RT.com tells us that a new port is to be built at a little settlement called Indiga, on the shores of the Barents Sea.
Adapted from Google Maps
The story is that it will be needed for exporting coal, and will need a rail link between there and Surgut in western Siberia:
"The annual cargo turnover is set to reach 70 million tons, 50 million tons of which will account for coal shipments, extracted from Russia’s biggest coal mining area in the Kuznetsk Basin, located in southwestern Siberia."
This begs the question, why put all that effort into new northbound rail and port construction, when the Trans-Siberian Railway runs in the area, connecting East to West?
In fact there are already discussions going on between Russia and Japan for using the Trans-Siberian route for freight transport, possibly all the way from Moscow to Vladivostock, saving up to 40% in costs compared with current sea and air routes (see RT story from 20 August this year.) The city of Leninsk-Kuznetsky is somewhere within striking distance of that railway.
Surgut is rather further north. But it is a leading oil and gas town and the first RT article says that Indiga was to have been used for exporting liquefied gas. Rosneft didn't get the permit - but is this a possible comeback, for them or some crony of the Red King?
Or is there a longer-term plan relating to the Eurasian Union (a sort of Eastern EU)? This has been cooking for five years. In which case the theme is not so much East-West trade as Russian-centred North-South trade:
Unlike our British Government, which appears to be unable to think further ahead than the next Party Conference, the Russians may have an Oriental capacity for playing the long game and covering their intentions.
So, coal to the Arctic? Doesn't quite seem to explain it all.
Those who know me will be very aware that I have been trying to move house for some time, "some" being a very elastic word in this context.
This time round we have been unfortunate on two separate occasions. On the first sale we simply could not find a suitable property within the time frame our buyer was prepared to wait; and on the second, having found a property, we were lied to about a certain item that was only revealed in its true light after the searches and money was spent, so again back to square one and we lost another buyer, c'est la vie. It all fits in well with our moving horrors of the past but that has been covered in a post some time ago.
This is about estate agents. Over the years we have dealt with and put our trust (an increasingly diluted trust, over time) in a variety of agents, all of whom suggested only they could sell your house at the highest price in the shortest time span with the utmost efficiency. The vast majority have failed miserably on all counts and have on occasions been responsible to driving me to drink, not that I need much of a push in that direction.
People reading this who simply put their house on the market and sell and move with no problems are always amazed when discussing moving house with myself and in their eyes you can see that look of “He must have been part of the problem,” such are the stories I can tell. But that is not true, though I do believe I carry the burden of all things bad in the house-moving world, a sort of cross to bear on behalf of all vendors.
But this is not not about any personal tribulations, well only partly. It is about a certain aspect of estate agents that seems to be set in stone, the stereotype who inhabits these high street offices, the same sort of stereotype depicted as a car salesman on the Fast Show by Swiss Tony - far from being a rare species they abound in car showrooms as they do in estate agencies, I have met those as well !
Our latest toe-dipping into the house-moving arena has meant we have changed agents more than once, not necessarily because we actually believed it would make any difference but because if a property does not sell within a set period or there is a problem they all stop working for you and start working for themselves, i.e. offload your property at any price as it clutters their books and makes them look inefficient and that would never do.
Back to the stereotypes. They seem to fall into three main categories:
The branch manager. He will normally be a bit more normal in dress, decent chinos, polished shoes, or a reasonably smart suit and the obligatory BMW or Merc, rarely will any other car do for a first visit. A theme repeated at all levels of estate agency is gravitas, the appearance of success over ability. Strangely the few women encountered at this level have all been fairly normal and for some strange reason they rarely arrive in the BMW or the Merc. This of course is a generalisation: the exceptions have been a couple of the younger ones who manage to display somewhat more than average cleavage or wear very tight skirts - to be fair, I don’t mind these diversions if they take my mind off the whole sordid saga of selling my house, even for a very brief moment !
The negotiator. This is the level where the stereotype really kicks in. The men, mostly young go-getters, dress in a variety of obvious agency outfits, from the ludicrous winkle picker shoes that would have been out of place even in the Sixties so extreme are some, to the tight trousers that exaggerate the shoes. The waistcoat sans jacket is de rigeur here as well and a head of hair that is either of the Poldark variety or the other extreme, the polished shaven pate. Some also have now forsaken the leather document folder and taken to the ‘man bag’ - nice.
