New post on "The Conservative Woman"

... in which I discuss Bercow's Monday statement and the points of order arising.

Here:

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/point-of-disorder-mr-speaker/

FRIDAY MUSIC: Fandango, by JD

The Fandango is a lively couples dance from Spain, usually in triple metre, traditionally accompanied by guitars, castanets, or hand-clapping ("palmas" in Spanish). Fandango can both be sung and danced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandango

Why the "Withdrawal Agreement" does NOT mean leaving the EU

Htp: Wiggiaatlarge, JD

I Promise To Pay The Bearer - Nothing, by JD

Reading this in the Daily Mail the other day reminded me that I had seen people waving their cards at the tills and then walking away without collecting any receipt or verification. How do they know at the end of the day what they have spent and where? Do they all have such wonderful photographic memories? Very often the purchase is for a minimal amount which baffles me even more.

But the use of credit cards and debit cards is annoyingly widespread. I say annoying because the users of cards are the ones who hold up the queue while they fumble in purse or wallet trying to find the card. Then they take an age to put their pin number into the reader and then take their time replacing said card in purse or wallet.

(It doesn't really annoy me, it just amuses me and I have all the time in the world.)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6814055/One-three-card-payments-Britain-day-contactless.html

But in among the comments was this: "A misleading article. Whilst payment volume is higher by card, transaction volume is still note and coin ahead of card, including contactless."

So what exactly is the percentage of cashless transactions in the 'market place' and what is the percentage of cash purchases?

An illustrative tale:

I was watching the racing from Cheltenham last Friday (Gold Cup day) and enjoying it as usual of course. The coverage includes news from the 'betting ring' at regular intervals. There is one reporter standing watching the bookmakers and telling us about the changing odds. Before one of the races he was standing with £10,000 in cash in his hand and saying it was from a punter who was waging it on a particular horse, he then threw the money into the bookmaker's satchel while shouting at the camera. He did the same again before the Gold Cup. He counted out five bundles of £1000 each and said 'this is for a friend of mine' and he handed the money to the bookie and received a betting slip in return. (Both horses lost, by the way!)

So I thought to myself: how is that going to work in our new exciting and wonderful cashless society? And if 'cashless' betting ever arrives, what happens if you have a winner and you go to collect your winnings? "Give me your bank details please and we will transfer your winnings electronically." Yes.....er, no I don't think so.

 I can't imagine that the bookies will welcome such a thing. More to the point, owners and professional gamblers are all happier to deal in cash and some owners are very rich men indeed and are not without influence in this country.

And then I thought of other instances where cash is the best choice; car boot sales or craft fairs or 'flea' markets and other second hand markets.

My father always had a pocket full of cash and so did I in the days we were building houses. Most traders did prefer cash because it was and is quicker and easier than anything else if you need to buy materials and other odds and ends during the working day. In fact up to the early seventies there were still things like wage packets and people were paid with real cash money! (Pound notes are not 'real' money; they are promissory notes. It is written on every bank note - 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of £xyz')

I still pay for everything with cash as far as possible. In fact I have forgotten the pin number for my credit card; if I use it at all it is for buying on line. Last time I used it outside was to buy a second hand car - half cash and half card! I suppose I would get arrested if I tried to do that now :)

Will we all be forced into this plastic world or will enough people resist? And is it as widespread as the papers are telling us because I have seen contradictory articles saying that there is still £x billion in notes in circulation.

As my grandfather used to say when he looked at the state of the world "I'm glad I'm on the way out!" and then start laughing at the absurdity of life. I am pleased to say I have inherited his sense of humour!
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Sackerson says:

The Bank of England responded to a Freedom Of Information request several years ago, saying:

"The link with gold was finally broken in 1931 and since that time there has been no other asset into which holders have the right to convert Bank of England notes. They can only be exchanged for other Bank of England notes. Nowadays public faith in the pound is maintained in a different way - through the Bank's operation of monetary policy, the object of which, by statute, is price stability."

Faith and trust are in short supply these days; and "price stability" doesn't mean what it used to. The BoE says: 

"Monetary policy affects how much prices are rising – called the rate of inflation. We set monetary policy to achieve the Government’s target of keeping inflation at 2%.

"Low and stable inflation is good for the UK’s economy and it is our main monetary policy aim."

