Next, Cummings is up before the Science and Technology select committee tomorrow and is widely expected to launch a surgical one-man strike against the prime minister. If anybody knows where the painful pressure points are it's Johnson's former senior adviser, the man once thought all-powerful. It should be explosive. Downing Street are said to be bracing for impact.
But I want to turn to another issue, that of the new British standards. To say the government has made a mess of Brexit is a serious understatement. Even its supporters think so. Richard North is particularly scathing about leaving the single market for example, which has created so many needless problems, especially in Northern Ireland.
Is is clear the Vote Leave mob had no understanding of what Brexit entailed, how British industry would be affected, how difficult it would be or how long it would take. Amazingly, even now they seem totally unable to learn from past mistakes.
They started as men in a hurry and it led them to make big strategic mistakes. The WA is the most serious and we are seeing the results of negotiating against your own deadline from a weak position, with neither transparency or consultation. It isn’t surprising that nobody likes the NI protocol. Things keep having to be delayed because systems are not ready - and indeed may never be ready.
The same thing is now happening again on the UK adopting its own standards. At a meeting in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) earlier this month, officials told representatives of the UK’s approved product testing and certification bodies that the government is considering scrapping the 1 January 2022 deadline for getting the new UKCA marking system up and running.
Richard Waterhouse, a spokesman for products specification body the NBS, who was at the meeting, said last week that he thought the time needed to switch to the UKCA marking had "not been thought through" and added:
“You have to question whether any analysis was done on the volume of testing required and the capability and capacity of testing organisations to do that.”
Sound familiar?
Another major contractor told Building (a construction industry website) last week that the "lack of clarity and clear direction means we can’t really plan mitigation measures effectively or begin to estimate the impact on project planning and delivery.”
They claimed that the industry could quickly run out of key construction materials next year if the required testing could not be carried out in time.
It seems there has been a total underestimate of the amount of time and effort needed to certify all the things that need certifying by some of these often newly created UK bodies. The construction industry, already facing shortages and price increases, now faces the uncertainty of not knowing what standards are to apply next year. Frankly, it looks completely stupid.
One can't help but think the government is behaving like the Bourbons who are said to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Lastly, I worry about where this country is headed. I scan Twitter and follow a lot of people that I have great respect for. They are far better informed and more rational than most of the mainstream media and you can learn a great deal from them. But mixed up in it you see a lot of comments from seriously unhinged Brexiteers, although I confess I don’t follow many and I only see a small fraction of what goes off.
Yesterday, I noticed a tweet from the The Leave Alliance. I think Richard North is or was connected to it in some way, he and his son certainly have links on the Leave Alliance website to their blogs and he has one to their website on his blog. The Leave Alliance Twitter account describes itself as "Sceptical Leavers. Read our comprehensive #Brexit plan: http://bit.ly/1MpVMI3" with the link taking you to Dr North's magnum opus Flexcit - note it is "our" comprehensive Brexit plan.
The account is furiously tweeting and retweeting all day long, often with quite forceful messages. I used to think North himself tweeted from the account but I hope I'm wrong. Take this for example:
We need an organisation called Hate not Hope. Because hope is a meaningless platitude. Hate is productive. And there's a lot to hate about the mess we're in.
— The Leave Alliance (@LeaveHQ) May 24, 2021
What normal person would tweet such a thing?
How can we ever come together when there are people around actually promoting hate as a "productive" thing?
We are truly lost at the moment.
However, in the midst of the Brexit disaster we shouldn't forget that some people think it's all going swimmingly. How about this from Lord Moylan:
How to distract Twitter from the huge and growing success and popularity of the @BorisJohnson government..... https://t.co/5S5zWZcfJ4
— Lord Moylan (@danielmgmoylan) May 24, 2021
Huge and growing success? I think he must be on hallucinogenic compounds.
