in exchange. They're already being offered a good deal for them, because for us the cost of avoiding disruption is worth doing that deal.

Even now a deal could happen. If we agreed as much level-playing-field as the EU has put into it's deals with Canada or Japan. But if they insist on us taking their regulations within out market, and their courts to enforce it and us having to comply with new laws they haven't yet written - then of course we're going to say no! Given our laws and standards are currently the same, a system that costs us in trade advantages to change stuff, if they believe the changes to be reductions in standards is perfectly reasonable - but the problem is they don't like the sectoral agreements they've already made with Switzerland that work like that - and would like to replace them with one overall deal. Which the Swiss won't agree.

It's a two way street. And any attempt to say that it's just the UK that are being unreasonable is bollocks of the highest order. I agree negotiating with Johnson is hard - would you trust him? But they just destroyed the political career of the trustworthy Prime Minister they had to deal with by being totally unreasonable. So tough shit!

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

Nick Ryan,

We can't crash out without a deal. We left. Just over a month ago and with a deal in place. There can't be a no deal Brexit anymore, as Brexit has already happened.

Will we exit the transition period with a new trade deal? Almost certainly I think we will. But it'll be something very minor - not an ambitious all-sector free trade agreement. There isn't time to negotiate that unless both sides were quite close on what they wanted, not even if we and the EU agreed to another year's extension to December 2021. But we could have started negotiating that in 2017, had the EU been serious about it - rather than trying to split the negotiations up into sequenced chunks and thus try and "win" by imposing deadlines at awkward times. That was a choice they made, not the UK.

As for dictator BoJo? Grow up. When he calls off the next election, then you can call him a dictator - and everyone will agree with you. Until that point, or it looks like we're even remotely likely to reach that point, you just sound like you're being silly.

I think there's a lack of trust in the ECJ. Obviously it's also a political thing - the tabloids don't like policies they approve of being over-ruled by courts from their own country, let alone nasty foreign ones.

But it's also a trust issue. For example at Maastricht the UK negotiated an opt-out from the Social Chapter. Later signed up to by Labour. But I can remember the ECJ ruling on UK holiday pay entitlement that the social chapter should apply to the UK in that area because of "health and safety". It's always been seen as a federalist court, in that it often rules in the way that gives the most power to the EU in cases that effect where power should lie.

After all, the treaties were pretty clear that Article 50 shouldn't be reversible without a unanimous vote of all members once activated. But the ECJ ruled that this was not the case, against both the legal opinions of the Commission and the British governement and English courts. The High Court ruling on Gina Miller's first case was that A50 had to be activated by Parliament not the government because it was irreversible.

So the UK government's attituded is that the ECJ is an EU institution and will always rule in its favour in disputes between us and them. So they can't be trusted to mark their own homework. Which is why most international trade agreements have arbitration panels that are independent of both sides.

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

I don't think so. I think the uncertainty over Brexit will be pretty much solved by June. I could be reading this wrong of course, but I just don't think there's going to be any large scale deal done at this point. Not until political leaderships have changed. Both sides have done too much to piss the other side off. The EU side couldn't resist continually prodding at May until they'd "won" the negotiation. Coming out with a deal that was so obviously one-sided that even if she could have got it through Parliament, a later government was almost bound to repudiate it. Plus they did their best to undermine her credibilty - only to act all surprised when she no longer had the political capital to push through the deal.

Also May was surprisingly careful in her language. Given some of the shit she took, particularly in some of the almost certainly made up leaks from quite a high level in the Commission - I was surprised she didn't hit back a bit more. And I think Johnson has taken some lessons from that (even if they're the wrong lessons), which are that trying to get a deal at any price (because you think no deal will be worse) means you'll be offered less. And also that not fighting the PR war means you get crucified in your own press and so lose the ability to govern anyway. Hence he's now going for the least ambitious agreement, in order to try and get something achieved.

The problem with fighting the PR war of course is that you're then giving the other side's politicians less room to compromise, because they also don't want to look weak in negotiations. But that's a game the EU definitely started deliberately with the supposed leaks about May "begging for a deal" and the demands for a €100 billion payment before they'd even start negotiations. Which was bound to poison the atmosphere - and now they're repeating the same mistake with all the rhetoric about how there can be no free trade agreement like they've offered to many other countries, because reasons. Even though the two sides aren't actually that far apart on some of the "level playing field" stuff - but they're destroying their own ability to compromise by being so strident before talks have even begun - while also making it harder for the other side to do so.

I think the EU have become obsessed with being seen to "win". Which is why we had three failed Greek bail-outs. And they made the Greek government grovel for the last one, in a completely unacceptable way. It's also what happened in the Cypriot bail-out. And I think Johnson has decided that it's not worth completely bending all his attention on getting a last minute deal a few days/weeks after the December deadline has passed. So he's going to walk away while it's still early enough in his government that he's got the political capital to be able to. And of course try and blame it on the EU. Then both sides will have too much political capital invested - so there'll be no new trade deal done until Macron, Merkel and Johnson are all retired.

