Author Archives: Tim Newman

David Lamin

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Take a look at this video of Labour MP David Lammy:


Take away the London accent and you have all the characteristics – body language, tone, vocabulary, hand gestures, sentiment – of a third world demagogue who winds up in The Hague twenty years and a hundred thousand corpses after seizing power. If he were in uniform you’d think he was auditioning for the leading role in an Idi Amin biopic. Remainers are prone to complaining Brexit is making Britain a laughing stock. How do they imagine having MPs like Lammy makes us look?

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Clone China

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This is an interesting development:

Jaguar Land Rover has won a legal case to prevent a Chinese car brand from selling a copycat vehicle, ending a three-year court battle. In 2016 the UK-based carmaker sued Jiangling Motor Corporation for its Landwind X7 sport utility vehicle, which the company claimed bore extremely similar resemblance to the Range Rover Evoque. On Friday the Beijing Chaoyang District Court ruled that five major features of the car were copied, and ordered Jiangling to cease production, sales and marketing of the vehicle.

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Several international carmakers have complained about local brands copying their designs, but the case is the first time that a Chinese court has ruled in favour of an overseas manufacturer over a Chinese carmaker.

For all the talk about China taking over the world in terms of technology, while their progress is based largely on ripping off other people’s designs to produce versions of inferior quality it’s difficult to see how. If China does start to innovate, one of the biggest problems they’ll face is stopping others copying their intellectual property as they have done. Perhaps this latest ruling is a sign the Chinese are becoming aware of this, but I expect they’re going to find abandoning that business model is a lot harder than adopting it.

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Gender Pay Flap

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A reader sends me a link to this video of members of Australia’s gender equality extortion racket being questioned by a senator on their data collection practices. Have a look for yourselves:

I don’t object to female politicians. What I object to is bureaucracies stuffed with spectacularly thick or intellectually dishonest individuals (of either sex) tasked with pushing hardcore feminist agendas on the rest of the population. At some point, which I concede might be long into the future, people are going to openly state that feminising government was a bad idea. Probably when picking through the ashes of whatever is left of our civilisation.

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Captured Nation

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It’s been obvious from the beginning of negotiations that the ruling classes on both sides of the English Channel don’t want Britain to leave the EU, but they’ve been so incompetent they haven’t even managed to engineer a solution which works in their favour. Instead, Theresa May is reduced to simply putting her deal to the vote again and again, like a monster at the finale of a horror film which has sustained so much damage all it can do is repeat its stock phrase before finally expiring.

My prediction is the EU won’t budge on the backstop, May’s deal won’t pass on the fourth or even fifth attempt, and those in charge will simply say “Well, we’re just not gonna leave.” This is pretty much where we are already: if they were going to let Britain leave, we’d have been out last Friday. In my experience, arrogant technocrats will attempt to put a veneer of propriety on their decisions but ultimately they’re content to just do whatever is most convenient for them, principles be damned. The only reason to try to ram May’s deal through is to give the ruling classes a flimsy excuse for their actions, but it’s not going to make any difference. Britain might well end up leaving the EU this year – perhaps after a general election – but it won’t be as an end result of the farce that’s playing out now. The conclusion of that was decided an awful long time ago; what’s changed is now everyone can see that.

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Strangers in a strange land

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There’s an article in the BBC lamenting that the whole world is designed for men and, having succeeded in their demands to access every workplace in the land, women are finding they’ve not been tailored to suit them.

From police stab vests that don’t account for breasts, to safety goggles too large for women’s faces, to boots that don’t fit women’s feet, Ms Criado Perez says the list is endless.

This reminds me of the oft-heard complaint that there are not enough female film directors, in response to which Tim Almond among others likes to ask: “So what’s stopping them?” The complaint isn’t so much that women are being prevented from making films, it’s that Hollywood studios aren’t handing directing duties on blockbuster films to women. Which isn’t the same thing.

