WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[plaques]

What was his reply??

[Stanley]

Trust you to ask for something I don't have!!!

[Tizer]

The combination of Stanley's post of an obituary and my having just read more about the late pilot Eric `Winkle' Brown, plus my having sat in the cockpit of a 1950s Vampire jet yesterday leads me to an interesting story: the day that Winkle Brown was scrambled in a Vampire to catch a UFO. I'll leave it to this web page to relate the tale: LINK

[Tripps]

Very very strangely - I was thinking about the magazine 'Cycling Weekly' only yesterday, and our disappointment (as purists), when it changed to 'Cycling and Mopeds'. It seems this happened in 1957, and it appears that we weren't the only ones to be dischuffed.

Looking for more sales and advertisers in June 1957, Cycling introduced pages dedicated to mopeds and the magazine changed its name to Cycling & Mopeds.[9] The move accelerated the decline in sales until, under the insistence of a new editor, Alan Gayfer, mopeds were abandoned and the magazine widened its outlook to all forms of racing on the road, on the track, to cyclo-cross and to cycle-touring. Among those taken on by Gayfer and who have remained in cycling journalism are the television commentator Phil Liggett and the author Les Woodland.

[Stanley]

A discussion on World Service from the Hay on Wye Literary Festival discussing sovereign wealth fund, QE and levels of personal debt in the UK. Fascinating and well worth seeking out. I continue to be baffled by the reasons why anyone should see a loan at 1200%+ as a viable way round a cash flow problem!

[plaques]

On a lighter note the recent cock up at the London zoo which allowed a gorilla to escape reminds me of the song 'Brother Gorilla' by Jake Thackray Gorilla..

[Stanley]

A commentator on economic affairs on World Service commending a central banker for being inventive enough to coin the saying 'In the country of the blind the one-eyed men is king' Not so, here's the usually accepted root from Wikipedia. 'From Latin in regione caecorum rex est luscus, credited to Desiderius Erasmus's Adagia (1500).' There is an even earlier example that is very similar from the 6th century.
Donald Trump accusing Hilary Clinton of drug taking before appearing in the last debate....
Later at 07:20. An interview with a very snooty woman dean of York Minster explaining why all the existing bell-ringers have been barred from pursuing their skill. She cited health and Safety and the effort to modernise the management of the Minster. The Bell-master in charge of the ringers said that it came completely out of the blue and that some of the 'facts' quoted by the dean were incorrect (One of her assertions was that it is 'obvious' that dealing with large weights like the bells is inherently dangerous....). The ringers appear to be baffled and I always suspect actions like this which are justified by modern management speak and the need to adhere to new regulations. The bottom line is that until this is sorted out the largest ring of bells in the UK will hang silent. Very very suspicious....

[David Whipp]

Haven't caught up with the latest egregious behaviour from Trump...

The vibrant autumn colours in our Town Square.

[Tizer]

Those of us in the northern hemisphere should look out this evening (weather permitting) for the `supermoon', when it appears larger than normal and reddish in colour. A couple of informative links follow:
`What is the 'Hunter's supermoon' and when is the best time to see it on Sunday?' Telegraph
`A rare hunter’s supermoon will appear this weekend - here's how to watch' Science Alert
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She cited health and Safety and the effort to modernise the management of the Minster.

Now why does this make me think of the National Trust? The NT is getting a lot of flak, quite rightly, for getting carried away with commercial interests and ignoring its origins and reasons for existence. For example it has been raising the rents of tenants on its estates to a level where the occupiers can't afford it and have to move out. Then the NT makes the houses into holiday cottages to rake in more rent. It has also angered many people by its activity in the Lake District where it has split a big farm estate so that it can get the farmhouse separate from the agriculture. There are plenty of other examples. And although it's bringing in millions in profits it still relies on unpaid volunteers. In the cases where it has replaced volunteers with paid staff in country houses it's being claimed that these staff have less knowledge than the volunteers had.

