The rigor moris of Brexit has long set in with UK paralysed at Westminster and Holyrood and Cardiff Bay over the conundrums and what-ifs of Brexit. Whitehall's mandarins rotting where they sit in trying to execute an impossible trade policy.
Brexit has for two years paralysed government with nothing being done. Our expensive politicians and civil servants seem to gotten the country into a pickle of their own making.
The dreary daily litany of EU cherrypicking or having cake and eaten and fantasies of frictionless trade are unlikely to butter any parsnips or bake any Kent apples into American pies. UKIP all the more bizarre in Kent - and a wider Conservative issue as what David Cameron wisely termed UKIP fruitcakes and loonies drift back into the Tory ranks - with its reliance on UK and European tourism and trade.
And Dover as Europe's largest port ferrying the car parts of the Midland Engine that keep Toyota and Ford and Nissan and Kent's James Bond's Aston Martin purring seamlessly across the sea, and shunting them under it through the Channel Tunnel.
As an aside, the Channel sea routes as the busiest in the world long overdue both Climate Change and air pollution testing and restrictions on ships. Although clearly KCC under the Toxic Two and TDC can't be trusted on monitoring.
East Kent certainly needs jobs: the foolish delays in 5,000 jobs at Pfizer-Discovery Park the largest USA pharma inward investment site in Europe due to astonishing mismanagement and governance. Government seems to have learnt nothing from the coalpit closure s of the 1980's in reliance in a single industry and effective management of sunset industries. While just 2,000 further jobs would provide full employment in East Kent.
It's worth noting that Siemens of the #DavosTrump15 with one deft move have provided at least 700 jobs in East Yorkshire for a rail factory. A boon not just for that region but bringing German and UK engineering expertise together in the supply chain for HS2, HS3, Tube etc even ASEAN Rail. While Siemens subsidaries in wind turbines are already turning in East Yorkshire and no doubt ideal with Kent's Vattenfall Swedish electricity giant and solar panel subsidiaries.
In contrast the Grand Tarmac Projects of Manston and Stack yielding nothing but the hot air and wind heating the County Barn of Kent and a surge in cancer cases and corpses through faked air pollution data.
As Ramsgate Mayor I wouldnlt hesitite to instigate not just Red Cross Week as a regular feature of Red Cross Town - with the good folks of the RNLI centre stage too obviously, medevac helicopters foolishly downgraded in the Northern Powerhouses of Belfast's Bombardier and Derby's Rolls Royce and BAE's Preston factories - but also Johnson and Johnson Day.
An outrageous bias towards J&J as one of the world's leading skincream and personal care companies?
Yes.
Why not?
It's a great company from Tylenol onwards and the UK-USA Special Trade Relationship won't be very special if trade isn't encouraged.
Maybe Toilet Duck could clean out the Privy Council too - they'd certainly need gallons of the stuff for KCC and TDC councils. Even Esmerelda the pig used as an air freshener in the council chambers is feeling faint.
But neither J&J or Janssen or Ambassador Woody Johnson should be under any doubt of UK and East Kent support for their growth. UK failing dismally - as is USA - in 200 cancers research, Diabetes 5 strands, Dementia an unknown unknowns and EU Rare Disease Day. Even London as the TB capitral of Europe, and a measles epidemic all needing greater efforts. Much as graphene as a wonder material is drifitng sideways with nothing produced.
How absurd that 130 UK univerisites aren't each linked to a USA university and with a Cancer dept etc.
But J&J Day would be a day to fill up your Resilience Box - obviously with Johnson and Johnson products but let's not be too prescriptive against Unilver or Colgate-Palmolive or Reckitt or Boots.
Suncream and bandaids should form some of the prerequisites of any Resilience Box and while Asda Walmart would want a few weeks to stock up on tinned food essentials whether John West Liverpool-Thailand's tuna, or Fairtrade tea and coffee, Welsh spring water and the Man from del Monte hurrying up deliveries of tinned pineapple and so on.