Similarly, what’s stopping a bunch of entrepreneurial women spotting this giant gap in the market for women’s stab vests and safety goggles and touting their wares around every organisation (meaning, all of them) which boasts about their gender diversity? Surely the management would welcome them with open arms and submit an order tout de suite, if only to stem the flood of complaints being submitted to HR. But no, the demand is that people already out there doing stuff should consider their needs more. The individual female employees who’ve been forced to use unsuitable kit have a genuine complaint, but when it’s presented by the BBC as an example of widespread patriarchal indifference it sounds like a bored wife complaining her husband is inconsiderate and doesn’t notice her enough.

Democratic Congresswoman Niki Tsongas at the time called out the military’s unresponsiveness to the needs of female service members, citing the “alarming” disadvantages for women, including being unable to properly fire a weapon, Military.com reported.

Yes, there are women in the US military who can’t fire a weapon properly. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. Of course, the implication here is the weapon should be redesigned to suit women, or women given a different weapon, which would be interesting in a war to say the least. I bet none of this was discussed during the debates over whether women should be allowed to serve in the first place.

From apps to the actual size, there are a number of design features that have made some women say smartphones have been designed with only men in mind.

Women’s hands are, on average, around an inch smaller than men’s – which can make the industry’s ever-increasing screen sizes problematic to use.

Texting one-handed on a 4.7-inch (12cm) or bigger iPhone can be difficult to impossible for many women (and small-handed men).

So they can buy the smaller-sized phone, can’t they? Or do they want the version with the big screen but an option to defy physics during text messaging operations?

“The comprehensive health app on the iPhone that didn’t have a period tracker; the way Siri could find a Viagra supplier but not an abortion provider – that’s what happens when you don’t include women in the decision making process,” Ms Criado Perez says.

Apparently if women are included in the decision-making process they’ll equate aborting a fetus with buying viagra. Could that be the reason why they’re not? And as Tim Almond would say, “Why can’t they build their own abortion app?” It can’t be that hard. What I expect is lacking is demand; how many women really want to arrange their abortions using Siri?

The formula for standard US office temperatures was developed in the 1960s, based on the metabolic rate of an average 40-year-old man weighing 154 pounds (70kg).

A 2015 study published in the journal Nature found that a female metabolic rate can be up to 35% lower than the male rate used in those calculations – which amounts to, on average, a five degree temperature preference difference.

Of course, this has nothing to do with men being required to wear suits in the office while women get to wear nice dresses showing lots of skin. But again, this is an example of women demanding access to workplaces and then complaining about everything once they get there. The old dinosaur patriarchs said that women wouldn’t like it, and it would make them miserable, didn’t they? The logical answer is staring us in the face, especially in the MeToo era: segregated workplaces. Is that what they want? Seems like it, doesn’t it?

“But it makes me so angry to think of all these women, living their lives, thinking there’s something wrong with them – that they’re too small or don’t fit or whatever it is.”

“It’s just that we haven’t built anything for women.”

The irony is that this is genuinely proof of how gender equality programs have failed, but not in the way she thinks. This is not the 1980s; women have occupied senior positions in every department of every large organisation for more than a decade now, so this “we” she’s referring to is as much women as men. But the power-skirts haven’t done anything about these practical issues women face, because power-skirts rarely get involved in practical issues. The actual design, manufacture, and supply of useful goods and services appears to still be done by men, while the power-skirts do…well, what exactly? HR departments are dominated by feminists holding seminars on sexual harassment and celebrating International Women’s Day but they’ve not even made sure their female employees have got the right kit. There’s a term for this sort of thing: abject failure.