The office manager. This one rarely comes into play. A sort of overseer, they usually talk total bollox when covering up the mistakes of the negotiators and will put you on hold a lot whilst they try and find an answer the negotiator can give for their cock-up, or alternatively say they are out of office and will phone back later with an answer. Very often the phone call never comes and you repeat the action the following day at least once. I have some time for the office managers as they sit watching this charade from a lofty position, knowing it is them that will face the ire of the client;but not always - the last agents we were with were all snake oil sellers from branch manager down.
The women, or girls as many are, do display a lot of clothes that are totally unsuitable for inspecting loft voids or guiding people around gardens in inclement weather, and the patter is missing with most of them compared to the men. They are more of a decorative add-on in the viewing area compared to the men and again they seem to mainly get the downgrades in the car stakes: the Mini reigns supreme in this area, emblazoned with the company logo. Maybe that is why the men won't be seen in one, knowing how despised estate agents are.
Another aspect of those employed, especially amongst women, is the name: a Mary or Joan just will not cut it. Lavinia, Antoinella... my current one I will not embarrass by revealing but I have never met a ‘real’ person with the same name even in these enlightened times. And if you can can combine an exotic forename with a double-barrelled surname you are made. The industry must have cornered the market in double-barrelled personnel. It obviously adds gravitas to the agency and our current agent has two on the books at this one branch which must generate extra points in the one-up stakes. Needless to say our exotically named negotiator has a double-barrelled surname, I wouldn’t have it any other way; sadly she is deficient in every other department and uses right-on phrases like scattering confetti - they are so numerous that I cannot remember a single sentence she has uttered without one. The fact she cannot remember a single relevant fact about our property is neither here nor there; she really has only attribute, a very nice bum, but that sadly is not going to sell my house.
It is often said that estate agency is a career option when you don’t have a career. After all no qualifications are needed yet you will be ‘helping’ people make the biggest and most expensive decision in their life and are dealing with sellers with properties that are a lifetime's accumulation of their wealth and savings. Both parties deserve more than a polyester suit chasing his commission at all costs.
The commission side of the business is one of the huge disadvantages of estate agents. Someone who makes a career out of selling unsuitable property to naive and new buyers so his commission racks up regardless is a first rate slimeball but they still exist.
"Why not go online and bypass the high street agent?" is the obvious response. There is no doubt that this side of the business will grow and prosper but not all is shiny gold. Two things should make anyone contemplating this route think hard: firstly, with most you pay up front, no sale and you lose your money; secondly, the prices advertised are not normally the finished deal - photos are often extra, newspaper placement (if you want it) is extra, and several other add-ons mean that overall you don't make the attractive savings you expected at first. Plus you do all the viewings. Nevertheless this will be the future, though you can guarantee that the day online outfits become the norm, having ousted the high street agent, the fees will go up: never expect a good deal from an agent.
Mind you, despite all the agents that promise to accompany the prospective buyers as part of the deal you will find that after the first couple the agents will start to phone the day before and say they are short-handed or have got their timings wrong or some such rubbish and could you do the viewing? Why? Because the most popular days for viewing are weekends and the agents or most of them still live in the "open only on Saturday morning" world and either don’t have enough staff to carry out their obligation or simply never intended to.
Do the different agents work in different ways? They will say they do but the bottom line comes first and there is rarely a fag paper between them. The posh up-market ones claim to sell the better homes and there is something in that as buyers, not knowing how they work, see the posh offices with Doris at the computer and think "this is more like it"; but the only reason they have a posh office and Doris is they charge more.
By now you will realise I am more than slightly cynical about the whole agency business. Anecdotally I could fill pages with stories of failure and misrepresentation and I imagine so could many others.
The posh agents are as mendacious as the chains. We had a good example last year, having signed the papers on a deal that included photos by a professional photographer and been shown the glossy brochures to prove it. The appointed day came for the picture taking and the manager turned up. I said "Where’s the photographer?" and he replied, "Didn’t I say? I do all the photographs !" Now he could have been a very good photographer, but he wasn’t.
We had a posh agent some years back that did nothing for three months and provided no viewers. They then phoned and suggested we lower the price, the usual first line of change when they have had no joy despite their having expertly priced the house in the first place. We dumped them and went with a local branch of a chain known at the time in Essex as Bastard Thieves because it rhymed with the same. Contrary to expectations they never stopped phoning and sending people round and they sold at an agreeable price, one of the few good agents we have had and from an unlikely source, so they do exist. How do you find one? You tell me.
