Conviction Politics vs Arithmetic

Green politicians are well named: they are inexperienced and untested by reality. We were all green once and we had, still have, ideas of how to make the world a better place.  Long may that be so but the more seasoned members of society reckon these ideas should be quantified before they become policy.   

Two camps of Greens, and like-minded parties in Germany and Scotland, oppose nuclear generation of electricity: those with rational concerns that can be addressed and those with only visceral objections with whom reasoning is pointless. When, last month, Nicola Sturgeon ruled out nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels in Scotland, she was rejecting the price of nuclear based on Hinkley Point C which is indeed extortionate. The price of electricity from the small, generation IV, Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs), however, is projected to be about one third of EDF prices. She needs to do the arithmetic. 

When 3,000 Greens were surveyed, 47% were in favour of replacing decommissioned nuclear plants with new ones, 32% were against and 21% did not know. Most of the objections concerned safety (Fukoshima for example) and waste disposal, not nuclear generation of electricity per se. After considering the substance of these two objections, the alternatives for the dunkelflaute days when the sun don’t shine, the wind don’t blow and renewables don’t deliver are reviewed.  The question for the rational Greens is whether the potential problems with generation IV nuclear are more or less than the potential problems with the alternatives. 

“As of October 2021, there are 441 nuclear reactors in operation in some 30 countries around the world. In the United Kingdom, 13 nuclear power reactors.” Getting to net zero carbon energy and nuclear safety are global, not purely national, issues. Little Britain should not be making up its own nuclear safety rules based on minimal, if any, experience of the latest technologies. The US and Canada nuclear regulators , NRC and CNSC,  are co-ordinating their nuclear regulatory systems and have completed their first collaborative project and the UK’s ONR should be part of that. 

The UK government’s (February 2020, p.3) review of new nuclear generation options stated: “In addition to electricity generation, AMRs use cooling systems or fuels that can offer additional benefits, including high temperature heat for hydrogen production, industrial process heat, desalination and the re-use of spent fuel to minimise waste. These applications could play an important role in decarbonising industry, heat and transport.” Advocates of CCS claim burying carbon underground would be easy enough.  If so, that would also be the case for AMR waste. 

Moving on to the alternatives, hydrogen is widely seen as a replacement for fossil fuels, e.g. kerosene, and also as a means of storage. “Long-range jets powered by zero-emission hydrogen used at scale globally are, by some estimates, 30 or 40 years away”.  Some see “sustainable aviation fuel” (SAF) and ‘electrofuel’, made from green hydrogen and captured CO2, as replacements for kerosene. Costs are five times kerosene and they are net zero carbon in the sense that they return captured carbon.  It might be better to use fuels that do not emit CO2 at all. 

We need to see the arithmetic for the more general use of hydrogen but it could not be used as a replacement for natural gas in general domestic use. By 2050, energy supply will be almost all electricity, including the generation of hydrogen and charging batteries. Maintaining the gas network for occasional domestic use on dunkelflaute days would not be economic especially as the natural gas network, much of it antique, would need conversion.

Hydrogen and batteries are the two most quoted candidates for electricity storage. Batteries are good for road transportation and shipping but not suitable for shortfalls in renewables. Ten successive dunkelflaute days would require a storage capacity of 14 TWh at a cost of £4.5trn – more than four times the UK public sector spending for 2020/21- based on the (published) construction and other costs of the 640 MWh storage system planned for the Thames Estuary. Similar arguments apply to fuel cell technology. 

In short, both hydrogen and batteries can make some contribution to storage, i.e. shifting renewable surpluses to deficits, but nowhere near enough. We will need to supplement renewables with constant power (“baseload”) which reduces electricity deficits and increases surpluses. If government statisticians have not yet calculated the optimal baseload percentage of average energy needs, they should have.  And they should have shared the arithmetic with us.  My guess is that 30% feels about right. Furthermore, the constant output required for baseload would probably be best suited by low cost nuclear, given the volatility of fossil fuel prices. 

