Beware Intolerance

Beware intolerance.

Last week Centre Parcs announced that it would no longer advertise in the Daily Mail and publicly apologised for any offence caused.

What happened?

One of the UK’s premier athletes, Tom Daley, a multiple diving world champion and multiple Olympic medallist, announced in 2013 that he was in a relationship with another man, Dustin Black. He joins many another famous and not so famous individual in preferring relationships with his or her own sex. Composers Ivor Novello (We’ll keep the home fires burning), Samuel Barber (Adagio for strings), Benjamin Britten (Peter Grimes) and writer Somerset Maugham all had lifelong stable relationships with male partners. Stable relationships involving deceased famous women are more difficult to find, but there are plenty of modern examples.  It’s that word “announced” that is recent.

Both Oscar Wilde, one of the finest exponents of both written and spoken English and Alan Turing, mathematician and father of computers fell foul of a law that persecuted homosexuals. That law was mercifully revoked at the end of the 1960s. Much more recently, same sex couples have been able to publicly declare their relationships and register them. This is turn has been followed by regular announcements from some public figures that they are either in a same sex relationship or at least wired in such a way that a future announcement in that vein is imaginable.

We move further.

Messrs Daley and Black recently announced that they were expecting a child. Whatever the mechanics of such an event might be, I very much doubt that either will give birth and the method, if any, by which DNA has been shared has not so far been, well,  shared, either. Let me make it clear at this point that I wish the two gentlemen and their progeny well: in my opinion, being a parent is both a wonderful gift and the most important job any individual will ever do. Obviously they both want that experience and that is a critical ingredient in being successful at it.

Enter Richard Littlejohn, who writes a column twice weekly in the Daily Mail. In his most recent column he commented on the impending arrival of the Black/Daley baby, supporting the idea of gay parenting, but offering his belief that the best option for a child was to be brought up by a couple in which both sexes were represented. The question that Mr. Littlejohn infers, I have been unable to find any research attempting to address.

Storm, outrage and opprobrium in bucket loads were heaped on Mr. Littlejohn and the Daily Mail by, amongst others, Centre Parcs and the South Bank Center. Hey-ho even the Stop Funding Hate pressure group weighed in; aren’t they in the realm of “we’ll kill anyone who’s for the death penalty”. Whatever happened to reasoned debate, not to mention Evelyn Hall’s “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it”?

It is worth remembering that without the ability to have a reasoned debate, in the 1960s, on the role of the state in an individual’s sexual orientation, homosexual men in Britain might still be facing Alan Turing’s fate of choosing between enforced castration or a prison sentence, rather than being able to announce imminent joint parenthood.

This episode should be a red flag. For organisations to punish individuals and other organisations for their beliefs is institutionalised bullying and a very big step on the road to making heresy illegal. And who amongst you will be the ones to define heresy? The Spanish Inquisition, the German Nazi party and Da’esh have tried and the end-game is always the same, the killing of innocents. Nice company you’ve chosen to keep, Centre Parcs.

Brexit - what a mess

Well, that’s it then, all the rhetoric is over and the result is a Brexit. As the Chinese proverb says, beware of what you wish for – you may get it.

Now I know that we are all being urged to treat this as a “positive opportunity” and to “work together and work to heal our differences”. Yeah, right. The Scots are seeing as a “positive opportunity” to finally get their independence. The Irish are talking about a United Ireland. The Welsh are crying for the money they’ll lose from the EU and Yorkshire have realised that the development  money they were getting to places like Hull will also disappear A joke web-site for London to declare independence and stay in the EU got 30,000 signatures in just a few hours. As a Yorkshireman with Celtic roots I’m not proud of my country any more. No wonder the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, wants us to get out as quickly as possible.

Looking at the map, it is pretty clear that it’s the English agricultural areas and the needy development areas that produced the biggest “leave” support – and they are the ones that receive the EU subsidies. Worst of all there are so many “Leavers” interviewed on TV who are saying “I only voted 'leave' as a protest; I never thought it would happen”. For them, it must be like walking up after a drunken one night stand with an ugly bedfellow and a hangover. “Oh my God, what did I do?”

