Just because it’s a conspiracy theory, it doesn’t mean it’s not true

It’s not just social media that start rumours. A week ago, the Washington Times  published a story linking the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan to the highest-category bioresearch lab in that city. An Israeli expert emailed the WT with the allegation – or speculation, shall we say – that the Wuhan facility was part of the Chinese government’s clandestine  biological weapons program, though only indirectly: what he called ‘dual civilian-military research.’ According to the WT article, the US State Department issued a report last year echoing such suspicions.

Chinese scientists uploaded the results of their analysis of the new virus’ genetic code on 22 January, which to some may seem suspiciously fast, bearing in mind the first case of infection was identified in December. Nevertheless, in itself this timing is not sinister: when SARS broke out 18 years ago US and Canadian scientists unravelled the code in little over a month. Since then a range of bat-related coronaviruses have been studied and the Chinese findings are that the latest one is 79.5% identical to SARS. So, no smoking gun there.

Why would an Israeli intelligence officer break cover with a story like this, at this time? Is it a move to help sustain funding for the military at a time when President Trump’s detailed ‘two-state’ plan to settle the Palestinian issues threatens to bring some kind of peace to the region? We can all play at conspiracy theories.

However, raising the biowarfare issue may prove an embarrassment to this informant’s side, if he has one. Unlike China and the USA, Israel is not a party to the Biological Weapons Convention, whereas Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Libya are, and Egypt is a signatory awaiting ratification. Naturally determined to defend itself when surrounded by mortal enemies, Israel is alleged to have not only numerous nuclear weapons but an offensive biological warfare capability.

If so, was that email to the Washington Times intended precisely to draw foreign attention to Israel’s multivariate arsenal? Sunni-Shia tensions centring on Iran may have encouraged a group of Middle Eastern countries to give a cautious welcome to Trump’s proposals, but the ostensibly (they know their supporters) ‘not contents’ include the Arab League; the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and the President of the Palestinian Authority (Mahmoud Abbas). Perhaps Israel is rattling its tail and warning ‘Don’t tread on me.’

Biowarfare is one of the horrors to come out of Pandora’s box, and no-one knows how to stuff it back in again. As though humanity hasn’t enough ways to torment itself! We must suspect that a number of countries are saying one thing and secretly doing another but let’s remember that the last gift in the box was Hope.

A related – and topical - issue is disinformation, of which the Chinese lab one may be an example. Topical, because one of the undertakings in the 2019 version draft Political Declaration between the EU and the UK is a ‘security partnership’ to tackle ‘disinformation campaigns’ (paragraph 78). The term is not defined there and given both parties’ love of secrecy could mean ‘attempts to discover and reveal what our horrid leaders are up to.’

Julian Assange is still in jail. Unlawfully, according to his friend and veteran investigative journalist John Pilger. Shhh…

Save the BBC! By JD

The British Broadcasting Company Limited began in 1922

In defence of the BBC and public service broadcasting

The first director general of the BBC was John Reith (later to become Lord Reith). Reith summarised the BBC's purpose in three words: inform, educate, entertain; this remains part of the organisation's mission statement to this day.

The term "Reithianism" describes certain principles of broadcasting associated with Lord Reith. These include an equal consideration of all viewpoints, probity, universality and a commitment to public service. These traditional values became synonymous with the BBC and were a template copied by national broadcasters around the world.

Reith was Scottish and his idea of 'traditional values' would most likely have been based upon Thomas Reid's 'Scottish Common Sense Realism.' (Reid's 'common sense' was adopted and adapted by Thomas Jefferson for America's Declaration of Independence and their Constitution.)

My own view of life is also, I hope, one of common sense and so here are my own personal memories of TV past and present, with a side track or two into the social context of the TV age.

The first TV my family acquired was in 1954 or maybe 1955, I'm not exactly sure but I recall walking home from school and, seeing the distinctive 'H' shaped aerial above the chimney pot. I ran the last 100 yards or so into the house. We had a telly! A large wooden mahogany cabinet which housed a tiny 9" screen. Just one channel, the BBC.