Renewables plus hydrogen storage plus baseload will still leave a shortfall on dunkelflaute days. The candidates to cope are surplus electricity trading, biomass with CCS (BECCS), and gas or oil with carbon capture. 

Trading surpluses is valuable for filling Grid shortfalls if UK weather patterns complement those of our trading partners, i.e. Norway, the Low Countries and France. If they match, however, importing and exporting will not help, We have enough data to establish the extent of complementarity and the arithmetic should be published. Current practice is not encouraging as in 2019, the UK imported 35% of its energy needs, with Norway being the source of 57% of the imports. Hardly any is exported. 

BECCS requires burning the stuff that removes CO2 from the air (vegetation) in order to put it back and in the process removes the agricultural land the world needs for food production. Full-scale Drax BECCS would be more expensive than Hinkley Point C which is Ms Sturgeon’s objection to nuclear. BECCS is not so much a means of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere as cash from the government.  

With current and known technology, it looks like oil and gas are here to stay with carbon capture either at the time the electricity is generated (CCS) or direct air capture independently (DAC). 

19 pilot DAC plants are currently operating worldwide and 70 CCS projects in Europe, 14 of which are in the UK. This makes Ms Sturgeon’s objection to new offshore oil and gas recovery somewhat surprising. Mapping net zero energy requirements has many uncertainties but lead times are such that choices have to be made now. The enthusiasm for AMRs in the US and Canada indicates we should be taking them more seriously that we seem to be doing.

Despite the rhetoric, Germany is re-considering nuclear because of worries about dependency on Russian gas and the Scottish government remains open-minded: “We are aware of increasing interest in the development of new nuclear technologies such as Small Modular Reactors. We have a duty to assess this and all other new technologies based on safety, value for consumers, and contribution to Scotland’s low-carbon economy and energy future.”

Just do the arithmetic. 

The UK does not have a gender pay gap

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has a report out insisting that the gender pay gap in the UK hasn’t changed at all. Or, rather, once we take out the education factor it hasn’t changed. We on the other hand, and correctly, insist that the UK doesn’t have a gender pay gap at all:

But there has been no similar progress for graduates for whom the gap in hourly wages has not shifted at all.

This means "barely any change" to the gender earnings gap, the IFS said.

In the report itself the more subtle points are:

Gender gaps in pay, paid work and unpaid work have substantial consequences for inequalities in material living standards. Women in single-adult families, especially single mothers, are especially vulnerable to poverty. Women in opposite-gender couple families have been found to consume less than their male partners.

 Inequalities in earnings and its three components increase vastly after parenthood. The opening of gaps around childbirth suggests that unpaid care work is central in shaping inequalities in the labour market.

 The gendered roles that mothers and fathers take on appear to be largely unrelated to their relative earnings potential. Even mothers who earn more than their male partners before childbirth are more likely than their partners to reduce hours of work in the years after childbirth.

What we actually have is a child pay gap, possibly a motherhood pay gap.

As we’ve pointed out many times before mothers - all else being equal - earn less than non-mothers, fathers earn more than non-fathers. That in a sexually dimorphic species the gendered reaction to the arrival of children differs does not surprise us.

This leaves the question of what, if anything, should be done about it?

Norms, preferences and beliefs appear central to the choices of families. Two-fifths of both men and women in the UK agree that ‘a woman should stay at home when she has children under school age’. Internationally, there is huge variation in the proportion of the population who hold traditional gender attitudes. The extent of agreement with such statements is strongly positively correlated with gender gaps in labour market outcomes.

 However, these constructs are not immutable. An accumulation of policies consistently supporting a more equal sharing of responsibilities between parents (or large policy reforms challenging gender roles) may help build up a change in attitudes that leads to permanent change in norms. Given the huge economic costs associated with the status quo, even expensive policies could potentially pay for themselves if they successfully ensure that the talents of both women and men are put to their most productive uses, whether in the labour market or at home.