[Stanley]

Tiz, I share your misgivings. For well over thirty years I have been convinced that the accountants were the new ruling class in politics and business. Every new policy had the fingerprints of the bean-counters. I don't know whether it is because of the manifest failings of the finance and accountancy sector but it begins to look as though they are losing ground to the new breed of bureaucrats who speak a strange language deriving more from McKinsey than standard English. They cherry-pick the new regulations and adopt those which further their aims. In the case of York Minster it is partly due to changes whereby honorariums can no longer be paid to support volunteer staff. They now have to be on the payroll with all the complications that involves. There is also the constant need to 'maximise income' for the upkeep of the fabric as other sources of subsidy dry up.
See THIS for a Guardian report of a very similar situation in the Vatican City. Macdonalds is to open a branch in St Peter's Square! It was reported this morning that the rent will be $30,000 a month! That's a lot of nuggets and burgers!
These trends are par for the course, we see it in business, government and wider society. Ethics and principles are trumped by the balance sheet and the personal ambitions of the top bureaucrats who see an opportunity for increasing their 'importance' and the salaries they can command. Again, this is a common trend in every sphere of life, public and private. The pay gap between top management and the workers has never been greater. The justification being of course the 'fact' that the top management are essential. That's why regulations and the balance sheet are used for justification. Personal ambition trumps public service.

[David Whipp]

Kennet entering Bingley's Five Rise Locks as part of its commemorative journey along the full length of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal to celebrate the 200th anniversary of its opening.

The Kennet's home moorings are at Barnoldswick's Greenberfield Locks and the barge will be passing through Barlick tomorrow (Tuesday) morning, coming up the locks between 9.30 and 10am. Kennet is due through Salterforth around 11.15am.

(One of my jobs today is getting the bunting out...)

[Tizer]

Seen in the window of a cafe in Camelford...

[Stanley]

That's a good image David, perfect in fact!
The world faded into the background yesterday. What grabbed me most is the fight to survive what is happening to us. Sorry but that's our reality now.

[Tizer]

I took this photo in the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton last week. It's an aero engine from 1914 designed by Gustavus Green whose engines powered most of the early British aeroplanes built before WW1. They were too heavy for later aircraft and he went on to build them for the Navy's motor torpedo boats. I found this article about Gustavus Green from New Scientist magazine, 22nd January, 1959. Very worth reading! It's on the Google books site and you can enlarge it using the zoom button at top left. Gustavus Green

[Stanley]

Thanks for that Tiz. Interesting! What interests me is if you read about the RR Merlins and the inception process they did exactly the same thing, built a prototype, proved the concept, put it into production and tweaked the design in the light of operating experience. Only difference between them and Green was that production was in house.
The arrival of the castings and drawings for the Fieldhouse Engine.
As is now the new reality, monitoring Janet's fight for time.

[Stanley]

News of Janet's fight.
The 50th anniversary of Aberfan tomorrow.
The continuing good weather for late October.

[Stanley]

I've been sent this. Well worth reading!

The Death of British Business by Simon Head
The New York Review of Books/NYR Daily LINK

It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the disaster the British people have inflicted upon themselves with their decision to leave the European Union, taken in the referendum last June. More than three and a half months since the vote, some of this damage is difficult to quantify, including loss of influence with the US, Europe, and the wider world, the flourishing of insular nationalism, especially in England, and growing hostility toward immigrants—a tendency that had been already visible during the referendum campaign and was disgracefully exploited by the Leave campaigners. But in recent weeks, there have also been stark indications of a kind of damage that is readily quantifiable and severe: the damage that Brexit has and will continue to inflict on the UK economy—an economy that, after decades of mismanagement, is overwhelmingly dependent on foreign enterprise and foreign capital.

At the beginning of September the Japanese Government sent a blunt “message to the United Kingdom and the European Union” warning that, without Britain’s present trading relationship with the EU and the full access to European markets it guarantees, Japanese financial institutions “might have to…relocate their operations from the UK to existing establishments in the EU.” The UK’s other leading trading partners have been issuing similar warnings. On September 6, Eric Schweitzer, head of the German Chambers of Commerce and Industry, warned that amid the current Brexit “deadlock”—the uncertainty about how Britain’s arrangements with Europe will play out—many investments in the UK are now “held up and will not be carried out.” At the G20 summit in Hangzhou in early September, Barack Obama himself acknowledged the risk that Brexit could “unravel” American business investment in the UK.

