Police review update: Ramsgate and Kent

Crediit where it’s due I wanted to point out, almost 2 weeks after the first police review meeting, things are much improved in the town centre with tramps, pedzone cars etc.

Some issues remain:

1. In 2 weeks I haven’t seen any police foot patrols day or night. Prowl cars excellent.
2. Some tramps remain at the BetFred benches: drunk and yelling and litter before 6pm and drug gangs/groups:

3. Lots of bicycles in the pedzone: zooming through, wheelies, groups of kids and often going the wrong way through – is CCTV working? Road Safety generally 20mph (and road crash maps) and future bike reg/insurance/helmets?
An OAP/child will be seriously injured or killed soon.

4. Cars on pavements: mainly the kebab shop Slovak reg car and beach kiosk owners – the pedzone and seafront should also be extended soon: 8am to midnight? And marina/harbour car reduction. Same day towing/fines and clamp/crush should be viable: plenty of free car parks

5. Street drinking from newsagent single cans still an issue – a condition of licence/no sales before noon? An ASBO Most wanted ban list? Tobacco controls a separate licence issue?

6. A useful update would be on drugs gangs and dealers/County Lines as it goes underground again – Lords report on seaside towns heroin use and largescale former Blockbuster store town centre cannabis site/Manston 3am flights/yachts shows a major issue

7. Wetherspoons review: seafront funnelling into town centre/seafront – the largest pub in UK

8. Prowl car non-999 tasks review: ASBO noise policy with TDC closed at night, parking tickets, litter/grafitti grotspots, broken street lights, potholes reporting

9. Generally, concern over port still being used for live animal exports: collusion between port staff and police despite a council vote to end use: Port Act 1847 and Animal Welfare allows lorries to be turned away

10. FOI on staffing/salaries/ EK rota etc useful against £250M budget – excessive guns/ammo/training a concern

11. Thanet Metals dumped van/immobile sign by Copart Ltd near Pfizer (and several Bedz Ramsgate eyesore roadside signs), and broken wind turbine for scrap/dismantling nearby at Richboro/MT Energie

12. Manston airport DCO and Pleasurama and Dreamland final stages of council corruption

13. Pandemic #1 UK strategic threat: TB to ricin etc etc. A review of vaccines/policy etc would be useful

14. Truancy: by school and offrolling

15. Social dumping: by Maidstone and London – review of care homes, police presence etc

16. Bank Holidays and festivals: police overview

Hope these points are useful.
Kindest regards
Tim
• disused wind turbine near MT Energie and Pfizer
• £280M KCC pension funds
• £20M Canterbury shopping mall purchase
• Canterbury West mega car park
• Nemo mega pylons
• 30% RTC council reserves
• £1.5M Harbour St fund
• KCC commuter train link to Lille and Eurostar connection at Ashford

Dividends end at Dover and Osaka for UK and G20?

A rigorous Sunday Times article "Go East income seeker" details the potential for UK growth alongside the stock markets of Australia, China, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore. Indeed Chancellor Phillip Hammond inking a deal with the Shanghai and London Bourses for such growth ahead of this week's G20 meet in Osaka.

And the Thai-Cambodia new railway not just creating the strategic linkage of Bangkok and Phnom Penh and no doubt HCMC but already delivering value for UK/European and Asian investors in the £500M redeveloment of Phnom Penh railway station with new retail concourses etc. The St Pancras of South East Asia?

With the Sunday Times detailing the Asian funds of Henderson and Schroders for continued growth, brands such as South Korea's (and North soon?) Samsung, Taiwan's Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Aussie Vintner Treasury Wine estates likely to deliver on that growth.

While Aussie wine brand 19 Crimes and UK's Brewdog beer new crowdfunding float likely to give Treasury Wine a run for its money.
The Sunday Times Business profile of Philip Aiken Chair of Balfour Beatty alongside The Mighty Quinn, ahead of the LSE100 promotion this week of Aveva industrial software with its merger with France's Schneider Electrics. And Aiken as a board member of the UK-Australian Chamber of Commerce alongside Boris Johnson's mentor Lynton Crosby suggests richer depths of growth beyond warm beer is untapped between UK and Australia and Asia.

Although with the G20 Summit in Osaka lost in translation and the noise of the Brexit mess and Tory PM leadership run off between Boris and Big Rice Jezza H suggests UK failing to maximise such growth.

Brexit dampening Japanese expansion in UK: Nissan Sunderland Qashqai and Honda Swindon marking a Japanese retrenchment from the Thatcher years of attracting Asian FDI.

With my Sincerity Advertiisng hat on, perhaps Big Rice needs to refloat his Hotcourses Japanese lessons quickly after Osaka so the Brexit blip is not lost in translation along with hundreds of skilled jobs in the previously moribund UK car industry.
Perhaps Mrs H is indeed a secret weapon to deploy beyond the fripperies of Huawei and beyond the Who Lost China Debate: Germany not hampered or hamstrung by the EU in turbocharging its exports to China.

Both the Iran conflict being stirred up and Huawei perfidious China debates perhaps more in line with USA trade dominance in Big Oil and Big Tech - and not necessarily in UK interests.

Much as The 3T's of Tibet and Tiananmen Square and Taiwan need not restrict both China-UK political and trade relations. As with the Extra Special Relationship highlighted by POTUS Trump for The Treble Club of tripling UK-USA trade there is no reason why UK - and USA - shouldn't have similar plans in place with China and the rest of Asia.

And wise heads such as President Xi no doubt pondering a future when mainland China is more like Taiwan or Hong Kong. Perhaps the David Cameron China Fund a way to maintain strong Chinese trade growth without unrest. Not every Tibetan or Uighur can be jailed or Hong Kong protests halted.

UK was hardly a harbinger of democracy in Hong Kong under colonial rule nor in stoking the forest fires of the Opium Wars that continue to blaze to this day out of control in the Shan and Chinese border heroin regions of Myanmar.

Both the largest meth seizure in Australian history and the largest $1BN cocaine seizure in USA history in Philadelphia in the last month are no surprise with UK and USA disengagement from Asia.

And UK's rather soggy growth not just in China but Taiwan and the Koreas rather dismal given the Pacific strengths of the Commonwealth. And the blood and treasure invested, if not the Kokoda Trail, then from Kohima to Kwai to Korea by UK in previous years.

While Toshiba and Hitachi rightly disinvesting from the UK nuclear indsuty with the faltering Sizewell project - and Toshiba previously from the USA nuclear industry - suggests those companies in need of better paths within UK and USA.


### Big Rice from China and Osaka ###


Osaka the ideal place to begin that Strategic Dialogue - especially against the latest POTUS Trump personal letter intervention with Kim's North Korea, a contrast to Hormuz sabrerattling and spy planes. POTUS Trump's billet-doux no doubt urging nuclear disarmament with a loosening of trade sanctions and FDI and trade growth.

In my politics work I urge Meiji Kent in terms of regearing Kent's stagnant and old-fashioned and elderly economy: Locate in Kent the regeneration organisation of The County Barn local government - in contrast to Japanese Local Government - seems a dusty if not closed shop.

An estate agent on the rates highlighting the empty warehouses of the Garden of England's economy does nothing for Kent growth or FDI inward investment.

Perhaps USA Ambassador Woody's Museum of Agriculture is in olde worlde Kentshire rather than Europe. And next door to the UK Museum of Technology with Sinclair C5's and BBC Acorn computers dusty exhibits in the failure of Big Tech compared to Tim Apples or Bill Microsoft.

While the Hay Festival citing Japanese innovations in a Future Ministry for citizens in 2060 surely the type of project that Big Rice could deliver on as PM rather than Brexit or budget bloat and UK militarism for more than 2% the NATO target. That a rather silly pledge given UK is spending 2.3% already, no NATO criteria except more tax, and EU allies spending around 1.5% with few worries of a Russian invasion beyond Donetsk and Venezuelan posturing as Syria becomes Putin' quagmire.

Big Rice might well ponder on Govey's pledges on the repeal of the now 20% regressive VAT tax to sit alongside his Eireish 12% corporation tax economic pledge. Both useful but far less so to economic markets than a clear rejection of Brexit as already begun by Tom Watson deputy Labour leader.

Govey's excellent initiative on computer programming in schools might well be matched only by DNA Studies in schools and universities. Just 100k Chinese studients in UK and only 8k Thai suggests those Big Rice foreign language Hotcourses are growing cold in in UK's 130 universities and the international student market - certainly in comparison to Jane Duke Oz Minister efforts in ASEAN.

While student tuition fees abolition and investment in school 3D printers and Kindles and AR/VR far more socially useful than tanks either rusting in warehouses on the rates (200 of UK's 400 tanks now rightly wareoused/junked for spare parts) or actively being used.

The 769 old Warrior armoured cars/troop carriers surely right for the bin with £400M spent over since 2011 to upgrade half of them, and nothing delivered by Lockheed Martin. The Cold War days of tank battles across the German and Russian prairies long gone for such kit.

And such tax fund use and waste in stark contrast to the aerospace giants also detailed in the Sunday Times of Airbus, Boeing, Rolls Royce and GE (no doubt Lockheed too) new pledge on zero carbn emissions and electric planes and kit as Airbus Vahana flying taxi and Rolls Royce and Airbus 100 seat plane EFanX.

The Serious Fraud office beginning fraud prosecutions at Patisserie Valerie in the Finance Dept suggests as with the Glick QC and One Essex Court frauds or the Lord Grabiner and Philip Green BHS scandal an idleness in the CPS in maintaining UK's reputation for fair trade and excellence in business.

A damage done by the High Courtski antics even beyond Judge Mann of dodgy UK lawyers and Russian oligarchs. Kent's bumbling County Barn frittering away another £280M tax pensions in the Woodford Fund scandal, after their £500M tax waste in Icelandic banks.

Perhaps 1MDB investments are next for Kent's pensioners? Perhaps no more ludicrous than tobacco investments alongside the Kent Public Health remit to stop smoking, or failing to remove asbestos in schools beyond legal payoffs to dead teachers.


### New Space Race launches ###


And separately Airbus of Bristol and Toulouse, and Boeing of Sheffield and California schooling NATO on the benefits of supply chain integration in tooling each other's spare parts to reduce cost and waste, and improve supply lead times and factory capacity.

No doubt effective too for The New Space Race kicked off by POTUS Trump to Mars and the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and Boeing etc rockets.

Perhaps Osaka and the G20 will begin the delivery of that space mission by the top 20 economies alongside simpler projects such as ocean plastic cleanup and SuperSewers.

Toshiba rice cookers for example might well outpace UK nuclear reactors and sit alongside a UK-Japan Space Junk cleanup.

Hitachi no doubt revving its engine for UK's HS2 and other rail projects such as Kwai Rail. Big Rice urging on HS2 in his PM bid and reflecting on the prioritisation of HS3 and Northern Powerhouse projects.