Having organised their postal votes, my children were in Spain and Germany on Black Thursday. My son has a small company with customers in Europe. His Facebook post read “I’m thinking of applying for political asylum” and my daughter “with a Spanish husband and Scottish mother, I have options”. Both of them are part of the wealth-creation class, doubtless they will be asked, no forced, to pay additional taxes in future to continue to provide the leaving areas with equivalent subsidies. There is no other way that the rebate to the NHS could be funded. And me and my wife? We live outside the UK, but pay UK taxes there which we can’t escape for reasons I won’t go into here, we rarely take any of the services offered to people of our age, as we are not here to do so: we woke up on Friday considerably poorer.

Of course there are those Bremainers clinging on to hope. A referendum is advisory, so, in theory Parliament have the right to reject it: very unlikely, but just possible. Since many were disenfranchised, like EU residents who have been living in Britain for a long time but have never applied for British Citizenship, since they didn’t need to – we belong to the EU and have signed up for the free movement of people – an appeal could be made (where, the European Court?) to enable them to vote retrospectively: hmmm, I can hear the screams from the Brexit camp already. Parliament takes on board the rerun petition and authorise another go, even have a best of three perhaps: in your dreams.

So, we are all going to have to live with consequences. Here are a few that I predict. Many of those pensioners living in France, Spain, Italy and elsewhere in the EU will discover their free health care there will no longer be available there, sell up and come back to the UK, putting pressure on the Health Service, so needing the illusory 350 million a week promised. The fall in the value of the pound will create higher priced manufactured goods in shops, this will depress the High Street and cause inflation at the same time, leading to higher interest rates, increased mortgage payments and so less money to spend: hence, we will see higher rents and increased unemployment. Some Europeans living here will go, particularly those in low paid jobs, requiring increased immigration from poorer non-EU countries to do the jobs that Brits won’t do. Scotland will leave the United Kingdom, so Hadrian’s wall will be renamed Farage’s wall as it is strengthened to keep out all those Syrian refugees shown on his poster streaming unchecked into the North. 

If you can feel anger coming through, you are right. Perhaps later I will start to see a plus side, but not today. All I see is a positive opportunity for damage limitation.

Leave or remain? What will leaving really cost?

Leave or remain? That’s what we Brits are being asked to decide on very soon.

Right now, it is almost impossible to turn on the TV or open a newspaper without seeing and hearing about Brexit and Bremain. Discussion programs dominate, with particular emphasis on the economy but, the strange thing is, there’s more passion than persuasive data. At the end of program, there’s a common audience complaint, “we still don’t feel we have enough information to make a decision.”  And about what? Well. the economy of course.

Amazingly, according to the website www.fullfact.org “There is no definitive study of the economic impact of the UK’s EU membership or the costs and benefits of withdrawal”, as the House of Commons Library says. So, no wonder there is such a dearth of information. Why no such study has ever been commissioned I have no idea but couldn’t help wondering if both sides feared the answer. Or perhaps no-one expected it ever to be needed.

Then suddenly it struck me, try to estimate it! Health warning: there are going to be some figures coming up.

 

According to the fullfact.org website, the UK net payment to the EU, after rebate, contributions to farmers and poorer areas, like Cornwall is £8.5 billion pounds a year, that’s eighteen in and nine and a half back. That’s about two pounds a week or a hundred pounds a year, each.

If we left, we’d get that back, but there’s a cost. Of course we’d still get access to the single market, but we’d have to pay tariffs on our exports to EU countries. The UK exports about £325 billion a year, of which 44% or £143 billion goes to Europe. The tariff charged is 4.7% to non-EU countries and so, if we became one of those we'd need to find  £6.7 billion annually.

There was a massive project called simply 1992 which was a collection of actions to ease movement of people, goods and money around Europe. The estimate was that it was worth over 1% of the GDP of each country, and the UK participated fully. If we leave, we'll lose that The UK’s GDP was a whopping £1.86 trillion in 2015, and that means that losing the benefits of project 1992 will cost us £18.6 billion every year.

What that shows is that we will have to pay something like £25.3 billion to get back our £8.5 billion, so, far from being better off, it will cost the country around £16.8. Numbers will billions in don't mean that much, but it translates to us all being to the bad, about 4 pounds a week each, every man, woman and child. Put another way, leaving Europe will cost every two children family at least £800-00 a year.

