Serendipity is the cure...

 

What price can you put on a life? For the residents of Glenfell Tower at least, the answer is £3,189.85. The local council had to make cost savings, and for social housing refurbishments one of the biggest costs at the time was installing zinc-lined, fire resistant cladding. So the answer was to switch to aluminium lined cladding cladding, resulting in the fire spreading faster than it would have otherwise done. All for £3,189.85 per victim. We just spent two-thirds of that on our next holiday...

I'm no expert on the matters of local Government budgeting, but someone must have made a conscious decision to switch the cladding away from the fire-resistant option to make the numbers add up. I don't blame that person as no-one can predict the future, but it says a lot about our leadership structure when a decision is based upon financial aspects rather than suitability. Police numbers cut, fireman positions sliced by the thousands - it seems Theresa May is indeed correct in that a "magic money tree" does not exist to pay for such things, unless of course her Government suddenly has to find £1 billion to pay give to the DUP so that their MPs vote the way she wants, which will allow her to maintain control of the House of Commons - In case you were wondering, £1 billion would pay for 10,000 Police officers and 13,000 firemen.

So Theresa May has managed to hold onto power. Now what? Today saw the announcement by Michael Gove, who in case you missed it is now back in the Cabinet as Environment Secretary, that the UK was reclaiming its fishing waters. Around the UK, old fishing communities were told that, once we leave the EU, they would have the chance to fight-back against these foreign nasties who had invaded our waters, and so these areas voted leave in their thousands. However, the truth is starting to reveal itself. What the UK has said it will withdraw from is nothing to do with the EU's Common Fisheries Policy which allows all EU Member States access to between 12 and 200 miles of the UK and imposes quotas on how much fish can be caught to ensure that prices do not collapse and stocks do not disappear. The UK has instead signalled the withdrawl from the London Fisheries Convention which was signed in 1964, before the UK joined the EU, and allows vessels from Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands to fish within 6 and 12 miles of the UK. THis could have been done whether Brexit happened or not, and it should be noted that this Convention is more harmful to UK waters than the EU's policy. Of course, withdrawing from the LFC will also cause issues for UK vessels as they won't be able to fisnh off the coasts of the aforementioned countries anymore. This will harm the UK industry more than others - in 2015, UK vessels caught 618,000 tones of fish in UK waters and 90,000 tonnes in the waters of other LFC countries, whereas foreign vessels caught only 10,000 tonnes in UK waters - 9 times less. Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves...

I cannot help but feel that we're being fed a load of #fakenews to keep the populous from wondering why Brexit is even taking place. When David Davies met Michel Barnier last week they exchanged gifts - Davies giving a book on hiking and Barnier offering a walking stick in return. The messaging behind these gifts seems simple - Davies implying that we're going on a tough journey together and Barnier suggesting that the UK would need some support to complete the trip. Never has a truer anology been created. This week my partner in crime was officially given her matching orders by the Article 50 European Commission task force. She was seconded by a UK institution to work on their behalf in Brussels with a focus on drafting legislation that affects how big businesses operate. Although she has been in Brussels for almost 3 years, she had already started to be kept out of certain European Commission meetings for fear that her work would influence the Brexit negotiations. After receiving the official notification, she was called to a meeting at the UK Representation to the EU where Sir Tim Barrow was present, along with others in the same situation as her. The general feeling at the meeting was that negotiations had started well and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the message delivered was that a good deal was on the way but it wasn't clear what that deal would look like. Essentially speaking without giving any insight or real information to people who were essentially being let go from their positions. After dinner last night with friends, one of which works at Politico in Brussels, the story broke this morning in the Politico EU morning edition that non-permanent Brits were being kicked out of the EC as of the end of September 2017. What a coincidence!

She'll be fine. The good thing about a Brit in Brussels at the moment who has EU institution experience is that they're very much in demand by both associations and industry alike. However, what concerns me is that not all can make the transfer to another job so easily. We hear a lot about the potential move of some banks, at least partially, from London to EU27 cities such as Frankfurt and Paris. The reality is that bankers, market and money men will always find another job if they choose not to relocate, but what about the others who are in the shadows - the office cleaner who has his hours cut because there is less to clean, or the kitchen assistant who looses his job as there are fewer mouths to feed? The 'ancillary services' that surround big banks, and the people they employ, run in to the thousands, but you won't hear their plight until it's too late. These are the people who are already resident in the likes of Glenfell Tower.

Vice-President of the European Commission Dombrovskis refers to Brexit as a "them v us conundrum", with leave voters voting the way they did last year due to perceived barriers to equal societal opportunities, even though most of the issues raised are unrelated to the EU. But how do you dispell a widely held belief when it may not be entirely true? Just telling people that they're wrong is more likely to lead to an argument than agreement, and if anything just serves to exasperate their beliefs of a two tier system. Poland went through a similar them v us feeling in the mid 2000's shortly after they joined the EU, potentially caused by Governmental promises of a better world in the EU which did not immediately materialise. This sentiment has continued, and we now find a staunchly nationalist, anti-EU Government sat in Warsaw. So much so that when Donald Tusk, the ex-Polish Prime Minister was running for re-election to lead the European Council earlier this year the only Member State to vote against his reappointment was... Poland. Upon Tusk being re-elected, Warsaw reacted with fury, declaring that the EU was nothing more than Merkel's puppet and "very clearly under Berlin's diktat". Open the Daily Mail or the Sun most days of the week and you'll find similar wording in the UK. Is it any wonder that people form anti-EU thoughts?

In today's big society, social class is very much part of our fabric as it was 100 years ago. Perhaps the only difference is that those less well-off now live within eye-sight of those with more material wealth instead of the haves and the have-nots being separated by fields and meadows. As Frederick Douglass put it, "where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, neither persons nor property will be safe".