Michael Gove in The Times today waffles on incoherently about the post Brexit opportunities for Britain. Well one of the architects of Brexit would say all this wouldn’t he ? But it’s bunkum – none of the fictitious “benefits” of Brexit Gove lists is substantial or even true. Just vague pseudo-patriotic puffery revealed in those oft-repeated words “Take Back Control”. The truth, an alien concept to this man and his cohorts, is that we never lost it.

The “deal” announced with such self-congratulatory bombast illustrates why no nation , and certainly no European nation, is independent in the modern world. The deal restricts Britain’s freedoms and constrains our independence of action. It is Brino – Brexit in name only – if by Brexit you mean taking back control as Gove claims here.

The 21st Century world is interdependent like never before. In Europe partners created a structure to both acknowledge this interdependence and to further it. “Ever closer Union” – the antithesis of “Take Back Control” – does involve some surrender of sovereignty but does that make any one of the 30 nations either in the EU or closely allied to it any less of a nation? Of course not.

Michel Barnier described the “deal” as being “Lose/Lose” and, of course, he was right. Europe and Britain are both the poorer for it. Those of us who have travelled extensively across mainland Europe and the continent’s more geographically disconnected members (all in the EU) do so to relish the differences. Countries like (say) Finland and Croatia are no less Finnish nor Croatian for being in the EU. And nor was Britain if only we’d seen it.

EU membership gave we Brits benefits unthinkable to previous generations. The right to live, work and travel freely across thirty countries should never have been surrendered. There is no more symbolic representation of Union than this – but it is so much more. Economically, socially, culturally and emotionally the “Four Freedoms” said, rightly, that no modern man is an island entire in itself. And nor is the nation of which he is a citizen.

After 1st January the only way is up. But the medium term outcomes of Brexit look extremely hazardous for the United Kingdom. The viability of Scotland as an independent nation in the EU is very much enhanced by Brexit. The EU27 won’t have to dig too deeply into their pockets to smooth the way. It will happen. No doubt the Welsh will do the same. And if the Northern Irish can bury their sectarian differences, as they did when they signed the Good Friday Agreement, then a reunited independent Ireland is another certain outcome.

So what of Little England ? Sad, silly and adrift we will be a museum of the past. Clinging on to our past “triumphs” waving a flag of a Union that no longer exists and in terminal decline. The Celts will soon forget us, they never liked us much anyway.

In his seminal business book “In Search of Excellence” Tom Peters described the main characteristics of successful companies. One of them was that they tended to “Stick to the knitting”. There are few better examples of this than Shell.

In my 40 years with Shell as an employee and later as a Trustee Director of the British pension fund I saw how good we were at things within our areas of experience and competence. And how bad at diversification. The exploration for and exploitation of hydrocarbons, oil and gas, was what we did. And we did it well. All the way from the well head to the petrol station we were on top of our game. You could be “Sure of Shell” all the way along the supply chain.

But get out of our comfort zone we were hopeless. The list of failed step out activities is a long one – from Nuclear Energy in the 1960s to the latest “Shell Energy” farrago we simply did not know what we were doing. We failed in metals with “Billiton”. We failed in electricity generation with “Powergen”. We failed in coal, forestry, solar and wind. The list is a long one.

The idea that Shell could run a Broadband business is quite preposterous – we couldn’t run an operation marketing Gas to commercial/industrial customers an area where you’d think we had some relevant competences. “Shell Energy” aimed at the domestic gas market, is yet another step out too far.

The success of Shell, the reason that Shell shares have always been a blue chip investment, is that we looked after what we knew best. We had geologists, engineers, rig builders, tanker captains, pipeline experts, oil traders – even a few marketers like me. And lots of accountants. We did our core competencies well. And we invested so much in the Oil and Gas business that for a time Shell was the worlds largest commercial capital investor – in any sector.

When we were good we were very good, but when we were bad we were awful. We once ran a corporate tv commercial lauding our involvement in Forestry which included the line “One Day it may be our biggest business”. We withdrew from Forestry the following year!

The future of the energy sector as demands to get greener and move away from hydrocarbons is complex but the reality is that the only thing that Shell brings to the Renewables table is money. There is no corporate memory on renewables just as there clearly wasn’t for domestic gas. You can buy a gas marketing company, as Shell did, but that doesn’t mean you have the competence to run it.

Can you be “Sure of Shell” any more? Only where they “stick to their knitting”.