The clash here is between the two meanings of “liberal”. The modern - and we insist wrong - meaning appears to be equal outcomes at the population level. The correct meaning is that older, classical, one of equal ability to maximise personal utility. You know, this idea of freedom and liberty to live life as one wants?

The claim being made there is that the population must change its ways to meet that desire for equal outcomes.

We agree entirely that if there were an equal number of househusbands to housewives then that disparity of outcome at that population level would disappear and those outcomes would be, at the population level, equal.

The thing is, well, what if the individual folks don’t in fact want to do that? What if sexual dimorphism means that this outcome is not in fact utility maximising?

There’s really only one way to find out, isn’t there? Have that potential equality, as we already largely do, that equality of choices, and see what happens. Our bet is around and about what currently does but we’re willing to be proven wrong. The idea that the population must be forced into some - by revealed preference - undesired manner of living their lives seems most illiberal to us. Even if it is an attempt to meet that modern liberal goal of equality of outcome.

Being ignorant of something doesn't aid in diagnosing that something

Given that we were so involved in that electricity privatisation and the design of the subsequent system, a little comment on something:

The obvious next question is why on earth you would design an energy system this way. The answer is ideological. In the 1980s, the Thatcher government had a problem. It was committed to privatising the power stations and grids that produced and supplied our energy. But its doctrine of efficient markets didn’t work for a system that, like the railways, was a natural monopoly. Its solution was to create a completely new, separate function of “energy supply”, whose sole purpose was to turn this natural monopoly into an artificial market.

The problem here is that if you’re entirely ignorant of even the words being used then you’re not going to be able to diagnose the system nor any problems in it.

A natural monopoly is a specific thing. It’s where a market or system will entirely naturally tend or trend to monopoly. A classified ads section perhaps. People advertise in one specific one because that’s where all the potential buyers look - the buyers look in that because that’s where everyone advertises. Or a social media network, there are 3 billion on the one of those because there are 2.999 etc billion other people on it.

There’s absolutely nothing at all which makes electricity generation a natural monopoly. There is no good reason why the people who own a nuclear plant should be the same as the folks who own windmills. Owning Drax doesn’t make any difference to the likelihood of the same organisation owning solar cells. Nor does owning any part of any one of those four things make owning a chunk of the next more likely, more affordable or even more sensible. Power generation just isn’t a natural monopoly.

Nor is power retailing, something which is largely a function of efficiency at running a billing system.

The grid, ah, now, yes, the grid is a natural monopoly. Wiring up the country twice is just one of those things which isn’t going to happen. Which is why at privatisation it was carved out of the CEGB and remained separate and highly regulated. For what actually happened at privatisation was to identify which exact parts of the whole system were a natural monopoly, therefore not to be left wholly subject to market forces, and which parts were not and which would function best when subject to as much market force as could be brought to bear.

The actual problem the electricity supply market is having now is that government has forgotten what it was doing and why. Introducing that price cap both limits the market forces being brought to bear and also bankrupts legions of the retail suppliers. Exactly what wasn’t to be done, limiting market forces in those parts of the whole system where market forces do and should be left to work.

But then as we say in the headline, if you’re ignorant of something, as The Guardian is here, then that’s not an aid to diagnosing, or even understanding, that something. The pity is that government seems to have made the same error.

Welcome to the Sovietisation of the British Economy

An interesting little commentary on how planned economies turn out:

Dozens of car models — many of them plug-ins — are so scarce that second-hand versions of the same vehicle are retailing for more than those coming off the assembly line, according to the most recent data.

In the latest signs of the upheaval in the car market, figures show that 25 per cent of “nearly new” cars are more expensive than their brand new equivalents.

As it turns out closing down an economy then trying to get it back up again is a difficult task. Which is an interesting commentary on that difficulty of planning an economy - there is no central node of knowledge that can manage the whole thing.

We’ve also seen the same thing elsewhere. In the Soviet Union, where they planned all production, this idea of the nearly new being worth more than the in-production new was commonplace. Not just for cars either - a standard method of making a, admittedly small, living was to do the queuing in the shop to gain access to those new goods then resell for a profit immediately outside said store. With a possible waiting list of a decade for a new car then yes, those nearly new just off the production line examples were worth more than the new and in production ones.