J&J Day should probably be held early in April the start of the tax year to give the good folks of J&J an early profit boost and begin preparation for Winter (it happens every year - go tell it to the Royal Marines).
And the Resilience Box should hold photocopies of prescriptions and medical database printouts even DNA profiles as the NHS DNA rollout builds up steam. Any rare prescriptions and OAP's at risk could also be flagged up on a medevac database. Unless Crapita rarther than Microsoft are hired to deliver it.
While I like most people would defer to Ambassador Woody on both the NFL playlist and stocks of vaccines to be held for call off in UK and rotation through Africa and India. Winter's here so the flu vaccine has run out let's have a cup of tea and bumble along can't be England's motto each year.
While the New European article on the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed more people in months than the years of trench warfare in Flanders Fields just over the water from Kent, details the horror of bird-flu-based diseases.
Yet the horror of Ebola showing how vaccines can be rapidly produced from scratch.
Surely any Kent-Thai police coperation should include not just the locations of supermarkets and pharmacies and vaccine stockpiles, helicopter and medevac systems and even the new mega-farms that hinder and endanger organic sales. UK-USA trade is hampered to some extent by the very real fears of chlorine-washed chicken and salad, Frankenfoods and animal antibiotics.
The latter one of the key factors in AMR the antibiotic-resistant bugs that would yield a medieval plague from nothing more than a scratch from planting a Kent orchid. And UK has much to learn from Stanford University efforts on Pandemic swabs of the NYC subway etc as an early warning system for TB etc.
Even sampling the sewers as a bio-chem attack forewarning.
And it's no use crying over spilt American dairy products on their way to UK if a pandemic closes the ports and airports and fills the hospitals.
An excellent series of trailers for BBC4 documentary Contagion! highlights the likely effects of a Pandemic across UK. No doubt 30% dead as with Spanish Flu and Black Death plague.
Pandemic now upgraded to the No.1 threat facing UK.
That making something of a mockery of the usual threats of Russian invasion (or neglected flashpoints such as the Greece-Turkey border) as the MOD budget cuts draw near - undersea cables in UK under threat! Or more realistically an electro-magnetic pulse bomb a real but rather overheated claim for budget detailed to Congress.
And are the Magnitsky crimes really so different from Lord Grabiner and One Essex Court, Britain's best corrupt barristers? Crooked courts and barristers and lawyers and judges? Rigged sessions? Whitewash and coverup? Random charges and jail sentences? No wonder Russian oligarchs feel at home in paying off the UK High Court.
Parliament long-delayed in sentence reviews, judge performance, capped legal fees, closed courts reform with cameras in-camera and so on.
While Putin's pre-election unveiling of new sea and air nuclear missiles Kraken (named after the Kent Police drugs ship and yachts searches?) and Balalaika (citing Kent's Beatles lyric in Back in the USSR? - surely UK should have more of the Red Army Choir and Bolshoi as well as Russian pop stars? But Kraken and Balalaika look as if they should be named Photoshop and Greenscreen. Surely Chernobyl proves nukes in Europe are a danger for everybody and a UN disarmament already begun?
One Australian thinktank suggestign new North Korean fighter jets no more technologically advanced than the ride-on planes outside supermarkets. And fears that rain on the parade might dampen Pyonyang's cardboard missiles. At the very least firing them over Japan rather silly if they veered off course - something of a failure for Chinese diplomacy and sanctions especially with a President for Life Xi. A North-South Korean Summit and unification talks sensible as the summer weather and clear skies and US Marine Expeditionary forces arrive.
Much as the Pentagon claims of a missile gap with Russia in the 1950's Cold War proved to be just so much hogwash. The new Pentagon $700BN defence budget dwarfing the USA and UK aid budgets of $20BN each. Even nuclear missiles not much use against superbugs.
BBC Hard Talk Stepehn Sackur interviews with even Johnny Mercer MP a potential UK defence minister as poacher-turned-gamekeeper rather than mere military cheeerleader, expressing reluctance for more military funds from such waste and incompetence. Certianly not the absurd random 3% breaching NATO's carfeully worked-out(?) 2% target.