While Panasonic, with or without Dutch medical giant Philips and Mitsubishi, no doubt pondering on the potential for any vacant Honda Swindon factory and say a DNA Bathroom Mirror as part of the Social Care project that both Big Rice and Rory Stewart PM hustings cited as unfinished UK NHS revolutions.

Go East a viable investment strategy and perhaps more Japanese companies would be wise to reflect on Going West again after Osaka too.

@timg33

Uncle Tu and ASEAN workaday politics for UK and Thailand

So it’s all over bar the future shouting and debates as Uncle Tu is crowned PM last week by King Rama from the lengthy election campaign.

And more twists and turns of the election than a nest of cobras as Cabinet roles are handed out in the 20 party coalition and Senate majority of Uncle Tu.

Khun Thanathorn and the Future Forward party settling for second place in opposition with Pheu Thai - and a majority of House of Representative votes.

And not one but two Prime Minister Shinawatra’s settling for the booby prize of exile in Dubai and Hong Kong and warm praise and support from Princess Ubolratana.

The non sequitur of Democracy by Dictatorship rearing its ugly head in UK too not just with the S44 King Henry VIII laws of the Executive changing parliament laws at random but also the threat of a proroguing of Parliament (ie closing it down) to pass any Brexit laws.

Is the Tower of London big enough to hold 600 MP’s?

That last prorogue one of the most peculiar bids for support by Dominic Raab in the Tory PM election as Theresa May now resigns as Tory leader for a caretaker PM role.

The PM elections rather dismal beyond Brexit and more Brexit so far, with tuppence off tax and hospital car park charges featuring as in a parish council election.

Govey with an aim of abolishing the regressive VAT sales tax perhaps the most sensible point on taxation to emerge from the clouds of cannabis and opium smoke and torpor surrounding the candidates. Maybe lashings of cocaine and shaba would spark them all up.
Perhaps Eton isn’t what it was if this is the generation of future leaders it has minted so far.

###UK pseudo elections? ###

While the second if not third unelected PM in recent years with May and Brown previously suggests Thai democracy is on a firmer footing than UK.

And the pseudo-elections of the hereditary Lords as they die off – a tiny electorate of just 92 Lords is worthy of the rotten boroughs of old UK.

Lord Fowler fouling the Lords’ nest as Speaker in failing to deliver 21st century basic reforms.

Co-opting all the senior military and police chiefs into the Thai Senate is perhaps a canny move by Uncle Tu in reducing the potential for a future coup.

Unless a Young Turk with a tank fancies his chances as PM and Democracy by Dictatorship.

But with the elections over and the semblance of normal democracy in place and a further coup improbable then Uncle Tu faces the cut and thrust of politics as normal.

The only light at the end of the tunnel for PM Tu a new song making a whole album of ditties (and regular airplay on Thai radio and the Government House tannoy and Khun Apirak’s barracks?).

Questions already raised over reforms of the new Constitution.

A vote of no confidence aired for next year potentially.

The economy weakening to 3% growth.

The ASEAN Chair of this year frittered away in the kerfuffle of the elections.

And a longer election count even than East Kent with the ballot boxes stored overnight in the council offices with promises not to run the preferred votes through the photocopier. Or the Battlebus of supporters bussed in.

### County Barn £280M scandal ###

UK democracy certainly not what it was with the bizarre Swindon Borough Council election cack-handled by CEO Susie Kemp detailed in Private Eye of 10 Tory candidates being given(!) an extra(!) 2,385 votes each, and despite public outcry taking up their seats(!).

Kent maintaining its reputation for corruption and incompetence against such competition with the £280M loss of KCC pensions in the Woodford scandal ow being reviewed by the Lords. That mismanagement after the £500M pensions scandal of the Icelandic banks at the County Barn.

Worth remembering that the sale of the British Embassy in central Bangkok , Thailand’s largest ever land sale yielded the smaller amount of £400M, far larger sums routinely wasted in the County Barn as it struggles to fill potholes. Probably cheaper to fill them with five pound notes.

And the peculiar Manston airport application by Riveroak funded by not just a Belize mystery company but Delaware, Panama and BVI too and the Swiss Helix bank, that claims it has issued financial information to the public enquiry that yet remains unknown and unseen.

But on that point of the ASEAN Chair not the UK Battlebuses, surely lies the green shoots of recovery for Uncle Tu and Thailand?
Vietnam wisely already preparing for its Chair of ASEAN next year and its UN Security Council membership.

The theme of A Seamless ASEAN and sub themes of Defence and Community surely playing to Tu and Thailand’s strengths.

Kun Thanathorn and Future Forward also no doubt calling for a defence review with its anti-conscription policy too.

And lese-majeste reforms must be on the cards given the witch hunts detailed in the Bangkok Post of Khun Pannika by the royalist parties on petty issues of clothing and Facebook posts. Even King Bhumibol before his death railing against the frivolous use of the lese-majeste laws.

The Thai monarchy treated with far more deference than the UK monarchy – Prince Charles vehemently criticised for years over his green policies before being proved right.

While the massive success of both Thai and Cambodian Prime Minsters opening the BKK-PP rail link for the first time since 1970 is surely galvanising the extension of the link from PP-HCMC under the Vietnam ASEAN Chair.

Cambodia aside, the strategic linkage of Saigon and Bangkok for the first time by rail is a massive trade coup for both nations – and connecting all of the ASEAN mainland’s deep sea ports.

That softening of the Thai economy steeled with extra trade potential – certainly with UK given a 35% downfall in trade since the closure of the Thai SSI steelworks in Newcastle.

### Smart Cities on track? ###

In my Sincerity Advertising role I receive several emails from the Thai Board of Investment in UK for a Sincerity office in BKK and ASEAN – but those emails written only in Thai which must dampen the possibility of UK investment in Thailand and EEC.

And that ASEAN rail infrastructure whether to HCMC or to Kwai and Yangon must be sparking a surge in smelting. Also even for True and AIS 5g mobile internet transmitters in Thailand.

UK this Summer rolling out 5G to the first six main UK cities and that expertise could easily be tapped into by the Tu government to get Thailand 4.0 and its digital superhighway back on track.

And all those concrete rail sleepers from Kwai to Yangon must spur on ItalThai and Siam Cement growth et al. Even restructuring with the Six Companies.

The UK banking and mobile industries in need of further competition beyond just Metro Bank or one Bangkok Bank branch: 50k Thai expats and booming Thai tourism into UK surely calling for better calls and better banking facilities.

While Thailand and UK each with 35M tourists could well collaborate on programmes such as OTOP and Kitchen of the World from the successful launch of the Bangkok Michelin guide.

Thai Red Cross surely working with UK Red Cross on OTOP and GI geographical indications as Ulster Weavers featured in aprons and tea towels and hessian reusable bags. While The Independent in its antiplastic/oceans/recyclable work highlighting not just paper cotton buds, but bamboo toothbrushes and bamboo toilet paper.

While both Uncle Tu and Khun Thanathorn could at least agree on channelling their inner Richard Branson with Hyperloop rail possibilities Yangon-BKK-HCMC or to Ubon and Udon, or Chiang Mai-BKK-Singapore.

The ASEAN Chair becoming unglued with the delays on KL and Singapore rail despite the Connectivity theme.

And on Cambodia, surely it’s the work of moments for Thai and Khmer cross border cooperation in extending the Battambang rail to Siem Reap and Angkor for Thai tourists, and the Royal Road to Isaan.

The animal welfare ban on elephants at Siem Reap surely an issue for depressing Thai tourism receipts and jobs, as at the Surin Elephant Festival or Phuket dolphin shows with changing Western tastes and tourism company animal protection policies.

And Battambang and those other ASEAN Smart Cities sinking into the swamp of failure or at least inaction at the moment.

Forest dwellers highlighted by veteran journalist Khun Sanitsuda, and Blue Flag welfare card are surely an ASEAN revolution for land registration and the banking of the unbanked from Satun to Solomon Islands by companies such as HSBC and Prudential if SCB or GSB are unwilling.

Resilience is not so resilient in Thailand if another tsunami or earthquake or volcano would send seismic shockwaves through the Tu premiership far more than crop haze.

And if Sports Diplomacy is still little more than bread and circuses here in East Kent with the financial bread of investment lacking as the Dreamland circus only just refloats. While the 13-0 drubbing of Thailand by USA in the Women’s World Cup suggests greater possibilities of links with UK as a Sporting Superpower.

Thailand wouldn’t walk alone in not just promoting Leicester’s Siam Foxes or the Carabao cup or Chang’s latest shirt sponsorship or the Premiership in general but community work to rival Khun Tippy’s Million Footballs CSR at King Power Leicester. And sports science and training for athletes translating into innovative healthcare in an ageing society.

Argentina’s VR company Vrify launching into London exactly the sort of tech-health activity that may well be on prescription beyond just e-sports or Thai medical tourism in future.

And if it’s too early to detail the Hyde Park Corner English language schools, the new Tu government must surely want to put a rocket under Thai English language skills and school links.

Thai FDI surely worth exploring with EEC for the Thames Valley Gateway from The City and London Docklands down the Kent coast to Dover Europe’s largest port.

An interesting Asia Foundation report on Isaan highlights not just farm debt but the potential for increased farm machinery sales and Doitung-style crop diversification if Thailand is too reliant just on a glut of rice against China and India exports.

UK exports aside (especially designer rice varieties) to restaurants such as Surin here in Ramsgate a top ten UK Thai restaurant and part of the Kent Cuisine Culture (try the sea bass!). And The Sportsman Michelin rated bistro).

Uncle Tu must be pondering the possibilities for Thai rice exports to the famine-hit regions of Sahel and East Africa in the wake of Thai peacekeeping with Kent Royal Engineers in South Sudan.

Thai rice exports and hungry Africans and UK DFID and USAid funds and UNSDG hunger goals seem an ideal combination. Rice rotting in warehouses as people go hungry seems an easy problem to solve in the 21st century.

And those East Kent Core Company Saga cruise ships and tourists surely should be wending their way to Asia’s wats and waterways more frequently. Thai tourism already expressing concern at cruise ships docking at cargo terminals rather than dedicated tourism berths.

While Thai SME companies from Tshirts to makeup to coffee beans, as well as DHL shippers surely taking a leaf from dynamic blogger Lhyzie Bongon in the Philippines in Asia-Europe trade.

Foodstuffs from Baanson coffee in Chaiyaphum to United Fruit pineapples in Hua Hin must be surely keen to rack up more UK exports and sales.
With Finland as EU chair and Helsinki one of the main cargo hubs to Thailand, DHL along with Thai Air must be keen to expand exports as well as detail the potential air slots in the London Heathrow expansion.