There are one or two other wheezes you will come across. If things are slack you will be sent buyers who can’t afford your property to make it look like you have chance of selling when there is none. You also may get an almost immediate viewer who is a cash buyer and is in a hurry to buy; mostly these are not real buyers, they are rent-a-viewer and an offer from these has never transpired. You will also get viewers sent who have not even got their property for sale but you have distinctly stated you don’t want anyone who is not at least on the market, so they don’t tell you.
Estate agents are still not regulated other than associations run by - you guessed it - estate agents, and if anything goes wrong unless it is fraud they are very difficult to pursue for damages. Not to be regulated when dealing with with what is for most people their entire worldly goods harks back to a time when the devil took the hindmost, yet for years proposals have been put forward and then diluted or binned. They are almost a protected species.
We had a very good example in the family years ago of what would be blatant fraud in most businesses. An aunt left with a property after divorce wanted to sell and move to a flat because of her advancing years. This was in the boom of the eighties, and the property was on a private road within walking distance of Virginia Water station, one of the prime property areas in the South-East. She got no viewers and was extremely naive and I only got to hear when it was too late, otherwise we would have purchased the place as we had sold at the same time. The agent got her to drop the price in a rising market, and it did sell - to a builder friend of the agent. There was nothing anyone could do about it, and that was as good a reason to detest estate agents as any I can think of.
Now just having shown round a couple who have viewed for the third time and having been told that the nameless one couldn’t make it, the same nameless one who told the couple she would meet them here, I am even more convinced her bum really is her only asset.
It could be said that estate agents are an easy target for stereotyping and so be it as they conform regardless of ridicule. That is why if you get a good one you should stick with them: they are a rare breed, one that is actually working for you the person who pays them rather than working for themselves and a quick commission.
Update: the very nice bum showed a prospective couple round the house. Phoning the following day she almost squealed with delight that an offer had been made. "Not enough," I said so she went back. In the next phone call she was at her most breathy-voiced and successful-sounding: "An offer you can’t refuse," and so it was; well, it was what we wanted. "Only one thing: the prospective buyers have sold their place but the house they were buying before you fell through so they want you to move out by Christmas in exchange for the good price."
It was difficult at that stage not to use obscene language but I managed not to. My answer was: "If they want us to move out they will have to pay for our costs of renting, double-moving and storage, with a bit on top for the bloody inconvenience at our age."
Nice Bum goes back to the prospective buyers but returns with not enough, but pleads with us as it is a good sale. "For you and the buyer," I said, "but not us. Why can’t they rent? My wife is struggling with ever worsening arthritic knees and more. I am getting too old for all the upheaval twice over. Let them rent." Once again she goes off to convey our position.
The following day again a breathless successful voice on the phone: "Yes, they will rent, but want you to pay their storage and extra costs, plus they want to start the sale process straight away with an exchange date pencilled in," despite the fact we have not yet found a house.
"I think not," I say; big sigh at the other end. "No way am I paying their costs on anything. They lost a property: not my problem, and if the sales process starts and we don’t find something we will have to move out; and if they agree to a normal sale we will be liable if we accept their offer as they want to cover your finder's fee come what may."
This puzzles Nice Bum: "What do you want? This is normal now."
"It might be for you," I say, "but not me. All I want is an offer on the table whilst we look around and as soon as we find something we accept the offer, straight forward, no strings."
By this time NB is in despair, as the bottom (!) line is all about selling, not looking after her client. This goes against the grain. Despair is setting in. Once again she goes back.
The next day NB is despondent: the prospective buyers will look elsewhere unless we agree.
"Elsewhere it is, then."
Silence.
"I really don’t know what you want." says a very down NB.
"I think you do," I respond, and with that we return to square one.
Someone has posted a quotation on Facebook saying:
"The United Kingdom built its power around two principles: keeping the British Isles united and the European continent divided. Today it is about to succeed in the opposite."
Too neat, I think.
The EU member nations are divided too, which is why the EU is determined to make an example of us. I can hardly believe the incompetence of negotiators on the UK side, especially Mrs May since she seems to have taken on the role herself despite being on her third Brexit Secretary.