This analysis has been very simple. It assumes that we don’t lose a single European customer. We haven’t thought about what has to be sacrificed to find the tariff to keep the price to the European customer the same. Obviously that additional tariff cost has to be found and it can only come from profit, which hits investment, or cost, which means salaries or investment or parts, and we haven’t discussed the knock-on effects of those possibilities. We haven’t discussed the cost of “taking back control”, the Brexit camp scream about interference from Brussels, but haven’t talked about the cost of setting up or expanding the UK’s “independent” standards bodies. We haven’t talked about the cost of all those experts and consultants that will be needed to negotiate our relationship with Europe and all the additional civil servants needed to exercise that control that has been taken back. If all those are added in then 4 pound each figure will rise but by how much is speculation.

I want the UK to remain in Europe for us all to continue to be better off.

Travel broadens the mind ... if you can get through the red tape.

Leave or remain? That’s what we Brits are being asked to decide on, and very soon.

I’ve just finished applying for a Visa Waiver for my wife to visit her daughter & family in the USA. It’s called an ESTA and I could feel the will to leave sapping away as each page completed revealed another one to do. “They” wanted her name history, parental information, employment history, all current and previous passports, contact addresses and residential addresses. “They” declared that there was no guarantee of privacy before asking such questions as “have you ever been involved in genocide or drug dealing” (I felt like answering “yes, against flies and mosquitos” and “yes, I was a barman at Uni” but haven’t noticed a great sense of humour exhibited by homeland security) … and this is to waive the need for applying for a visa!

We’ve forgotten that travelling around Europe has become so much simpler and less bureaucratic with the EU. Show your passport and that’s it. But if we leave? At the end of my first year at University, I travelled a little in Europe. France (Paris), Spain (Barcelona) and Germany (Kaiserslautern) were all on the itinerary. Spain was not then part of the EU. French trains could not run on Spanish rails, and vice versa, as the gauge, (the distance between the two rails), was different in the two countries. Crossing the border between Spain and France took a good two hours.  We had to leave the train from Barcelona just before Perpignan, take our bags and passports through to French customs. Finally, when all passengers had gone through, we boarded another train and got on our way to Paris. Years later I took the same trip and on that second trip, I boarded a TGV at Barcelona Sants station, crossed the border without stopping, alighted at Gare de Lyon and walked straight to the Metro. Spain had joined the EU, so passport, customs, and border checks had been made redundant and Spain had at long last allowed standard gauge to be used for high-speed international trains – originally they’d built railways with a different gauge “to make it more difficult for French invaders to use the railways”.

As for health, no worries now as EU members have to offer reciprocal services. Something we would lose if we left the EU.

I want Britain to remain in Europe because I don’t want to waste hours and even days of my life filling in forms just to go on holiday or make a business trip. More, I’m sure there are better ways for my personal holiday and business travel budgets to be spent than paying for people to make travelling longer, more costly and more difficult.

Leave or remain? War and Peace

Leave or remain? That’s what all us Brits are being asked to give our opinions on in less than two weeks’ time. This is the first of a few pieces where I’m offering my attitudes to the question – for what they are worth.

The biggest complaint that I see and read in the news and hear amongst friends and family is “we don’t have enough information, it’s not clear cut”.  

Let’s get back to basics. What brought about the EU in the first place?

Most of those voting in the coming EU referendum will not have any idea of what an absolute horror the European wars were even though they were regular occurrences for over a thousand years. And that, I firmly believe, is largely because of the existence of the EU, an organisation many of us are considering leaving. Now why?

Avoiding another European war was the idea that drove the visionaries of France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries to construct the Treaty of Rome – the foundation of the European Union. We Brits didn’t join for another twenty years, having turned down the opportunity of being one of the founding nations. Clearly we've been confused about Europe for a long time.

One of my early memories is holding my mother’s hand while walking across a bomb site in Sheffield. It seemed to my young eyes to stretch into the distance and on my right, there were three department stores and four clumps of twisted girders where another four had been. I think the three left standing were Marks & Spencer, C & A and British Home Stores; “Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, had mistaken the department stores for a steel factory” said my mum. Some years later I was walking with a German friend around Stuttgart; I noticed a rather odd configuration on top of a hill just outside the town “that’s where the RAF dropped their load on a bonfire, believing it to be the town” said my friend. Those two incidents happened in a war that seems as remote to most people as the Great War of a century ago seemed to me, but to my grandparents, the memories of that war were raw and real and perpetuated by fading photographs of lost brothers and cousins.

Anyone who’s read a history book knows Europe’s famous names. Here’s a few: Napoleon, Wellington, Bismarck and Nelson: they were all heroes blessed with a large helping of charisma. And they were warriors, first, foremost and above all.