Our household had entered the new television age and because my father was the first in the street to have a TV it meant that we had a crowded house for the 1955 FA Cup Final between Newcastle United and Manchester City. I can remember sitting cross-legged atop the dining table staring at the tiny screen and its fuzzy picture. Fuzzy it may have been but it didn't matter because it was, or seemed to us, a magical miracle.

Obviously I soon became familiar with the children's programmes and my favourite from the early days was The Bumblies, a very imaginative and surreal show from 'Professor' Michael Bentine.



There were also several American western series, the most famous being The Lone Ranger with his 'faithful' Indian companion, Tonto. (This was clearly an in-joke by the producers and writers; look it up in your Spanish/English dictionary.)

But among the many western series the best for me was The Cisco Kid; his sidekick was called Pancho who was adept at mangling the English language. At the end of each half hour episode the pair would 'ride off into the sunset' with Pancho shouting "Let's went!" That particular phrase appealed to me for some reason and many years later I would try to explain/translate to Spanish friends.

And then in 1958 (I think) the ITV channel was added in our region. My mother's reaction to the programme listing in the newspaper was "They are all half-hour programmes." But she and my father came from a generation who were used to 90 minute feature films at the cinema and chopping that into half-hour segments to accommodate advertising breaks would have been annoying. They and most other people were perfectly capable of concentrating for such a short time but advertising breaks would inevitably, eventually weaken and fragment people's attention span.

At school the classroom wit declared that it was a shame how the programmes interrupted the adverts. Probably without realising it, he was on to something: It was the showman P.T. Barnum who famously said “Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.” The bosses of commercial TV clearly agreed with that sentiment!

The radio continued to be the source of home entertainment for a few more years and there were a lot of extremely good comedy shows: the Goons of course (or the Go-On show as one mystified BBC executive described it); there was also Beyond Our Ken and Round The Horne, The Navy Lark, Hancock's Half Hour, Ken Dodd and his Diddy Men, Al Read, and many more.

Most of those comedy shows on radio continued well into the 1960s but there was a gradual shifting of the audience from radio to TV and with the appointment of Hugh Carleton-Greene as Director General in 1960, television began to reflect the changes in society and audiences grew; helped along by the introduction of a third channel, BBC 2 plus the colour TV in 1968 as well as new and different programmes such as -

: That Was The Week That Was (1962)
: Dr Who (1963)
: Match of The Day (1964)

William Hartnell (right) as the first incarnation of Doctor Who

'Reflecting the changes in society' is not strictly accurate; it is more that the BBC began to reflect the attitudes of the Director General and his social milieu which would have been that of perhaps a few thousand or so in the metropolis which did not reflect, in my experience, the culture of the provinces. The provinces and the capital are two very different peoples as pointed out in a rather acerbic aphorism of Nicolás Gómez Dávila: "The modern metropolis is not a city; it is a disease."

And so the Beeb gradually reflected the so called 'swinging sixties' and current received wisdom is that it was the start of the decline of the moral standards of the established order and the beginning of a rebellious youth culture; but the reality is rather different.

The disaffection with the 'establishment' began immediately after the Second World War with the shock election of Clement Attlee's government when everyone had expected a grateful nation to elect the war leader Winston Churchill. The late forties and the fifties brought the first rebels (with or without a cause.) In Britain there was the rise to prominence of writers who became known as Angry Young Men. In the USA their 'angry young men' were in the cinema: Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953); James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955); Blackboard Jungle (1955); and Rock Around The Clock (1956).

During the sixties TV expanded rapidly and colour brought new possibilities such as the televising of snooker, which produced its own inadvertent comedy when commentator Ted Lowe said "and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green."

That is one of the reasons so many sports commentators endeared themselves to the viewing public. They had no guidelines to follow and there was no 'correct' way to do what they did, so they relied on their own enthusiasm for their sport: Bill McLaren for rugby, Eddie Waring for rugby league, Peter O'Sullivan for racing, Harry Carpenter for boxing, David Coleman for football and athletics, and who could not love motor racing's excitable Murray Walker, sometimes known as Muddly Talker?

In many ways the sixties and seventies were a golden age for TV with the breadth of programmes reflecting the Reithian ideal to "inform, educate, entertain" and there were occasonally audiences of up to 20 million for some programmes.

