So the day has finally arrived when the Americans give their verdict on the Trump administration. All of the opinion polls appear to indicate that Trump will suffer some severe reverses and, indeed, this is the pattern of the mid-term elections when voters generally indicate their dissatisfaction with the government of the day. There may be one important difference, though – when Trump last was subject to a mid-term election, there was a 67% satisfaction with the state of the American economy but on this occasion, this has flipped so that more than 70% are expressing dissatisfaction. The pollsters have been wrong before and have often under-estimated the amount of support that Trump actually has, particularly amongst the white non-college educated part of the electorate but on this occasion t would be amazing if the plethora of polls did not indicate the actual result. The Democrats are actually ahead in about five of the key Senate races, often by only a few percentage points. Recounts do occur in American elections but they are much less common than in the UK political system where the constituencies are so much smaller but half of the recounts that have occurred in American history have occurred when the gap between the two contenders is less than 0.15% Last night’s TV contained the showing of the second half of the documentary detailing how the Ugandan Asian community were forced to flee the country under the impact of Idi Amin’s ‘Africanisation’ drive. Many of the Ugandan Asians, had been granted passports by the British Government. Approximately 27,000 to 28,200 refugees holding British passports arrived in the autumn and winter of 1972 through early 1973 (with the first flight landing at Stansted Airport on September 18, 1972) and many at that time made their way to Leicester where there other family members even though the city council at the time took out newspaper adverts in an attempt to dissuade them from coming. The long story is interesting, though, because as the decades have passed, it is evident that the Ugandan economy was weakened by this exodus whereas the entrepreneurial streak in the Asian community proved to be an economic asset both to Leicester and the UK. Late yesterday afternoon, I received a message on my iPhone which had a huge emotional impact upon me. By way of background, I need to explain that via the Methodist Centre I had come to know the superintendent of the local Methodist circuit and I attended his retirement ‘tea party’ when it was held a month or so ago. I knew that he was retiring to Scarborough which was the town in which my ‘Uncle Jim’ (not a real uncle but a life-long friend to my mother) and was a very saintly Anglican vicar had lived and then died in about 1962. Now my Methodist pastor had not only managed to locate my ‘Uncle Jim’s’ grave which happened to be not too far distant from the house where he now lived in Scarborough. As the day before yesterday was All Soul’s day, the pastor had visited the grave – perhaps unvisited since 1962 – and said some prayers over it, adorning it with a bunch of flowers each colour of which had a particular theological significance. Now my ‘Uncle Jim’ was the nearest thing I ever had to a father figure and on receiving the photo showing the newly adorned grave, I did shed a tear with a whole complex of emotions which are difficult to describe. I immediately sent the photo off to my sister and niece and of course expressed my extreme gratitude to the Methodist pastor for such a wonderful and thoughtful gesture.
As part of my kitchen tidying up, I unearthed a stainless steel coffee percolator which I have given a quick clean up and is now ready to be pressed into service – I seem to remember buying it in a charity shop a couple of years ago. There are no instructions with it but my domestic help, whose morning it happened to be, indicated how she thought it would work but it not electric and I think designed just to make coffee out of coffee grounds and boiling water. I need to conduct an experiment or two with it to ensure that it fits my needs but I will equip myself with some coffee grounds when I go shopping in the next day or so. In the middle of the day, I attended my Pilates class and then dined on some mackerel and a packet of Asian spiced lentils I happen to have in stock. News is breaking this afternoon of a new trade deal which seems to on the cards and may well be ratified at the forthcoming EU summit meeting,. The trade deal is largely about agricultural matters and is probably sorely needed as UK agriculture to the EU have shrunk by a third after Brexit. The UK and EU have agreed a draft deal on removing post-Brexit checks from food and agriculture exports, ahead of the UK-EU summit later this month. The 200-page draft text for this so called “SPS” [sanitary and phytosanitary] agreement has been circulated to EU nations in Brussels for consideration at a meeting on Wednesday. Similar texts for deals on emissions trading and a youth travel and work scheme have also been circulated alongside a 15-page draft joint statement for UK and EU top leaders. The food deal is the most significant part of the so-called Brexit reset agreed so far, removing checks and red tape that hit exporters after the UK exited the EU’s single market. As a result of the agreement, the government claims the UK economy will eventually see £5.1bn worth of annual benefits. In return the UK needs to agree a ‘dynamic alignment’ with existing EU regulations and standards. The American mid-term elections are currently underway but with there being a 5-8 time difference, it will probably be midnight before voting ends in some states and even then we shall expect there only to be exit poll predictions rather than anything more substantive. But these early polls may give a clue as to how the real results will pan out in the small hours of Wednesday morning because at least they are based upon how people have actually voted (in the case of exit polls) rather than opinion polls. Donald Trump himself gave some weird speeches as the campaigns were drawing to a close and he did appear to acknowledge in one of his rambling utterances than it was unknown for adverse results to be experienced by the ruling party in the mid-term elections even he claimed to be one of the most popular and/or successful Presidents of all time.