There is an interview with Britain’s top soldier in The Times today. Much of it is silly “Britain contra mundom” fantasy – grotesque and silly exceptionalism. The decline in numbers of our Armed Forces is recorded and NATO gets a brief mention. But the reality is that it is only as a part of alliances that the U.K. matters at all. We do not need to be a major military power in our own right and haven’t been for decades. Of course when Russia is militarily strong and on Europe’s borders it needs to be kept in check. But that is not a concern for Britain alone.

new European defence model is urgently needed and, despite Brexit, Britain needs to be part of it. A European Defence Force (EDF), politically accountable to the EU and to the European Parliament, is the way forward. That’s direct accountability not the accountability by proxy of NATO.

If Russia is in our backyard it is not the only global threat – but again we need to get real. Britain alone can do nothing about Iran or China or North Korea all arguably real threats to global peace. Sending gunboats to the South China Sea to protest about Hong Kong is as laughable as it is pointless. Being a division of America’s military might in Iraq, when our European neighbours sensibly kept their distance, was surely the last instance of Britain’s delusion of independent military significance.

If the Falklands was invaded again we certainly couldn’t defend it on our own. And there are no other distant possessions that we could defend either. Our global role, on our own, and our ability to be able to assemble a task force has gone and will not return.

Threats need to be met first and foremost with diplomacy not with weapons. But it helps to carry a big stick. The gunboats near Hong Kong and the ludicrous threat to use them to defend our fishing rights close at home were utterly preposterous. The stick was barely visible and waving it made us look ludicrous.

When there was an empire to defend then Britain did need to rule the waves. Today in retreat in our lonely island offshore of Europe and isolated from it we may posture about military significance – but the reality is we have none. Except , of course, with our allies. We should play an appropriate and active part in NATO and in due course in an EDF. We have a lot to offer as part of an alliance – nothing at all as a flag-waving faux great power stick in the past.

There are plenty of illustrations of Britain’s laughing stock status in the modern world. Our utter failure to complete major infrastructure projects on time, on budget or at all (in some cases) is one of them. In layman’s language we just faff around.

Whilst most of Europe has joined Japan and, more recently China, in having high speed rail networks we have just one short line in Kent. Whilst cities from Dubai to Berlin have modern airports London has four ageing ones each in the wrong place with inadequate capacity and little or no coordination (and no transport) between them.

Pessimism about future air travel is misplaced. Whilst the pandemic has reduced demand this is surely a temporary blip. And when demand turns up again, as it will, London will be ill-equipped to cope. I lived in Hong Kong in the 1980s when the planning for a major new airport was underway. It was delivered ten years later an island having been reconfigured to make way for it !

LHR has always been a hub airport with long distance travellers frequently changing planes there. This generates income both for the airlines that operate out of it and for the nation. Inadequate capacity drives this traffic away – to Amsterdam or Paris and in the future, one suspects, to Berlin whose new airport has just opened.

Of course Little England may drive demand away if the worst happens and Brexit tanks our economy. But if the presumption is that somehow we will weather the storm of our isolation one way or another we will need substantially increased airport capacity for our capital city. If a brand new high capacity airport is ruled out then a third runway at Heathrow and a second one at Gatwick will be essential. Let’s get on with it.

The Government announcement (in today’s The Times) regarding the banning of gas boilers in new homes demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of energy supply.

1. It is extremely unlikely that there will be a significant number of hydrogen powered boilers within the timescales shown . To change the gas supply network from natural gas to hydrogen is theoretically possible but it would be prohibitively expensive and logistically complex. You could create a small number of new estates with localised hydrogen fired heating from their own storage tanks but I would judge this to be unviable.

2. Many of the new gas boilers installed every year at present are retrofit replacements in existing properties. To replace these with heat pumps is unlikely to be practicable in all but a tiny minority of cases.

3. Properties only have oil fired boilers if they are in non gas areas. If a home in such an area needs a new boiler there is no practical alternative but to install a new oil fired one.

4. Brand new properties could be required to have heat pumps and electric rather than gas cookers. But the practicalities of doing this seem not to have been thought through in technical or economic terms. We have little or no collective memory on this subject and even experimental heat pump heated new homes just don’t exist let alone exist any on a commercial scale.

5. Whilst domestic use of gas for heating and cooking in private residences is a major sector there are others. Offices, schools, shops, factories and all public buildings have gas fired heating systems. The scale of this is considerable. Hospitals, for example, have large gas (in some cases oil) fired boilers for which there is no obvious alternative.

Energy policy is complex and understanding it is not helped by headline grabbing announcements which have no practical logic to them.