As with most things in life, it couldn't last. The decline in quality of the programmes probably began in the eighties with a noticeable withering away of those three ideals. And with the increase in the number of channels available there was a need to fill those channels with something, anything no matter the quality. TV companies were, after all, in the business of selling their audiences to their advertisers. The formulaic repetitiveness of the programmes on offer means we have now arrived at a situation where the only place we see anything really creative or imaginative on our televisions is during the adverts.

Bruce Springsteen in 1992 released a song called "57 channels and nothin' on." That title and the reason for it are self evident.

The current hostility to the BBC is based on a perceived 'lefty' bias within its programmes. A quick scan through the schedule reveals not so much a bias as a kind of schizophrenia. I don't see any socialist propaganda in these from the BBC -

: Dragon's Den
: The Apprentice
: Bargain Hunt; Cash in the Attic; Antiques Roadshow
: Homes Under The Hammer
: Festival of Remembrance from the Royal Albert hall
: Trooping of the colour
: State opening of Parlaiment
: The Proms

And does that perceived bias have any influence on viewers/listeners; do they even notice it? The 2016 referendum result suggests not and the recent election result must have come as an even bigger shock to the 'lefties', whoever they are (I have never been very sure who is to be defined as a 'lefty' and who is not. A clear definition would be helpful; slur by slogan is not a great deal of use to anyone except perhaps those who use slogans as an alternative to thinking.) To suggest that TV has such a powerful influence on its audience is an insult to the people of this country and those who continually carp on about left-wing bias really ought to get out more and meet some 'ordinary' people for a change, a refreshing change in fact.

The BBC is still the best and usually the only place to see excellent Arts programmes; it offers very good travel shows; I am not so sure about its science output, the last good science presenter was Sir Patrick Moore. The BBC has zero competition when it comes to the excellence of their music programmes both on Radio3 and on TV. The commercial channels are a wasteland without music in my view!

The BBC is so much a part of our culture perhaps we do not realise how important it is as our national broadcaster. The great State occasions are always covered by the BBC, part of their public service remit. At Christmas and Easter it is the BBC which gives us the annual carols from King's College, Cambridge as well as the appropriate church services during the two major events in the Christian calendar. And they still show Songs of Praise every week, however diluted it seems to be at times. The commercial channels pay little or no attention to any of those things.

So to all the siren voices calling for the abolition of the BBC, I would say: be careful what you wish for, it might come true and you will regret and miss it, if or when it disappears!

Coronavirus: China’s perfect storm?

This could be worse than the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak of 2002/3. Vlogger and former China-based businessman Matthew Tye (aka ‘laowhy86’) says that the new strain of coronavirus seems to be more transmissible than SARS; and early indications are that more people are dying than recovering. That makes the need for containment even more urgent.

Yet officials have been slow to admit the problem and respond accordingly, so exacerbating the spread of the disease. The first case appeared in Wuhan on 8 December, but a planned food-sharing public banquet for 100,000 people there went ahead on 18  January, by which time 49 cases had already been made public, and the next day the populace was assured that the sickness was not very infectious. When a number of performers fell ill during the Government’s New Year celebrations on 21 January the State media merely praised them for carrying on with the show and showing great spirit. The following day came the order to wear masks (not enforceable with fines until a week later), and on 23 January Wuhan was finally quarantined and the airport closed. However, by this time five million people had already left the area and passengers had been allowed onto planes if they showed no symptoms, which unfortunately in the case of this virus take a long time to manifest themselves – as the authorities already knew - so many infected persons may have travelled out by air.

As China urbanises, many millions of people are moving around the country in pursuit of work. For example in Wuhan’s province of Hubei, the 2000 national census showed 2.8 million migrants  moving north to Beijing and south to Guangdong (both c. 700 miles distant) and to other coastal cities. This central region is well served with modern rail and road networks, and although Wuhan’s airport is now shut, there are huge numbers of other aviation routes in China, both internal and international, so air travel threatens to be an especially powerful disease vector.

The initial concern of officials, says Tye, was to suppress news of the outbreak. Eight people were arrested on 1 January for talking about the existence of the virus, and on 14 January media reporters were detained and their phones and cameras searched for information. By the end of the month the government was still arresting those who spoke out, and (26 January) banning articles on the internet.

