“The official explantion for the U-turn is that Britain’s spooks can no longer vouch for the security of Huawei’s kit now that the US has banned the sale of American chips to the Chinese technology company, forcing it to use domestic components. But there’s little doubt that the real reason is political. It had become clear that opposition from Tory backbenchers had made Mr Johnson’s original approach unsustainable.”

“The Times” leading article today

The idea that there is the slightest likelihood that Britain’s Security services on their own could “vouch for the security of Huawei’s kit” is laughable. They can’t – and nor do they need to. This is all another example of this Government’s preposterous British exceptionalism.

China is very big. It’s very big because the West ensured that it would be. Corporations like Huawei were created by Western demand, western exports, western finance and, initially anyway, Western style management. British companies, British financiers, British diplomats drove and fuelled China’s transformation from a big but backward country into a big and innovative and highly sophisticated one. But not on our own. The world came beating on China’s door. And the Chinese opened it very wide.

The cause of China’s current preeminence is that it was a convenient place for the West to transfer its manufacturing to as well, of course, for it being a massive and lucrative market. But China is also a threat. There is a paradox here. China’s very existence relies on supply to and demand from the West. Most of this is fairly benign and some of it highly beneficial (the manufacture of drugs and medical equipment for example). But with the current leadership of the People’s Republic being so nationalist as well as imperialist the West needs to take care. There is a real and present security threat seen gruesomely in Hong Kong and potentially in Taiwan. It’s more than sabre rattling.

The threat to security does not come from Chinese companies but from the Chinese Government. That they use companies like Huawei is obviously true. But the solution for the West is at a higher level. And it can only be combated by joint action . There is already extensive monitoring of what the Chinese Government is doing using sophisticated intelligence as well as old fashioned Agents on the ground. This is a cooperative effort across Europe and with allies in North America and around the world. Any “vouching” of Huawei takes place in this context – if the company is some sort of security threat it is a threat to all.

Boris Johnson is acting as if Britain on its own matters to the Chinese. But it’s all willy waving. Sending a gunboat will no doubt be welcomed in Peking – if they don’t already have an agent on board the HMS Queen Elizabeth I’m sure they soon will, not to mention electronic surveillance. Really they know Britain is no sort of threat but they’ll keep tabs on the carrier just to be sure.

Nixon in China gave the green light to the beginnings of the growth of the PRC as an economic and commercial force. The financial power this growth has given the Chinese drives their political and military power and ambition as well. Huffing and Puffing over Huawei by Boris Johnson is as comical as it is impotent. The challenge of protecting Britain’s interests will not be met by Virtue Signalling like this. It’s a rather bigger task and one requiring extensive transnational cooperation with allies.

“Long before it became fashionable, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was a dedicated gin drinker.” So says “The Times” today in an article about the Royal Family launching its own brand of Gin.

“ My Grandma (b. 1887) was a prodigious gin drinker especially in the 1930s when she ran a hotel in Cornwall with a busy residents’ bar. Whether quaffing Gin would have been regarded as “fashionable” I don’t know but it was certainly popular. My Nan’s preference was “Gin and French” which had a healthy slug of Gordon’s topped up with Noilly Prat – a French Vermouth. A popular alternative was “Gin and It” which used Italian Vermouth.

The mixing of Gin and Vermouth reached its apogee in the United States with the invention in the interwar years of the “Martini” which certainly was “fashionable” . The barman’s challenge for a Dry Martini was to maximise the spirit and minimise the Vermouth. 🍸. The drink is essentially neat Gin with a bit of flavouring – a bit like “Pink Gin” , popular among Naval Officers.

In the 1950s the prewar Vermouth based cocktails were still popular alongside the ubiquitous Gin and Tonic or Gin and Bitter Lemon (the latter seems to have fallen out of fashion). Over these years, pre and post war, the gin brand was relatively unimportant. They were nearly all “London” gins – Gordon’s, Booth’s, Beefeater – and whilst there was some brand preference it was really what you put in the gin that mattered rather than the gin itself.

The development of designer gins is a modern phenomenon which has taken it out of the commodity product category. Gins can be like malt whisky with variations brought in by the blending process and the choice of botanicals etc. This has given the industry a massive boost – helped by improvements in tonics driven by the remarkable “Fever Tree” company. The added value that these initiatives have given the industry is considerable – who can blame “Royal Family Limited” from cashing in ?

As societies progress over the years they generally get healthier, people live longer more fulfilling lives and their choices increase exponentially. But for these advances to happen we have needed to accept the curtailment of some of our freedoms.