Outstanding article in The Times today by Matthew Parris about the Madness of King Boris. From the perspective of history, when it comes to be written, this will be seen as a period of national insanity. I remember Suez and the brave voices who spoke up against it – mainly from the Left. Whilst the most guilty men this time are the headbangers of the Tory Right (and beyond) the abject failure of Jeremy Corbyn to honour effectively Labour’s unequivocal 2015 manifesto pledge in favour of Britain in Europe was also culpable.

We know the dangers of rabid Nationalism and the horrors it brought. No British family in the twentieth century was untouched by it. My mother was bombed during the Blitz by the nationalist Nazis whilst my father was a Prisoner, in Siam, of the nationalist Japanese. In my own lifetime I have witnessed raw nationalism still extant in the dying days of the British Empire and in the equally imperial Soviet Union.

The “English exceptionalism” of Boris Johnson is no less than a resurgence of nationalism. It will lead to the break up of the United Kingdom , of course, as similar nationalist forces north of the border secede from the Union. And the Irish will unite, peacefully we must hope. Collateral damage of stupidity, but who can blame the Celts ?

Little England will be like the sad cousin in the family who went off the rails. You know, the one who took to the bottle and is an embarrassment at family gatherings to the extent that he stops being invited. We will sit on the sidelines pathetically waving our faded flag proudly boasting of the recovered sovereignty we never lost. Delusional, demented, daft and drunk. And do you know what might really hurt – no one in the real world will care. Our stock of goodwill will long since have vanished.

There is so much wrong with the effusion of Brexiteer propaganda that is James Forsyth in The Times today it’s hard to know where to start. The best place is to point out the fundamental lie about what the European Union is. The underlying premise is that the EU is some sort of dastardly sovereign entity bent on doing down us noble Brits. But this is nonsense. The negotiations are with senior civil servants accountable to the European Parliament whose sole obligation is to act on behalf of the 27 member States.

If M. Barnier and co. were in some way acting wrongly or irresponsibly don’t you think one of the countries of the Union would say so? None has. If anything the warnings from France and Germany and the rest have been to stick to their guns and make no inappropriate concessions to Britain. This is of course underpinned by those European countries which though not in the EU do have trade deals with the 27 – Switzerland and Norway for example.

The arrogant and ignorant approach of Lord Frost, his preposterous obsession with Sovereignty and his loyalty to the bumbling fool in Downing Street show him to be the third-rate apparatchik he is. I asked a former top civil servant , knight of the realm and friend of mine, about Frost. “Doubt he’d have passed the entrance exam” he said.

To do the wrong thing, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time, with the wrong people is what we now do as a matter of course. Inadequate politicians who have a clueless disregard for the national interest. A sycophantic governing party in Parliament who collectively spout jingoistic claptrap and are no more than lobby fodder. A compliant media who like Mr Forsyth do their masters bidding. There are no checks and balances and restraints, just faux-patriotism and bombast. And so we have A bumbling fool, a third-rate apparatchik and a rapid decline to irrelevance

The problem is not that we have an unpopular Prime Minister and a struggling Government. That’s happened before and we’ve survived. No, today’s crisis comes from the fact that we have an administration of woeful incompetence which they compound with mendacity. They are useless, and they lie about it.

In 1940 it was Labour who pushed for change at the top. Their MPs, in supporting the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill, weren’t playing Party politics but acting in the national interest. “Speak for England Arthur “ called out a Tory MP when Labour MP Arthur Greenwood called for Chamberlain to go. Somebody needs to speak for England today.

Democracy relies upon checks and balances to work. It may be the Virus that keeps people from the streets to protest against our malignant Government but I fear that it is more likely to be complacency. Public opinion, if we believe the polls, has turned against Johnson and his Junta but there’s no civil unrest. What protests there are come from those who shout libertarian messages ( as they would no doubt see them) – the anti maskers and anti lockdown mob. But the real people of England haven’t spoken yet.

It may be that the impotence of the masses comes from us not being able to articulate a solution because there isn’t an obvious one to hand. Yes we are sick of being governed by idiots but there isn’t an election for four years. Yes a substantial majority of our people now see Brexit for the disaster it is, but its happened and we will shortly all be making the worst of it. Johnson should go, of course. But have you seen those in the frame to replace him when he does?

2020 has been the year of the unprecedented. Around the world governments have varied in the nature of the response to the virus and in their success in containing it. New Zealand recently overwhelmingly re-elected their Prime Minister and her Labour government not because it had as a nation swung to the Left. They recognised competence and rewarded it. Donald Trump’s rejection was probably swung by voters who saw his woeful incompetence and rejected it.