Fellow vlogger and Tye associate Winston Sterzel (aka ‘serpentza’) reports on a doctor who treated the first cases and informed his clinical WeChat messaging group on 30 December, telling them not to make it public for fear of being closed down, but to warn family and friends. The authorities picked up on this and made him sign an undertaking not to spread rumours: ‘If you continue to be stubborn and don’t repent […] you will be punished to the full extent of the law! Do you understand?’ Subsequently he contracted the virus himself and is still fighting for his life.


Seeing the intensive preparations now ongoing (e.g. new hospitals being set up in days), it seems that the government’s media are under-declaring the number of cases. Sterzel says he receives feedback from Chinese followers saying more people die of the flu in the USA; but he points out that with coronavirus a higher proportion are hospitalised and there is no vaccine. Further, although China reports improbably few cases of flu annually, Sterzel’s doctor wife tells him that this is because their method of recording causes of death is different than in the West. Rather than report the immediate cause, they will write down any pre-existing condition (e.g. a heart problem) and attribute the death to that. That is the opposite approach to that used by the USA and UK (for an example of ours see page 5 here). So, this is a way in which the true state of affairs can be disguised.

The crisis management has moved on to scapegoating since (says Tye) the Chinese Communist Party’s focus is on maintaining its power and the confidence of the populace. The mayor of Wuhan resigned on 27 January, becoming a target for public shaming and hatred, but later laid part of the responsibility on the central government in Beijing, which in turn seeks to blame the local administration in Hubei, which had been downplaying the scale of the emergency.

The Chinese strongly resent critical comments from outsiders, says Sterzel, and are quick to accuse the latter of racism. It’s understandable, given China’s treatment by foreigners in past times; but it encourages a culture of denial and disinformation.

Some may say that Tye and Sterzel may not be entirely unbiased, since they have abandoned their businesses in China because of difficulties with the authorities. For his part Sterzel says that since President Xi came to power attitudes to foreigners have hardened and the ‘golden age’ of opportunity there for non-Chinese is over.

It is also most unfortunate that this epidemic, which needs close international cooperation, has come during a developing trade war. In 2018 President Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese imports, and China has retaliated with a reduction and then a total ban on US agricultural products, which were worth $19.5 billion to the US in 2017. This, added to other factors, is causing American farmers to suffer terribly. Trump is trying to protect US employment and Americans' standard of living, but the path down from globalisation is far more difficult than the way up and at the same time international relations are souring.

Perhaps, as this potential pandemic looms over us, we will start to work together again for the common good.

FURTHER READING:
Excellent blogpiece by 'Legiron'
A more sanguine view from 'Moon of Alabama'
A pro-Chinese Westerner, Godfree Roberts, defends Beijing's approach

Fancy a Short Trip ? By Wiggiatlarge

I could have added this to the first Sale piece, but it is not so much a sale item as a con on advertising in the mad world of hotels and holidays: misleading, confusing and non existent offers are all part of the armoury used in advertising in the travel industry.

A certain hotel booking portal has a series of adverts telling us that by using them they will have done all the hard work and found the cheapest room rate - smiling girl with smug look pays less than the non-portal user who is furious, I am sure you know who I mean.

When these holiday web sites such as Expedia initially started out, genuine savings could be made by comparing all of them yourselves, but Tripadvisor then started to collate all the same sites under the heading being viewed so you could see who was the cheapest without going to all the sites individually; seemed like a good move at the time and indeed it was for a period of time.

As always with these things the good times end. Further comparison sites started up and little by little the financial variations gradually disappeared, not that you would think that was the case if you view the adverts on television with the mobile phone being held up with huge variations in the price of the hotel that it is set in.

The truth is somewhat different. Going back to Tripadvisor, you will see still all the different booking agents underneath a particular hotel and almost without exception all will be the same. The variation shown in the advert may well exist but not in any meaningful way, i.e. a place no one is going to or a very bad time of the year.

When a small reduction occurs there is normally a good reason, e.g. the booking agent is not offering the late cancellation ability of the others, so in reality it is not cheaper; and to be fair, the late cancellation - whilst very useful - is often abused by the holiday maker, so many establishments are simply not offering it as before.