As with Kent's Tom Tugenhadt chairing the Defence Committee, broken ports such as Portsmouth and Chatham - even Ramsgate with an expanded yacht marina given the 2nd largest sail festival after Cowes - need to sail a different course rather than relying on naval overbuild.
While the Sobchak Russian Election interviews detail Russian opposition to the Crimea annexation and Ukraine invasion. The 1980's KGB playbook of Putin limited to minor destabilisation of Eastern European nations and dissident attacks.
Kent's Margate is twinned with Sevastopol in the Crimea - and Soviet-style tower blocks such as Arlington House that litter Havana and many Russian cities - and road signs such as Alma Road (no JFK Street) celebrating the first Crimean invasion by Britain rather than Russia. Surely more consideration needs to be given within NATO and EU over very real Russian fears of Western invasion whether 1812 or 1853 or 1914 or 1941 and the carnage and chaos that ensues. Even the 1920 invasion by UK and USA troops.
Russian troops in Paris or Berlin, even Georgia in 2008, comparatively a mere blip.
Much as wiser voices in Russia must see the Partnership for Peace with NATO already laying the building blocks for full EU membership. It's hardly outrageous to consider an EU stretching from Manchester across to Moscow or Stockholm down to Sudan. Certainly the collapse of Libya and Syria that sparked much of the recent UKIP froth (and every Med refugee corpse washed ashore a testimony to the failure of NATO navies) requires in-depth planning of not just the reconstruction of those nations but the wider integration of North Africa and Levant with Europe.
It's hardly outrageous for the brio and brioche of UK coffee culture to encompass Ethiopian coffee for example. Starbucks now a strategic industry for UK and USA and Caribbean and ChiangMai as Texaco previously? At the very least there's a lot of potential for Isaan silk whether tablecloths and napkins or socks and skirts.
And Thai princess Maha this week highlighting orchids with Kew Gardens surely positive for UK-Thai trade even Kent orchids.
I've long highlighted the potential for UK trade and Kent orchids with the revival of the Battle of the Flowers. UK agriculture failing under monocrops and dustbowl topsoil removal of trees and hedgerows and bees.
Prince Mo MBS of Saudi Arabia visiting UK, to see UK efforts on gaining the Aramco listing, also marks a break from the past of an insular Saudi Arabia with Neom potentially a new city-state off Aqaba and key Israeli tourism site at Sharm-el-Sheik near the mouth of the Suez canal. BP forecasts of oil demand remaining high through to 2040 perhaps overdone given VW ending the diesel combustion engine by 2030, first UK driverless car routes underway this year, 5G wireless across EU by 2020 and vigorous growth of solar panels and wind turbines batteries.
Perhaps Prince Mo MBS could do more with UK graphene for desalination plants and irrigation canals across Arabia.
General Sir Gordon Messenger the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff likely to step up to the head of the military role this Summer and as with General Nick Carter head of the army wisely holding onto their epaulettes and sword in walking the right side of the military-industrial line, in calling for yet more money for military failure.
But still neglecting the costs and input of GCHQ already monitoring every Facebook post etc in their calls for more cyber warfare funds. Surely duplication along with USA upgrades of Menwith Hill. The Five Eyes security sharing irrelevant to Brexit but more a liaison failing with the Five ASEAN Eyes.
##While the collpase of Northern Ireland in powersharing in Belfast for over a year without government and calls for the status quo of both an open border and EU membership must surely encourage Ireland unity, already de facto with open borders and shared passports, ahead of the 1922 anniversary.
Sinn Fein descriptions of Northern Ireland as a putrid little statelet hardly so outrageous given the jerrymandering dilution of Ulster to the Six Counties to instigate a Protestant majority. Yet concerns over the Kingsmill supermarket bread incident of a Sinn Fein councillor now sacked, in celebrating the horrific Kingsmill Massacre. Exactly the sort of ethnic cleansing incident that rightly stokes Protestant fears of a Northern Ireland Catholic majority within an Eire Catholic state.