This idea that the used is worth more than the new - with the exception of antiques of course - is that example of the Sovietisation of the British economy.

Sure, right here right now this is an entirely transient phenomenon, a result of the Great Pandemic. The Soviets didn’t have that excuse - which does rather show the dangers of having a properly planned economy, doesn’t it?

The cure for high prices is high prices

What if demand for something rises? Supply then has to either increase or prices do. Those high prices then call into being that grunt work of trying to increase supply. Things that didn’t make sense before now do as methods of said supply, new methods of creating supply are chewed over and so on. The cure for high prices is high prices:

As demand for electric vehicles grows amid a push for a greener economy, carmakers globally are grappling with rising prices of everything from semiconductor chips to copper and aluminium.

Now the expense of lithium, a metal found in every commercial electric battery, is starting to bite as a lack of mining capacity strains supplies. Experts say it is likely to get worse and more investment in production is needed to meet electric vehicle supply chain needs.

Just off the top of our heads, spodumene mines in Australia are opening up again (they closed when the by-product tantalum dropped in price), new spodumene mines are under development all over the place, West Africa and so on and on. The geothermal waters under Cornwall are being filtered, as are those around the Salton Sea, the Kruzny Hory and on and on. The “lithium triangle” in South America and the brines there are being scoured for more opportunities. When Bolivia stops insisting the cars are made up on the altiplano, rather than just allowing the lithium extraction, then perhaps that supply will come online. When Chile issues more extraction licences - the current ones are Pinochet era and it’s the nuclear ministry which may, but does not, issue more* - then that huge supply will be more available. On the subject of brines one group of possibly bright chaps insists they can filter the Red Sea (a little above normal oceanic Li content) and there are beady eyes peering at desalination plants all over the place.

This is before we go and seek out examples of anything, this is just culled from a casual reading of the newspapers recently.

Not that we’re here to make commodity price predictions but there’s a reasonable chance that more than enough of these will come online and that the lithium price will slump at some point off in the middle distance. There is, after all, no shortage of actual lithium around in that lithosphere, it’s only economic concentrations that are scarce.

At which point two observations. That demand for more investment - that’s entirely missing the point. Which is that the investment is not just happening it has already happened. Armies of geologists have been scouring the world for a decade and more already.

Why? The second observation, because the cure for high prices is high prices. Further, given that markets are forward looking the cure for high prices is predictions of high prices. The predictions themselves moving the efforts back through time as people now act to capture those potential profits in the future.

By the time the bureaucracy gets to hear about it everything has already happened. Which might not be as silly as the Chilean licence granting system but it is a fundamental objection to that idea of state planning of such things.

*An isotope of lithium can be used to make hydrogen bombs but this is really just an example of the stupidity of state planning

The very point of carbon permits is that you don't control the price

There are two basic market methods of controlling carbon emissions - carbon permits and carbon taxes. That second allows you to control the price of dealing with emissions but the quantity thereby changed is unknown. The aim of carbon permits - along with market trading of them and so on - is that the quantity allowably emitted is known but the price of the action is both unknown and uncontrolled:

Ministers are considering a dramatic intervention in the carbon market to cut the amount big polluters have to pay for emissions permits.

Prices have soared in the past month, from about £50 per tonne of carbon dioxide to £74. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a stock exchange announcement that prices had breached the threshold for the government to step in.

No, that’s not what you then do. Having decided to go the permit route - we disagree, think the settled price but unknown quantity of the tax is better - then that’s the decision that has been made. To control volume not price. You don’t then try to control the price again as you’ve just made the opposite decision.

If we’re honest about it we’re not all that worried by the original problem, climate change, itself. What does keep us awake at nights with attacks of the screaming abdabs is that near no one seems to be paying any attention at all to what has been shown and proven to be true about how to deal with it if it all does exist and does need dealing with.