The UK PM debates yielding concerns on the BBC over Boris Island airport being revived and the third runway at Heathrow debate. The Scotland-Ireland bridge far more productive for the UK economy than a Boris Island but a grain of truth in considering an airport in the sea as Hong Kong. And a review of the strange second Gatwick runway overbuild that emerged as well as a third Heathrow overbuild runway and half-empty Gatwick, Birmingham and Stansted airports.

Vietnam’s ASEAN Chair probably concerned about underperforming Vietnam Air at Gatwick.

Much as Finnish companies from Nokia to Suunto can see the growth potential in both UK and Asia with Helsinki cargo airport as stability returns to UK and Thailand.

Time for Change
@timg33

Oz and UK and Treble Club exports/FDI

A choice for Australia: merely a Chinese Farm dwarfed by Indonesia’s population, or a UK and Commonwealth 21st century trade hub.
And a strengthened Pivot South with UK Irish Guards at Darwin– or the risk of more Pacific radiation from India-Pakistan nuclear conflict or Spratlys/Guam and North Korea nukes?

And Pacific Resilience Group on monsoon/typhoon floods, volcanos, earthquakes, forest fires and tsunami.

Beyond Project Chaika, there are various other possibilities for UK-Australia growth:

1. BBC Murray-Darling river eco disaster shades of Aral Sea/Cape Town water disasters, and Barrier Reef coral and tourism degradation and decline.

2. Oceania recycling: 20M Oz and 2M Pacific populations not including 7M PNG and 200M Indonesia – 21st century Oz recycling and sewage upgrades with Pacific islands cleanup: AIIB and ADB. Geraldton port expansion and WA rail spurs?

3. Woomera Rocket Ranges again with new Oz Space Agency and UK Space agency: Surrey Satellites and Glasgow City space companies – end of Oz car industry regeared for space junk niche with UK and Japan?

4. IndoPacific Oceans robo sub exploration: missing Malay plane/radar fail and tsumanis

5. Oz shipyards: UK defence and Border force gunboats and RNLI Coastguard with Plymouth/Portsmouth/Liverpool John West fisheries etc

6. VR/AR: Oz digital industries 24/7 Moneypenny

7. Oz military: Alamein and landmines clearance - TobrukDiggers – Prince Harry Landmine Free Africa Angola and Princess Diana campaign begun and UK-North Africa growth: Egypt/Libya etc – and Desertec solar

8. Perth: hispeed rail to Adelaide and north through Geraldton to Broome to open up WA wilderness tourism with The Six Companies eg JCB and Balfour

9. Sydney central hispeed rail: Brisbane-Cairns and Canberra-Melbourne/Adelaide. Chatting to an Australian army colonel, vast distances, and strategic borders, failing to be closed due to dollar quibbles

10. 19 Crimes wine expansion – and Oz wine/lamb growth with NZ Infratil Manston crimes ban (Infratil Group care homes businesses etc review in Oz?)

11. Oz Sports Diplomacy and UK Sports Superpower: soccer, tennis, Thorpedo¬¬ swimming pools and cycling – and Sports Science

12. TimorLeste ASEAN membership and Oceania focus on Commonwealth growth of small states/Climate Change and end last French/UK Pacific colonies eg paedo republic of Pitcairn, and Clipperton

13. Hawaii and its Union Jack flag, the second USA state after Virginia and its shipyards, for Commonwealth associate membership

14. Oz Flying Doctor and Air Ambulance expertise with UK and South Sudan

15. Pacific Plastic Patch cleanup – and UK Ghost Nets charity on discarded fishing nets and Asia plastics rivers

16. WW2 shipwrecks: pre-1945 nukes medical metal eg UK war graves tampering and Chuuk Japan ships and UK Pacific Nukes guinea pig military medal and Guam etc Agent Orange/napalm dumps review and Marine Reserves as UK

17. Oz Mars test base as USA Utah?

18. Reseeding oceans and trees desertification: SuperSewers and desalination/graphene canals

19. Fossil Fuels industry replacements: coal mining for solar/windfarms as UK success story

20. Moneypenny 24/7 again: timeshift eg Oz movie industry studios and special effects, BPO etc etc
21. Cambodia Corcoran bridges and AusAid: Duke report on Oz universities and international students

22. UK/OZ police Most Wanted/exchanges – largest ever Oz crystal meth haul last month

23. IndoPacific submarines/naval disarmament debate – Spratlys/Paracels/SG/Kra

24. VN: Oz non-CWG war graves

25. Kwai Rail upgrades and Oz Allies: UK-Oz-ASEAN focus

26. Oz products in UK stalled: few brands beyond Amber Nectar or Speedo/Zoggs or the Marmite of Vegemite – Johnson and Johnson suncream and Davos15 Adidas stalled?

27. Oz UK tourism growth eg WA expansion, Saga cruise ships: Sydney and Oceania/Solomons and neglected Kokoda Trail and Guadalcanal, Easter Island and Robinson Crusoe Island tours with Chile etc

28. Aborigine and Oceania and Canada Pacific First Nations arts UK

29. Alaska-Asia Bering bridge: Vancouver to Shanghai with dry feet and without tides/storms

Isaan report and UK

Excellent report on Isaan region in Thailand by Asia Foundation and UK DFID aid funding:

https://asiafoundation.org/publication/thailands-inequality-myths-reality-of-isan/

The basis of further/expanded UK activity in Thailand and ASEAN.

Time for Change

@timg33

#2 South Sudan a beacon for Africa with UK and USA and Thailand?

The Parliament review of the monstrous failure of providing the cystic fibrosis drug Orkambi from USA and now the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on Italian Mafia fake drugs infiltrating the NHS is no doubt a further scalp for Kent Pocahontas Elizabeth Warren on the warpath in her POTUS bid on drugs prices.

And Norman Lamb MP of Parliament Committee raising the issues. The Collapse of Southern Italy under the Mafia matched only by the NHS Medicinees Agency denying and denying the problem then calling an urgent inquiry as patients sicken and die from fake drugs.

POTUS Trump probably also pondering the Rust Belt opportunities – and Treble Club possibilities with UK trade on focused investment – as the Presidential race crunches into first gear with Democrat debates this month.

With my Sincerity Advertising hat on I’ve long argued for the regeneration strengths of Buffalo beyond Madison Avenue.

As with Somalia and Yemen and Libya though, the opportunity for South Sudan is to deliver peace and prosperity after years of civil war and before the deeper effects of Climate Change and desertification across the Sahel.

Perhaps greater UK efforts needed for LatAm with the mega power failure across Argentina an Uruguay: G20 nations falling at the first hurdle of a Digital Economy without electricity. And the Great British success story of the mega windfarms form Lincoln to Kent ready to help the sunny and windy nations of the South Atlantic and Patagonia?

Interesting Lord Browne former CEO BP refloating the possibilities of Desertec Sahara solar panels - I previously worked on the Beyond Petroleum strategy. Those MENA nations not regearing fro solar beyond oil likely to fall further down the poverty and conflict leagues. Perhaps as South Sudan rises with a New Economy.

Former USA UN Ambassador Nikki Haley taking time to spur on the US Embassy in Juba before preparing for the launch of her book “With all due respect” in the Autumn - the Fall if you prefer.


### FDR and AOC New Deal for Africa and USA ###


Boris Johnson in his PM bid no doubt reflecting on the inadvertent wisdom of both the Scotland-Ireland bridge, and remarks on clearing the Libyan bodies from the Med seafront. That latter comment perhaps paling into insignificance with the economic decline afflicting Tunisia after the Sousse tourism beach killings – and Egypt and the Luxor deaths in previous years -and potential for Somali tourism prosperity along its seaboard highlighted by NZ’s Helen Cark.

But silence on the NZ Manston Infratil criminal extradition of Steve Fitzgerald and Matt Clark now at Wellington Airport.

While potential boondoggle projects such as the Jonglei Canal, perhaps the Aral Sea of Africa without rigorous evaluation, have ground to a halt since civil war in 1983 and the strange rusting hulks of the mega tunnelling machinery visible from space, presumably Mars, and surely awaiting prompt demolition and effective scrap metal recycling as Kent’s Royal Engineers are more fully deployed from barracks and stirring memories of the Channel tunnel megatunnel kit.

Already the vanguard of the Royal Engineers in place with Operation Trenton as UNMISS and recent support from the Thai military and Cambodia. The UK’s secret weapon of the RE 521 well digging battalion still AWOL, probably in the rough pubs of Chatham. Perhaps gearing up to complement the new Prince Harry initiative on Landmine Free Africa in the delicately placed footsteps of Princess Diana in Angola.

Kofi Annan’s warning of DRC Congo UN forces as too large to be invisible and too small to be effective key in driving greater UK peacekeeping involvement. Already the BATUK base in Kenya capable of being expanded for greater USA support in Somalia. As can also be expanded the under-used UN Police training base in Ethiopia.

POTUS Trump might have paused in the absurd nonsense of searching for Obama’s Kenyan passport or Hillary’s homebrew email server, but again food for thought in more focused troop rotations through Kenya and Oman and Afghanistan.

The end of piracy in Somalia and winding down of the war in Yemen and potentially Libya the low hanging fruit of just Syria as the last main MENA security threat.

In my MP and Mayor campaigns I’ve urged no further awards of the QPM Queens Police Medal in Kent or the other 43 forces except for bravery, not admin, and for being deployed to peacekeeping zones as South Sudan.

UK Deputy Chief Constables deployed from the 43 forces for 6-12 months gaining valuable experience and links as Kent Police used to as with the 1954 death of a Kent Police UN Peacekeeper in Cyprus. UN Police service in South Sudan should be a badge of honour and the gateway to the Chief Constable role.

While Surin Village School charity work shows 60M children not in school primarily in sub-Saharan nations such as South Sudan. Schooling, aside from the benefits of education, providing the basis for vaccines and Pandemic Prevention, the UK’s main strategic threat, whether TB or Ebola or HIV or Spanish Flu.

UK American Hollywood star George Clooney and husband of Amal Clooney the UK lawyer soon to star in the Catch 22 television series and famous for using his Nespresso coffee advertising fees for Sudan human rights drones. The USA embassy in Juba probably needing to caffeinate up with UK DFID chief Rory Stewart and Matt Rycroft and Helen Lewis to access USA military drones and USAid budgets.

And Irishwoman abroad, EU ambassador Sinead Walsh no doubt exploring further bridges along the White Nile, as well as Halo trust and MAG minefield clearance work with the Red Cross. And probably distracting dynamic Eire USA ambassador Dan Mulhall from his poesy to mobilise the Red campaign and U2 in Africa again.

If bridges are being built in South Sudan then fences and walls are going up again in Europe.

Justin Welby Archbishop of Canterbury here in East Kent already active on mobilising the Sudanese Anglican church, while his right hand man the Bishop of Dover retired, if that’s possible from the church, not just promoting Buddhist tolerance in Kent but no doubt pondering on deploying the UK church along the Rome pilgrim paths.