I can well remember the time when a room rate of say £100 per night could be found for say £75, a genuine saving with a bit of work sorting through the different companies. Now that they all have the same page scrutiny, it is as if  they cannot afford to be any more expensive than the others, so by a ‘gentlemen's’ agreement they all price in unison.

In fact in many cases it is better to phone the hotel direct and barter, as they have to pay the booking agents a percentage, so there is going to be wriggle room by going direct.

In a similar vein, discounted luxury holidays are going the same way. I remember out of curiosity going to a website when the first of these sites came online, I believe the first was Secret Escapes, and there they were, heavily discounted luxury holidays, well some of them. Naturally a whole raft of trending sites with the same idea sprang up offering the same, and you started to wonder where all these discounted luxury breaks came from. Were there really that many unsold holidays the travel firms were desperate to unload, or was it a mirage?

Remember you have always been able to get last minute bookings at a discount, as long as you could be flexible with dates and were not too fussy on specifics; yet all these or the vast majority once you get past the lead in 'bargains' are not that cheap and nearly always come with dodgy dates (e.g.November in a Scottish luxury hotel) though again you could get lucky and do better by phoning the hotel direct if you really want to go at that time.

One of the companies now prices rooms per person as in a package, making finding the room rate appear remarkably cheap at first glance; but of course, when you double up the single rate - and I checked a few - it was little different from the rack rate; and this in November !

What these luxury discount sites have done is to remove much of the original sellers' own discounted deals from their sites, many of which were genuine savers, so they have effectively taken some real bargains out of the market. Many travel companies have little or no discounts any more.

When investigating 'three for two' offers which are popular - usually out of season, and often offered by tour companies - again, check the hotel direct one. I did out of curiosity: it showed the same offer on their web site but also an upgrade to a junior suite, so better than the tour company.

It is often said a good travel guide can alleviate many of the problems of hotel booking. To a degree that is true, but there are caveats even there: are they up to date? A change of hotel owner can transform a good hotel to a rubbish one overnight - I know, I’ve been there. Guides in their early formative days can be very useful, but the owners of these guides soon succumb to advertising and the revenue it brings and despite assurances the guide loses its honesty; some guides I have used have descriptions that one finds difficulty in matching to the reality.

For years, I used Michelin guides for restaurants, to good effect. Even there they have slumped somewhat in recent years; and don’t bother with their hotel section - the inspectors for that section are either blind or on the take. So many hotels have been dogs when portrayed as excellent: four- and five-star ones with bedrooms that have not seen a new mattress in decades, or are described as ‘comfortable’ yet are so small there is nowhere to hang any clothes or put your suitcase, and the bed is so short that even John Bercow would have a problem stretching out. How do they get such good ratings?

Cruise companies are especially guilty of this. Several firms that only sold discounted cruise offers are no more. The cruise companies do their own offers if you book early but the same ‘offer’ is normally there way into the season. It is a bit like discount kitchens: they are always on discount, which means there is no real discount. Plus many tour operators that do advertise late bookings are often found to be only marginally cheaper than the standard rate.

Even the ferry companies do the same: the real discounts are becoming ever harder to find and the popular routes now never have them unless you count cheaper midnight sailings as an offer. There is a well-known ferry discounter that gives virtually all its routes discounted prices at the same rates as the ferry companies themselves; how this actually gets to be a discount is not that clear !

Cruises themselves have become very popular and the market now caters for every man and his dog. Gone are the days when saying you had just been on a cruise brought about signs of envy in those you were speaking to. Now, the enormous Blackpool-at-sea ships can manage 5000 passengers a go - and it shows: ersatz shopping malls in the middle of the ocean do not appeal to me but many obviously think otherwise. But you do get what you pay for: this survey shows the down side of the big ships and remember there is no escape as there is on land - imagine having an altercation over the last sausage at a late breakfast and not being able to avoid the person you had that with for two weeks.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-7925157/Best-worst-cruise-lines-2020-revealed-Viking-Ocean-Cruises-MSC-bottom.html

Look very carefully at the small print if you need to cancel a cruise. With some, if you cancel under 90 days before leaving, you will be liable  for the whole cruise and any extras booked at the same time.

This is from a ferry company's '15% off' offer; 'terms and conditions apply' - they certainly do !