You wish to control volumes of emissions? Then fine, do so. But don’t then try to control prices as well. You’ve made a choice, stick with it. Quite apart from anything else if you intervene to increase emissions permits if the price begins to bite then no one will bother to worry about reducing emissions, will they? Because there will be intervention as soon as the price begins to bite.

Blimey, we ask you, where do these people get their ideas from?

Apparently spending money isn't a good way to do stimulus

This is a good lesson for us all to learn in two different ways:

Dame Meg Hillier, Labour MP and chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: "It cost the taxpayer £50 million just to administer the pointlessly rushed-through Green Homes Grant scheme, which delivered a small fraction of its objectives, either in environmental benefits or the promised new jobs.

"We heard it can take 48 months - four years - to train the specialists required to implement key parts of a scheme that was dreamed up to be rolled out in 12 weeks.

"It was never going to work at this time, in this way, and that should have been blindingly obvious to the department. That it was not is a serious worry. I am afraid there is no escaping the conclusion that this scheme was a slam-dunk fail."

Well, yes, and let that be a lesson to all those Green New Deal enthusiasts. Actually getting competent workfolk on site and doing something useful is not something governments are good at. No matter how the effort is financed - say, green or peoples’ quantitative easing - it’s the people making hammer hit nail that are the actual scarce resource.

There is also this:

A government spokesperson said: "The Green Homes Grant voucher scheme was designed as a short-term economic stimulus and was delivered during a global pandemic.

Government actually trying to spend money isn’t a good way of doing stimulus. Don’t forget that, assuming we want to do any stimulus at all, the aim is just to get the money out there. To increase that gap between government revenues from taxation and government spending. That increase in the deficit is the stimulus.

Rather than fiddling with bad - OK, lousy - plans to create some lovely little project government actually has two effective and efficient ways of gaining that stimulus. One is simply to give money to people - as the US showed with their possibly overenthusiastic lockdown stimulus checks. The other is to stop taking money off people. Simply cut taxes to produce that stimulus. As Keynes himself once pointed out, cutting national insurance will appear in the next paycheque, will be of a size that would be stimulatory. There’s almost certainly nothing faster as stimulus than doing that.

So why don’t we try to learn that lesson. We want stimulus? Don’t get government to try to do anything, just get it to take less money off folks. Tax cuts, not spending increases, don’t try to get government to fertilise the economy from one end of the alimentary canal just stuff less into the maw in the first place.

If you're calorie counting lettuce then you've a severe problem there

We’ve muttered the odd bit and piece about how we tend not to trust many new measurements. Not just £ s d or the way in which a silver dollar actually had some value, nor this newfound again freedom to use lbs as the French continued to use livres. Those old ways were probably just more culturally comforting than anything else. We take issue rather more with some of the newly constructed measures of things.

For example, once it became obvious that actual poverty was conquered in Britain the concept of relative poverty was brought to the fore. We’ve whine about how people adamantly refuse to note that the age profiles of the varied ethnicities are different - it’s therefore no surprise at all that ethnic representations in populations where age is a factor differ from the portions in the general population.

We think we’ve found a new one to shout about:

Given that poorer UK households would have to spend nearly 40% of their income to buy food for a healthy diet, according to recent data from the Food Foundation,

That strikes us as being an absurdity. Just on the mere face of it. Median household income is £30,800, poverty is less than 60% of that, so say the edge of poverty is £355 a week. 40% of that is £142 a week. And given that the average weekly food bill for a household is £60 we do not believe for a moment that original calculation. It’s nonsense, but why is it nonsense?

The answer being that the Food Foundation is using a method stupid even by the gormless standards of the usual wokeist campaign groups.

They measure the price of foods by their calorie contents. So, lettuce is a bad way to get calories - however good it is in other ways - therefore it’s expensive by the calorie. Potatoes are cheap by the calorie. OK, that’s fine in real life as we go gain our calories from those cheap and calorie dense foods and eat the other stuff for the other things in them, minerals, vitamins, flavour and so on.