Especially ominous for Britain are the warnings coming from the US and European investment banks which now dominate the City of London, which in turn dominates the UK service economy. On September 21, Daniel Pinto, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase’s corporate and investment bank, told the Financial Times, “It’s hard to see how we can serve all of our European clients, and the European economy, without access to the single market.” And other “senior executives and advisers” in the City of London cited by the FT now estimate that 20 percent of all investment banking and capital markets revenue generated in London—worth some £9 billion ($10.9 billion)—could be “disrupted” if these companies lose their free access to the EU single market in financial services. In a September report, the London consultants Oliver Wyman have estimated that the kind of “hard” exit from the EU toward which the UK Government is now moving could cost the UK service economy up to 75,000 jobs, £38 billion ($48.34 billion) in lost annual revenues, and £10 billion ($12.2 billion) in lost taxes.

The supporters of Brexit should have seen this coming. A large-scale flight of foreign capital from Britain in both manufacturing and services would be a mortal blow to UK economy. In 2015, for example, roughly half of all Japanese investment in the EU was in the UK, with a thousand Japanese groups using the UK “as an effective springboard into Europe,” in the words of the Financial Times, and with Nissan, Toyota, and Honda’s UK assembly plants making up the core of the UK-based auto industry. Now, Kenichi Ohmae, who as head of McKinsey’s Tokyo office in the early 1980s advised Nissan to set up its main European plant in the UK, is already advising his Japanese clients to keep clear of the country: “If you have to make an investment beforehand, then you have to invest in continental Europe. This is no longer a country-by-country decision, it is one country versus the whole EU.”

The UK has long depended on heavy flows of investment from abroad to make up for the weaknesses in its own corporate and financial institutions. In 2015 the UK ran a deficit in its external trade in goods and services of 96 billion pounds ($146 billion in 2015), or 5.2 percent of GDP, the largest percentage deficit in postwar British history and by far the largest of any of the G-7 group of industrialized economies. By comparison, the US ran a deficit of 2.6 percent of GDP, while Germany earned a surplus of 8.3 percent, Japan a surplus of 3.6 percent, and France broke even. In the memorable words of Mark Carney, the Canadian-born Governor of the Bank of England, the UK must depend on “the kindness of strangers” to remedy its trade gap.

The reason for this unusual dependency is that for decades the UK has been unable to produce enough goods that the rest of the world wants to buy. According to WTO statistics, between 1980 and 2011 the UK’s share of global manufacturing exports was halved, from 5.41 percent to 2.59 percent, so that by 2011, according to UN statistics, the dollar value of UK merchandise exports at $511 billion was not far off the level of Belgium’s at $472 billion, an economy with one six the UK’s population, (and not included in the Belgian figures, the value of German exports routed through Belgium ports).

Looking at export industries such as IT products, automobiles, machine tools, and precision instruments, all strongly dependent on advanced R&D and employee skills at all levels, the UK’s performance looks even worse. The period of 2005-2011 is especially revealing because it includes both the years of the Great Recession and the collapse of trade between the advanced industrial economies, but also years in which their trade with China and other BRIC economies such as India and Brazil grew rapidly. Since one of the chief claims of the Brexit campaigners has been that there are now these exciting new markets in BRIC countries waiting for British exporters to conquer, it is worth looking at how British companies actually performed during those years.

All the leading industrial economies increased their exports of advanced goods between 2005 and 2011, some spectacularly. South Korea, with its proximity to China, was the big winner with a 93 percent increase in the value of advanced goods exports, followed by Germany with a 46 percent increase, Italy with a 35 percent increase, Japan with 31 percent, France with 24 percent, and the US with 22 percent. The UK could manage just a 7 percent increase, even though it benefited from an 18 percent devaluation of the pound. What has saved Britain from relegation to the European lower echelons—to the level of Italy, Spain, or worse—has been the pursuit over several decades of an economic strategy that has encouraged global corporations in both manufacturing and financial services to come to the UK and fill the British business vacuum.