To keep pace with target inflation (and how is that measured? RPI? CPI? Something else?) you need your bank account to give you 2.5% per annum pre-basic rate tax - on all your savings, not up to some wretchedly low limit.

Money used to be a store of value. For centuries, a loaf of bread was a penny. And as I said a few years ago:

"The Bank of England's website has a page that lets you calculate cumulative inflation for any period from 1750 onwards. According to them, a basket of goods and services costing £1 in 1750 would have cost (the equivalent of) £1.80 in 1900 - an average annual inflation rate of 0.3%. That period covers the tremendous increase in productivity introduced by the Industrial Revolution and further late-nineteenth-century scientific and technological developments, so inflation is not needed for business and prosperity."

Then there's the danger of strangers electronically hacking into one's bank account; and the wholesale spying by retailers and potentially the Government, on all our transactions.

But if you want something worse to worry about, there's the EU's Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD). Under this, if a bank is in crisis, it can cut its debt to creditors and/or exchange the debt for a share in the ownership of the bank ("Congratulations! You are now part owner of a dodgy business!")

So what, silly creditors, who'd lend money to a bank, you might think. What many people still don't realise is that their bank deposits are no such thing - money left with a bank is, legally, an investment. And, dear "depositor", you are not first in the queue to be paid when a bank defaults.

If more people understood the implications, they would be a little less likely to leave their life savings in those reassuringly solid marble-and-plate-glass fortresses. This is causing concern in high finance circles, too.

Except holding cash - paper receipts for Nothing At All - is hardly an attractive alternative.

Can you imagine that at a time like this, Canada's comical boy PM sold off the rest of the country's gold? Keynes called gold a "barbarous relic", but it has an intrinsic value - they used to say that "an ounce of gold buys a handmade suit" and that's still pretty much true. Compare that with a rotting paper relic.

Clap hands for Tinkerbell, everyone. Only the power of faith keeps us aloft.

Why it's so hard to agree a deal with the EU

The Times They Are A-Changing, by Wiggiaatlarge

I had to make a journey down to London from Norwich the other day to see my sister who is not at all well. Having been twice diagnosed with pleurisy by her GP she was taken into hospital just after Christmas in excruciating pain to be told she has bone cancer and ten fractures to ribs and spine and as well as being on a chemo program she is encased in a brace that resemble Robocop.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I rang the door bell but she is amazingly upbeat and is of the ‘have to get on with it’ brigade which certainly helps at times like this.

She has always been the family archivist. If you want a photo, essay, whatever, she will have it tucked away in the dozens of boxes full of photos and much much more. With her husband being a not well man with numerous serious ailments the place resembled a cross between a care home and a museum. So much stuff is kept there, it borders on hoarding.

She started to show me old photo albums and there were dozens of myself as a child that I have never seen, ‘Oh you will have to look at this then’ and out would come another full of family photos going back to before WWI.

My sister has also just taken in the contents of an aunt who just died, the last of the generation of my parents who was 96. A brilliant student at St Martins School of Art before the war, she went on to be a fashion editor for a large magazine group attending the Paris fashion shows and others; always immaculate, as she was to the end when going into hospital more worried about her hair than the illness - habits die hard.

There were folios and boxes of her drawings, not just of fashion, also going back to her student days. Much is being collated and given to St Martins for their archives; some individual pieces were stunning.

Anyway, among all this nostalgia was a series of wartime magazines called Parents, sixpence monthly. I took one copy as it contained a picture of me inside (no, I am not going to show on here): I had been entered for the Bonniest Babies competition. Amazingly it had a £50 prize for the winner, a lot of money in 1944 ! And sadly I did not win, but my mum still loved me ?

Inside this small austere magazine are the articles and adverts of the time and as always when confronted by something like this the usual, “I remember” prefixes dozens of items displayed within plus much within the articles.

The adverts naturally are child associated…..

Some of the articles today would be laughed at - or would they? So much then was basic common sense, something sadly lacking in many areas of today's world, from how to make slippers for your child from scraps from your rag bag (who has one of those these days?) to health tips on how to handle baby’s first tooth, and the problem of “dirty heads” - we all met with nitty Nora at school with her metal comb in the bowl of disinfectant ! Also we all lined up for a dessert spoon of malt from a very big tin, always a wonderful antidote to the cod liver oil we also lined up for. And how to cope with your child and his listening to the radio and its educational value ?