There may come a point when we say enough is enough – “No Deal” might trigger that. But a nation that can be persuaded to vote Conservative because of a populist Prime Minister driving a bulldozer through a wall doesn’t bode well for the chances of a mass uprising. It’s said that countries get the Government they deserve. Perhaps we do.

“Join me in a toast to capitalism — still our only hope for progress” says Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times today in an article that will no doubt gladden Rupert Murdoch’s heart, if he has one.

I suppose in a world, and especially a country, where everything has to be binary economic and political system choices have to be binary as well. Capitalism good, Socialism bad if you like. The only workable reality is different. We have a mixed economy because There Is No Alternative – the modern TINA is participation between the private sector and the State.

Every nominally capitalistic enterprise lauded for its achievements by Mr Syed could not operate without services provided by the State. From healthcare for its employees to transport infrastructure. From the police and the emergency services to welfare and transnational relations on trade Government, and the public sector, are essential.

Whilst the private sector relies on the public sector the reverse is also true. The National Health Service, whilst publicly owned, has a raft of private sector suppliers – not least for the crucial dispensing of medication. Our healthcare system depends on a significant amount of contracting out. So does virtually every other public service.

The real threat to common-sense in our economy and our society comes from ideology. The Orwellian Good/Bad depiction – the simplistic and naive description of the heroics of capitalism here for example. The recent capture of the Labour Party by old-fashioned Clause IV Socialists was a victory for ideology and dogma over pragmatism. But those on their soap boxes crying out for Socialism are matched by those screaming for unbridled Capitalism. They are both demonstrably wrong.

Modern economies, the creators of wealth and progress, have been driven by free enterprise and private sector entrepreneurs. But decades of unbridled capitalism led to abuses to such an extent that Governments had to step in. Regulation of the manufacturing sector, for example, came from government not out of the kindness of the hearts of Victorian businessmen. The growth of the Trades Union movement came similarly as a response to exploitation.

The modern day debate should be ideology free and pragmatic. Fine tuning of our economy, including who does what and who owns what, should be based on public interest alone. Margaret Thatcher’s administrations and those of her Tory successor John Major gave us the core of the public/private mix we still have today. None of the services privatised in the 1980s and 1990s were renationalised by Blair or Brown. There is certainly a case for greater public accountability in some of them and possibly a return to public ownership, but not for ideological reasons.

The real modern triumph is not “capitalism” as such but the mixed economy. This is a continuous task and demands continuous review. But it’s fine tuning not Revolution that makes sense. We don’t need a neo-Thatcherite privatising revolution any more than we need the dead hand of Corbynite socialism.

“Britain and the EU could begin a new, and perhaps happier, relationship as sovereign allies.” James Forsyth in “The Times” today

Britain and the EU are in no way “sovereign allies” – this is a fundamental misreading of what the European Union is. The Union is an alliance of 27 sovereign states – it is in no way “sovereign” itself. It has no role other than to implement the decisions and the will of its members.

Britain has not been negotiating with a sovereign entity but with civil servants of the EU Commission. The power lies not in the Brussels bureaucracy but in the governments of member states. These governments would all have to ratify any deal.

Throughout the Brexit process – before, during and since the Referendum – Europhobes have blathered on about “Sovereignty”. Sometimes as code to cover their xenophobia, sometimes as simplistic faux-patriotism – often as flag-waving populist nationalism. The truth, of course, is that at no point did Britain’s membership of the EU impinge materially on its sovereignty.

To believe that Britain once surrendered a significant part of its self-governing freedoms by being an EU member is preposterous exceptionalism. It requires the arrogant premise that 27 different and proud indendent nations – the French, the Germans, the Italians and the rest – are somehow less concerned about their sovereignty than Britain .

The modern world is interdependent to an extraordinary degree. No nation is an island entire in itself any more. This reality has to be governed by rules and codified in formal agreements. This incidentally makes us more secure – allies whether political, economic or cultural tend not to go to war with one another. Jaw Jaw is always preferable to War War.

Terminology so loosely used by Mr Forsyth is inflammatory but then the whole sovereignty argument was and is incendiary. Many who use the word “Sovereignty” know that it can be a classic bit of binary jargon despite the fact that the concept is so obviously a nuanced one. Societies at every level accept some restraint on their freedom to act. At a national level every treaty, every alliance, every deal leads to lost or pooled sovereignty to some degree.

For Britain to be the only country in Europe not in or not closely linked with the world’s largest bloc beggars belief. Even the Swiss, traditionally fiercely neutral, have strong formal ties with the EU. If they can give up a tiny fraction of their historic sovereignty why on earth can Britain not do the same? Welcome to Little England, sovereign but the world passes us by.