The UK’s favorable financial and legal environment helped draw foreign capital. But it was access to the EU that allowed this to happen on a large scale. Since the early 1980s, leading global corporations have located plants and offices in Britain, sometimes taking over British businesses in the process, using British soil as a terrestrial aircraft carrier to assault the single European market. Trade figures for the past three decades show with brutal clarity how dependent the UK is on this aircraft carrier status, and how much it stands to lose if a full Brexit is carried out. Even with the benefit of major inflows of foreign capital the UK’s trade performance has been the weakest of all the G-7 industrial economies. What will it look like without them?

How the UK got into this situation is told in detail by two books: Nicholas Comfort’s Surrender: How British Industry Gave Up The Ghost 1952-2012, which deals especially with the collapse of British manufacturing in the late twentieth century, and David Kynaston’s The City of London: Club No More: 1945-2000, which chronicles the corresponding failure of British financial institutions and their displacement by international competitors. (Club No More is the final volume of Kynaston’s four-volume history of the City of London, one of the outstanding achievements of contemporary British scholarship.) Kynaston and Comfort are best read in tandem, and the cumulative impact of their histories is devastating.

The most telling chapters of Surrender are those dealing with the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, because they give the lie to the claim that Margaret Thatcher as prime minister arrested and reversed Britain’s industrial decline. Some of the most damaging cases of British industrial collapse took place during and following her period of office, and are well described by Comfort. Among them was the implosion in 2004 of GEC, a sprawling engineering conglomerate and a rough British counterpart to GE as the UK’s market leader in power generation, industrial control systems, and defense electronics.

In the early 1980s, GEC employed 250,000 workers in Britain, but it was brought to its knees in the early 2000s by its last CEO, George Simpson, who made a series of disastrous acquisitions of American IT companies just as the dot-com bubble was collapsing. Much the same fate has befallen the British car industry, part of an industry that following World War II ranked second in the world to its US counterpart. From the 1960s onward the leading British car manufacturer was downsized in a series of poorly-executed corporate restructurings, first as the British Motor Corporation, then merged as British Leyland, and finally as Rover Group.

Between 1988 and 2005 Rover was propped up successively by Honda, British Aerospace, and BMW, but none of them could turn it around. In 2005 the company met a sad and humiliating end at the hands of a quartet of British asset strippers calling themselves the Phoenix Four. Once they had control of Rover, and despite its extreme frailty, the four looted the company with pay and pensions awards to themselves worth £42 million. (They managed to escape prosecution when Rover finally collapsed, but were barred from being directors of any public companies for between three and five years.) Twenty-six thousand workers at Rover’s main Birmingham plant and the plants of its suppliers lost their jobs when the company went into receivership in 2005.

In his account, Comfort includes similar obituaries of British corporations in such disparate areas as machine tools, mechanical engineering, shipbuilding, steel, consumer electronics, and textiles. In 2007, Imperial Chemical Industries, a corporate giant of the first half of the twentieth century, vanished after a series of ill-judged acquisitions and the sale of its surviving rump to AkzoNobel. And in 2009, ICL, the leading UK computer maker, was taken over by Fujitsu following a series of bad product decisions in the 1980s and 1990s.

As we have seen, the steady erosion of British corporate enterprises was partially offset by an increased flow of overseas investment to Britain, which had become a low-cost and low-wage producer in comparison with its nearest continental European neighbors. Also attractive to foreign investors was the efficiency, transparency, and—for American investors—familiarity of the British legal system, especially when set alongside those of its counterparts in continental Europe. But none of this was enough to raise deprived regions of the country to the level of even moderately prosperous local economies in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the south of England.