Protestant civil rights potentially in jeopardy now as Catholic civil rights were 50 years ago. Certainly no UK parliament oversight over the £1BN bung to DUP by the May government and how/where it will be spent in Belfast.
Indeed perhaps a concern is whether Eire would actually want to govern Northern Ireland given the collapse of industry and tourism: 70% of the economy a form of UK Communism in being reliant on State funding. And weak efforts not just on the Bombardier trade crisis but even marketing Game of Thrones locations - as Eire is doing with Star Wars sites - and Titanic museum.
Armalites and butter aside, Northern Ireland health indicators are the worst in UK. And as in Kent, the Northern Ireland border highlighting how Brexit is a nonsense in the JIT modern world. UK car parts and Irish animal parts crossing each border several times before being processed.
Job growth in thousands of extra customs officials sat on the rates watching the driverless lorries go by is hardly socially useful. The flow of cocaine and heroin and pills only likely to increase - 70% of Afghanistan lost to the Taliban and the source of 90% of UK heroin, and all the more reason for Airbase Heroin within the Shan highlands and Doitung work for the other 10% of UK heroin.
The techwar approach of million dollar missiles on mudhuts or B52 bombings of motorbikes or even more bizarrely, nuclear weapons loaded onto bomber planes, only goes so far. the failure of Reconstruction - any attempt at Reconstruction - likely to hinder Afghanistan and and Iraq, as well as Libya and Yemen and Syria, even Congo and Chad and Sudan for generations. Equatorial Guinea not just the world's slowest growing economy at minus 7% but possibly the last dictatorial regime propped up by American oil companies.
Certianly the NHS database just a year ago wiped out by Crapita or Lauri Love hackers or North Korean hackers is a real failing along with Windows XP in aircraft carriers and subs.
As is the affable John McDonnell chancellor-in-waiting being unable to name any business heroes in the FT. As the head of Camden housing dept previously, those tower blocks looking suspiciously Soviet. And as with asbestos in schools no explanation from any of the main parties as to how fire regualtions could help set tower blocks alight.
Corbynism with over 90 Labour front bench resignations is looking suspiciously like old wine in old bottles for a thin gruel of 1970's socialism. Energy price caps and zero fat foods and interest rate caps the work of mere moments rather than another snap election to hustle through foxhunting or some such nonsense. No wonder 50% of the electorate don't vote.
Nationalising trains as a flagship policy is hardly outrageously awful but hardly likely to grow the UK economy. While Jaguar Land Rover crawling to a halt as manufacturing is suspended over water supply problems is a concern not just with rust in the Midlands Engine but here in Kent.
While the quietly capable Lord Gus O' Donnell the former head of the UK Civil Service and Britain's Talleyrand in deftly weaving through a variety pack of governments since 1979, rightly calls for 100 year planning in UK governance.
A child born today would be likely to live at least to 90 years old and a Gilgamesh Strategy long needed as horrifyingly UK and USA life expectancy has managed to fall two years in the last five. That takes some doing.
The May government surely one of the worst in UK history and one of the worst manifestos ever, with every policy now jettisoned, still leads Corbyn's Labour suggesting either a lack of talent or a lack of effort. Karen Buck MP's housing strategy unlikely to get off the ground if she's so easily lead up the garden path by the Bar Standards Board for One Essex Court?
And UK as a G7 nation tumbling to the bottom of that league table amidst the Brexit waffle. And already more a G25 on GDP per head.
All the more reason for Ambassador Woody to send a fax to Bill Gates ahead of Wimbledon - another tech presidential run with Zuckerberg being served up? - not just to write his own cheque on the NHS database - an NHS 70M database would fit on Bill's car keyring and take less time to start up.
But also to tee up a parade of US business talent over the next few years to deliver more than KFC and DHL (4 warehouses into one won't go) on the Special Relationship:
Scwarzenegger!
Ballmer!
Cuban!
Mackay!
Perdue!
McAuliffes 2!
Bloomberg!
Tracy!
Osteen!
Gates 2!
Time for Change
@timg33
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