A little noticed detail from Gove's statement to Parliament last week was what convinced me of this. He talked about setting a June deadline, after which if there was insufficient progress the government would concentrate of planning for there being no deal. The fact he set it as a deadline was pure trolling. Having a go at the EU for what they did to May with the timetabling of the exit talks and refusing to start until money had been sorted out, and then refusing to start talks on future trade until the withdrawal agreement was agreed - even though the Irish backstop would have been completely pointless if they'd been able to make a customs deal first. But I also think they mean it - because if you believe talks are going to fail anyway - then it's politically better that you control it - and can try to blame the other side on your own timetable.

I think there's a deal to be done, just nobody statesmanlike enough to get it. And to be fair to May - I thnk she genuinely believed that no-deal would be awful and that the EU wouldn't offer better - so it was her job to get what deal she could even if it destroyed her career and party. So I've a bit of sympathy with her. And even though I don't like Johnson, I think he's the negotiating partner the EU governments fucking deserve for the way they collectively behaved towards May.

Re: 1% mortality

The death rate will be hard to work out because some people that would have died of other causes would die of Coronavirus first. Particularly as the unreliable figures we've currently got have the lowest death rates being in the 10-18 group (quite surprising that) - and the risk going up quite high for people over 80 - which obviously isn't surprising. But you'd expect death rates to be lower in more organised countries where governments aren't trying to cover things up - as happened in the last big ebola outbreak - where some countries got the death rate below 20%. I think the average death rate for that is 30-40% - the worst outbreak ever was 90%!

According to the worst case assumptions of a government report from after bird flu they were talking about 50% of people getting the new flu/coronavirus (those were the two the report was most worried about) - but about half of those getting it having no symptoms.

Some of the large numbers of people being off sick will be for quarantine, rather than for being ill.

The idea is to slow down the spread so that the disease peaks for 4 months, rather than 1-2. Making treatment more manageable.

Re: No thanks, I'll go live on my boat...

Italy had temperature checks. We didn't. Italy were the first country in Europe to have a major outbreak, so little good it did them.

According to a government report on preparedness from after the Bird Flu thing, checks at airports and stopping flights at best would delay the outbreak in the UK by one week. That's from modelling, so take with whatever large grain of salt you prefer. However they also say that with our large global connections - we'd likely be one of the first countries to get infections anyway. So they don't expect to do general controls at airports.

Re: Government Guidance

There's a US company going to human trials on a vaccine in April. And I've seen vague reports of a Chinese company also looking at trials as well.

Obviously early stages though.

Re: Learn to touch-type

Can't you have paper at a similar distance to the screen? One thing I had (in fact when I was learning to type), was a sort of desktop music stand type thing. You can get various ones, some being on arms that hang from a monitor - and then your paper is hopefully readable using the same prescription as your screen.

I have much worse proplems than most people though. My reading glasses are focused at 6" distance - that's not a typo, 6 inches. It's because they're x5 magnification. They're the sort of thing surgeons use for close-up work - here's the natty up-to-date version which doesn't have NHS frames like mine... linky. So getting a desktop organied is a bit of an effort - and therefore something I think about quite a lot.

Re: Glasses

Perly King,

the lower section is my reading prescription which works for the keyboard and the upper section is a mid-range prescription which works for monitors.

I don't mean to be glib here, honest. One solution to this is to learn to touch-type. I don't know how good the programs for this are, as I learned the old fashioned way by using repetitive excercises on a typewriter (ask your parents kids...).

I noticed the other day that my 20 year old Logitech keyboard now only has labels on half the keys. I have it underneath a shelf that holds the monitor - so I can literally only see half of it - unless I move it or push my chair back.

Government interference in business doesn't seem to me to be a particularly conservative position.

Depends what you mean.

You can't have business without government interference. It's government interference that allows us to have a system of private property, and the legal personality that allows large companies to be formed with many owners and the ability to operate in a large scale way over the long term.

Copyrights and trademarks are government intervention, as are the police to stop shoplifters and the court system to solve disputes. And competition law, corporate finance reporting law etc.

Being conservative is about having a minimum of this to protect people from abuse of market power while allowing markets to be as free as possible.

For example if you don't have copyright, then you don't have a way to guarantee monetising creativity - and if you don't have that, then you get less stuff created - because the creators have nothing to live on. This applies to films, music, books, software, design, research and many other areas. So it's a proper concern of government to poke its nose in here. The question is, how much?

Re: The true star in Segal's films is the editor.