The European Union has succeeded in its aim of avoiding war. How? By creating the foremost opportunity for continuing dialog, friendship, trade, travel and mutual support amongst nations that had previously regularly knocked six bells out of one another. It hasn’t thrown up many charismatic heroes though.

I want Britain to remain in Europe because I’d rather leave a safe Britain to my grandchildren and their progeny than the opportunity for them to become heroes and heroines.

Farewell HMA Tom Fletcher from the BLBG.

On Tuesday, members of the British Lebanese Business Group (BL BG) gathered together for an address by the outgoing UK Ambassador to Lebanon, Tom Fletcher.

One of Lebanon’s top ten banks, Credit Libanais, generously offered to host the gathering in the sumptuous suit on the 29^th floor of their new headquarters building: a glass enclosed terrace afforded wonderful views of Beirut stretching out into the Mediterranean in the evening sunlight. Chateau Bell-Vue had donated cases of two of their wines for the occasion. Many thanks to both organisations.

HMA Fletcher was introduced by Chairman, Graham Ball who then showed a short video of his recent “saying good bye to Lebanon” walking (yes, walking) trip of about 100 kilometers. His itinerary started from Hamat in the North, along the coast down to Beirut. It looked like a lot of fun with plenty of sampling of local produce, as well as touring the container terminal in a fork lift and visiting different points of interest. An imaginative and unique way of raising his hat in farewell to a country he has come to love.

A short address was followed by a lively and extended Q&A session. His Excellency reminded us that on his first meeting with the group, it had asked him to “fly the flag and we’ll do the business”; a combination that has resulted in British exports to Lebanon doubling to over half a billion pounds Sterling annually. His embassy have certainly flown the flag with the return of British Airways, arrival of Marks & Spencer and many, many other British brands gracing the malls of Lebanon. And then there was Great British week and the initiation of annual Business awards.

Many of the questions probed Tom’s view of the future and he remains fiercely optimistic for on his blog.

Lebanon. In support of that view he cited the potential presented by the offshore gas field, coping with the Syrian crisis and its attendant influx of refugees, coping with the presidential vacuum and the attendant government torpidity, coping with the issues of electricity shortages and indeed the Lebanese amazing capacity for coping.

He explained that he believes that Lebanon’s future should and must be in Lebanese hands and has urged political leaders to listening less to the advice and wishes of foreign governments and more to the wishes of the Lebanese people. It remains his hope that evolution will prevail and that his vision of Lebanon 2020 is achievable, if not necessarily by that date. Many of those views are developed further

The evening was closed with the BLBG presenting HMA Fletcher with an engraved box of locally made cheese serving knives.



Tom, the BLBG thanks you unreservedly for your support and wishes you and your family all you wish for from the future.

Graham Ball, BLBG Chairman. 

BLBG meeting 25th November – “State of the Nation”

Her Majesty’s Ambassador’s annual address to the British Lebanese Business Group (BLBG) is eagerly awaited and usually results in the best turnout of the year. Last night, over seventy braved heavy rain in the dark to get to “the residence” in the hills above Beirut, and they were not disappointed.

Rather than stick to the tried and trusted formula of describing the regional political situation, HMA Tom Fletcher first described the successes of flourishing trade between the two countries. Annual exports from the UK are now running at well over the half billion pound mark, with Scotch salmon, Scotch whiskey, high end yachts, British Airways and Perkins engines getting special mention. There has also been a dramatic increase in UK brands on the Lebanese High street, Lush cosmestics have just opened their third branch here for example. An historical parallel was drawn between the Phoenicians, (the old name for the Lebanese), and the British as maritime trading nations.

 

He went on to talk about increasing links in many other spheres before drawing inspiration from a recent Lebanese invention for measuring the human body’s vital signs. Worn on the wrist, the “Up”, as it is called, measures heart rate, number of steps taken, breathing rate etc. before regularly uploading them to a handy iPad. The rhetorical question posed was what would such an instrument show if put on Lebanon’s hypothetical wrist. Still alive and functioning but in need of external support was the net of HMA’s view.

The whole event was fueled with excellent canapés, some using one of Scotland’s exports mentioned above and lubricated, if one wished, with the other one, or, of course, with Lebanese wines.

An excellent evening, lively, informative and fun.