In the 1950s my father could drive to the pub, quaff three or four pints, sit in his driver’s seat unprotected by a seat belt and so long as he infringed no road traffic rules he was within the law in doing so. When wearing a seat belt was made compulsory and the breathalyser was introduced a decade later Dad complained vociferously about the curtailment of his freedoms. Barbara Castle really got it in the neck from him and his golf club drinking buddies.

What I do in my own home is within certain limits up to me. But when I venture out into the community rules of behaviour apply. I can’t drink and drive – a couple of half pints aside maybe. And I have to belt up. These restraints on my behaviour are not just to to protect me, though they do, but to protect others. They are uncontroversial (though no doubt on the eccentric fringes of the libertarian Right there are anti breathalyser and anti seatbelt societies).

Which brings us to Michael Gove who would no doubt like to be seen as a libertarian. Freedom of choice as to whether to wear a face mask for example. Gove’s opposition to regulation is as idiotic and selfish as my father’s opposition to the breathalyser was fifty years ago. And as ignorant.

My wearing a mask 😷 doesn’t actually protect me but the collective wearing of masks does protect me and the community as a whole. For this to work there has to be compulsion. If I drink and drive I threaten myself and others. The same with not wearing a face mask. Gove, as ever, is playing politics and seeking the applause of the libertarian cohort in his Party and beyond. Let’s hope most people see it for the populist conceit it is.

“Thanks in part to (Lord) Chris Patten’s governorship of Hong Kong, Britain left Chinese shores on a moral high in 1997.”

The quote above is from an article about China by Matthew Parris in The Times.

I lived in Hong Kong for four years in the 1980s, have revisited it many times since and have many HK friends. These friends liked Patten but they all knew that he had received a hospital pass. The damage had long since been done. He made little difference as the “Last Governor “. His hands were tied by what went before. There was no “moral high” – the abandonment of Hong Kong’s people was an amoral act . Period.

Throughout its long history as a British colony Hong Kong was a benevolent (mostly) dictatorship. Democracy was absent and power was firmly in the hands of an appointed and unelected cabal – mostly British ex-patriates. Knowing that the New Territories would have to be handed to China in 1997 Britain could have changed the governance structure of the colony well in advance – in the 1960s for example. If Hong Kong had become largely self-governing by say) 1970 the negotiations with China that had to take place in the run up to 1997 would have been held in a very different context.

Hong Kong as a clone of Singapore was a very viable proposition. Sovereignty would be in Peking but Hong Kong would have been run by Hong Kong people. Not by the British colonialists but not by China’s authoritarian gerontocracy either.

When you are dealing with dictators it helps to carry a big stick. Militarily of course Britain could not compete with the PRC . But we were not without assets. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were British in perpetuity under international law. This was a hand played badly in the negotiations and if the colony had been self-governing and effectively independent in the early 1980s the outcome would have been very different.

In the land of the blind the one eyed man is King. It is generally acknowledged that this is the least talented Cabinet in living memory. Rishi Sunak is the exception. Labour cannot attack him for what he is doing but they most certainly can for what he believes. From supporting Brexit in 2016 to his extreme free market personal ideology he was potentially the most economically Right Wing Chancellor of modern times. We are firmly in “Tax Payers Alliance” territory here.

Mr Sunak’s brief political career to date has been mainly about establishing his credentials in the Conservative Party. He did this at a time when the Party handed itself over to its Hard Right – and as it happens that’s where Sunak sits. I would not accuse him of opportunism. I don’t think that he has spouted a libertarian, free-market hard neoliberal position to secure a personal political advantage. I think he really believes it. But as Harold Wilson said “Campaign from the Left, govern from the Centre”.

I remember when Ted Heath came to power in 1970 on a very pro Business and economically non-interventionist manifesto. (That was ten years before Sunak’s birth so he won’t remember it !). Within a year he was knocked off that free market pedestal by what Harold McMillan called “events”. Suddenly Ted, like Harold before him, had to “govern from the centre”.

In February this year (pre Covid) Hard Right Tory economic veteran, and uber-Eurosceptic John Redwood advised Chancellor Sunak that “We need a bigger and more prosperous private sector, which requires lower tax rates and a holiday from yet more prescriptive regulation.” I doubt that at the time Sunak would have disagreed. You don’t have a successful career in Goldman Sachs if you’re a wishy-washy interventionist “Tax the rich” liberal.