I feel that "quite good" is going a bit far...

I highly recommend Thom Tuck's 'Straight to DVD', a brilliantly silly comedy for Radio 4 - which I've just found: Youtube linky

I saw one of his films a while back, after hearing the show, so was intrigued enough to watch. All Thom's rules seem to apply, including scene in strip club and crucial fight scene at Baddy's House.

There's one brilliant bit of editing, where they've clearly had to re-do some dialogue. Either due to an emergency script change, to try to get the plot to work, or because of a technical failure. But Steven Seagal can't be arsed to go into a local studio and read the lines, so they've got one of those impersonator guys to do it for him, they guys who used to dub "melon farmer" over Eddie Murphy's dialogue in the days when ITV wouldn't show 'Beverly Hills Cop' uncut.

So Seagal has been too lazy to take half a day out of his busy schedule to do some voice work on a film that he "wrote", "directed", starred in and produced! Talk about an artist's attention to detail...

Re: Is this the best HP have?

oiseau,

I pretty much always believe in cock-up as an explanation for events ahead of conspiracy.

In this case though HPE couldn't do the kind of due-dilligence that they (and many people on here) would have been expecting. It's commented on in their preliminary due dilligence report how little information Autonomy were giving them - which is in line with takeover practices in London that are different to those in the US. I believe in the US you get much more access to the takeover target's books - whereas over here there's less info given out.

Obviously, if the target really wants to sell, they'll give you whatever access you insist on.

Re: Is this the best HP have?

Autonomy had the money in the bank, and there was apparently no written deal to say they had to take the software back. And a handshake deal isn't worth the paper it's written on.

In the absence of any stated evidence to the contrary I suspected that Autonomy's US sales boss (Stouffer?) was using this deal to accelerate his revenues by one quarter in order to meet an internal sales target. Which presumably means his bonus?

But that makes less sense now we know it was put to the auditors. Because that implies that other people have looked at this complex transaction and OK'ed it - which suggests possible other reasons to do it? After all a payment of $400k to the reseller for babysitting some licenses for a few months is quite large.

So I'm still confused by this. But as that $400k was already in the final books for the year, as was the sale it relates to, I don't see how any of this is relevant to HPE's case.

If sales people trying to get their sales to match their targets as exactly as possible, to maximise bonuses, was a reason to make multi-billion dollar write-downs - no large company would have any money at all...

Re: Mobile Roaming

UK consumers pay their phone bills to UK companies. It’s therefore a pretty easy bit of legislation to pass.

Re: Mobile Roaming

True. But it was also EU law that forced the Premier League to put their TV rights out to multiple tender - so that one broadcaster couldn't own all the rights. The results being that if you want to watch all the footie games, you now have to pay £200 a year extra. Which I'd suggest is way more than most people ever spent on roaming calls.

There are swings and roundabouts with everything. If you think free roaming is a vitally important policy, write to your MP and get it put into UK law. And if they won't, vote for someone else.

Re: 5 year plan

LDS,

It's not quite true that nobody elected Boris Johnson as PM. Sure, it's technically true. Only his constituents can send him to Parliament. But he was known as the leader of the party before the election, and anyone voting for a Conservative candidate knew they were also going to get Boris as PM.

Which is one reason why Labour did so badly. As 37% of people who voted for them in 2017 but not in 2019 said that they did so because they didn't want Corbyn to be Prime Minister (that's an Opinium survey). That was also a big effect in 2017, where Labour MPs were having to resort to saying, we're over 10% behind in the polls, so you're voting for me as an MP, not for Corbyn as PM. I think the second reason for switching was given as their Brexit policy, which was about 25% of switchers.

Von der Leyen was not a serious candidate for Commission President, in fact I'd not read her name suggested anywhere until Macron brought it up at a Council of Ministers meeting. The EPP (centre right) spitzenkandidate was Weber, leader of their bloc in the European Parliament - but having no government experience he got shot down by the heads of government. Because of that, the EPP then vetoed Timmermans, the PSOE (centre left) choice.

The spitzenkandidate system was an invention of the European Parliament in order to try to make European elections more important and/or more democratic, by forcing the "winning" candidate onto the heads of government who have the choice by the treaties, in consultation with the Parliament. It worked with Juncker, but only just, and was never accepted by the Council of Ministers.

The Commission has to undergo an approval process by the EP, but it's not like an election in that the Parliament (much less the actual voters) don't get to choose, they can only reject.

Re: I'm waiting

Dan 55,

It was EU directives that caused the last Labour government to change the law. We still got to keep some "tradtional measurements", agreed at EU level, so beer and milk could be sold in pints. And loose veg in pounds too I think? But the law was changed so all meat had to be labelled in kg, although could be dual labelled.

