The video doesn’t seem complete…
Did it run until 10.33 for you Graham?
Excellent (and frightening) explanation.
Way back when, I got caught speeding in Zimbabwe when were belting back from Vic Falls to Jo’burg. It was just after Christmas, we were tired and we decided not stop overnight on the way, as we normally would. The roads in Zim were totally straight and as it was a 1300 km trip so we were zipping along to get home in daylight. Otherwise we might clunk a warthog or some larger animal in the dark.
In the middle of nowhere I was flagged down by a police motorcycle sidecar combination tucked into the bush by the side of the road. They seemed to have what might well have been a radar gun, who knows. I do remember it took me quite a way to come to a standstill. I reversed back and they told me I’d been clocked by their “gun” at 150 Klics or something similar and the fine would be XXX Zim dollars, on the spot.
As we were heading out of Zim I’d limited local funds so I dug out what I had and offered it to them. When they’d counted it, they scratched out the speed on the ticket and wrote in a lower number that reflected the funds available. We then set off flat out again. Very reasonable, pragmatic people, unlike Johnson and his pals.
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Yes it’s a good video.
It’s almost impossible for those opposed to find a response. They’ll oppose it in Parliament of course - but if it passes in the Commons, a battle in the Lords or in the courts - or both - would I guess suit Johnson/Cummings down to the ground - indeed, I suspect they care less about Northern Ireland than about finding another excuse to curtail the power of the courts.
Reminds me of Russia in the cowboy days 20 years ago - you could pay the official fine or a bit less in cash on the spot and no paperwork. Similar practices were endemic in nearly all public services, since the state wasn’t paying police, doctors, teachers, etc, enough to actually live on - necessity rather than corruption.
On a delayed flight back from Ulaan Baatar once we had to make an unscheduled stopover in Moscow, and pass unexpectedly through passport control without visas. I’d worked a lot in Russia so knew what to expect, but my fellow passengers were outraged by my suggestion that we had a whip round and give the poor guy in passport control some cash - consequently he took most of the night very, very slowly processing everybody through while we sat in the airport. A couple of dollars each would have seen us all through on the nod to our nice aeroflot hotel beds.
I landed in Moscow S2 once, 1990s, done it loads of times so knew what to do. In front of me in the passport/visa queue were 2 Americans, one of whom I guess had been to Russia/Soviet union before and was trying to impress his boss, who hadn’t. He put a 20 dollar note in each of their passports and presented them at the desk. The immigration officer took one look at them, nodded to security who led them away, rubber gloves going on as they went. 
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It’s all rather frightening IMO. It seems to me that Johnson and his puppeteers are completely unscrupulous. What will they do to British citizens without international oversight?
A rather different view here… that it’s posturing to distract from coming capitulation to the EU’s position:
“Tory strategy is unchanged: to provoke a major confrontation in order to lower expectations ahead of a substantive climbdown.”
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Many’s the time I’ve come up against PWC, KPMG (Bearing Point), Andersen (RIP) and its spinoff Accenture, Deloitte, E&Y, etc. etc. Based on my experience the one thing I will say for them is, when tendering for Government contracts their total incompetence in IT in general and software development in particular is more than made up for by their World class schmoozing skills. Their business model has nothing to do with the quality of the end product or, in fact, ever delivering an end product. It’s all relationships upfront and then mutual arse covering subsequently. Which, of course, aligns perfectly with the outlook of many politicians and civil servants too. Not only in the UK.
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It’s not rocket science, is it? - the firms that win tenders are those that are good at writing tenders, which may or may not be related to how good a job they actually do.
I think there is a natural tendency for humans to “game” systems - it is often observed that any performance metric which is turned into a performance target ceases to be useful as a metric, precisely because people will adjust their behaviour to improve the metric and not necessarily the performance.
So we probably should not be surprised thaht this applies to the tender process.
Yes, that’s why one has to choose the metrics/targets carefully. Quarterly EPS targets which drive share price combined with shed loads of executive share options for has in some (many?) firms, hollowed them out by removing long term planning/investment from the executive agenda.
Totally agree.
Jim worked as an independent contractor for HMG for many moons and gave them excellent advice and some common sense and saved the taxpayer millions of pounds.
Very often it is the civil servants who do not want to go the Minister bearing bad news, even if that is needed.
I had to laugh when a Tesco executive complained about unfair competition from the likes of Lidl, because the German giants did not follow the UK/USA remote shareholder model, and since they didn’t need to keep making quick returns to shareholders they could act more strategically!
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Not a good job…
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