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Smarter than Louise Mensch

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This is an amusing series of Tweets, from someone I’ve written about before (1, 2 & 3)

“I’m a Russia expert and told everyone not to listen to Mensch’s ravings about Russiagate. But here’s why I think Russiagate is real…”

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Departments of Higher Religion

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Via a Twitter correspondent, a piece by Toby Young in The Spectator on Accenture’s wokeness:

New employees at the British headquarters of Accenture, a global management consultancy, were slightly taken aback during a recent induction morning when the head of human resources encouraged them to wear rainbow-coloured lanyards declaring themselves ‘allies’ — not just at the meeting, but permanently. In addition, they were given the option of adding the word ‘ally’ in the same rainbow pattern to the footers of their company email addresses. Anyone confused by HR language — a reference to the second world war perhaps? — was referred to the company website, where the word ‘ally’ was helpfully defined: ‘An ally is someone who takes action to promote an inclusive and accepting culture regardless of their own identity and demonstrates commitment to an inclusive workplace. We currently have allies programmes for Mental Health, LGBT and People with Disabilities.’

It’s not just politics that’s becoming infantalised with cheap gimmickry, it’s everywhere. There is some good news, though:

This madness, which long ago infected university campuses, is now seeping into HR departments of large employers. The result is the rise of the woke corporation, and it might affect the way you work. Certainly, no one should assume that their own company, however sensible-seeming, is immune.

Crackpot ideas that used to be confined to neo-Marxist professors in grievance studies departments have been enthusiastically embraced by the giants of capitalism. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola are all on board and anyone who publicly challenges this new orthodoxy is not merely endangering their chances of promotion, but at risk of being fired.

And that is that companies which operate like this will not survive long once their legacy rents run out. As I’m fond of saying, it’s small and medium-sized companies which reject this garbage or turn it to their advantage which represent the future for bright, capable individuals.

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Pick a Colour

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One of the things which separates Western Europe/North America/Australia & NZ from the rest of the world, and makes these places infinitely better, is politics is not divided along racial lines. Even with the legacy of slavery and the civil rights movement, US politics has never been divided into white parties, black parties, Hispanic parties, etc. The idea British political parties could divide along racial lines is so absurd you’d have to explain it a few times before anyone would understand what you even meant.

This isn’t the case almost everywhere else. In Nigeria, it is generally expected that presidents – who are elected via a pretty free and fair process – will alternate between one from the north and one from the south. The northerners are generally Muslim and look quite different from the generally Christian southerners, and each side wants one of their own in charge. I also happen to be friends with a chap from Trinidad, and he told me the politics of Trinidad & Tobago are split along ethnic lines between Afro-Caribbeans and those of Indian descent. When it comes to voting, everyone votes for a candidate who shares their ethnicity. Whenever I stumble into some information about an election in Africa or Asia, the candidates’ ethnicity or tribe is always mentioned because it lets you know who their supporters are.

Back when I was in university, the only time term “white nationalists” got used was in documentaries on American prison gangs. When I saw the film American History X with a bunch of fellow students, the whole concept of white nationalism seemed absurd. Twenty years later however, and we are told that white nationalism is “on the rise” and “a growing threat”. Until recently, I was quick to dismiss this as nonsense, but I’m slowly coming around to the idea it might be true. The trouble is, white nationalism is being promoted by those very people who have brought the term into everyday use. Here’s an example:


The idea that Trump is a white nationalist is preposterous, but if we have a Somali congresswoman wearing a headscarf bellowing from the rooftops about white nationalism in chorus with hundreds of other prominent figures, people are first going to start getting used the idea and then wondering if there may not be something in it. The Obama years saw America’s racial fault lines widen substantially, a process not helped by the president himself (and that’s putting it charitably). Since Trump’s election, it has become routine for Democrat politicians to openly campaign along racial lines, all with one thing in common: whites are there to be denigrated. Accusations of white supremacy are simply a tool political charlatans deploy to hobble their political opponents, but it appears to be an effective one. But a consequence of ethnic minorities playing divide and silence along racial lines is that, sooner or later, whites will start to play the same game. It’s not the extremists like the Christchurch murderer that people need to worry about as much as ordinary people who hadn’t even heard the term five years ago being slandered as white supremacists by grifters who want to make everything about race. They will start to think, and indeed are starting to think, if minorities are voting along racial lines and using any obtained power to launch attacks on whites, they should recalibrate how they see the future of politics.

The response by the ruling classes to such fledgling opinions has, as usual, been precisely the wrong one. Take this for example:

Facebook has said it will block “praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism” on Facebook and Instagram from next week.