Then came Rishi’s “events” which changed him from being a dedicated follower of the Redwood faction into the most interventionist and free-spending Chancellor of the Exchequer of modern times. Not his fault, of course, but it must have hurt. This wasn’t “Government from the Centre”. It was Government from the Praesidium.

Before the referendum Sunak endeared himself to the hard core Eurosceptics by saying “It can’t be right that unelected officials in Brussels have more say over who can come into our country than you.” This may seem a curiously anti immigration position for a British Asian to take, but it went down well in Yorkshire where he is an MP. And Sunak’s fellow British Asian Home Secretary Priti Patel, could have used the same words – and probably did.

If, as seems increasingly likely, Rishi Sunak becomes Prime Minister within a few months he will have to manage not just the calamitous economic and business challenges of the Pandemic but of Brexit as well. The combination of these events, and of dealing with them, will bring unprecedented social consequences. It is possible that the worst effects of Brexit on trade (etc) can be ameliorated by a “deal” with the EU27. The earlier Sunak takes over from the inadequate Boris Johnson the better in this regard – especially if he rapidly dispenses with Johnson’s puppeteer Dominic Cummings. But even a deal-brokered Brexit will not be a walk in the park with an ailing economy totally reliant on Government support and spending.

So will Prime Minister Sunak be forced to “govern from the Centre” – when the current alternative is to govern from the hard-interventionist Left he’d probably settle for that. The supreme irony of where we are is that the most committed anti EU Conservatives (of which Sunak was one) took this position from a hard non-interventionist and free enterprise perspective. For this Parliament not only is that not going to happen but Britain will not enjoy the benefits of membership of the most successful single market and customs union in the world either.

Rishi Sunak may morph into a pragmatist and cleverly find an accommodation with the EU. The ideologues won’t like that – they’d probably quite welcome the riots in the streets which could be a consequence of Britain’s self-evident ungovernability. Especially if they are viewing them from their tax exile home or from their Chateaux in Provence.

According to a piece in The Times today Royal Dutch Shell is considering moving it’s corporate HQ from The Hague to London and predictably the Brexiteers in The Times and also elsewhere are already beginning to celebrate this as a triumph. They shouldn’t. This decision, if taken, says virtually nothing about the management of the corporation and a lot about the respective tax regimes of Britain and The Netherlands. The tax benefits of the U.K. as they are at present, are made clear in the article. As is the perceived need to simplify the Capital Structure. These issues have nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit. It’s financially driven and pragmatic.

Royal Dutch Shell’s (RDS) has over the past few decades become a much more centralised corporation than it was in the four decades during which I worked for it. The direction of the business comes primarily from London and The Hague – with Houston being a sort of third central office for some activities. RDS has always been Anglo Dutch and this is unlikely to change.

The Hague as well as being the location of the HQ is also the location of the executives at the top of various key business streams such as Oil and Gas exploration and production – the “Upstream”. All the technical, engineering and associated activities of the Upstream take place in The Netherlands. The same applies to Manufacturing (the Refining sector). In theory all these Holland based activities could relocate to London and there would be some cost reduction benefits – but it’s very unlikely to happen.

Shell Centre in Waterloo is the location of the central offices of Shell’s other businesses including Marketing, Supply Trading, Legal, Finance etc. This duality of location is long established and it would be complex to unravel it. Certainly any move of the registered office HQ from The Hague to London would have few implications for the daily operation of the business. Very few employees would be in any way affected. The only visible change of a move of HQ would be that RDS AGMs would in future be in London rather than The Hague – which would please The City.

Goodness me those people in the nineteenth century were racists weren’t they? Well yes when seen from today’s enlightened times they were. (I didn’t put quotes around “enlightened” – I genuinely believe that is a fair descriptor of how we approach race today). Some will say that to criticise Dickens, or Marx (or Enid Blyton of Agatha Christie for that matter) for their racist views or racist expressions is wrong because they were simply products of the mores of their times.

I cannot even write the original title of Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little…” book here because The Times automatic word checker would reject the whole post if I did. The use of the same word in Fawlty Towers has led to some rapid post hoc editing of the archive. Twenty-first century enlightened standards being applied retrospectively to the 1930s and the 1970s – let alone to the late 1800s.

The root cause of what some would see as a preposterous application of political correctness to the past is a contempt for the perceptiveness of the people today. It assumes that people aren’t smart enough to see what John Cleese and Connie Booth were doing when they put those words into the Major’s mouth. The Major was an old bigot not untypical of his age and times – I know this because there were a few similar in my own family. Surely most people can see and understand this – and learn from it?

