The most right-wing man in Britain

Beaver sightings! At Woodlands Castle. Wanted dead or alive. £1,000 reward! For crimes against trees. Beavers have been cutting down our trees!

So reads a sign erected by landowner Sir Benjamin Slade on his land around Woodlands Castle, Somerset. A beaver expert, who examined the damaged trees, begged to differ, telling the BBC that "Beavers produce distinctive scalloped chips when they gnaw trees and there weren't any ... It looks as if it has been done by humans with an axe."

The needle of my Great British Eccentric detector was flickering by this point, so I googled the beaver-bashing baronet and, boy, was I not disappointed. Sir Benjamin was, I discovered, either:

1. The living embodiment of that comic monstrosity Sir Henry, eponymous antihero of the surreal monologue / film Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, or
2. an upper-class performance artist who has turned his whole life into a Vivian Stanshall tribute act

Here's Sir Henry Benjamin sitting at the bar in his main property, a stately home, near Taunton, holding forth to interviewer Robert Chalmers on the general beastliness of foreigners. Chalmers doesn't record whether the baronet was wearing hairy tweed and waving an overflowing balloon of brandy for emphasis, but that's how the interview looks in my head:

"Russians?" Sir Benjamin Slade pauses, seeking the adjective best suited to the compatriots of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. "Dishonest."

"Chinese?" I venture. "They're impossible."

"Brazilians?" "Sex, football and dancing. That's all they do."

"Germans?"

"Boring. The Romans described them as boastful. They're at your feet or at your throat."

Sir Benjamin embarked on this guide to global culture after recalling how he once defaced an atlas before presenting it to his godson. "It was this wonderful children's book, showing all the countries of the world and saying lovely things about each. I took this atlas and wrote on every country, all about the people. It is quite horrific, this stuff I wrote, and which the godson read. One of my friends said: 'Do not let anyone see it. Or you will go to prison.'"

Just drop whatever you're doing and read the rest of Chalmers' interview. It's hilarious.

Surprisingly, Sir Benjamin has a blog. Unsurprisingly, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Vote Leave Beaver.

"Yes, I can see it's been defaced by Bolsheviks, but what the Devil d'you think you're wearing, man? This isn't a ruddy carnival, you know. Quick, pass me my pistol, see if I can't wing the blighter. Bloody country's going to the dogs..."

Creepy clown panics nation

Kudos to the people at Business Insider for their dementedly appropriate choice of image to illustrate Lianna Brinded's article on the leaked Treasury report about the likely impact of hard Brexit. With his blend of slapstick absurdity, nihilistic menace and terrifying unpredictability, The Joker has to be the perfect brand ambassador for Brexit.

Fixit means Fixit

It seems to me that Britain being in the European Union was a good deal for Britain. Britain avoided the unpalatable bits, like joining what turned out to be a disastrously badly-designed Euro and accepting functionally open borders (personally, I'd have been quite happy if we'd joined Schengen, but this wasn't to the majority of British peoples' tastes). Britain also got most of of the good stuff: the ability to attract inward investors (like Nissan in Sunderland) with the promise of access to a continental-sized market, access to a massive market on our doorstep,* the negotiation power of being part of a huge trade bloc, visa-free travel and access to continent-wide work and educational opportunities.

The EU was far from perfect, but it didn't need to be perfect for a Remain vote to make sense, just better than the alternatives.  And, as far as I can see, the EU status quo was better than the alternative scenarios the Leave campaign came up with - either soft Brexit, with single market access but no voice in making the rules Britain would be forced to obey, or the hard fantasy version, where Britain just throws its existing trade arrangements and negotiating leverage away and then loudly demands that the club it just flounced out of and everybody else in the world gives Britain preferential treatment, while the rest of the world rolls its eyes and says "can you believe these guys?"

But, like I say, the EU is far from perfect, with the design and execution of the Eurozone occupying its maximal distance from perfection. Brits wanting to get out of the EU makes no sense to me, but you've only got to look at the way the Euro is destroying growth, whole economies in southern Europe and the European social model, to see why taking back control from this European project might make sense to some Europeans. Never mind Brexit - some people are looking at the Euro and deciding it might be time to Fixit:

The advantages of leaving the euro could outweigh the disadvantages, concludes an interim report published yesterday by Euro Think Tank, a working group of economists from Finland.

The authors of the report argue that the ability to rapidly adapt to external shocks and mitigate their adverse side-effects is the greatest advantage of having a flexible exchange rate instead of a fixed one – especially for small open economies such as Finland.

