Cressida Dick Resigns. About Time, But Why Now?

 Yesterday Cressida Dick announced her retirement. Yes, the Met Police Chief, the person who inherited Tony Blair's teflon overcoat so nothing could stick to her has finally resigned.

But why now? 

After all, she's avoided resigning over very serious issues including the rise in knife crime in London, the rise in crimes against women and the conduct of her Police officers. Before she became Police Chief she avoided resigning over the DeMenezes case. She's been teflon, she's been untouchable, unsackable. Or was, until now.

So what has changed? What are we not being told? 

Retirement and Systemic Fragility

 Well, I've come to that point in my life where I'm starting to sort out pensions and stuff. Yeah, I'm THAT old.

One of the many deferred pensions I have is from ICL (Now Fujitsu) when I worked for them back in the 80s/90s.

Maybe there's an amount of Rose tinting going on, but looking back they were pretty good times. I gave ICL 8 years of my life and despite not being rewarded in monetary terms (I was one of the Mid-80s intake that replaced high paid engineers with young, willing but lower paid staff) the crack at work was always good amongst the ordinary workers. Management was another thing entirely, the company mired in office politics. That's partly what killed them as a manufacturer. I saw the writing on the wall and left a couple of years before the manufacturing facility in the UK was sold off and closed down.

And that's what brings me on to systemic fragility. Because ICL eventually became Fujitsu and now only focuses on software and services. It doesn't make anything any more. Even the arm of ICL in India, ICIM (International Computers India Manufacturing) eventually became Zensar Technologies and only deals in software and services.

The hardware is now all made in Taiwan or China. Or the components that make the systems are made there. 

Which is a problem. A bloody big problem, strategically. 

Because if ever China decided it would like to have a pop at invading and occupying Taiwan, the supply of chips for computer systems would dry up overnight. We've all seen the issues with car manufacturing with shortages of certain chips halting production and that was just because the chip makers had to ramp up production after the lull from Covid. 

Just think what the impact would be if we couldn't get ANY chips from Taiwan. Where else would we get them from? China? Er, I don't think so if they're the one invading Taiwan.

Just think what the effect would be globally if the West went to war with China. What would happen if the global supply of things China makes (virtually bloody everything) stops. 

In fact would we be able to manufacture the weapons needed to attack China? Because even though the technologically advanced chips for the weapons systems might be made in the West for security reasons, the ancillary chips, the ones that don't require high-level security are supplied from Taiwan.

Transistors, capacitors, resistors, all the high-quality (not the cheap Chinese crap) are mostly made in Taiwan. 

I hope weapon manufacturers are looking at their supply chain, or have already looked at it and started to use robust and secure methods of supply from inside their own country.

It doesn't have to be Taiwan. Russia has signed a pact with China, so if it kicks off over Ukraine, we could see China invading Taiwan at the same time to produce a two-front conflict thereby making it more difficult for the West to commit serious numbers into the fight. China could instead just stop exports to Western countries in solidarity with their Russian friends. 

We really as a country need to look more seriously at security of supply. Not just for goods that require security of supply, but also energy. We need to have an independent energy supply because the Russians could turn the gas tap off any time they like and we would be absolutely fucked.

Here We Go: Work Until You Die: The Return of The Serf.

It seems moves are afoot to yet again raise the retirement age. The likes of myself, only 8 years away from retirement at 67, may never actually get to retirement as the rumour is the age is going to now be raised to 68. For people born later, the government seems to be looking at raising the age past 70.

Now, given the average age of death or life expectancy is currently 82, that doesn't give people a particularly long retirement. 

Some may argue that some people live well into their Nineties, but they are a minority. By 75, if you're not already worked to death then you can look forward to a 7 year retirement,

Whoopie Fucking Do.

People really need top start looking at successive governments and political parties and wake up to the realisation that they do not work for us, the people. Pressure always needs to be applied and when that pressure is released, the governments slip back to type and revert to favouring their fat-cat buddies in business.

My solution? Easy. Hit the companies that offshore their corporation tax liabilities with double or treble Employer's national Insurance. Because they HAVE to pay employer's national insurance, they cannot offshore that liability. Yes, I'm talking about the massive high-street killing tax evaders Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, et al.

If they want to earn billions and send it overseas, then sorry, we'll devise a strategy to claw that money back. For decades companies have avoided paying huge sums of tax and as a result the exchequer doesn't have the money to pay for pensions. 

They're not only sending money offshore, but they have also decimated the high street so we're losing out on the tax that would be paid here in the UK. 

So it's about time we started loading them with punitive measures to repay for the destruction they have caused to our national tax take. Well, here's a plan to get some of that money back.