'Please Note: Terms and conditions apply. Subject to availability from a limited and variable allocation of space. Excluded travel dates: From UK: 21-23 May; Thurs-Saturday departures from 16 July to 22 August. From France: Saturday and Sunday departures from 1 August to 1 September. Discount does not apply to vehicle supplements or onboard accommodation. Excludes foot passenger fares. Offer may be withdrawn at any time. New online bookings only.'

Well, that narrows it down a bit…

One cannot but get the feeling there is a kind of consensus with all these companies on a form of price fixing. So many of the holiday offers are deliberately confusing. You need to do a great deal of reading the small print to get the actual like-for-like price: small things, as with a hotel room that appears cheaper but does not include breakfast, when not that long ago all rooms included breakfast in the price - and some of the breakfast prices are just another loaded add-on, taking the combined price comfortably above the inclusive one. The inclusive breakfast is seemingly on the way out, as is free parking, or parking on-site as it used to be called.

Whatever way you book your holiday, one point that is actually in favour of a package holiday is the insurance: on any holiday booked this way, the longer trips are covered by the companies with insurance that is a lot cheaper in most cases than the policies you can get separately, especially for the older traveller where rates including health insurance start to rocket after 75. With stand-alone insurance you have the added concern of having to declare everything that has ailed you since childhood, otherwise your policy could be voided in a claim situation. It might not seem much but it is amazing how many items over a life can mount up and all add to the premium, in some cases making travel prohibitively expensive.

Some tour operators do an inclusive policy where no such items need to be declared. This can be a great saving if you are in this age bracket, and there is no point in spending hours and hours finding the best deals if the advantage is all eroded by the insurance costs. Sadly some insurance companies make it obvious by their pricing that they are not interested in the older traveller, despite more and more of this sector having the disposable income to travel frequently; this also narrows the field of those still giving insurance to the older traveller, which means they get a stranglehold on premium rates, so check the small print of tour operators re travel / health insurance.

I have just put together a short week-long trip and it was hard work sorting through the hidden charges and extras. Some of the price differences are minimal anyway, if you fail to see what is and is not included these days. Nno way can you assume on the integrity of a particular company; even old stalwarts that you have used for years are starting to use the same ruses. It could be worse: train/air tickets, anyone?

Bon Voyage!

FRIDAY MUSIC: Alfred Schnittke, by JD

In the 80s and 90s there were many excellent magazines on the market and one I bought each month was ClassicCD, their first issue was June 1990. All of those magazines, for one reason or another, have ceased publication.

The ClassicCD magazine usually had a CD attached to it with selections of music from newly issued CDs which were reviewed within the pages of the magazine. From the reviews and the CD I discovered a lot of new composers and artists; new to me that is.

One such was Alfred Schnittke who first came to my attention playing piano on Arvo Pärt's composition 'Tabula Rasa' (a fabulous minimalist piece of music which also features the violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Schnittke

It was after buying that CD that I discovered, via ClassicCD magazine, that Schnittke was also a composer. The following videos are a representative selection of his varied work.

Note: video 4 here is the opening of Schnittke's Requiem set to a film excerpt from Fritz Lang's 1921 film "Der Müde Tod". Videos 5, 6 and 7 are the five movements of 'Suite in the old style' (that's what Google translate tells me!)

New post on The Conservative Woman: 'Out of the EU and on to a hard road ahead'

On the TCW site here: https://conservativewoman.co.uk/out-of-the-eu-and-on-to-a-hard-road-ahead/

THE Withdrawal Bill has passed all its Parliamentary stages, received Royal assent and we’re out on Friday. Allegedly. The Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration are not that much altered from the versions Mrs May failed to get through and I fear that the new PM may be telling himself that a compromise that satisfies nobody has the most chance of shutting up the malcontents on both sides.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope there is a way to ensure that we don’t leave ourselves under EU legal jurisdiction, we don’t put our armed forces at risk of being embroiled in EU military adventurism, we don’t dash the hopes of our fishing communities, and we don’t continue to pay out monstrous amounts of money. Is there any other way than ‘crashing out’ without a deal?

