Yesterday morning I got up just after 6.00am but had gad a rather attenuated night. This is because primarily BBC were showing the classic Hitchcock film of ‘Psycho’. I watched until the critical shower room scene that everyone remembers from the film and then carried on watching the rest of it as I had never seen the whole full length pf the film before. Shot in black and white, this was Hitchcock at his best, of course. I generally have a look to see if there is a pressing news story and the Ukraine conflict may be nearing towards a resolution on Trump’s terms. The Europeans are trying not to offend Trump (to preserve the small amounts of American military aid?) but are desperately trying to mitigate the worst aspects of the Trump plan which gives Russia practically everything that it wants. If America walks away from this conflict, which America may still well do, then we are left with the grim prospect of most of Europe vs. Russia and a war than rumbles on for ever and a day. Meanwhile, America is struggling with the imposition of the Trump tariffs that are having unpredictable consequences for many American companies. Much has been written about the trade war of 2025 – plenty of ink spilled about the drama in the White House and the economic consequences playing out across the world. Far less has been said about another of the profound impacts Donald Trump’s tariffs have had on businesses across America: they have left many of them utterly befuddled and deeply confused. The problem is not just that firms are now having to pay a whole load of tariffs on stuff they are importing. It runs deeper than that: in many cases those firms are struggling to work out how much those tariffs ought to be. All of this reminds me of two almost fundamental truths which are often forgotten. The first of these is that government by simplistic slogan is not really government at all – a very sage American politician out his finger on this dilemma a long again with the memorable phrase that one ‘needs to campaign in poetry but to govern in prose'(i.e. translating rhetoric under actual workable policies takes detailed and sustained hard work) The second truth is that tinkering with any part of a system such as the modern industrial state often has unpredictable consequences. Herbert Spencer, one of the founding fathers of sociology, gave the very prosaic example that an artisan trying to remove a small cockle (dent) from a metal teapot and may accomplish this only at the expense of another dent appearing elsewhere. But one does get the feeling that particularly in modern day America, the consequences or modelling of policy changes has not been done. This, of course, is what a well-functioning civil service ought to be doing if they are not decried, radically reduced in number or replaced by ideologues with no real expertise in running anything. My Droitwich friend and I exchanged some texts in the morning because we were going to snatch a little time together this morning but one of her sons has woken up with a high temperature which evidently has to be her first point of concern. So after I had got up, exercised and showered, I threw some things into a bag, some pharmaceutical and some soups, which might prove useful for her son to help alleviate his fever and then made my way down to Droitwich. By good fortune, my friend had a free 15 minute slot as any commitment had been moved around and so we could have a quick elevenses with each other whilst I handed over what I had brought, Then it was a case of getting back to Bromsgrove and setting off for my Pilates exercises. It was so blustery that I lost my hat on several occasions on the way from the car park to the exercise studio were our class is held. Afterwards I returned home and made a sort of stir fry consisting of onions, peppers and tomatoes and I also threw in sone cocktail sausages left over from the party. Then I parboiled some broccoli and added these to the stir fry together with some onion gravy. All of this made for a satisfying lunch on a foul and rainy day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I was eating my lunch, I tuned into the Parliament channel and was just in time to witness a very rare event which a bill put forward by the Liberal Democrats to open negotiations with the EU to secure greater market access for the UK which had resulted in a tied vote of 100:100. It was supported by the minor parties such as the SNP and the Greens, and the Conservatives voted against. But although the official policy of the Labour party was to abstain there were sufficient Labour ‘rebels’ to ensure that the bill was passed. The Deputy Speaker of the Commons was in the chair and she evidently knew (or was informed by the clerks in the House) that in the event of a tied 10 minute rule, past precedent is that it is allowed to go forward with the casting vote of the Speaker to allow time for further debate. Now the Labour party could allow this to go forward by granting it time within the parliamentary timetable or effectively allow it to die through lack of time, but it will be interesting to see which way the wind blows on this particular issue. Tonight, there are a couple of episodes of ‘Yes Minister’ repeated on BBC4 which I have probably seen before but are well worth watching on a subsequent occasion. I am always amused by the fact that most episodes depicted have a kernel of truth about them because the script writers were fed with some salacious stories in a weekly lunchtime meeting and whilst no doubt the stories were elaborated a little for the sake of good comedy and entertainment, they are not completely fictitious either. I also tuned in the evening before to my daily repeat of ‘Rising Damp’ by the obscure channel ‘That’s TV’ which showed iconic comedy from past decades. But it is now been taken off ‘Freeview’ and is only available on a subscription channel for \u00a310.00 a month ( and I suspect will get hardly any takers). Judging by some of the reactions to this change that I have read about, several people (including myself) who have got used to their daily fix of classic comedy are now both deprived and distraught!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday morning I got up just after 6.00am but had gad a rather attenuated night. This is because primarily BBC were showing the classic Hitchcock film of ‘Psycho’. I watched until the critical shower room scene that everyone remembers from the film and then carried on watching the rest of it as I had never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7892,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7891\/revisions\/7892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}