The news yesterday was completely dominated, as you would expect, with the enforced resignation of Angela Raynor, the Deputy Prime Minister, for her tardiness in declaring the correct amount of stamp duty on a property that she was purchasing. The story is a complicated one but basically, she thought she could get away with not declaring the full worth of the property and claiming that it was her prime residence although she was still a trustee of the property she had in trust for her disabled son. My take on all of this was she that she should have realised that as Deputy Prime Minister and in charge of housing to boot, she should have realised (as the HMRC website makes crystal clear) that she was still regarded fo tax purposes as having an interest in her former property. She had tried to cut corners by going to a cut-price form of conveyancers to facilitate the purchase of her new property but should have employed the (much more) expensive law firm that had set up her trust and would have advised her accordingly. Raynor claimed that she had received legal advice on the correct level of stamp duty but the conveyancing firm have riposted that they do not give advice so someone is lying somewhere. So, her offence was breaking the Ministerial Code by not taking sufficient care over her tax affairs and, I think in the court of public opinion, it is felt that the report of the ethics adviser was a fair one and so Raynor had no alternative but to resign. Keir Starmer has engaged in a large-scale reshuffle of his cabinet a lot of which was in the offing in any case and there has been some ‘rearrangement of the deckchairs on the Titanic’ but the movement of politicians to new responsibilities seems quite sensible to me and may mean that the government looks as though as it had a bit more purpose than tackling the evident problems. There is no doubt that Nigel Farage and the Reform Party have been setting the political agenda for weeks now and immigration has remained as he most contentious issue as it has done since the five years since Brexit and nine years after the referendum. Incidentally, Research by the Centre for European Reform suggests the UK economy is 2.5% smaller than it would have been if Remain had won the referendum. Public finances fell by £26 billion a year. This amounts to £500 million a week and is growing. The ultimate irony is that had we remained within the EU, we would have found it so much easier to send the ‘small boats’ migrants back to France. In July 2017, the European Court of Justice upheld the Dublin Regulation, declaring that it still stands despite the high influx of 2015, giving EU member states the right to transfer migrants to the first country of entry to the EU. The United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union took effect at the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, at which point the Regulation ceased to apply to it. So the profound adverse consequences of Brexit are still plaguing the country.
The evening before last, there was not much on the TV to interest me so I watched the Scotland vs Denmark football match which was not a great match but was interesting in its way. Scotland were playing in Copenhagen and were very much the underdogs but managed to secure a 0:0 draw and hence one point in the competition which was a pretty good result for them. There is a fair bit of Women’s rugby on the TV today which will probably engage me a little but in the meanwhile, I will settle into a Saturday routine which will include some lawn cutting this afternoon. I still feel waves of relief at having discovered my misplaced garage front door keys without which I might not have been able to access the mower. I was just about to depart on my morning walk down into town when, quite unexpectedly, my son and daughter-in-law dropped in to see me. Evidently, I was very pleased to see them and we exchanged bits of news with each other, one of which is that my daughter-in-law informed that that following her retirement, she too has started some Tai Chi classes. Then they continued on their journey to their South Coast holiday but gave me a lift into town where I met up with one of my Saturday morning friends but not the other. I walked back up the hill and was a little saddened to see that my friend, the French lady who lived down the road, has now definitely sold her house and departed to live in Cheshire with their daughter so this makes two of my friends that I have established over the past 18 years now selling up and moving away. The one consoling feature of this weekend was that I knew there were going to be several of the Women’s World Cup rugby matches and in the first of these, I saw Scotland well defeated by Canada. But the Scots made a pretty good fist of things as the Canada team is a very strong one and could well emerge as overall winners of the competition. The second match I started viewing is very much harder to predict as it was Wales vs. Fiji match and at half time, the Fijians were ahead taking several opportunistic tries. Eventually, Fiji won the entire game by the very small margin of three points. Wales came within inches of scoring a try to win the match but to be honest there were multiple handling errors on both sides which made the final result very unpredictable. Probably, on balance, the Fiji team deserved to win the game and it is only their second win in their world cup history but if Wales had converted some of their tries and made fewer handling errors, the game was well within their grasp but they just failed. I will be attending church this evening with a particular degree of interest because it should be the first occasion in which we can meet the new and fairly young priest who has been allocated to the parish. I am quite eager to get to know him because some of his theological training was in a seminary in Spain in Valladolid and therefore there is a chance he is a Spanish speaker and we have something in common.