Both Cyprus and Libya perhaps the greatest failure to date of UN and EU with over 10,000 Mediterranean drownings each year, and the Sudan crises and the Syria/Assad crisis plunging the EU into the populist/nationalist crisis still playing out with the Faragist Brexit Party in UK, Mattini in Italy, Le Pen in France and Orban in Hungary.

One small positive in the colonial-era gay human rights breaches is the overturning of such legislation in Botswana as well as Bhutan and Brunei gay discrimination. Such death penalty and hate legislation sanctions surely also low hanging fruit.

And The Six Companies of Deere, JCB, Mott, Murphy, Bechtel, Balfour and Hitachi - there never was just six providing the basis of that Africa New Economy.

For the picket line of the Sahel from Dakar in Senegal to N’Djamena and Lake Chad (another Aral Sea shrunk by 45% in Chad) to Djibouti on the Red Sea and Suez Canal route surely now marks the southern frontier of Europe.

As with Spanish Sahara and Morocco dispute effectively raised by UK’s Karen Pierce in UN New York in December it’s not inconceivable that similar sand berms will be raised by Kent’s Royal Engineers across the Sahel – less as sandy Checkpoint Charlies but as desertification barriers to the onward sweep of the sand tides of the Sahara.

As well as the African efforts of The Six Companies: Balfour Beatty and The Mighty Quinn, Murphy, Bechtel, Mott McDonald, JCB and Hitachi. the various incarnations of The Six Companies and supply chains delivering not just The Boulder Dam but even thousands of bridges in Cuba.

ASEAN Minister Richard Graham, probably urging on his colleague Mark Field, given Mabey bridges in his constituency capable of going into overdrive and overtime.

Construction in itself moving the Sahel into a New Deal, worthy of FDR or AOC, of not just aid but functioning and growing economies. As would the Wau-Juba rail link – that eventually connecting with the Morocco hispeed rail. Africa’s first hispeed rail studied last week, with Morocco’s burgeoning food exports to UK: xx sardines, by Liam Fox the dynamic UK Trade Minister swapping his air miles for rail miles and a long-delayed UK Strategic Rail Group.

Thailand’s USA Senator Duckworth no doubt keen to ensure her Cairo, Illinois constituents feature in The Davos15 and The Six Companies groundwork for Cairo, Egypt – UK already steaming ahead with the Cairo Metro.

While her USAF strategic initiative in Scott USAF base might well plug into those Clooney and Sudan drones, even Med refugees, for more than five eyes extra analysis of East Africa.

Much as the West Africa ports of Dakar and Nouakchott would need greater oversight to provide Atlantic ports facing north to Cherbourg and Dover, and west to Virginia and south to Rio and Buenos Aires as African trade increases.

The Arabian Smart Cities already underway along with the tilt to the Mediterranean by Prince MBS, that gaining more attention and effort and FDI as the Yemen war concludes, and hispeed rail across Arabia from Port Sudan to Kuwait and Tehran.

That lynchpin of a stable and peaceful and prosperous South Sudan also providing not just a strategic focus for UK with is SANE approach: the mega markets of South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt, or Africa Smart Mega-Cities such as Cape Town, Lagos and Cairo. My previous work on UK New Towns and Cardiff Bay and London Docklands national developments flagging up the new UK potential in such Smart Cities with the Chunnel and Crossrail engineering and Super Sewer and the Shard, all Europe’s largest construction projects for decades.

But, hence the Thailand focus, South Sudan also provides a strategic link to the Indo-Pacific.



### If it’s Tuesday it must be a gin day, all week ###


Not just the Suez Canal approaches already with USA Marines at Camp Lemonnier and the nearby Chinese and Japanese military bases, but linking across Arabia to the Persian Gulf and Oman. Those Pentagon golf courses on the rates soaking up the new Trump budget?

A USA Africa Command upgrade from Stuttgart and out from under the US Army Europe umbrella, if not to Juba or Khartoum then Nairobi or Djibouti might refocus better Pentagon value from that $750BN budget in safeguarding peace and prosperity.

For, as the Persian Gulf becomes strategically less important with peak oil and growth of Desertec-style solar farms, Muscat in Oman provides a stable and progressive eastward outpost to the IndoPacific: Pakistan and the OBOR/BRI deep water port of Gwadar, and India and Thailand and Singapore.

That last megaport perhaps augmented by the Kra Canal through the Thai isthmus to the rest of ASEAN and China.

Lake Chad and Jonglei Canal, along with the Aral Sea forewarning on water wars, surely the basis of major UK thought leadership by FCO and DFID et al at the Budapest Water Conference in October.

While the Indo Pacific and Pivot South, and former UK Chagos base, is already a key element of USA naval and Resilience policy even before factoring in the conflict potential of Indian and Chinese submarines.

If the FCO’s Miss Moneypenny in Australia claims it’s always International Gin Day somewhere in the world then USA Ambassador Harry Harris is willing to play bartender to serve up a gin martini shaken not stirred for an Indo Pacific naval policy from Korea to Canberra to Cape Town.

If only UK was serving up greater trade with Korea as well as Japan given the Brexit mess had yielded the loss of Honda and Nissan. Empty MOU’s with Korea on current or future trade maybes are thin gruel for two of the world’s most advanced G20 economies.
Those incompetent UK Myanmar officials haven’t been sent to Korea to mess things up there too?

More positively Soccer Aid despite a UK defeat perhaps marks the kick off not just of renewed UK efforts and Sports diplomacy in South Sudan but a richer strategic impetus.

The UK as a Sporting Superpower and with football as one of its key currencies, the real/only World Series – Senegal’s xx xGolden Boot in the Premier League – calling out for a marshalling of Charlton Athletic or Manchester United or Crystal Palace under the strategic stewardship of Arsenal and its community work.

UK Ambassador to Jamaica foregoing the Reggae Girlz Women’s World Cup efforts, to field a team of Jamaican nurses to the Leeds teaching hospitals as part of the Social Care and Gilgamesh Strategy. Exactly the right blend of training and learning and Kent Chevening scholarships not healthcare plunder that UK and the Commonwealth needs.

And no doubt a cookie cutter template of South Sudan future employment and hospitals.

While DFID with USAid – each with the world’s largest aid budgets of c.$20BN each as well as G20 support - is surely able to deploy the Red Cross and its DEC partners more fully in South Sudan alongside Virginia’s Operation Smile and Clearly spectacles.
Operation Smile already with medical and hospital ship links and blueprints in Africa and Asia.

And the Bidi-Bidi refugee camp in Uganda cannily taking South Sudan human capital for its own Smart City of the future – much as Jordan and Turkey will no doubt do with their Syrian brain drain in reverse windfall.

And if the UK’s IndoPacific strategy was recently described as nonexistent then the green shoots of South Sudan growth also sit alongside Commonwealth efforts: it seems astonishing that one of the world’s largest organisations and only Anglophone institution has no specific plans of expansion.

Surely gone are the days of imperial vicar’s tea parties of warm words, warmer beer and cold tea with the potential to forge a more robust 21st century Commonwealth institution.

Rwanda already one of the non-colonies leading the way. While the political and economic and population heft of India and Bangladesh and Pakistan mark a seachange for the future as Prince Charles’ reign begins.

Undoubtedly Duchy Original biscuits, as in his Cuba and Caribbean Commonwealth visit, will be merely the appetiser for detailed Climate Change action and crunchy trade reform in the Commonwealth.

South Sudan must surely be in the frame for Commonwealth membership and Sudan even before the Senegal Youth Games in 2022 and infrastructure upgrades - that Moroccan rail link?

While Justin Welby the Archbishop of Canterbury has already forsaken the vicar’s tea party syndrome (but not the Duchy Original biscuits) for a more muscular approach in welding the Anglican churches, and others, into a political force for stability in South Sudan and Africa.

South Sudan over the next decade could just be a beacon for the rest of Africa.

Time for Change
@timg33

A Tale of Two Sudans with UK and USA and Thailand

The unrest in Sudan again with demonstrations in Khartoum, Omdurman and Port Sudan with upto 100 demonstrators shot dead and thrown into the Nile highlights the dangers facing not just Sudan’s slide into chaos and dictatorship but the threat facing neighbouring South Sudan as it emerges from such a state.

The latter the world’s newest nation, unless you count last month’s name change by North Macedonia, formed from its civil war and breakaway from Sudan in 2011.

The unrest now in South Sudan’s Yei River state that conflict in microcosm.

But if the Sudan unrest has yielded, as with Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the toppling of the dictator Bashir – and potential ICC extradition for war crimes and crimes against humanity or at the very least an Idi Amin exile to Saudi Arabia – then there are wider considerations for UK and Europe and USA in helping South Sudan on the road to peace and prosperity.

East Africa a great USA success story for POTUS Trump with the peace treaty between Eritrea and Ethiopia – the latter’s PM now using his good offices to intervene in the Sudan crisis. While POTUS Trump has urged caution on the forever wars of Pentagon policy and new $750BN budget with the Special Forces casualties in Niger - a factor in the Tim Kaine War Power Act debate:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/17/world/africa/niger-ambush-american-soldiers.html

Perhaps the routine drone assassinations of the Obama years is reaching a natural end. $1M missiles for mud huts and motorbikes seems poor value in delivering peace and prosperity and no real substitute for boots on the ground whether military or humanitarian workers.


### Africa trade hots up for UK and USA ###


And both Ivanka Trump and PM May have had very positive trade visits to Africa to refocus UK and USA trade efforts not just in the Extra Special Relationship heralded by the POTUS Trump UK visit but in Africa with its growing markets of young consumers.
UK looking extremely foolish in the Who Lost China trade debates of the Cameron years if Africa trade slips away with the weight of the Commonwealth and DFID and EU etc.

While the POTUS Trump state visit to UK spurring on calls for a Treble Club of a tripling of UK USA trade to $3TN. That perfectly feasible given UK and USA already the largest trade partners of the other.

Indeed with UK, USA and France neck and neck in African trade and far more investments than any other nation, even the much-promised efforts of China, in transport (the new Djibouti electric train already running out of gas) and natural resources then African trade success is also there to be lost.

France most active militarily in West Africa in Mali - albeit this week the massacre of 100 villagers in Dongon in the witches brew continuum of terrorism and poverty and civil war. Both UK and USA perhaps wise to take lessons from fellow NATO ally France in its Francophone African successes.

Increasingly South Sudan is becoming the lynchpin in UK strategy for the Sahel. Dynamic new Ambassador Chris Trott now in place and kicking off greater EU aid and trade ties with the opening of the bridge at Kuacjok to ease the way over the Jur river and around Wau region.