But despite all these daunting challenges, are we too concerned with shorter-term matters? Perhaps we need to step back and see the big picture. The industrial Revolution that Britain pioneered multiplied human effort and, coupled with the development of international trade, allowed our population to increase to six or seven times what it was in 1801, the last time we were anything close to food self-sufficiency.

 To get by in World War Two, we ‘dug for victory’ and slaughtered most of our food animals, which left us short of natural fertiliser, and the land was reportedly ‘losing heart’ towards the end. Starvation was a possibility.

Since then, we’ve been building on agricultural land and flood plains, while a lunatic New Labour deliberately lost control of immigration in order to teach their political rivals some idiot point about diversity; now we don’t actually know how many people are in this country.

Today we import 80 per cent of our food (the 50 per cent figure is a fudge – food processed here from imported materials is counted as British) and according to Sunday’s BBC1 Countryfile programme, our farmers depend on the Common Agricultural Policy for 61 per cent of their income; otherwise many of them would be goners. Even if we cut out dietary luxuries, if anything seriously interrupts the system, we’re up a gum tree.

Since we can’t feed ourselves, we have to pay the world for our board. Food is cheap (for us) because of modern farming methods that ultimately depend on fossil fuels in various ways; and also because of relative currency values that make the pound buy a lot more in many foreign countries – for now. So, make-and-trade it is.

Except it isn’t. In the 1970s, a Conservative government signed away our fishing rights and plugged us into an EU-regional trading system that undermined our industry; the damage showed up in unemployment and underemployment –  both carefully disguised – imbalance in visible trade, gradual personal financial impoverishment for much of the populace, widening wealth inequality, growing public debt and neoliberal rules that allow rich individuals and powerful corporations to flee if taxes become too burdensome. And then it went global.

All this was foreseen long ago, as we see here:

In the recording above, Sir James Goldsmith was speaking to Brian Walden in 1994, not long after the signatories to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) had agreed to form the World Trade Organisation. The billionaire warned that globalisation would harm the interests of the Western working classes, as on a smaller scale the EU’s internal market had done already, and he began by citing the experience of France, where he had recently won a seat in the European Parliament:

‘In France you had in 1973 420,000 unemployed. Between 1973 and 1993 the economy grew by 80 per cent, eight zero, almost doubling; and the number of unemployed went from 420,000 to 5.1million. What can be the purpose of an economy which by doubling goes to 5.1million?’

He went on to say that a similar situation pertained in Britain. Had it not been for North Sea Oil and monetary expansion (BoE and the mortgage boom), I’m not sure Conservatives would be looking back on the Thatcher years with such unmixed admiration.

Some say, get completely free of the EU and let’s trade on WTO terms. In that case, we need to examine the latter more closely, too. It’s a topical issue, for despite his domestic political travails, President Trump took the opportunity last week at Davos to call for reform of the WTO since China, though now the world’s second-biggest economy, is still benefiting from preferential terms relating to its WTO status as a ‘developing’ nation.




Bloomberg explains further here, but the takeaway for us is that although several other countries have agreed to give up that status in future talks (see point 7 in the article), China is digging its heels in.

There’s a reason for that. Although the Middle Kingdom has the highest Gross Domestic Product in the world in terms of local spending power (Purchasing Power Parity), it has a vast population and per person its income isn’t even in the top 100. During President Xi’s term of office (and he has no intention of leaving soon) electricity production has more than doubled and he seems determined to continue industrialising and urbanising his country, whatever Greta, Sweden’s Joan of Aargh! may say.

Who runs the WTO anyway? The makeup of its secretariat is interesting: headed by a Brazilian, with deputies from Nigeria, the USA, Germany and China – so, two developing countries, one superpower, a wannabe superpower (already interfering in Africa and compromising Ireland’s constitutional military neutrality) … and the huge Chinese axolotl, neither primitive nor developed. (By the way, note that the latter’s WTO deputy, Yi Xiaozhun, is in charge of intellectual property issues: Mr Xiaozhun must have so much to discuss with his American counterpart!)

Post-Brexit, shouldn’t the UK also have representation at a senior level in the WTO, as a major global trading economy and freshly-liberated nation? For his part, Trump has more than once indicated a preparedness to withdraw from the WTO if necessary, but I wonder whether even our new UK government is capable of fighting its way out of a wet paper bag, let alone triggering WTO-exit. The next 11 months of EU trade negotiations will be a key test of its general will and skill.