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The company said it had deemed white nationalism an acceptable form of expression on a par with “things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity”.

But in a blog post on Wednesday it said that after three months of consultation with “members of civil society and academics”, it found that white nationalism could not be “meaningfully separated” from white supremacy and organised hate groups.

So while our benevolent rulers and their media stooges wax lyrical about the importance of letting ISIS barbarians return to civilised society, governments – via tech giants and “members of civil society and academics” – have decided white people discussing what might be best for them is to be banned. So I have a question: do you think this will make it more or less likely that white people will consider voting along racial lines in future?

Here’s another story:

Austria’s government has said it may disband a far-right group that received a donation from the main suspect in the New Zealand mosque attacks.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the government was investigating whether the Identitarian Movement Austria (IBÖ) was a “terrorist organisation”.

Prosecutors confirmed that the group’s leader, Martin Sellner, received about €1,500 (£1,290) from Brenton Tarrant.

Mr Sellner confirmed the donation but denied any ties to the suspect.

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“I have nothing to do with this terror attack,” Mr Sellner said, arguing that his organisation was a peaceful anti-immigration group.

He said investigators raided his flat in Vienna on Monday and seized his phone, computer, and other devices.

Here’s another question: do you think designating this organisation a terrorist group because it received a donation from the Christchurch murderer will soften or harden attitudes to immigration in Austria? One would also have thought that Austrians of all people might have paused before wielding a law which can so obviously be abused in future should the wrong people come into power. Hell, Sebastian Kurz is already way to the right of every other political leader in Europe; if he’s having to resort to this to stop himself being outflanked further to the right, who knows who could find themselves propelled to power on an anti-immigration platform?

Had this blatant race-baiting not occurred in American and (increasingly) British and European politics, white nationalism would be confined to the Aryan Brotherhood behind three rows of barbed wire fence and a concrete wall. Now it’s being advertised as a political movement, and people are showing an interest. If someone out there wanted white people to vote along racial lines, this was a good way to get the ball rolling. If that does start happening in large numbers, things will get ugly indeed.

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Mercenary Managers

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So I’m wondering whether I’ve found a niche in the market here, for what are effectively freelance managers. I’ve noticed every company or organisation has particular projects or tasks which fall outside the company’s core business, but have no resources available to assign to them full time. So what happens is they either don’t get done, or they get handed to someone to do in addition to their normal role, and often that person isn’t fully committed or doesn’t have the skills to do a proper job.

Say for example a medium-sized company making widgets wants to increase the size of its goods yard. Who would manage that? The operations manager? Doesn’t he want to concentrate on making widgets? Does he know anything about project management? Perhaps they have a project manager sitting around doing the odd project here and there, but if not, they need someone to manage it. Now the obvious response is you get a contractor in who can take care of the whole lot, but how does the widget company tender the job? Who writes the scope of work? Who manages the bids, deals with the clarifications? And once the work starts, who is responsible for managing the contractor, especially the hundred and one interfaces which require somebody to be making decisions on a daily basis. Who ensures the works don’t interfere with ongoing operations?

You can expand this problem to lots of one-off projects, especially those which pop up unplanned, such as damage repair. Looking back at my career, I ran a fair number of projects which were one-offs and nobody career-minded wanted anything to do with them, and were handed to me because I volunteered to do them. One involved making a crane to replace flare tips on an FPSO. Who, even in an organisation the size of an oil company’s, would managing such a task naturally fall to? The answer was nobody, hence it circulated for months before landing on my desk, and I did it mainly for fun.

The next obvious answer is you hire a consultant, but that’s not the same thing. A consultant will come in and give advice to the manager accountable for getting the task done. But what if there is no manager to begin with? I saw several instances of consultants hired to carry out activities without any manager being accountable, and they represented a waste of time and money. Look at ISO 9001 certification, for example. You can only hire consultants to come in and implement a quality management system once you have someone in the company with the authority to modify the business process as per the consultants’ advice, but what if they have no quality manager and all the other senior managers are 100% devoted to other tasks?

