This blog is operating on a now and again basis because I am busy on a demanding fiction project. Thank you for your patience. Over recent days some underlying themes have caught my attention for quick share.
Brexit
May’s heavily trailed speech laying out the detail of her Brexit plans disappointed everybody apart from her divided cabinet, because, once again there was no detail. However, the hard Brexiteers have gone very quiet. It could be that the truth is now looming before them through their ideological fog. For example:
America has made it clear that if GB exists the EU treaty governing freedom of the skies, it will not give us individually as favourable deal as it has given to the EU. It will exclude any airline not under majority UK ownership. British Airways and Virgin would thus be barred.
Additionally America has made clear that an integral part of any free trade deal (a fantasy anyway) will be full acceptance of America’s agricultural rules and standards, which are entirely anathema to most Brits. Chlorine chicken et al. And then came the steel tariffs, a catastrophe for the newly rescued UK steel industry. Hmmm. No wonder a flustered Dr Fox is off to America next week. This is not what a beautiful trade deal looks like. To us. But it does to Trump. Which is why he promised it.
Korea
The world is stunned, in a good way, of news that Trump and Kim Jon Un are to meet. Two things drove this. The first is the north Korea is feeling the pinch of stranglehold sanctions. The second is the presence, in home waters, of the largest nuclear strike force ever assembled, combat ready and able to respond in less than one minute to an order to entirely destroy North Korea. Not one but three carrier groups are visible on the surface, heaven knows what is beneath the waves and still more still over the horizon.
But what gave effect to the meeting plan was the intervention of South Korea as the broker and lead negotiator. And the subtle reason Kim Jon Un went with their plan and the reason President Moon pressed forward with what to many seemed pointless overtures with such vigour, is the evident truth that BOTH Koreas would go under if the US pressed the button. The prize for Kim is what, as this blog pointed out from the very beginning of this drama, he wanted all along. A meeting with the President of the United States on equal terms.
Water
If ever a case needed to be made that privatising water was a big mistake as many Tories thought at the time, it was the shocking fact of Jaguar Land Rover having to halt production because of water shortages due to ruptures in the supply system from the cold weather. It was nothing to do with the weather, which sometimes comes very hot and at others very cold. It is because the companies responsible have not maintained their networks properly so that they are weather resilient. Too little investment and too many dividends.