I had first-hand experience of this while researching my book The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (2005). I visited Japanese-, American-, and German-owned plants all over Britain, including Toyota, Honda, and Nissan’s assembly plants in the northeast of England; the plant managers showing me around would invariably explain that they were supplying the whole European market. Of course, these sales opportunities had opened up thanks to Britain’s membership of the EU and the free access to the European single market it guaranteed. This was also the chief rationale for locating the plants in the UK in the first place. With the completion of Brexit, this rationale will disappear.

This is the first of Britain’s self-inflicted wounds, phase I of Britain’s economic hara-kiri. The second phase brings in financial services. In A Club No More, David Kynaston demolishes Thatcher’s claim that she turned Britain into a leader in the dynamic and cutting-edge world of financial services. Kynaston shows in painful detail that in the fourteen years that elapsed between the deregulation of British financial companies in 1986 (the “Big Bang”) and the year 2000, the City of London experienced an accelerated version of what had already been happening in British manufacturing: a massacre of British brokerages and investment banks at the hands of their US and European competitors.

Among the first British companies to go were ancien régime brokerages with names like Fielding Newsom-Smith, Pember and Boyle, Pinchin Denny, Scrimgeour Kemp-Gee, Wood Mackenzie, and Kitcat and Aitken. Their demise was followed by the disappearance of most of the City’s British investment houses, some going back to the nineteenth century. Deutsche Bank took over Morgan Grenfell in 1990; Barings succumbed to the activities of a rogue trader in 1995; S G Warburg, the creation of the legendry Sir Siegmund Warburg in 1946 and once the City’s dominant investment bank, was taken over by Swiss Bank Corporation in 1995, and eventually by UBS; Kleinwort Benson was acquired by Dresdner Bank in 1995; Hambros by Societe Generale in 1998; Robert Flemming by Chase Manhattan in 2000; and the investment banking side of Shroders by Citigroup, also in 2000. N. M. Rothschild, founded in 1811, was one of the very few survivors.

One veteran observer of the City quoted by Kynaston denied that this British rout mattered, drawing a reassuring analogy with the Wimbledon tennis championships. In 1995, Stanislas Yassukovich noted: “Wimbledon is still the world’s greatest tennis event, yet when did we last have an English player in the top ten seeds?” (In 2013, Scottish tennis star Andy Murray finally ended the drought by winning the men’s singles title.) But by 2000, another longtime observer of the City, the financial journalist Andreas Whittam Smith, was less sanguine:

We have given the keys of the City of London to its global competitors. They could, if they chose, on grounds of national rivalry rather than pure commercial calculation, set about dismantling it. The threat is there, even if distant and, in many people’s opinions, improbable. It could be the stuff of nightmares.

With Brexit the nightmare is no longer distant and improbable. Even before the June vote, EU governments, backed by the European Commission in Brussels, were trying to change the rules of the EU single market in financial services in ways that would force banks dealing in Euro-denominated bonds and securities to do their business in financial centers where the euro was the local currency, thus excluding London. In practice this would have meant that British banks and foreign banks with their European headquarters in London would lose much of their “passporting” rights, granted by the EU to do business within the EU.

As a member of the EU, Britain was able to prevent this, but outside the EU it will be highly vulnerable to further regulatory assaults from Brussels. According to data just released by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, nearly 5,500 UK- registered companies, the great majority in financial services, depended on these passporting rights to do business in the EU and stand to lose them with Brexit.

The issue for Britain now is whether Prime Minister Theresa May has the fortitude to face down the Brexit radicals within her own party and save Britain from the economic havoc that ‘hard Brexit’ and the exclusion from the European single market will surely bring. But in her keynote speech to the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham on October 5, she gave few indications that she will. Instead, she played unashamedly to the Brexit gallery, affirming that Britain would trigger Article 50—the provision of the EU treaty setting out the process for formally withdrawing from the union—by the end of March 2017. May also made the reduction of immigration from the EU her chief priority, and aligned herself so closely with the anti-immigrant wing of her party that she drew praise from Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front.