The Food Foundation only measure food costs by the calorie. And then says that because calorie light foods are more expensive by the calorie then so is a balanced and healthy diet. Entirely missing that balanced part of course, where we get calories from where calories are good to get from and vitamins equally and so on. They really do price their diet as if we eat the lettuce (or broccoli, cabbage, whatever) as a calorie source.

Actually, that’s not just stupid or gormless that’s mad. But that’s where that expense of the healthy diet number comes from. An entirely insane calculation of the cost of that healthy diet. One in which they are calorie counting lettuce - and if you’re doing that you should realise there’s something severely wrong.

But here’s what really worries us. As we can see here this is being referred to as reasonable by others. It’s now that we should be objecting, before this becomes a commonplace. So, we’re complaining.

The Food Foundation’s calculation of the cost of a healthy diet is flat out insane. Stop using it.

As ever, it's the customer who really benefits from a transaction

We don’t have to go far to find folks who insist that every transaction means the customer is being ripped off - look the supplier is making a profit, that must be evil! These people rather missing the point, in a voluntary transaction that consumer must also be gaining something they value.

As it happens we can even assign rough values to who gets the most out of this. Profits are, at most, some 10% of GDP (after we subtract depreciation etc). The usual calculation of the consumer surplus - the amount of value that consumers get that they don’t have to pay for - is some 100% of GDP. A very crude comparison indeed but the weighting seems to be 10:1 in favour of those consumers.

We also find ourselves with an example out in the wild:

The eurozone’s most powerful banking groups have demanded long-term access to London’s multi-trillion dollar derivatives trading market in a fresh blow for Brussels’ plans to seize business from the City.

In a joint letter, finance trade bodies said that the bloc faces a “cliff edge” unless it extends exemptions that allow trades by European Union institutions to take place in the UK and other major markets.

The City does indeed provide varied services to companies across Europe and the world. The City makes a fat income from doing so, huzzah for the City. The EU has been muttering for decades that perhaps all that value generation should instead be within other countries - the City as pirates sailing off with all those profits. But when push comes to shove look what happens.

The customers insist that access to the value they gain is far more important than who gets the relatively trivial - trivial to the value those consumers of the services gain - profits from the process.

It’s the customer who benefits from voluntary transactions which is why said customers, consumers, partake of them.

What Migrant Crisis?

Marsham Street 

“I’m so glad you were able to accompany me to my new ministry, Humphrey.” 

“My pleasure, Minister.” 

“You know, Humphrey, I’ve come to regard your advice as positively Socratic; Platonic dialogues and all that.” 

“You are too kind, Minister, but that is beyond me.  The civil service has long since ceased recruiting people who know about such things.” 

“Yes indeed, back to business.  Quite a conundrum: these migrant chappies crossing the channel.” 

“More than 23,000 such migrants have arrived already this year compared with 8,500 in the whole of last year and your predecessor was panicking, sorry, expressing mild concern, then.” 

“Why do these people want to leave La Belle France anyway?  My wife and I often motored around there in the summer.  Picnic lunches bought in their charming covered markets and the Michelin star dinners are absolutely cracking.  The weather is better too.” 

“If I may say so, Minister, the camps in the Pas de Calais do not receive many Michelin stars.” 

“Then they should nick a few bicycles.  I believe there are over 270,000 job vacancies in France.” 

“That may be so, but they don’t speak French and they would need identity cards, proofs of right to work and bank accounts, just for a start.  And, as the French point out, they really, really want to come to Britain.  They say the UK’s ‘pull factor’ is caused by us and it’s up to us to eliminate it.” 

“The fact remains, Humphrey.  That we coughed up another £55M in July to stop the crossings and they have just gone up.  The French police simply watch.”

“True but the French say they have spent €217M and prevented 60% of attempted crossings.” 

“Passez-moi un morceau de sel.  After they watch them on the beach, they have to fish them out of the water when they launch because, according to your newspaper,  ‘any attempt to stop the dinghies [is] too dangerous because of the risk of panic or sudden movements that could capsize the vessels.’  So if we push them back to French waters, they would have to rescue them?” 