When listening to David Starkey I wasn’t seeing archive footage of an old racist spouting offensive views. I was watching a old racist spout them today in real time. His pathetic little interviewer failed to challenge him which seemed to encourage the fool to be more outrageous. Why the hell he did it I’ve no idea – because he was allowed to I think.

If we remove all the statues and edit all the books (and maybe throw some on the fire) how will we learn about the past? If you throw some slaver’s statue in the Harbour it doesn’t make what he did not to have happened. It just means that fewer people will know about it. Are we likely to be able to know more about Cecil Rhodes if his statue is hidden away out of view or if it’s somewhere we can see it – with a suitable plaque explaining who he was and what he did and the times in which he did it? Do we really need to be protected from the past? Or might it not be preferable that that past was better explained to us?

Any student of politics will know that there is an almost unlimited range of political opinions and possible policies which can be assembled selectively into a Party manifesto. The underlying logic of a political Party should be that the chosen assemblage has a modicum of consistent logic to it. The last Prime Minister who came close to doing this was Margaret Thatcher – before her Clement Attlee.

Thatcher took her guidance from the free enterprise handbook of Friedrick Hayek and Attlee from the writings of John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge. They were of course opposed ideologies but you knew where you were. Opponents of Thatcher or Attlee pretty much opposed their full packages. There wasn’t much room for pick and mix.

Most politicians and governments in the post war period have not been ideologically pure and have put together programmes that were pragmatic in order to be electorally attractive. In office the appearance of competence and perceived electability has dictated actions. When the global economic crisis hit Britain in the late noughties Gordon Brown took charge and his outstanding understanding of the issues led to competent decision-making and common-sense – he was widely praised and indeed honoured globally for this. But he lost the 2010 General Election. It wasn’t enough to have been right and able. You had to be electable as well.

Margaret Thatcher ticked the boxes of the electorate even though most of them had little understanding of her underlying ideology except in the most uncomplicated terms. But the appeal of “freedom” was an attractive one and there was consistency. Selling council houses and giving consumers options among energy suppliers (for example) came out of the same core ideology called “freedom of choice”. Freeing The Falklands from the yoke of Argentinian rule was the ultimate and electorally decisive action. Link this to attacking the “enemy within” – militant Trades Unionism – and you have a coherent philosophy and one that can be and was made appealing.

Margaret Thatcher once said (in 1984) that “Politics is not an essay in public relations” it is about getting “decisions right.” I think Clement Attlee would have agreed with that. The problem is that other political leaders have and do see their role as to be primarily effective in their management of “public relations”. If this means being economical with the actualité so be it.

The driver of the current Government’s actions is arguably ideological – the problem is that unlike Attlee or Thatcher the ideology is not transparent and is rarely openly referred to. There are links with Thatcherism of course and Libertarianism and English nationalism can be characterised as variants of Thatcher’s “freedom”. The problem is that there is no credible committed and visible leadership from the top. Nobody knows what Boris Johnson (or his immediate predecessors) believes in. If anything.

To be an informed and capable pragmatist – a John Major (to some extent) or a Gordon Brown is handy in times of trouble. We could do with one now. Competence trumps ideological purity when push comes to shove. But today we have the worst of all worlds. The Government is an “essay in public relations” and not very good at it. That aside it’s one raison d’être when elected was to “Get Brexit Done” .

The fact is that in the unexpectedly choppy waters of 2020 rushing into a post Brexit world has become the wrong thing to do, for the wrong reasons at emphatically the wrong time. The public clearly agrees with polls showing “Remain” with a clear advantage over “Leave” – this despite the fact that we have actually left the European Union! To have acknowledged this and bought time – extending transition for a year or two would have been the pragmatic thing to do. But no – we may not know what this Governments’s ideology is, but Brexit is its flagship (only) policy. Those choppy waters are going to turn into a tsunami next January.

The biggest cancer in British politics has been the takeover of once moderate major parties by extremists. The Corbynite triumph in Labour was open, bizarre, serendipitous and fatal. Overnight people you had never heard of (and were on the fringes of the Party) were on its front bench or, like the barely credible Seamus Milne, pulling strings. The consequences of this madness don’t need repeating here.

One consequence of handing Labour over to the fruitcakes was handing the governance of Britain over to the Hard Right and this, of course, led to Brexit. Corbyn did not campaign for “Remain” in 2016 with even a modicum of conviction despite the fact that in the 2015 General Election Labour’s Manifesto was unequivocally pro EU. This was a gift to the Tory Eurosceptics , Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and the rest of the gruesome “Leave” brigade.