What these companies need is a freelance manager who they interview and assess like any other senior member of staff, but who they employ for a specific, finite task and who will take ownership and be responsible for getting it done, after which he moves on. Of course, there are difficulties with doing this, not least to do with incentives and accountability for both the hired gun and the firm’s existing management, but there’s a demand there, I think. What about you?

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When they go low, we go lower

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Remember Jussie Smollett, the American actor/singer who claimed he’d been attacked by a couple of rednecks in downtown Chicago in the early hours one morning, only for it to emerge that he’d paid a couple of Nigerian lads to fill him in? He was staring down the barrel of serious criminal charges but whaddya know, they’ve been dropped.

Readers may recall that Smollett’s original claim had the entire Democratic presidential field rushing to his aid, and it seems his connections have come through once more. However, the Chicago PD and mayor are less than impressed:

In a striking news conference [which can be seen here – ed], the mayor and the police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, sharply criticized the State’s Attorney’s Office and the actor himself.

Mr. Emanuel said that Mr. Smollett’s celebrity had played a role in the decision, calling it “a whitewash of justice.”

“You cannot have, because of a person’s position, one set of rules apply to them and one set of rules apply to everybody else,” Mr. Emanuel said.

“Our officers did hard work, day in and day out, countless hours, working to unwind what actually happened that night,” he added. “The city saw its reputation dragged through the mud.”

Mr. Johnson said, “I think this city is still owed an apology.”

“At the end of the day,” he added, “it’s Mr. Smollett who committed this hoax.”

Nor are we finding much remorse from Smollett:

Exoneration or no, for Mr. Smollett, who maintained his innocence, the outcome could hardly have been better. After the hearing, he read a statement outside the courthouse without taking questions. He thanked his family, friends and “the incredible people of Chicago and all over the country and the world who have prayed for me, who have supported me.”

That’s right, he still maintains he’s innocent. And I wasn’t very surprised by this:

[T]he state’s attorney’s office had already drawn scrutiny for its handling of the case. The Chicago Tribune reported that after police department sources began leaking their doubts about Mr. Smollett to local reporters, Tina Tchen, a former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, had emailed Kimberly Foxx, the top prosecutor, saying the actor’s family had “concerns about the investigation.”

Firstly, why did Michelle Obama have a chief of staff? Secondly, far from embodying “class and grace” as his worshippers claim, the more I read about the Obamas the more they look like low-grade grifters, neck-deep in the sort of corruption that infests Chicago. If I were to be even more cruel I’d point out that Americans elected a half-African for a president who displayed African-style governance – including the prominent, high-spending wife and an inability to retire gracefully and silently.

Now on the one hand this is nothing new. The wealthy and connected were always subject to different laws from the rest of us – look at Edward Kennedy, for example. But on the other hand, now they’re not even pretending. They’re corrupt, and they don’t care who knows it. Also, I’m sure a lot of young black men will be contrasting Smullett’s fate under what passes for a justice system with their own were they to face similar charges. The American justice system is stacked against black men, and the sheer scale of gross injustices meted out against them should be a matter of priority for any governing party. Kim Kardashian, for all her faults, has done an admirable job in pushing Trump for prison reform, a bill which the president passed.

Which is ironic, don’t you think? The supposedly racist president Trump has signed a bill aimed at putting fewer black men in prison for non-violent crimes. What did Obama do to redress the balance in his eight years in charge? And now his wife’s mates are intervening in the justice system to ensure a wealthy celebrity gets sprung without charge despite overwhelming evidence that he’s guilty. It’s not surprising black Americans became so disappointed with Obama, and this latest incident will hardly have helped. While it’s probably too much to expect them to vote Republican, we can at least hope some will start to see that Democrats are not their friends either. What’s going to be really interesting is whether Kamala Harris can bring out the black vote. She’s on record as going all-in for Smullett, and her black credentials are sketchy to begin with. If she can’t, Trump’s a shoo-in for 2020.

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