But we ought to reassess our policy towards the WTO – another one that likes to give orders from very nice offices far away – because remote supranational quangos practically guarantee trouble for the little people, aka ‘the many.’  

Take the Airbus dispute: The EU subsidised the makers ‘illegally’ and the WTO ruled that the US could impose retaliatory tariffs on EU goods. This is to hit exports of Scotch whisky. Irish ex-EU beef exports could also suffer and at the same time the South American trade bloc Mercosur has agreed with the EU a deal allowing it to send annually 99,000 tons of beef to Europe.

Irish MEP Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan told the EU Parliament that the agreement ‘paid the most sustainable beef farmers on the planet to go out of business: We don’t want that type of support. At the end of this, farmers have got to come out of it all right. It’s very hard to believe how they will, though, because they usually are the ones who – both in a literal sense and in a metaphorical sense – end up with the shit on their hands’.

I hope I’m right in thinking that Dominic Cummings’ recent job advert is for a team to tackle much more than Brexit and if so, I fully support him. The detailed planning to get us out of this nexus of potential disasters will need the geniuses and weirdos he’s looking for.

A bug’s life (coronavirus)

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/what-new-coronavirus-n1119081

The death toll from the coronavirus continues to rise in China, and with it the conspiracy theories. Amidst all the horse-pucky in the latter you will often find a seed or two of truth.

For example, we now know that Wuhan, the city where the outbreak started, is also the location of China’s only level 4 biological research facility, or the only one we’re allowed to know about.

Someone connected this with the escorted departure of some Chinese scientists from a similar laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada. Nonono, said CBC: ‘online chatter’… ‘disinformation’ (watch for that word with Google Alerts, there’s an organised official counterattack against social media infospread)… before reminding us of one of their earlier stories that revealed the National Microbiology Lab had sent live Ebola and Henipah viruses to Beijing on an Air Canada flight last March. Good job planes never crash.

The Chinese probably didn’t need shipments of coronavirus, though. After all, their SARS epidemic eighteen years ago was another version of the same class of virus. The earlier one was traced back to cave bats in Yunnan; the latest has also been blamed on bats and a Chinese vlogger has had to apologise for commending them as a delicacy (like almost everything else: if its back is towards Heaven you can eat it, is the old Cantonese saying) – or is that explanation itself official disinformation?

Could it possibly have been an Andromeda Strain-type accidental lab release? The 1975 (effective date) international Biological Weapons Convention prohibits the military development, production etc of germs and viruses, and China signed up in 1984. Yet given the fallen state of mankind and especially governments, I shouldn’t be surprised if it hasn’t continued undercover there, as this writer claims.

Asked where the UK does its bio and chemical research, most of us could only name Porton Down (I remember the Aldermaston marches, but when did the public march against germ warfare?) However, we have another facility in Hertfordshire, three in Surrey and three more in Greater London. I hope it’s all white-hat stuff, though I can imagine Whitehall arguments for developing nasties in order to find defences against them if ‘the other side’ tries to use them.

There’s two in France and another French-supported one in Gabon. They do like to do things their own way, do the French; unlike us, they don’t need US authorisation for their nukes, either. A reason I pick on our Continental cousins here is a story that caught my eye in 2016, about the opening of a level 3 (allegedly) bio-safety laboratory in French Polynesia. Funnily enough, that Tahiti News article has since disappeared. The Institut Louis Malardé (ILM) opened it, not on the main island of Tahiti or in Pape'ete, but on a tiny two-square-mile atoll called Tetiaroa. Supposedly it is for research into mosquito-borne diseases and having it locally would save processing time, according to France.tv. Google flagged up an article on the ILM site with a snippet under the link - ‘Lutte contre les moustiques. Une expérimentation innovante à Tetiaroa’ - that now I can’t find there.

Colour me sceptical, but we have every reason to distrust our rulers and their massive military establishments. Humans aren’t grown-up enough to play with such toys; the trouble is getting them back into the box.

It’s easier to keep us in the dark, I guess. New definition of a British D-notice: ‘dis information must not be released to da public.’