That Wau road link enabling the rail link to the capital Juba and onto Kampala in Uganda, linking in the key cities and ports of Khartoum and Port Sudan in Sudan, and Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya.

Tourism euros aside, those infrastructure improvements along with regional airstrips, speeding through the flow of DFID and USAid for one of the world’s poorest nations.

South Sudan with the world’s fewest roads and none paved, 97% of its people in slums and a daily wage of $2 and no paved airstrips.
While with Peak Oil and the only pipeline through Sudan to the Red Sea, landlocked South Sudan is at ground zero in terms of economic growth, if not rolling backwards into conflict again.

While former PM Theresa May in one of the last official visits pausing to throw a few shapes with African schoolchildren and at the Tory party conference and Ivanka Ghana textiles underscores lost growth in South Sudan. But the subsistence agriculture of South Sudan unlikely to yield a wheatfield to sprint through, even, perhaps, carrying a loaf with a stash inside of Guinea narco-state cocaine for Govey to energise his PM bid.

Govey's Dress Gordon tartan from the POTUS Trump state visit more likely woven from South Sudan textile mills of the future with the Trump tartan. If not jostling for space with Big Rice Jezza H rice mills and brick factories.

Certainly the Clean Clothes campaign in the Sunday Mirror highlighting the Premier League football shirts scandal of 75p per hour wages in Thailand and Cambodia and Bangladesh in for the real World Series of £100 shirts must cause food for thought in ASEAN and Africa. And by dynamic Cindy Cao former UNICEF and EU-KH Representative in the corridors and plush watering holes of Brussels.



### Water, water everywhere in Budapest and Balaton nor any drop to drink ###


While a forewarning for South Sudan of UK and USA policy in Afghanistan crumbling over the lack of goat milk and leather factories: First World nice to haves ignoring Third World critical issues. Or water bowsers and clear irrigation ditches and Thailand’s Doitung on heroin crops - perhaps Govey elbowing Rory out of the way in the PM election for a taste of opium.

And Helmand second only to the Great British English seaside towns for a steady supply of Afghan and Shan heroin. The Myanmar military now beginning search operations on the Thai border and not Chinese border yet.

While Ambo Woody in UK is still nursing the bruises from raising the Americanisation of the NHS (never start a land war in Asia, and never mess with the British NHS two great American truths?) probably swapping his NFL baseball cap for his Johnson and Johnson hat, and wondering on the possibilities for soap and condom and tampon factories in Africa and East Kent Pfizer Viagra.

London’s Mike Bloomberg or holidaying Warren Buffett would surely pause only for a microsecond before investing?

Certainly just those future Trump Hotels on the shore of Lake Chad or Somali seafront or in downtown Juba would gobble up thousands of those little bars of soap and miniature bottles of shower gel and shampoo.

Ambo Woody must also be sketching out a game plan for the Women’s Football (Soccer if you must) World Cup as well as his nascent European NFL growth in this Year of USA Sports. 6M UK viewers for last week’s Women’s FA Cup the largest broadcast television audience yet – with minimal scheduling and promotion.

While the 13-0 drubbing of Thailand by USA in the Women Word Cup suggests UK’s soccer export is alive and kicking in the home of gridiron.

While the quietly capable Senator Eshoo and dynamic POTUS candidate Kamala Harris, both in the West Coast Republic of Boeing, must be thinking on the possibilities for the Boeing board of directors in their Seattle or Sheffield HQ with every EU banned airline an African airline. That’s a lot of new solar planes needed given Californian wealth is built on aviation.

And air links easier between Africa and Europe easier than links between African nations. So Bristol’s and Toulouse’s Airbus, or Tim Apples, would probably have a view on those unpaved runways and lack of air traffic control electronic kit in South Sudan.

While McCain buddy, Lindsay Graham must pause between mouthfuls of hickory nuts or pecans sprinkled over his Kelloggs Cornflakes, the Rolls Royce of breakfast cereals, and wonder where in say South Sudan all those Arizona dumped aircraft could be properly dismantled, smelted and recycled for Ford or Volvo or John Deere hubcaps. And retooled back at Boeing Charleston?

That John Deere a more progressive force in MENA or Russian prairies than Jihadi John, or the ISIS Beatles? Especially with 11BN not 7BN mouths to feed soon.

Especially across Sahel and Yemen with for example that 45% shrunken Lake Chad again (the Aral Sea of Africa?) with 1M thirsty people in Fort Lamy on its riverbanks, or the dry taps of water-stressed Cape Town last year.

Even here in East Kent, Manston aquifers aside, less rainfall than Syria now with Climate Change. That East Kent tourism boom in the sun only deliverable with water and beer to quench their thirst - or drown their sorrows if the New York Jets lose on satellite telly.

(to be continued)

@timg33

Thailand schooling UK and USA beyond Animal Farm and 1984?

An interesting article as always by Khun Surinya in the Bangkok Post on Thailand schools:


https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1687488/school-merger-policy-so-unfair-to-kids


And a follow up editorial article by xxx to spell out this vital issue in further detail:


https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1687888/school-mergers-need-extra-care


Some 18,000 THhi village schools in danger of being merged within a 6km radius and a further 3,000 such schools in border regions preserved due to mountains or near the frontier.

Separately that last point a factor in East Kent NHS planning with the perpetual attempt to reduce services based on the centralised view from The County Barn quartered safe in Maidstone but fenced in by their empty champagne cases and road noise from over-centralised tarmac and tax.

That overly bureaucratic drawing of lines on maps failing to reflect conditions on the ground or in this case the large blue expanse of the Channel that makes up one side of Frontline East Kent - indeed the longest coastline of any English county.

On similar ground Khun Surinya pointing out that a broad brush to removing village schools could endanger the wider societal benefits of education especially in the Charter regions of Isaan and North and Deep South where the mountains and canyons are not the highly-funded glass and steel of Bangkok.

And are regions where travelling is that much more difficult on potholed country roads in the monsoon and blazing sun of the dry season not the aircon luxury of BKK Skytrain or more clunky buses.

Both points apt for African and ASEAN Smart Cities given East Kent's involvement in the crocodiles of Walking Buses.

Truth in the rumour that most Bangkok airconditioned shopping malls use more electricity than most Thai regions?

On that last point UK Acting Ambassador to Thailand, Margaret Tongue highlighting in a Renewables Energy conference that ASEAN sunshine is 30% more productive than UK for solar panels. UK taking no lessons from anyone in The Age of Climate Change in rapidly divesting its coal and oil industries for solar and windfarms, the largest UK windfarm already off the Kent coast.

And also constituting many of the new Marine Reserves to begin reseeding the oceans.

That delayed in Kent as the County Barn now caught out by £260M as its fossil fool speculation with public sector pensions fails again after the zillions wasted on Icelandic bank speculation. Chief Constable Pughsley sent me a Resilience Fax that he will have to stay late and work longer in cutting Kent Police pensions. Somebody needs to clean out the County Barn Aegean stables he says, as it's a right old pigsty.

### Breakfast of Irn Bru and bagels ###

Govey, the UK Environment Minister and former Education Minister and now PM candidate against Jezza H and a strangely subdued Sajo, perhaps infected with the curse of the too-large Home Office, wisely taking lessons from Caroline Lucas UK Green party leader on oceans and forests (a new UK Tree Tsar in place) and the less glamorous topic of top soil raised by Kasetsart University.

Govey pausing from his breakfast bagel - probably Warburtons - to highlight 40% of UK top soil lost since 1840 and only six harvests away from famine.

The dynamic NFU leader Minette Batters no doubt doing the same to her members and agricultural colleges. The Daily Mail highlighting the absurd scandal of garlic capable of being grown in UK flown from China and frozen for 6 months shipping, placed in non-biodegradable plastic pots by M&S and those pots flown in from Belgium on non-solar Boeing and Airbus planes.

Lessons from Thailand on OTOP and Doitung long overdue. Indeed from East Kent Core Company Bakkavor (now 27th on London Stock Exchange) on food management whether fresh fruit and veg or healthier pizzas and desserts.

Former PM candidate Foxy busy laying out the groundwork for UK Strategic Rail Groups in the new Morocco hispeed rail, Africa's first, and Cairo Metro, one of the world's largest and crowded cities. Foxy no doubt pausing only for a can of Irn Bru, made in Scotland from girders, from the buffet car to save his hip flask to share a dram or two with Ivanka at the Trump State visit dinner.

Why no Ivanka Fashion brand still? At the very least donate all the profits to USAid Africa from her successful trade visit? The Trump tartan looked quite boring too surely Kent's Vivienne Westwood could glam it up and punk it up a bit?

And if there'd be few takers for a Trump perfume (the smell that lingers? , the smell of Trump?), surely a Melania brand on perfumes and interior decor would be a breath of fresh air? Even a First Lady brand for the future?

The wheels wobbling on the Trump visit over silly London Mayor insults and off the cuff NHS remarks but Melania effortlessly crowned the Queen of Fashion in every UK newspaper with full page reviews of her dresses and hats.

But I'm still having to use Esmerelda my best pig as an air conditioner at the County Barn.


### Water water everywhere in Budapest ##

While travel on the ferries and canals and islands of Asia surely ripe for consideration as part of the major Hungary UN Water Conference in Budapest in October alongside Mekong dams, 10 Asia rivers and ocean plastic deposits and recycling, and RNLI and swimming lessons and pools.

UK again taking no lessons on those less criteria aside from the bizarre and foolish Gucci fire station demolishing the Ramsgate swimming pool and tarmacking sports fields gifted by the Edwardians for health.

Kent slipping backwardness and worsening mortality rates.

Tracey Crouch, Kent's former Sports Minister and Gambling Safety Tsar limbering up on the touchlines as the only qualified FA referee in parliament, the chirpy John Bercow and august Lindsay Hoyle Deputy Speaker aside respected for their skills in managing the Brexit silliness and kindergarten rowdiness of parliament, with her freewheeling Olympic Swimming Pool Campaign for all 34 UK counties.

If UK invents products for USA to manufacture (trains, cinema, USA, television, democracy, Bermuda shorts, internet etc etc) then UK as a threadbare Sporting Superpower is also truth in cliche.


### Burmese Days wasted ###


Thailand's village school reforms aside, although Chi Onwurah MP's solar panel work with Vodafone/EE for remote villages in Africa surely as relevant in the mountain bothys of Cairngorms as Kalasin and certainly the mountains of Myanmar after years of UK failure, there is a wider issue in Thai education.

Orwell would be turning in his grave at his Burmese Days now long wasted with a faltering UK Embassy and British Council.

As with Road Safety the same debate occurs each year with an increasing education budget, no flies on Thailand's education planners in meeting the needs of a 21st century Thailand 4.0, but hugely underperforming English language skills.