And Ministry of Food adverts with tips on how to make nourishing healthy meals out of very little and what we can do with cheese - the MoF recommends Cheese Moulds using grated cheese, unsweetened custard breadcrumbs, a teaspoon of made custard, a pinch of salt and pepper, all blended and mixed, poured into a mould and set: turn it out like a blancmange and serve with green salad and tomato and cold potato salad, Does anyone remember that ?

And what appears to be a curious ad for saving paper. Obviously it was a war time request, but the ad does not say what the paper was saved for. It finishes with in bold: “but it is so important, so vital, so necessary  to continue to save paper all the time.” Wartime naturally had a very different set of values, so much today is taken for granted; war condensed requirements down to to the basic, the vital. It is hard to imagine going back to all that. Though the utterances of certain scaremongering idiots would have us believe Brexit will achieve the same; they have no idea.

Brexit: healing divisions, keeping the peace

A few days ago, I posted a piece titled "Fighting Talk: Brexit and civil disorder," arguing that the disconnect between Parliament and the people was potentially - in the long run - a threat to the Queen's peace in this country.

But if that sounds over-the-top (as is so much in the language of public debate these days), consider Professor David Starkey's article in the Daily Mail today

"It is no exaggeration to say that British democracy, which stands in direct line with Magna Carta, is now unravelling before us [...]

"The EU referendum tore apart the veil: it was now the People versus the Parliament...And where will it end? In [an]other very British revolution? Or something nastier?

"I don’t want to prophesy, good historian that I am, but I fear the worst."

Trouble starts with intemperate language, and there's a lot of it now. Not just in the illogical and ill-tempered exchanges on social media, but in mainstream print news. Even Boris Johnson, with all his experience in both journalism and politics, is so reckless as to say that Mrs May has wrapped a "suicide vest" around the Constitution.

And then there's the Union Jacks sprouting everywhere on Facebook, and the self-styled patriotic groups. At first this may be seen as a bit of venting, not to be taken seriously; but then what I remember seeing of the first formations of the Serbian Army in Bosnia was a bunch of fat, scruffy oiks.

Maybe there's a historical rhythm to riot, insurrection and war. It could be that every generation has to start a fight. 1914, 1939, the youthquake of the 1960s, the fall of Russian Communism in 1989... we're about due, perhaps.

These days the word "extremists" is usually accompanied by the adjective "far-right", as though that is the only element that threatens us. I would argue that the State will manage to deal with such people - they identify themselves with little disguise and can easily be spied on electronically, policed, infiltrated, warned, tried, jailed. The task of the State is made harder by the fact that the Internet allows for the proliferation of "echo-chamber" sites, reinforcing the prejudices of the deluded so that they drift ever further away from common sense; the number of these madhouses is such that  not all incidents will be prevented. However, the perpetrators are likely to be caught, sooner or later. It is like the fire service: there will be outbreaks, but they can be addressed swiftly and contained.

A real conflagration requires really serious mass discontent, often with help and encouragement from outside; an analysis of events that promises a better alternative; organisation and leadership; a trigger. And it may succeed if the ruling power has its energies divided.

Think of the historic difficulties between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland. The Fenians  bombed London's Clerkenwell Prison in 1867, but it was the middle of WWI that was an opportunity for a mass uprising.

Then there was Germany in WWI, supplying 50 million gold marks to Russia's subversives so that they could circulate propaganda newspapers among army and navy units and factory workforces; and then sending Lenin to them in a sealed train; all to collapse the established order in Russia and free German divisions to come West and tackle the Allied Powers.

Too late. But the law-abiding, freedom-loving, God-fearing German nation was driven mad with war, starvation through blockades that were continued after war's end, vindictive peace terms that bankrupted them and gave them a hyperinflation that wiped out the savings of the middle class.

Then think of China in WWII, torn by warlords, and Stalin's sponsorship of Mao Tse-Tung as the latter was carried thousands of miles on a litter, reading voraciously so he could learn from the tyrants of the past. And later, Mao's own sponsorship of Communism in neighbouring countries.

A lot has to go wrong, and be made to go wrong, before ordinary people tear up their ordinary lives.

But when society is put under extreme stress, millennial movements spring up. Norman Cohn's classic "The Pursuit Of the Millennium" (1957, revised 1970) shows how mass anxiety and despair, caused by economic breakdown, drive communities crazy.