And tensions within the EU will not be resolved no matter what the EU does to us. In fact if they push us too hard they will give even more motivation to Italy, Hungary et al. to do their own thing.
It's the combination of wiliness and mule-headedness on the part of the EU leadership that is stoking the crisis.
Data source: Press Gazette(The right-hand column is mine.)
To put it into perspective, if you multiply the daily sales by six and add the Sunday edition, the Mail's weekly loss totals 1,019,198 - more than the entire current sales of the Guardian/Observer (979,801).
Why so large? In part, possibly because of Mr George Carron Greig's editorship since he took over the DM from Paul Dacre. The new line on Brexit, vilifying those who are trying to see the result of the Referendum put into practice, will have repelled many readers.
As Dacre warned in the Spectator:
"Support for Brexit is in the DNA of both the Daily Mail and, more pertinently, its readers. Any move to reverse this would be editorial and commercial suicide."
Further, it is my impression (and do please correct me if I am wrong) that Greig's Mail on Sunday was (still is?) supportive of Scottish independence-while-simultaneously-remaining-in-the-EU. This oxymoronic nationalism is a strange confection also espoused by the otherwise penetrative intelligence of Craig Murray and I can only understand it in terms of an almost gibbering atavistic hatred of the English. Or maybe something akin to that expatriate sentimentalism that causes New Yorkers to drink Guinness on St Patrick's Day, even if they're not of Irish descent.
Odd, you may think, that Lambeth-born, Eton-and-Oxford educated "Geordie" Greig might (if I interpret him rightly) take this stance towards bonny Scotland; but his father served valiantly in the Scots Guards during WWII and it's just possible that there may be family tradition at work here.
Which is why I recently wrote him a letter explaining the reason for cancelling my subscription, and concluding:
"May I also say how illogical it seems for a Scot to desire independence for his country within a profoundly undemocratic and micromanaging European Union, moreover a Union determined to become a single nation in which Scotland’s fate is to be a negligible backwater; and how contradictory it seems for him to wish this peculiar freedom for his country while doing his best to deny genuine self-government to the rest of the United Kingdom."
If I'm wrong about him, then perhaps I've made a fool of myself - not such a big task, really. But if I'm right, then I look forward to a Stuka-like further nosedive in Mail readership.
P.S. Bad Maths! The total actual losses in sales should have been calculated by reference to the levels of a year before. But that would support my general point even more re DM/MoS readership haemorrhage vs current readership of the Guardian/Observer.
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I followed up a political link to another site and as usual there were ads interrupting the flow of reading, all the way through.
So I clicked on "ad choices" and found there were 113 companies assuming the right to track my online path and target tailored ads at me, unless I specifically forbade it - which as far as I can, I have done, now.
I sometimes read columnists who complain that they get lots of ads for penis extensions and so on. What do they surf the Net for in their free time?
But for fun, I thought I'd do a few teasing Google searches myself:
"How can I make my penis smaller?"
"How can I cure my sex addiction?"
"How can I become less handsome?"
I'll let you know how I get on.
Any further suggestions for search sentences? Will you try something similar yourself - e.g. lots of questions about broccoli? Here's the first non-financial one I noticed on Tim Newman's blog, since the searches a few minutes ago. On the site it's a gif and the girl appears to be rocking back and forth a bit, hands out of sight; not exactly what I asked Doctor Google for. Still, they're doing their best, I suppose:
Found on http://www.desertsun.co.uk/blog/ 24.11.18
Faced with the truly awful draft Withdrawal Agreement that the Prime Minister seems determined to push onto us, some are saying "See, why don't we just stay in?"
That is a dangerous illusion. The word "remain" seems to imply staying as you are, avoiding the risks of the unknown; and in life, often a change of course overestimates reward and underestimates risks and costs, which is why 80% of new businesses fail.
But with the EU, Remain is not the option to stay safely on the platform: it is a decision to stay on the train.
And where is that train going? It is now going where it was originally supposed to go.
In the 1920s Jean Monnet began to lay his plans for a supranational organisation that would make military conflict between France and Germany impossible; first, by controlling coal and steel - the basic materials of modern industrial war-slaughter - and then by acquiring more "competences" (a code-word for "powers", used with other deceptive terms to soften the resistance from national governments and peoples.)