English pride in Shakespeare or East Kent's Dickens aside, it's interesting that Uncle Tu highlights George Orwell's Animal Farm on his reading list. Interesting in that Orwell's profound prose can be easily read by a school child, whether in Pegwell Bay or Satun Bay, and in Thailand's future political debates.

https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1688920/stuck-in-our-own-orwellian-nightmare


Uncle Tu no cardboard cutout dictator of the old school but no doubt wisely foreseeing the battlelines being drawn between the new parliament and 250 senators of the military regime and Khun Thanathorn and Future Forward party coalition lead of reformists.
Uncle Tu's unusual PM coronation and 250 handpicked senators perhaps out of the Orwell playbook as Animal Farm as a satire on the totalitarian Soviet regimes upto just after 1984.

https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1688884/pms-book-choice-baffles-nation

And Uncle Tu as PM with a 20 party coalition and majority of 3 votes the green shoots of a return to the chaos we've seen in the Bangkok Shutdown and Brexit 52:48 narrow win.


### Twitter trenchlines dug ###

Or the chaos this week of the Tiananmen Square Massacre anniversary. UK and Thai troops standing firm together in South Sudan as neighbouring Sudan convulses into more protests.

While the Twitter trenchlines are being dug long after Princess Ubolratana's seismic #howcomeiytsthewayitis with FWP #porrakpor and the European Tour of Khun Thanathorn and Khun Pannika and Khun Piyubtar to the BBC and posing in front of the George Orwell statue.

1984 equally valid for schoolreading lists and along with East Kent's sandwiches and Hunger Games salute symbols and Chula-Tham football match symbols of rebellion and opposition and criticism.

But, Bubbly Rory Stewart MP, and DFID Minister, beginning his MP campaign with impromptu public speeches channelled at Hyde Park Corner the basis of English free speech idolised by Orwell.

The New York Times citing Rory as goofy perhaps true (although as with Ken Dodd, Orwell's rival for Greatest Briton?, maybe he could eat an orange through a tennis racket's strings, and the curse of NHS dentistry supposedly free and excellent) but less sulphorous than the rather nasty E Chor insults facing Khun Pannika as opposition politicos try some political hairpulling to try and undo her policy points and Princess Leia-style pigtails/buns.

And if USA Ambo Woody has stumbled into the minefield of the NHS despite his State Department insurance surely American dentistry is ripe for growth if NHS is failing in its mission of free healthcare. Those gap-toothed British schoolkids in their asbestos classrooms might yet thank him as they finish their Kelloggs cornflakes schoolbreakfast and Illinois moo juice. And Florida orange juice.

Sonny's Specials might yet feature every week in every Asda-Walmart with the UK red tractor (is it a John Deere or a Massey Ferguson?) food spec brand for organic and free range and SME foods. Epecially with POTUS Trump now calling for a trebling of UK USA $$1TN trade as part of the Extra Special Relationship.

Despite the chlorine chicken totem, and that easily washed away in USA agri-reforms, most USA farmers are small family firms. Part oof the barn converted for some jars of honey to export to UK surely a no brainer for the bee crisis. And tree farms growing saplings and hedgerows for replanting on the prairies too. UK with 47 trees per person needing to treble that to achieve UN forestry targets. What's 60M x 47? About 300M? Those don't grow every year nor on trees.

And Rory might yet sink his gnashers not just into delivering UK dentistry but DFID dentistry and Kent-Virginia's Operation Smile cleft lips to South Sudan and beyond and the wasted Burmese days of a weak UK embassy and British Council.

Clearly the NHS-created-and-funded Moorfields Eye Hospital for Arabian Gulf royalty needs review too. Joe Public UK funding it but not for Joe Public Arabia?

While Rory's DFID predecessor Penny Mordaunt has highlighted hospital ships - and certainly Danish style armoured ambulances - for UK troops and aid and supply chain ripple effect through UK shipyards. Plundering nurses from the Commonwealth may be more palatable with extra training and Resilience facilities.

The first Surin Schools in Vietnam in the Mekong delta with HSBC's rather excellent Water programme in the delta and Vietnam mountains, unfortunately tripped and fell at the first hurdle. As did the Mali schools and school lunches programme.

It's too early to detail my Hyde Park Corner language schools project, but certainly Kent's Mickey Mouse Paramount theme park is overdue review. Cardboard cutouts optional (unless English seaside ones) but Uncle Tu could visit and consider that as a project for Siam Cement investment as well repairing the ongoing seismic faultlines in Thailand of Shinawatra and Pheu Thai.

Disney or Japanese Hinka theme parks aside, Thailand's cultural heritage well-preserved and surely a Victoria and Albert fashion museum exhibition with Thai silk overdue. Certainly culture wars could take a backseat to the military-antimilitary group that's unlikely to be bridged soon. A 10% increase in military spending during the Tu years likely to be unscrewed, stored and investigated in detail whether submarines are Stryker armoured cars or conscription in general and the number of generals and army size.

All debates here in UK, the bubbly Rory perhaps unwise to emphasise his brief role as colonial governor in the disastrous UK army regime in Basra in Iraq War the Sequel, potentially for Orwellians here in Brexit Britain. His opium smoking perhaps wiser for drab Brexit and PM campaigns although it's easier to get it here in than Afghanistan despite 20 years of UK military action.

Certainly it seems a bit mean of USA to charge $80M for 37 Stryker armoured cars when they're essentially scrap after the Iraq and Afpak wars winding down. And rather than tooling up USA police with surplus Iraq kit to machine gun yet more black people in USA's broken cities, shouldn't UK be considering buying them off the USA shelf rather than the duplication and bloat and reinventing of the wheel on the rates of Ajax and Boxer armoured cars rusting in barracks? Or the thousands of lorries in BAOR storage on the Rhine?

The latter surely waiting to be sparked to life and driven across any Gibraltar road-rail bridge (the first bridge already opened at Kuajok to smooth the way to Juba and lay the groundwork for Wau-Juba-Kampala rail) through the minefields of North Africa to UK's friends in South Sudan and African Commonwealth as the first school buses and public transport?

Lord Adonis citing a £2 fare cap on all UK buses in the transport and PM debates. In my MP and Mayor campaigns I've urged a flat return fare of £50 in UK from Lands End to John O'Groats. Perhaps with a Tube Zone-style 30 minute radius (or is that a circumference?).

Last week's Tobias Ellwood Defence Minister article raised the silliness of 3% NATO spend from a 2% target not yet met by most European nations: c.1.5% on average. And every European nation literally that much nearer to Russian panzers than UK. Tobias shooting himself in the foot by revealing that UK was already paying 2.3%. So beyond ex-Army vanity and MOD bloat and remnants of Empire and Cold War, it's clear somebody was sleeping through Sandhurst War College lessons.

And a concern if Parliament's Defence Committees are only staffed with ex-Army cheerleaders and Colonel Blimps looking for wars and budget-grab. The Pentagon's latest Iran War seemingly such fluff.

Young Turks such as former captain Johnny Mercer must be tempted to roll a grenade into the defence committee latrines at such twaddle. No doubt Kent's Defence Chair Tom Tugendhat and Ramsgate's former Defence Chief General Dannatt lighting the fuse for him. Or at least preparing his rations for him: a bit more bully beef in those sandwiches than the years of torturing and bullying of UK army veterans or Irish civilians or Deepcut soldiers.

UK and Thai soldiers whether in South Sudan or the Irish Guards in Kwai probably thinking how best to work together on UN Peacekeeping missions. Rumours swirl Chief Constable Pughsley is coordinating a Sudan Medal as a condition of the QPM, Queens Police Medal only given for bravery or senior typing, for UN Police duties.

No doubt Big Joke in Thailand would agree that no UK Deputy Chief Constable should even be considered for a Chief role without say 6 months duty with say the South Sudan police and UN Police. Kent Police with the proud but sad record of a UK police casualty on UN Peacekeeping in Cyprus in 1954.

A UN Peacekeeping College linked to Hendon and Sandhurst and Government House seems far more practical than the UN University of bureaucrats on the rates in Japan.


### A Supersewer of Brain Drain ###


Regardless of Thai schools, UK schools debates mired in concerns over leaky buildings, and boilers that fail in the Autumn not Winter, and deadly asbestos and parents funding pencils and notebooks (paper ones not Apples) and toilet paper. The latter probably to write on as well as use. While the scandal of pupils off-rolled to reduce classroom violence and improve school grades a factor in Chief Pughsley's review of truancy and social dumping in Kent from London.

A Brain Drain magnified into that SuperSewer again.

One factor worth considering more closely in Surin Village Schools was its success in beginning to link Kent and UK schools. The exchange of presents between Surin school and Ellington School for Girls wasn't just Union Jack pencil cases or Thai silk skirts but the basis of lessons in language (those Thai-English lessons again) and culture.

Especially with AIS and True weblinks and Open University MOOC's. Wiser retail heads such as Khun Supaluk of The Mall Group might consider not just fashion events but a live Teach-In broadcast to drum up footfall in the overbuild of Bangkok malls? Making maths fun would be going some (although my fashionista daughter managed to be good at both from algebra to zips) but certainly STEM highlights or English language via football?

Certainly UK universities needing to remain at the top of their Champions League with the first court case over Mickey Mouse degrees - not Disney brand studies or animation courses - but weak courses from Anglia Ruskin University.

The Surinistas drawing a thousand versions of Big Ben to highlight their impressions of UK. Kent's Trade Minister to USA Antony Phillipson probably tearing his hair out not just at the kids flying the flag the wrong way but Macys too. At least they're trying to make America Great Britain Again though. Certainly the UK USA Trump visit schooling both sides in the potential to increase the $1TN trade - POTUS Trump echoing Davey Cameron, more generally on UK trade, in wanting that to double and triple rapidly.


### Sonny's Specials a supersized farm sale and yard sale ###


Leaving aside the sterling efforts of USA Farm Chief Sonny Perdue on growing a new crop of brands and businesses, a glaring black hole is just 3M USA tourists to UK. UK achieving the same to USA (and 1M to Thailand) with a much smaller population.

POTUS Trump might well take lessons from the quietly capable Leo Varadkar in Eire his next port of call in his DDay commemorations to Eire in gaining UK passports for visits and residency from Brexit. A Boris bridge already raised for Scotland-Ireland in the Boris PM campaign and ripe for Irish-American know-how and The Six Companies with Murphy. Virginia and Kent's Terry McAuliffe years of work in Ulster and Dorothy McAuliffe's school dinners work creating fitter kids that could bridge the Atlantic and the Irish Sea and Straits of Gibraltar.

While if I've written before on the DDay implications for UK and USA:

http://lovekentloveramsgate.blogspot.com/2019/06/dday-uk-and-usa-next-75-years.html

There are also implications for Thailand in a closer working with UK and USA universities. Former PM Cameron's promise of a minimum of a year's work visa after graduation for international students has faltered but held. Both Uncle Tu and Khun Thanathorn must surely want a united front for Thailand's universities and language schools and 130 UK and 34 Eire universities.