If we'd just put that into law saying everything must be dual-labelled - then it would have been all fine and dandy. But the problem with EU regs has often tended to be our own government and civil service liking to gild the lily and add their own pet extra bells and whistles, while we're legislating anyway... So they put through laws that they knew would be unpopular, rather than just leaving time to solve the problem for them - as everyone got used to dual labelling.

Then all it took was some idiots who decided to ignore the law just to make a point, and some other idiots deciding to enforce a stupid and pointless law to the point of absurdity. Laws on weights and measures are required to stop unscrupulous traders cheating people, not to force us all to be more European.

I remember reading an interesting report, at the time of the Maastrich treaty, on compliance with EU directives - i.e. member governments actually putting them into law and enforcing them. Us and the Danes were the only 2 countries that had implemented more than about 60% of EU directives, both being somewhere in the 70s. It was also interesting that the two most Eurosceptic countries in the EU were us and the Danes - with them rejecting Maastricht in a referendum and us having a massive long Parliamentary battle over it.

Re: I'm waiting

There wasn't a huge amount of difference between the 1998 Data Protection Act and the latest version brought in last year to comply with the GDPR. i.e. our standards were already pretty high.

Though the new one gave the regulator more teeth - which is important. But I don't see that watering that down is likely - because it's a broadly popular law.

The idea that the UK are going to suddenly rip up all the standards that we've signed up to is ludicrous. In many cases our governments and civil servants have "gold-plated" European directives when putting them into UK legislation - then if they've been a bit to onerous, have blamed that on the EU to dodge the unpopularity. Which is probably one of the reasons Euroscepticism has been higherer in Blighty than other parts of the EU, until the Eurozone crisis caused it to rise in places like Italy. For example the whole "metric martyrs" thing was awful PR for the EU - but if we'd just put that legislation into law with no penalties, we wouldn't have been prosecuting shopkeepers for selling meat to people in pounds and ounces (as God intended) rather than horrible french measurements.

The things we may change are the really expensive REACH rules on chemicals, where apparently you have to fill out loads of paperwork just to play around with test tubes of experimental chemicals for research. At least that's one of the areas I've read is a possibility, it's a subject I know pretty much nothing about.

UK standards have tended to be reasonably high, and I'd expect that to continue whatever governments we end up with in future. Plus, lots of people complain when new standards are being proposed, but once implemented people and industries tend to get used to complying with them, and there's then a lot less pressure to change them - plus the political dynamic changes. The people who complain loudest are the ones who are losing out from whatever changes are about to be made, or feel that they may be. Hence the political cost of reducing standards is high, and it doesn't win you many votes, hence governments are far more likely to spend their political capital elsewhere, unless there's a compelling reason to change something.

Re: And losers they are

It's pretty self-evidently obvious to anyone with even a half-functioning brain cell who was folloing the presidential election, that the emails had an effect. Just by looking at the polling. Clinton's polling numbers would often drop after yet another leak from Assange (who was doling out the emails slowly rather tha putting them all out at once as Wikileaks normally do).

Also, when Comey put out the story about the FBI investigating the emails again, I seem to recall Clinton had built up a decent polling lead - which instantly disappeared.

Plus Assange appeared (hard to prove of course) to time his releases to when Trump was doing badly. The one I remember being a bunch of emails release soon after the grabbing-them-by-the-pussy tape got published. Of course this might not have been collusion with the Trump campaign, but just Assange being anti-Cllinton for his own reasons (or him colluding with Russia) - or equally could just be him attention seeking, as he had his hands on a big story and leaking it slowly gave him more control and publicity.

I'm sure it wasn't the only reason Clinton lost though. I've read enough stuff from polling experts to know that small variations are usually just random sampling errors and to be ignored. Plus the reasons politicians/commentators settle on for why polls move, aren't always the actual reasons. See the Corbyn supporters saying that they just lost an election because of Labour's Brexit stance alone, and nothing to do with their leader being the most unpopular party leader in British polling history.

Clinton didn't enthuse her own supporters, and had the email scandal, but nonetheless won the popular vote. I suspect that the reason she lost was arrogance, in that the Democrats cut campaigning in states in the mid-West they thought they'd won, and moved resources to try and win in normally Republican states like Arizona. If they'd been less greedy they might well have won the election. Obviously it's nice to get a bigger majority, but you need to make sure you're winning in your traditional heartlands first.

See Labour in 2019 shifting campaigning resources from the North to try to win seats off the Lib Dems in the South - and also pouring campaigners into the seats of the defectors from Labour who'd gone to the Lib Dems - which probably gave a few seats to the Conservatives they'd have otherwise lost. While also starving their Northern heartlands of resources to stave off the Conservative wins up there. I've seen analysis that suggests just targeting those resources better would have seen the Tory majority being 40-50 now instead of 80.