The Referendum result, though it clobbered David Cameron, didn’t over bother the Hard Left – now firmly in charge of Labour. The Tory Right couldn’t believe it’s luck. All it needed to do, as it had long planned, was to get Boris Johnson into Number 10. But a breakout of internecine strife clobbered that. Johnson walked away from the leadership contest in 2016 and the Right, much to their discomfort, had to suffer Theresa May – very much not one of them.

Despite winning a General Election against Corbyn (no surprise there) May couldn’t hold on. She was too centrist , even rumoured still to be a closet Remainer, so she had to go. The “ERG” Tories treated her with disdain and plotted openly to displace her. This time Johnson didn’t blow it, got to Number 10, won an election and purged what remained of the One Nation Conservatives.

So over a number of years we’ve had the unelectable Corbyn leading Labour from the Hard Left and now the all too electable Johnson leading the Tories from the Hard Right. The Centre hasn’t held and, until recently, seemed to have been vanquished.

It is important to distinguish the extremism of Corbyn from the extremism of Johnson. Jeremy really believed in Socialism of the Bevanite kind. He hadn’t liked Blair’s removal of Clause 4 nor of what he saw as the Blair/Brown neoliberalism. Of course Labour had always had its red flag waving socialist purists but in the past Social Democratic Leaders, from Gaitskell to Blair/Brown, had managed to keep them on the noisy margins of the Party. Under Corbyn they took over.

Johnson is different because unlike Corbyn he has no personal political ideology at all. He is the archetypical Groucho Mark politician with instantly changeable principles. The Tory Right didn’t like him because he was “One of Us” – he was clearly one of nobody, except himself. They liked him because of his electability and because they could tell him what to pretend to believe.

If the Conservatives for the foreseeable future have been captured by the Hard Right Labour is quietly moving towards being the sensible Party, which means moving into the gaping void which is the centre ground. Keir Starmer is undeniably in the Social Democratic tradition of Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan, Blair and Brown. This is the only positive trend in British politics, and it a very important one.

With eyes mainly on the challenges of managing the COVID-19 pandemic other issues, even Brexit, have taken a lower priority. This has allowed Johnson, pushed of course by his Tory Right sponsors, to move towards what looks like a No Deal Brexit. It is possible that at the last minute some magic formula will be found to avert disaster. But this looks unlikely and there are only six months to go.

How Sir Keir Starmer positions Labour will be determined by what happens in early 2021. If it’s chaos (quite likely) then he has only to look mature and credible whilst Boris blunders around in the mess. Sir Keir can afford to be reactive in response to events and try to be constructive. The Government will blame everyone but themselves. Sir Keir will need to avoid a shouting match and position himself and Labour to take charge if the Government completely implodes. This is far from impossible.

On 1st July 1997 the people of Hong went from being the disenfranchised residents of a British colony to being the disenfranchised residents of a Chinese one. They had few if any governance rights before 1997 and few if any since. The “Joint Declaration” was a sell-out – a human rights abuse by an uncaring decolonising Britain.

A territory without self-governance can still have Passport rights for its residents – but Hong Kongers have never had this. Yes they had a nominally “British” passport with which they could travel – if countries chose to admit them. But this document did not give them British nationality nor, crucially, the right of residence in the U.K. As such it was largely worthless.

When I lived in the territory in the 1980s, after the Joint Declaration was signed, those among my Hong Konger friends who could afford to do so acquired foreign passports – particularly Australian and Canadian – as insurance against the sort of situation they now face. Cities like Melbourne and Vancouver have hugely benefited from this immigration. But many who got these passports stayed in Hong Kong knowing that if things got nasty then they could then leave. It’s surely only a matter of time before many of them choose to do so.

Britain abandoned the people of Hong Kong in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher handed them over to a hostile foreign power without nationality or travel documents of any value. Nobody should misunderstand the legacy of anti-British feeling this act of negligence created. The mainly young people waving the Union Flag or the colonial HK flag are not being pro British. They are simply using these flags as provocative symbols of protest.

I very much doubt that many of the newly threatened people of the territory will be interested in the hugely belated and patronising “offer” now apparently to be made by Britain. Australia, Canada and New Zealand offer a more congenial welcome and these countries know what a valuable contribution Hong Kongers can make. Why would you want the vague prospect of passport of xenophobic, nationalist isolationist Little England when you can have one of a welcoming, open state where many of your friends, family and compatriots already live happily?