And one of the absurdities of the Brexit twaddle was that Eire (4M people) and Malta (400k - a third the size of Kent) could have been the only English speaking nations the EU and thus losing the right of English as an official EU language.

Thailand and ASEAN could have been the only nations flying the flag for UK with English as their second official language.

The increasingly bizarre and lacklustre Manston airport crimes collapsing on the first day of a strange DCO private sector land theft as none of the Riveroak tax haven finance details from Delaware to Panama to BVI to Helix Switzerland were disclosed to the investigators.

That relevant for Security Minister Ben Wallace rightly gaining the front page of the Sunday Mail for exactly this sort of NCA, the UK FBI, scrutiny needed for white collar criminals such as lawyers and estate agents with dirty money hiding behind court paper and delays.

Lord Grabiner of One Essex Court barristers, and still a judge, castrated not just over the BHS scandal but now court fees profiteering on the GPO Postmaster scandals with the Great British Postman accused of fraud when their IT systems failed - not only was Postman Pat innocent but the crimes far worse than the LIBOR frauds.

Riveroak and their white collar enablers failing to beheld ot account for wasting public time and tax. The Londongrad culture of High Court failure on Magnitsky crimes and Unexplained Wealth Orders long delayed.

The High Court becoming a pig sty to rival the County Barn as the clerks and judges slide around in their own muck.

Aidan Quinn QC and Bar Standards Board struck dumb with a deafening silence on why he hasn't raised the barrister crooks issue. Effectively handcuffing himself to the case as gamekeeper turned poacher on that farm. His colleague Naomi also a High Court judge which is strange regulator infiltration also silent.

The EU language debate flagging up the years of effort and funding in EU to preserve languages: Irish and Scots gaelic or Welsh or Cornish benefiting here in UK with even a new BBC Scotland television channel. That, and the seafood and independence politics of Sturgeon and Salmond, surely a lesson for Thailand in preserving and developing Isaan languages and Khmer variants rather than if not persecution then official downgrading?


### The Road to Brighton Pier ###


And why not Isaan television broadcasts in the UK alongside existing Thai channels and language learning on the Open University with British Council. And Thai Community Radio far more vibrant than UK with a rather monolithic cost-saving approach. Dreamland in Margate and far away Brighton Pier receiving the same music on rotation.

And if the rather excellent UK animation of the 1950's of Animal Farm is as neglected as the first 1984 movie before the Richard Burton blockbuster anniversary movie then the BFI British Film Institute and Film School in Beaconsfield must surely thank Uncle Tu in leading the charge on not just Orwell and UK films and literature but also the Thai literature and film industry.

What else is on his Summer reading list, or his song playlist? Surely BBC Four or EMI would already pick up a documentary of Thai music from Morlam to Chelsea and EFL's Carabao to general croonings?

Chief Pughsley leading one of UK's most Progressive Police forces and no doubt handing out a 1984 Kent Police speeding ticket to London Police Chief Cressida Dick on facial recognition policing on the rates without any parliament or council approvals or budget disclosure. Shades of those Tiananmen Square repressions and current Uighur gulags - and Bangkok Erawan terrorism - raise their ugy heads.

One of my favourite publishers in Thailand is Lotus Press (available in all good, nay superb, Asia Books stores with UK newspapers and magazines even the niche Private Eye just xx sales in UK) while other publishers also working hard as Khun Kong Rithdee with one of first translations of women writers.

Khun Apirak or other senior military types might well grumble at a George Orwell building for Coup Studies at the Army college (over half end in failure and almost all in more economic calamity than the civilian versions). Surely a few of Uncle Tu's tunes would be be a bit more relaxing rather than the rather strident Horst Wesselian constant blasts of martial tunes on barracks radio.

Rumours swirl that before his gypsy camp sojourn Chief Pughsley wanted to pipe in the The Laughing Policeman into Kent Police barracks but nearly had a mutiny on his hands. They'll not be laughing when they see their County Barn pensions or the new UK army recruitment tactic of a Sven Hassel Regiment of bank robbers and junkies recruited from prison.

Is it wise to give bank robbers and junkies firearms training and access to high explosives? Maybe it;s cheaper than storing all that Helmand heroin.

But perhaps the Thai Navy wise in steering clear of such issues since the Battle of Bangkok in 1952, for a life on the ocean wave and part of the Pacific Resilience Group.

Protection of those Kitchen of the World trade routes vital - coffee and bananas to rival the Blue Mountains of Jamaica but also mango and pineapple and rambutan even Thai orchids and roses part of the Airport City and EEC project with Belgium freight yet to figure in UK supermarkets and dinner tables.

The case for submarines and warships less viable than helicopter ships and rescue helicopters, ocean and fisheries mapping (both vital for Thailand Scouse John West and East Kent Core Company Thai Tourism Saga Cruises) and hospital ships. FWP calls for IUU oversight seem a little harsh given Thailand's and Thai Navy successes in recent years even though their Economist ads look as though they've been put together with a knife and fork.

Two subs good and four subs bad perhaps apt in Animal Farming for the Thai Navy if not none at all, with Asian arms limitations and robosubs.

A Thai Navy School of Advertising would be just silly though given the real possibilities of the above.

And maybe not the Orwell Coup Building just yet before the Returning Happiness project is complete.

@timg33

DDay: UK and USA the next 75 years?

The DDay 75th anniversary is significant not just for - at last - the first official state visit to UK by POTUS Trump, or the first memorial to the British landing beaches in Normandy but the last event of the liberation of Europe by those who took the beaches, and as POTUS Reagan said, climbed the cliffs, as it passes from living memory.

Here in East Kent the P22 US Navy patrol boat taking part in the DDay event and Ramsgate Dunkirk Little Ships event, and the P22 boat for patrol on the Rhine after WW2 a reminder of how far European tribalism had collapsed into flames.

P22 not dissimilar to the younger Kennedy's PT109 boat sunk off the Solomon Islands.

Certainly a larger boat needed on the Channel for the Ramsgate-Ostend and Dunkirk/Boulogne refloatation of the Channel ports. Hitler's worst efforts perhaps only outmatched by UK town planners in the long peace.

With protection against aggregates dredging for an expanded Dover port - perhaps proving opportunity for the sands of the Sahel and South Sudan economies with EV shipping.

Indeed the nearby Goodwin Sands stretching from the UNESCO wetland of Pegwell Bay by Ramsgate to the White Cliffs of Dover this week are rated a Marine Conservation Site with 6 other nearby sites as a war grave of rare UK and German fighter planes and bombers such as the recently excavated rare Dornier aircraft. And now the swimming tanks - failing in UK Slapton Sands-style tests but USA unaware of the results and further swim tanks and deaths in Normandy.

Perhaps the saddest reminder of UK and USA failing to work together to deliver on what Trump calls The Extra Special Relationship.

While Churchill as warlord and architect of DDay proved less successful in democratising UK society with homes fit for heroes returning from the frontline. Surely those troops huddled in landing craft and trenches would look askance at a modern Britain jailing its citizens for council tax, detailed by Chris Daw QC campaigns, or BBC licence fee debt and jail for pensioners, or homes fit for rabbit hutches, without minimum room and garden sizes detailed by Karen Buck MP and Cllr Tom Copley.


### Got any gum chum? ###


But as DDay passes from living memory Ambo Woody raising the bar on UK-USA relationship on an Extra Special Relationship in preserving the memories of the last survivors of the Normandy invasions.

My Dad as a child remembering he and his schoolfriends chasing after the lorries bringing in the 3M USA and Canadian troops ahead of DDay shouting "Got any gum chum, got any gum chum?". I always get a little tearful after he tells me that story as I don't like to think of him as a little child adrift in what was the UK as a giant army camp readying for the Normandy beaches.

As a child in war though he loved collecting shrapnel bomb fragments, and his brother a dashboard clock from a downed Messerschmidt and a billeted soldier briefly forgetting his rifle, or tracer bullets on the mantelpiece.

Such detritus of war familiar here in East Kent with a regular crop of sea-mines and aircraft bombs and Doodlebugs even after 75 years.

My dad's next door neighbour a Kwai survivor with a bento box stick for starvation rations of rice and fish, not much bigger than a thumbnail, that now preserved with his grandson.

That American sacrifice on DDay as poignant as USA troops and navies alone in clearing the Pacific islands as Britain grimly clung onto the rainsoaked jungles of India and Myanmar.

And my grandad speaking of how he escaped from Dunkirk in an abandoned row-boat either to one of the larger ships or even all the way back to here in Ramsgate. The good folks of Ramsgate throwing cigarettes and sweets and bedsheets for bandages and clothes to the British and French troops as they returned before returning in a few short years to Dieppe and then DDay with our Canadian and American friends and allies.

My grandad eventually working on the troop ships and convoys that kept the Atlantic open to Britain and Russia and he working via South Africa to El Alamein and India and Myanmar.

I still have his whittled stick of his journeys after 1940.

And my Mum every Xmas in the 1970's setting out a Xmas sock with an orange and apple for me and my brother and sister because as she reminded us she'd never seen oranges until after the war and the Commonwealth economies developed -and she sometimes only had a piece of coal as a Xmas present.

The dark days before DDay stretching well into the 1950's for UK with continued food and sweets rationing and only now the British Army on the Rhine at Bielefeld being demobbed.

My dad then as a National Serviceman conscripted in the 1950's with one foot in Beilefeld and one foot on the Berlin Wall scanning the horizon for Russian tanks with his Zeiss binoculars and ready to sound the alarm through the Fulda Gap, the Suwalki Gap of its day.

Only in the last decade those British Army on the Rhine WW2 occupation bases reduced to storage.


### The sweet success of Fortitude ###


Kent's role with General Patton and Fortitude long forgotten in delaying German panzers from attacking the Normandy beaches or first V1 and V2 rockets on Kent. The elder Kennedy brother dying in such a raid on the V1 launch sites in an early drone plane for a Manston landing.

Enough panzers or V1 rockets on the Normandy beaches could have sunk the landings and hurled the troops back into the sea perhaps not to return for years, if at all.

The success of DDay though leading to the liberation of Paris and Brussels upto the German frontier, and Rome, and Southern France occupations, and Russian troops liberating all of Russia to the gates of Warsaw. And the assassination attempt on Hitler, all in just 10 weeks.

The excellent Max Hastings DDay book Overlord details not just the neglected stories of the Royal Engineers and Seabees with Pluto and Mulberry but the wafer-thin logistics route of the Red Ball Express lorries that in essence continues as US Army Europe maintains its mission from 1942 in safeguarding Europe.

Perhaps apt now that US Army Europe is at the gates of Kiev in Ukraine, downwind of the Chernobyl nuclear spectre, and Poltava USAAF base when Russia and USA and UK were Allies.