Helsinki Times



*I never bought the argument that Europe would become unimportant in trade terms, because other regions of the world are growing faster. The European market is important because it's so close - literally a footstep away in the case of the land border with the Irish Republic. Nothing, short of physically moving Europe half way around the world, is going to change the brute facts of geography. 

Moneybags at dawn

The spectacle of Ukip MEPs brawling was highly entertaining but it didn't tell us very much we didn't know already. It's a party fuelled by the raw emotional power of hatred, blame and seething resentment, so people with poorly-controlled anger management issues were always going to buzz straight towards it, like flies to a cowpat. There's a bit more fun to be had from watching the ongoing regression from parliament to playground ("He hit me!", "No I didn't and, anyway, he started it!"), but the punchy stuff is just more of the same old, same old, Ukip just being Ukip.

The issue that provoked the punch up / handbags at dawn slap fight might point to something less obvious, though. The substance of the squabble was the suspicion that Steven Woolfe, who had already flirted with the idea of jumping ship to Theresa May's reassuringly xenophobic, Brexit fundamentalist Conservative Party, might actually defect. The defection of the odd MEP wouldn't be very significant in itself, but it did make me wonder whether a more substantive change of allegiance is on the cards, given two things we do know about:

1. The May government is frightening a lot of people in the City, and in big business more generally, by signalling that the need to be tough on foreigners and tough on the causes of foreigners trumps everything, even the profits of big business. For a party funded by wealthy corporate donors that's a precarious position to be in.
2. Ukip is overwhelmingly funded by a few rich ex-Tory donors.

Imagine, if you will, that a few of the businesspeople currently funding the Conservatives decided to turn off the money tap to an ungrateful government that seems determined to plough full steam ahead into a profits-busting hard Brexit. The party that was actually set to deliver the Brexiteers' most cherished dream could be defunded.

What would ex-Tory donors like Paul Sykes and Stuart Wheeler do then? Carry on funding a shambolic party of brawling schoolkids, while they watch the party that's actually delivering their beloved Brexit being sabotaged? Or abandon a divided front organisation with one MP that has clearly outlived its usefulness and redirect their wealth to prop up a financially beleaguered party now controlled by True Believers in Brexit? My money would be on the latter.

That defection would cause some real outrage in Ukip ranks. Fortunately for Ukip's disloyal big donors, their chances of getting punched by an angry 'kipper would be pretty remote, given that the moneybags who control our politics are rarely seen anywhere near anything as democratic as a parliament building.

In the green north

I just came across a sentence I didn't expect to read in an article about solar power up in Canada's Northwest Territories (come to think of it, an article about solar power at 60 plus degrees north was pretty unexpected in itself) :

There is a regulatory limit to the number of pellet stoves, LED lighting systems, and other clean projects Chilkowich can undertake.

“There is a cap on solar in each community,” she told me, because she can’t put Northwest Territories Power Corporation out of business. The company has to stay just profitable enough so it’s worth it to run the diesel generators all winter. When oil prices are low, the territorial government reinvests the savings in clean energy projects—but not too many.

“Everything’s connected,” Chilkowich said, as she explained the economics to me.

Brian Castner

Of course, solar can be competitive relative to generator fuel that's been hauled with immense difficulty up to remote and hard-to-reach communities, yet still be damned expensive in absolute terms:

While power in Edmonton, a comparatively southern city (population: 900,000), is 5 cents Canadian (about 4 cents USD), a kilowatt-hour of power in the indigenous community of Colville Lake (population: 166) costs up to $2.96 CDN. The first 600 kilowatt-hours of electricity are subsidized for residential customers, costing “only” 28 cents CDN, but businesses and governments make up the difference. The First Nations band in Jean Marie River was paying $1.91 CDN, making a solar array an easier sell.

But it's still pretty impressive. In parts of the globe further south, the potential is far greater:

Last week a milestone was passed when it was revealed that, for the first time, the sun provided more UK electricity from photovoltaic panels than heavily polluting coal-fired plants over a full 24-hour period. Just under 30 gigawatt hours – or 4% of national demand – was met by solar, the latest in a series of records set by the wider renewable energy sector in recent months.

Wrote Terry Macalister in the Guardian, in April 2016. But whenever there's a ray of sunshine threatening to break through the gloom, you can generally rely on Her Majesty's Government to rain on the parade:

But the solar industry argues it is being abandoned at the worst possible moment – just a few years before becoming self-sufficient, and at a time ministers seem prepared to back much more expensive nuclear or offshore wind power projects.

