An American take on Brexit

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Quotation from an current NPR article on the effect of Brexit:

“Matthias Matthijs, a political economist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, says the U.S. had already been gravitating toward Germany long before the Brexit vote. Matthijs says the Germans have been taking the lead in a number of recent crises.

“We’ve had the euro [currency] crisis where Germany was at the wheel, the crisis over Ukraine with Russia, Germany diplomacy was at the heart of this … and then the refugee crisis, the fallout of the Syria conflict, again, here you’ve seen Germany take the lead,” he says.

“We have extraordinarily close relations on a government-to-government level; there’s very little daylight in all the major issues that we are facing,” he says. The relationship will intensify as “the management of that Brexit is unfolding,” Wittig says.

“While the U.K. may lose its special status as a bridge to the European Union, it will continue to play a lead role when it comes to intelligence, Matthijs says.

“The intelligence cooperation between MI6 and the CIA is very close, internally as well between FBI and MI5,” he says. “And these are links that have been established since World War II and are ongoing. I mean they’re very, very, very close relations, very close cooperators.”

“Matthijs says Britain’s departure from the EU may even help strengthen NATO, because the U.K. may want to show it’s still very much part of the Western alliance — even if the special relationship with the U.S. fades. But the U.K. is expected to take a sharp economic hit for leaving the EU, and questions remain about how it will be able to afford to beef up its military.”

Part of the point of the EU was originally to enfold Germany into the community of European nations, and to have France and the UK in particular, as restraints and counterweights to German economic power.  At the beginning a majority of EU civil servants were actually British.  Already, Germany is accused of treating the smaller EU countries as sort-of economic colonies, its banks lending to facilitate purchases of German manufactured goods. EU expansion has been driven by Germany ( what were the British thinking?)  Now, the old idea of restraining it is dead, and the effects of that will unfold before our eyes.

Meanwhile, the UK is valued for its intelligence??

 

Thought for the day

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My wife and I were sitting in a Lisbon square, drawing.  A Frenchman leaned over to see what I was doing and we had a brief conversation.

“Are you British”, he asked.

“Yes”.

“May I see your visa, please? ”

Don’t laugh.  It could happen.

A bit of common sense

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Let’s accept that, (in the Disunited States) we’re “stuck with the guns and instead should focus on the bullets. If we required people to have a licence to buy ammunition, and stamped bullets with serial numbers so that shell casings from crime scenes could be traced back to stores, we could potentially save many lives without infringing anyone’s right to bear arms. It must be worth a go. As the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, the US has a 200-year supply of guns but only a four-year supply of ammunition”.  (Jeffrey Zalles in The Washington Post).

Wouldn’t you think that an idea like this would be embraced by all? What possible objection could anyone have, except, maybe, the additional cost of stamping the bullets. But is the stamping not worth it to trace down murderers and crazy people? What do careful, honest people have to fear? One has to give a reluctant nod to those very effective fear-mongering propagandists, the National Rifle Association – no compromise whatsoever on any matter to do with making killer weapons safer for the population in general. The continued health of firearms sales is more important to them than the safety of people. To Epicurus this would have represented the demise of civilised behaviour.

360- Reviews and why they should be abandoned

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Earlier in the year the New York Times carried an article on a management tool I was unaware of – the 360-review.  In my time as a manager we had annual staff performance reviews, strictly confidential and conducted between the manager and each of his/her staff.  The latest wrinkle on this is to encourage everyone in the department or company to comment on each other anonymously.

This is a horrible idea presumably originates  from some business school academic,  who, quite
probably,  has never managed a single soul in his whole life.  The article, written by a management consultant,  points out the flaws in this 360-review idea.  Comments, because they are anonymous, encourage cruel and personal comments that are hurtful and demotivating. Some people take advantage of them to avenge some slight or to get even about something they are aggrieved at.  The reviews tend  to happen when employees are about to be promoted or considered for promotion, or when their performance is sub-par and they could be sacked.  These events bring out the worst in some colleagues:  jealousy, personal dislike, ambition and sense of grievance.

The idea of these reviews is to make people better at their jobs.  I suspect that the opposite is the case. Human beings join groups for strength and mutual suuport, and in the hope that as a group they can be more effective than individuals.  It seems to me 360- reviews are more destructive than effective, poisoning the atmosphere  in a department and sowing suspicion.  They are definitely un-Epicurean and are inconsistent with a happy and ccopperative working environment.

In mourning

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For those who grew up believing in an open, accepting, outward- looking country, where the government at least tried to govern for all the people, where there was a feeling of community and a desire to get along with everyone, regardless of age, gender and country of origin; for those who still believe in cooperation but also in rules that govern and restrain the more exuberantly selfish; to all of you out there who have looked upon government as a necessary instrument for making a better life for the majority – join me in a minute’s alienated silence for a lost dream.

If you think the new government of a post-Cameron “independent” Britain will reject neo-liberalism, reintroduce democracy, pay attention to the ignored electorate, bring the banks to heel, magically stop immigration (especially stop immigration) and so on, you will be sorely disappointed. The Brexit politicians, schooled in the right-wing American think-tanks, care not one jot about you. They care only about themselves. In pursuit of money and position they will make the rule of the big corporations stronger, reduce individual rights, tear up the EU rules and regulations that may be voluminous, but do protect us. They will encourage the rich with lower taxes and better laundering facilities. You? You will be on your own in an even worse jungle, with reduced pensions, social security and government services. That is, if the economy doesn’t implode. Gone will be the moderating influence from the EU, poorly run though it might be.

My anxiety is now for the young, who already have enough to contend with. Everything that happens now in the UK will be result of Brexit and the responsibility of those who voted for it. The latter will have to be grown-ups now and accept the consequences, and naturally they will blame everyone but themselves. As for me personally, I feel I have lost my country of birth.   Ataraxia 0 – Stress 10.