The lavish barracks of the Rhineland and multi-billion NATO office blocks of Brussels surely highlighting what I describe as a Sarajevo Shift east and south for SHAEF. The infrastructure of Hungary and Serbia and Romania surely in need of upgrades, even the mafia drugs gangs of the Italian south of Naples and Palermo welcoming a brigade or two of American-Italian Marines rotating through Helmand.

Why win the war to lose the peace?

The vast American economy of FDR's New Deal becoming an astonishing cornucopia of ships, planes and lorries and jeeps - protected by my grandad. So many tanks that Eisenhower even halted deliveries of more tanks during the Battle of the Bulge.

And my dad being able enjoy from those planes and lorries some of the 6,250 pounds of sweets, 12,500 pounds of biscuits and 100,000 packets of gum issued to the first assault waves of American troops.

As Max Hastings details:

"130,000 (American) men with another 1,200,000 to follow by DDay+90...and 137,000 vehicles, 4,217 tanks, 3,500 artillery pieces.Week by week the transatlantic convoys docked in British ports unloading new cargoes of artillery shells from Illinois, blood plasma from Tennessee, jeeps from Detroit, K-ration cheese from Wisconsin."

That treasure paid with in blood in the Atlantic convoys, the 30% casualties of the first assault companies onto the beaches, and the CWG graves stretching from Normandy to Flanders.

The greater slaughter of a Nazi atom bomb and von Braun rockets on NYC prevented by the rapid success of DDay. Those DDay soldiers though surely horrified at the stockpiling of nuclear weapons into the 21st century or waiting for the nuclear test troops of the 1950's,and with the Murmansk convoys or Agent Orange army of Vietnam, waiting to die off and save on medicare and medals.


### A new Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha and Utah for an Extra Special Relationship ###


The Iron Curtain that descended from Trieste to Stettin now long pulled away as Churchill's idea of a United States of Europe takes imperfect shape despite the Brexit silliness through Russia and North Africa and Levant.

And if Ambo Woody is maybe more keen on Wrigley Field rather than Wrigley gum surely DDay75 is the right time to consider delivering on The Special Relationship with butter rather than guns as that Extra-Special Relationship?

Empire and Cold War and even FDR New Deal of the distant past but an Extra-Special Relationship capable of prospering beyond brass bands and braid and musket smoke of yesteryear.

If not Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah then surely there are 5 other key areas of expansion for UK and USA as an Extra Special Relationship in working together far more closely than bullets on the rates:


1. UK and USA universities from the top ten if not 20 best such institutions in the world and of course with the added strength of English as the world language. Surely Ambo Woody should have all 130 UK universities and 34 Eire universities marching in lockstep with all USA universities, with formal twinning agreements and research on STEM Cancer and Dementia etc.

Not to have Marshall and Kent's Chevening scholarship quotas for all Atlanticist universities seems weak. As does the equivalent of a British-Ireland Economic Council perhaps welding together similar think tanks such as the Council for Foreign Relations or Milken Institute or East-West Center.


2. The UK may invent stuff from trains and television and USA and cinema and internet but USA delivers on it. Surely Wall St and The City, the two pre-eminent financial services systems, should be more tightly linked to unleash a tsunami of capital? Those rickety American railways won't fix themselves or yet another burst levee.

A Bering Bridge and Tunnel or Scotland-Ireland a mere drop in the ocean themselves. And pennies in upgrading the Russian farm industry with agritech and John Deere tractors or Detroit Jeeps again.

UK and USA battery and cybersecurity just two of the Strategic Industries (a packet of gum if you can name any of the others) that aren't linked up over the pond.

While British schools and colleges and consumers must be crying out for USA Tech with Microsoft and Tim Apples. Perhaps the question on why Europe is not so good at Big Tech is a lack of USA focus on its buddies? Too much popcorn and Budweiser in the bleachers rather than working with UK on that Extra Special Relationship or even the real World Series of football - soccer if you must?

Kent's Pocahontas must be on the warpath over the diamonds under her Adidas moccasins of MIT projects gathering dust in that college library, or the closed shop of 75 years of NHS biotech data rusting in a Crapita database. Ambo Woody probably thinking of going NFL cap in hand to her over to help on his NHS gaffe.


3. UK DFID and USA USAid share similar branding and c.$20BN in aid each, by far the largest in the world. Again they must surely be more closely integrated with the Commonwealth to form beachheads against the poverty of East Africa or Western India? Ambo Woody has probably saved some Johnson and Johnson soft soap for the crunchy realities of Janssen cancer pills or Durex condom factories or tampons that would save and lengthen a billion lives.


4. With UK and USA each the largest trade partner of the other since at least the days of the Atlantic convoys shouldn't that be ramped up with say 1,000 companies in each USA state landing in UK and vice versa? The British capacity for tea and biscuits musings should be galvanised into waking up and smelling the coffee from Boston to Broadstairs. A beanfeast and bunfight of rapid growth.

That could extend to a more coherent Anglicised trade with China and India of city delegations etc. Vattenfall wind and solar farms here in east Kent for example, some the best Swedish exports since Abba or Volvo snow ploughs, are surely ideal in ramping up the Eco-Economy.

The largest ever UK exports of £649BN with Trade Minister Liam Fox surely capable of being doubled just with USA trade - 400k viable UK companies not yet exporting. In all sincerity, even without Sincerity Advertising, maybe 1,000 UK companies per state is too low?

While AOC digging in her Gucci heels over an Amazon warehouse must surely be wondering how else it could be best-placed in the USA Rust Belt. Or even Puerto Rico and Haiti or further afield in Panama's logistics economy and Caribbean Commonwealth.

Certainly UK-USA trade promises built on mega trade deals are mere vanity compared to the weft and weave of state and city trade delegations.

A gaping hole for both UK and USA is a Gilgamesh Strategy on Ageing even the interim of social care and training enough nurses and doctors. The UK and USA and Canadian Red Cross fulfilling that role easily even before DDay. It's neither rocket science nor brain surgery. Especially if UK and USA training hospitals can dispense with mooks for MOOCs.


5. The real World Series of football (soccer if you must) along with Cricket and Rugby and Crazy Golf certainly highlight UK as a Sporting Superpower but with gridiron and hoops could also be flag bearers for both UK and USA UNSDG and Smart City work in Commonwealth India and Africa. The latter neck and neck in underperforming for UK and USA trade yet the home of the world's youngest consumers through the next century.

Shouldn't for example Ambo Ken Juster in India be a guest of UK at the Cricket World Cup? He knows he's on a sticky wicket with promoting baseball in India but Boeing rockets at Sheffield or Syracuse or Woomera, or those road safety-tech Volvo cars in the Carolinas or Ford AR-glass not so impossible?

Goofy for UK and USA Creative Industries such as Disney and PBS and CSpan and Kent Paramount theme parks and comics not be working together. Even POTUS Trump turning the channel on Fox News for UK cultural impact of Winnie the Pooh and Paddington Bear and Harry Potter and East Kent's Bond, James Bond. That sit alongside Revolution beauty, with East Kent Core Companies such as Airfix, Bakkavor, Givaudan, Saga with the Davos 15 and The Six Companies.

And here in East Kent a gathering perfect storm of Charlton Athletic and Arsenal Community work, school dinners and twin towns.


### USA as a hyperpower without the hype and with a UK Extra Special Relationship ###


It seems a distinct failure of Old World thinking in the 21st century to emphasise aircraft carriers and massed armies in the Age of Drones or Climate Change, even Eisenhower's auld enemy of the military-industrial complex still talking up a war with Iran or China so UK and USA can take equal blame in failing to deliver on the disarmament aspects of the Atlantic Charter.

And as per the united Franco-German brigade of Strasbourg, a USA-Russian brigade can't be far from Brest-Litovsk and certainly nearer than Torgau?

Even a Scottish golf fan POTUS must be surprised at the number of Pentagon golf courses on the $750BN Pentagon rates for so few troops put into the field of battle. Wouldn't planting 18 trees before the nineteenth hole be as relaxing?

The American taxpayer perhaps grateful that US troops abroad now number no more than the first wave of DDay troops. Perhaps Kashmir calling ahead of the Koreas for USA troops as a security safeguard. The misfires of the last Trump-Kim Summit and subsequent short-range and limited gains surely only a pause in working through the appetite for armistice and hunger for peace in the Koreas even before the 2020 Olympics.


### From the shores of Tripoli to the halls of Marrakesh ###


Messrs Xi and Putin presumably preferring greater OBOR integration with Asia and Alaska and an American army quartered safe in the other unsinkable aircraft carrier of Japan.

China's inner island strategy undoubtedly a success, although perhaps more as modern mainland China becomes more like modern Taiwan in combining democracy and a booming economy.

UK slow in developing Koreas links as Asia's WW2 East German-style dispute fizzles out? A few Massey Ferguson tractors and JCB diggers alongside John Deere's finest might yet yield Rolls Royce harvest and roads.

And Irish gold in the shape of Kerrygold butter - and a can or three of Guinness - via NYC and Bering might even put some flesh on the bones of the Walmart Asda supermarkets of Pyongyang.

My daughter not averse to a bit of Isaan silk in a Pyongyang or Pusan, even downtown Hitachi or Kawasaki with John Lewis or Waitrose exports.

All the above a fraction of a percent of the F35 programme - or an even tinier percent of the cost of not replacing outdated nukes - could be deployed to deliver on all the above along with the Boeing NASA Space missions - even upgrading African planes with the Airbus of Toulouse and Bristol. Or US Army Medicine teams on Romanian TB Pandemics or Sahel Ebola and expanding the Operation Smile on Virginia's face.

Ebola vaccines as with DDay chemical weapons kit showing what can be done with a united effort on everything from rice to ricin.

While UK and USA films and television from Hollywood to Cricklewood surely capable of expansion before the onslaught of Bollywood and Nollywood production. Whether film archive digitisation or celebrating UK-USA Film Noir emigres from Wilder to Welles or ramping up the film slate with BBC and Film Four as well as HBO and Netflix.

And if DDay was the largest USA-UK invasion, again perhaps it's apt to commemorate that and the first UK-USA invasion of North Africa with Patton's Torch landings in illuminating the way for the clearance of the North African WW2 minefields of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. The shores of Tripoli and halls of Marrakesh though now being failed by US troops in those minefields - and the refugees now drowning within sight of the massed ranks of the UK and USA navies.

A Kaine War Powers Act and a review of ISIS/Iraq and Syria and AfPak wars long overdue - both Churchill and Ike unforgiving of failing generals from Kasserine to Falaise.

DDay75 for the next 75 years surely delivering on the disarmament and peacekeeping of the Atlantic Charter and a Special Relationship that really is an Extra Special Relationship.

Time for Change
@timg33