“Unfortunately, Minister, Channel Rescue, an organisation founded last year to ensure the safety of migrants, has brought a legal action against our home secretary claiming that pushing back is ‘life-threatening, inhumane and unlawful’.” 

“As I see it, Humphrey, Monsieur Micron is easily offended.  He regards any offer of help as patronising.” 

“Unfortunately, M. Macron shares with our own beloved leader a remarkable capacity for over-looking inconvenient facts.  Mr Johnson says the Northern Irish Protocol should be disregarded because he never really meant it and M. Macron says exactly the same about Frenchmen fishing in UK home waters.” 

“Two tits for two tats, you might say.” 

“I certainly would not, Minister.” 

“What are we going to do with all these rubber boats we must have collected?” 

“I hoped you would ask me that, Minister.  It may be time soon to share our plan.  We should agree with the French to make the manufacture, sale or distribution of these boats illegal from any source other than the sole French nominated supplier and labelled ‘Pas pour Hauts-de-France’.  We give boats to the French government for free and they get the profits.” 

“Jolly good that, Humphrey.  And we can send loads of loyal Tory voters over to stick knives into any rubber boats they find on the beaches of the Pas-de-Calais.” 

“Except fishing boats, of course, Minister.” 

“We don’t have to worry about them, Humphrey.  They’ll all be fishing in the Channel Islands.  Talking of islands, why don’t we do as the Australians do.” 

“That does have merits, Minister.  Anyone who the UN certifies as a genuine refugee is ‘authorised’, i.e. gets a visa to enter the country and has his or her right to remain accessed there.  According to the Australian government ‘Anyone who attempts an unauthorised boat voyage to Australia will be turned back to their point of departure, returned to their home country or transferred to another country’.  In practice, they don’t want to go back and other countries won’t have them, so they are dumped in a so-called processing centre on the island of Nauru.  Once the word got around the migrant community, they stopped going to Australia.”  

“It’s got to be legal, Humphrey, if the Australians have been doing it for eight years without trouble.  All we need is a processing centre on a remote island like St Helena, Macron would like that, or Ootsta.” 

“Ootsta?” 

“Humphrey, really!  Every school-boy knows Ootsta, or Out Stack.  It’s the northernmost place in the UK, an island 260 miles north of Aberdeen.  There’s no land between Ootsta and the North Pole.  Ideal migrant processing centre.  It would give those from hot countries the opportunity to cool their ardour and the locals wouldn’t complain, ‘cos there aren’t any.” 

“Minister, I fear I need to advise you of another point of view.  The number of boat people really is not that great in the scheme of things.  Many of them are useful trained people, doctors, nurses, fruit and vegetable pickers and lorry drivers.  Just the people we need.  We are, these days, critically short staffed in many areas.” 

“That’s only because, according to the Governor of the Bank of England, the PM is, according to some, Dagenham and has added up to another 300,000 to the public payroll.” 

“Dagenham?” 

“It’s five minutes beyond Barking.  Yes, there would be useful people along with terrorists, scroungers and lay-abouts.  Only the other day, I heard a boat migrant who has become a dentist on the Today programme.  Clearly he’s filling a gap.  Our department does not, Humphrey, have a great record in sifting the wheat from the riff-raff.  We had boatloads of people from Jamaica 60 years ago and we still don’t know who should be here and who shouldn’t.” 

“Minister, you are missing, if I may say so, the subtlety of my point.  At the moment, everyone is blaming the Home Office for not dealing with this so-called migrant crisis.  What I’m suggesting is that we give all the arrivals, except the obvious undesirables, identity cards and work permits.  Between them, they would have to look after the children that came with them.  Then we would transfer them to the Department of Work and Pensions as it would then become their problem, not ours.  With the DWP in charge, what could possibly go wrong?” 

“Congratulations, Humphrey.  You’ve cracked it.”