We're not there now, nothing like. In fact we in this country could lose a lot before we got to be merely as poor as we were in the early 1970s, and that was luxury compared to a generation before, and the privations of the interwar years (the Roaring Twenties didn't roar in Britain, and that was before the Depression.)

Yet there are historians and economists who claim to have identified a long economic cycle of boom and bust (remember Gordon Brown's claim that he'd beaten it?) For example:

• Nikolai Kondratiev theorised a wave length of 40-60 years, which implied that it was beyond the power of a centralised Socialist government to buck the pattern; so Stalin had him shot in 1938.
• Irving Fisher's analysis of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Depression saw a cycle of debt growth followed by deflation; these ideas were later developed by Hyman Minsky and then Australian Professor Steve Keen, who was one of the mere handful (he said 12 at first, later revised to perhaps 20) of economists to foresee the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (most of his fellow professionals tend/ed to ignore debt and inflation, thinking that the effects would be spread around in society and offset by wage rises.)
• Original thinker Charles Hugh Smith sees an even longer wave of 150 - 200 years and thinks we are approaching the breakdown point. 
• Financial analyst Martin Armstrong has developed a pattern-theory around the number pi and speaks of a "monetary crisis cycle" repeated throughout history (including in the ancient world); he sees 2020/2021 as a turning point ("that is probably where we will see the dollar rally break the world monetary system.")

Rulers of the past had seers and astrologers; today, governments have economists. Maybe it's all nonsense. But modern history certainly shows periodic horrible disruptions to our peaceful lives. What a wonderful period of relative peace and unparalleled prosperity we have enjoyed so far; but it's not guaranteed and not going to continue without our support.

I think there are two points to make here. One is that when disaster strikes, it may not be "far right extremists" we have to worry about so much as mass movements led from the Left and representing groups that feel excluded, ignored, despised and put down. How else to explain the success of Trump's Presidential campaign, and the Leave vote in the EU Referendum? These upsurges may not have been captained by Lefty politicians; but they could be captured by them. And when times are harsh, people become harsh.

Which leads us to the second point. Just as Noah built his Ark in sunshine, and Joseph advised Egypt's Pharaoh to store grain during seven good years to tide over the people in the following lean ones, so this (if not rather earlier) is the time our political leadership and news commentariat should be mending the divisions in our society, so that we can pull together when we face challenges of the scale that we have never confronted in our lives, though our parents and grandparents had to.

Imagine if, in 2016, either David Cameron or his successor Theresa May had said something like:

A very serious and difficult decision has been made, after a long period of fair and thorough discussion and a vote in which a record 33 million people participated. We promised that it would be a once in a generation choice, and that we, your Government, would be bound by it and would implement it faithfully.

This we will do.

A referendum like this was always going to be contentious. But just as the Government itself accepts the outcome, no matter how close, those who were of the alternative opinion, by taking part in it, have also agreed to accept it; and those who did not vote at all, as was their right, have thereby shown their willingness to go along with the result whichever way it went. This is how Parliament itself works - often on much narrower margins of votes - and it is what makes us a democracy and keeps us at peace. After a division, we reunite.

The key decision was whether we should remain part of a political organisation called the European Union. Together, we in Britain have chosen another path. So, in two or three years' time, we will once again have full and exclusive control over our laws and judiciary, our taxes and trade.

For of course we shall continue to work and trade with and visit the continent of Europe and its peoples, whether or not they are themselves members of the EU.

During the transition period, we will be negotiating agreements with the EU about how we deal with them in terms of goods and services, immigration and emigration, travel arrangements, the rights of foreign people working here and British people working abroad, financial services and so on. There is a lot of hard work to be done, and it will be done. We look forward to constructive discussions with our European partners in our changing situation, as well as with the rest of the world.

In the meantime we call on all people in this country, their political representatives, the news media and others to understand and accept that the nation's decision is collective, clear, binding and final. The agenda from now on is to manage the transition as smoothly as possible and to the benefit of all. Not for the first time, the British people have made history together and now we set ourselves once again to work for the common good.

Yes, just imagine.
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https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2019/03/fighting-talk-brexit-and-civil-disorder.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6818107/Historian-DAVID-STARKEY-self-satisfied-politicians-launched-coup-Brexit.html

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay17/disintegration5-17.html

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/understanding-cycles/2018-panic-cycle-year/