As many as 2,000 solar jobs are estimated to have been lost over the last 12 months and Decc’s own worst case scenarios warn of 18,700 jobs on the line.

To which the government response seems to be "Yeah, whatever, too busy fracking Lancashire."

One nation

Theresa May's one nation Conservatism is a funny old thing: 

"Just listen to the way a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public. They find their patriotism distasteful, their concerns about immigration parochial, their views about crime illiberal, their attachment to their job security inconvenient."

Rhetorically, she's standing up for the broad mass of "ordinary folk" against a terrible elite who keep oppressing them with their merciless liberalism.

First, there's something a bit dodgy about the assertion that patriotism is something that the "common" people do and elites only sneer at - it shouldn't have taken a great deal of thought to come up with examples of distasteful flag waving by unarguably privileged members of the elite. Do you, by any chance, remember this guy, Theresa?

You might counter that The Racist Floor Mop wasn't the sort of authentic working class hero patriot May was praising, but just a cynical politico who thought that the proles, like like those famously "cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies", would be easily distracted by a bit of patriotic rah-rah. I couldn't possibly comment.

But there are plenty more examples of patriotism among the definitely-not-downtrodden. The sort of folk who can afford a holiday cruise aren't exactly living from week to week on zero hours contracts, yet on some British cruise liners, you can roll up to the bar when the ship is due to pull out of port, grab yourself a Pimms,  and join in a bit of flag-waving in a "sail away" knees-up event to a pumping soundtrack of "Rule Britannia" and sundry other patriotic tunes.

And speaking of patriotic tunes, I don't expect that many of the smartly turned out flag-wavers who join the chorus of "Land of Hope and Glory" at the Last Night of the Proms come from rundown sink estates:


But, rhetorically at least, May's Conservatism is all about solidarity and inclusivity and definitely not about one group of people looking down the other lot. So remember, working class, people like us definitely don't look down on people like you.

But don't you worry, aspirational middle classes - we're going to open lots of lovely new grammar schools, so your precious darlings won't have their grades pulled down by those nasty, disruptive poor kids.

But don't you worry either, proles hard-working families - the grammar school system won't condemn your kids to a second class education. We can definitely promise that when we divide schools into ones that the well-coached children of the sharp-elbowed middle classes can get into by passing an exam and ones with no entry requirements, people are so not going to look down on the schools that you don't have to pass a test to get into as somehow second rate, because ... reasons.

Like I said, Mayist one nation Conservatism is a funny old thing, the funniest bit being how surprisingly similar it is to old-fashioned divide-and-rule.

The management secrets of Boris and Nigel

I, for one, will be sleeping more easily now I know that Mrs May has an actual plan for Brexit. I think this, from the Daily Mash, does a rather more thorough job than the Eurosceptic press of summarising the sort of detailed thinking and meticulous planning that must have gone into a decision that will affect all our lives for years to come:

"After careful consideration of the opinions of the cleverest 52 per cent of the population, I am convinced that sticking it to bossy Germans, arrogant French and stubbly bone idle Spanish is the best direction for our country.

"Of all the challenges facing our nation, the greatest is the existence of foreigners. I firmly believe we should focus on antagonising them, and that creating a massive bureaucratic headache is the best way to do this.

"This nation will thrive if it continues to make everyone’s lives difficult for no real reason..."

When you put it like that, you might think that now would be a bad time to look to the people responsible for the national omnishambles for guidance.

But you'd be wrong. The career advice site expecteer dot com is now offering up the careers of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to aspiring young executives as shining examples ... of how not to action your key deliverables:

What can you, as a manager, learn from the actions of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage?  Over-promising and failing to deliver is a fatal error in the business world.

Which would be funny, if the racist floor mop and Kermit's evil twin hadn't already turned our entire damn country into a horrible cautionary tale, designed to bring other nations to their senses:
As we Brits are already doomed, you might as well give up, relax, sit back, make a cup of tea, and spend your remaining time watching this adorable bat being adorable:
According to the warning at the end of the video, you shouldn't handle bats unless you're vaccinated and trained, as they can carry deadly viruses and even baby bats can bite and scratch. Unless, of course, you live in Britain, where getting scratched by a bat and catching a deadly virus means that you may never have to listen to the phrase "Brexit means Brexit" ever again.