Unless May soon changes course, Britain and its economy could face a decade or more of debilitating uncertainty. This is the amount of time it could take to negotiate a new trading relationship with the EU, which absorbs approximately 44 percent of UK exports and is by far its largest market. The British government knows that in a little more than two years Britain will lose its access to the European single market, the price it must pay for its hostility to immigration from the EU. But it has no way of knowing what trading regime with the EU will take its place.

It must now embark on a series of marathon negotiations with its EU ex-partners, certain only in the knowledge that the trading regime that will emerge from them may be far less favorable to business located in Britain than the one that exists now. It is hard to imagine a set of circumstances more likely to convince foreign businesses in Britain that they should act on their warnings to leave the country or reduce their presence there, and instead take up residence within the secure confines of the Single European Market. The British economy and the British people will suffer the consequences.
October 18, 2016, 8:28 am

[Stanley]

Thanks for the edit Tiz.
As always on this day, Aberfan.....
The antics of Trump. I'm afraid the major casualty in all this is US standing in the world. They are rivalling the UK in the contest for 'Most Broken Political System'.

[Tizer]

That Simon Head/NYR article says it all, thanks for posting it. I hope it gets read widely enough to help people see what we've got ourselves into. I heard someone saying again this morning that 52% of UK voters want to leave the EU. I don't believe that's true. If we were asked to vote again, now that people know what the referendum is really about and the false claims have been revealed, I think it would be a result in favour of Remain.

As well as Aberfan being remembered today, the 21st of October is also Trafalgar Day, remembering Nelson's success at the Battle of Trafalgar. I wonder if Putin thought it was a good day on which to snub his nose at the British Navy by parading his biggest warships in the English Channel within sight of British people? The aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and the nuclear powered battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy are leading the group of ships that belong to the Russian Northern Fleet. The presence of the ships has been flagged up in our newspapers this time but the Kuznetsov went to the Mediterranean in 2011 and 2014 but we didn't hear much about that. I suppose the heightened tension between NATO and Russia makes it a bigger news story today and this visit to the Med could be the first time the Kuznetsov has seen action. The sooner they're away from the UK the better - not just because we don't want any angry exchanges between our navy and theirs but also because the Russian ships are a bit prone to mechanical and safety problems, particularly in their nuclear power plants. The Russian navy wants to dismantle one of the Pyotr Velikiy's sister ships but fear the reactor core is too dangerous.

[Stanley]

It says something that we get into a kniption over what are after all two dinosaurs!

[Stanley]

A profile of Alexis Jay..... This was on Radio 4 and gave details of her liking for Wagner and her continuing care for feral cats..... Interesting to hear from people who actually know her.

[Stanley]

The importance of understanding what certain use of language means to both the speaker and the recipient. This is triggered by noticing how many people refer to Hilary Clinton as 'evil'. In my understanding 'evil' is reserved for the most heinous of crimes and misdemeanours but I begin to think that in the US it often means less than admirable or untrustworthy. Only a small point but it colours our understanding.

[Tizer]

My Collins dictionary gives 10 meanings for `evil' so it's not always easy to know what someone means when they use the word and it's especially vague when used out of context. The Collins meanings seem to range from wicked to `not held in high esteem'. American dictionaries might have a different range of meanings.

We often hear about the Suez Crisis of 1956 but little is said about the 3-year Suez Emergency which began 65 years ago this month with 60,000 British troops, mostly conscripts, rushed out to Egypt in only 10 days. It was a dangerous business and they faced some of the terrorist type attacks that we see so often now.

`The Suez Emergency: The forgotten war of the conscript soldier' BBC article

There's a good, concise description of the history on this web page: LINK

[Stanley]

I knew about this because when I joined the Cheshire Regiment in 1954 as a conscript many of my mates had just come back from there. Inside six months we were in Berlin holding back the Russian Hordes. The army was busy in those days!
What grabbed me was a smoke filled kitchen after I left the frying pan on the hob while I went upstairs for my morning constitutional dump! Not recommended! (The pan, not the bowel movement!) Door and windows open for 20 minutes on a cold morning!

[Bodger]

Was that because of the dump or frying pan ?