It is not only Britain that resisted. Despite Community discussions on military policy, France wanted to develop her own nuclear bomb; and despite attempts to harmonise agricultural policy, France wanted to protect French farming, which after WWII still employed a quarter of her working population and where the too-rapid introduction of efficiencies could have resulted in major civil disorder. De Gaulle vetoed British entry until the EC agreed the Common Agricultural Policy that used most of the Community's financial resources to sustain small French farmers. So France got what she wanted.
Britain could only get in once the CAP deal was unalterable - and the impact on farming and fishing (the incompetence of the negotiators on our side is staggering - fishing had hardly been considered!) was profound. This is not to mention the effects on our other industries, including coal and steel.
Remain supporters sometimes delight in pointing out that Margaret Thatcher herself was a Europeanist, forgetting that in earlier years she, like many others, saw the European project as essentially a trading bloc. She was prepared for Britain to play its part and fought for a rebate to make the arrangements less unfair towards us; in other words, she was trying to make the system work.
And that was reasonable, for by the early 1980s the EEC train had long been stationary at the halt of inter-governmentalism: negotiated multinational settlements.
But then, with a lurch, the train set off again. As Booker and North's magnificent study "The Great Deception" shows, in 1983 a plan was put together to unite Europe into a single nation. Monnet's dream, of which he was despairing by the end of his long life, was to come true after all. The Italian Communist Altiero Spinelli had a team draft a treaty to establish the European Union that was passed by the Parliament on 14 February 1984. There were two stages: first, the Single European Act, which was signed in 1986 and moved towards the establishment of a single market by 1992; and then the Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992 and setting the destination of European economic and monetary union, the foundation of a new supranational State.
Maastricht was the "dolorous stroke" for British sovereignty, and recognised as such by Parliamentarians who were otherwise strongly opposed to each other:
Margaret Thatcher wrote to Bill Cash MP on 17 March 1993 to say "I understand that it is being suggested in some quarters that I would have agreed to the Maastricht Treaty. May I make it clear that I would NOT have done so. In my view it is contrary to British interests and damaging to our Parliamentary Democracy."
Tony Benn MP, in the Third Reading debate in Parliament on 20 May 1993 (starting 6.35 p.m.), said "I have often wondered whether, when we lost democracy in Britain, it would be to the red army, the Militant Tendency or Oswald Mosley, but in fact we ourselves have given it up. The House has agreed to abandon its responsibility to hold to account those who make our laws. We have given it all up." For him it was - said dramatically but without exaggeration - "my last speech in a free Parliament."
The Maastricht Treaty was further amended over the years in Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon, each time extending the powers of the EU. Despite the British Labour Party's 1995 manifesto pledge to hold a referendum on the European Constitution, when it came down to it the Labour Government defeated a vote in Parliament to do just that.
So the express continues on its journey towards nationhood, and not only by the establishment of a Central Bank and centralised budgetary control over member States. Two days after attending the centenary commemoration of the ending of the First World War, Frau Merkel was in the European Parliament, once again urging the setting-up of a European military "intervention unit" and saying that "we have to work on a vision to establish a real European army one day."
And it's not just the loss of British Parliamentary sovereignty that is at issue. We have little enough control over our own politicians, but at least we were able to make PM David Cameron change his mind over bombing Syria. Our history has caused us to develop constitutional restraints on the Executive - restraints it sometimes tries to circumvent by "Henry VIII" enabling clauses and the use of Orders in Council. Even if we cannot always bell the cat, we have a political culture of healthy distrust towards our rulers.
The EU Constitution, on the other hand, is designed specifically to overcome popular resistance to unification, so that its "Parliament" is little more than a talking-shop where many members merely sign in and straightaway pull their wheelie suitcases back towards the taxi rank.
Many of the EU's political leaders have had their attitudes to power shaped in a very different political culture - think of Frau Merkel in East Germany, Donald Tusk in Communist Poland. More even than our own political elite, these people tend towards the bureaucratic and authoritarian. So not only has our country joined a larger organisation (thus further diminishing the citizens' voice), but this new and still evolving superstate centralises decisions almost as though it were run by an Emperor and his court. Who will restrain it if it decides sometime - as empires always have done - to make war? To invade, to expand, to silence critics, to crush rebellion?
To stay is not "to stay as we are." Paradoxically, to leave the EU is our best chance of holding on to an imperfect status quo.
