Bye Bye Nissan

It's being reported that the merger between Nissan and Honda is now off the cards, after negotiations broke down.

It was reported at the time that Nissan had about 6 weeks at most of time to negotiate a rescue package, otherwise it would go to the wall.

So it seems Nissan have taken the decision to fold instead of continue as part of a group of companies. 

I've never owned a Nissan, so I don't have first hand experience of their vehicles, but they made some cool vehicles. The Skyline/GT-R for starters, plus the Z-cars and other sport coupes like the 200SX and even the lardy 300ZX.

Some funky vehicles like the cube and Figaro.

20 years ago they made worthy and reliable cars that quickly became pensioner favourites. People of a certain age will remember people of a certain age driving the Bluebird and the Primera.

But things went awry. The relationship with Renault soured a pristine company. Their cars seemingly no longer built for reliability. You don't put up with cheap plastics and hideous designs like the later blobby Micra models if the thing is unreliable. 

Design went down the toilet. Not only with technical reliability, but with design disasters like the Juke.

The Qashqai was at one time the best selling car in the UK, but oh my god, it's a bland piece of design. The only things that made the Qashqai the sales giant it was, were the finance and leasing deals Nisan used to shift the things. That's the French influence right there: concentrate on the finance and not the cars. The cars are a means to a finance deal.

Nisan had other fundamental disasters like the chassis rust  and folding chassis issues with the Navara and Pathfinder thanks to using cheap steel for fabrication.

Issues with the Diesel engines also plagued certain models, but to be honest, that's the same for other manufacturers that have tried to keep up with impossibly strict emissions regulations.

Even when Nissan embraced the new electric car revolution, they stumbled. The Leaf was one of the early electric models from any manufacturer, but it was built down to a price. The lack of heat management of the battery meant the battery failed earlier than those that did have thermal management. 

Under the leadership of Carlos Gohsn, (the CEO who eventually got smuggled out of Japan in a music case) which started in 2001, Nissan went from worthy to washout. The GT-R was the last technical tour-de-force, but as the noughties progressed, the projects that were started before Gohsn came and went. What followed were pretty poor shadows of the reliable models that went before.

Nissan as a company stared to slide. 

The tale is the same as with other Japanese car manufacturers that found themselves with issues in the early 2000s. They allowed the Western car manufacturers to buy stakes in the company, usually just under majority shares. The Western companies gave the Japanese companies "advice" on how to build cars cheaper and maximise profits. 

In almost all cases that ended up with the Japanese companies making an inferior product when it came to quality and longevity. 

20 years later, we are here. At the end, almost. Sad.

Advice to The Government: One Crucial Thing That would Help Growth.

The one th9ing that the government should do to kickstart growth is to abolish the IR35 tax rules. 

IR35 killed the independent contracting sector in the UK almost overnight. I was caught up in the early adoption of the rules, being an independent I.T. contractor, but the IR35 rules have been widened to incorporate the media and medical staff like doctors working privately.

I do get why they were introduced: the then Labour government wanted to stop companies letting people go and re-hiring them as self-employed contractors, thereby avoiding the payment of employer's national insurance amongst other things.

But if they wanted to target that, they should have made the rule that if you originally worked for a company as a PAYE employee, you couldn't return to that company as an independent contractor for 6 months or whatever.

But, instead they made the rules catch ALL independent contractors, whether they were working for the company or not, whether they worked for the company in the office or not. Even if you worked one day in the office, you are classed as a "disguised employee". 

Media people, who may have their own PLC and work for several media companies doing different things, if they sit at a desk and read the news, or sit at a desk and edit a programme, they fall foul of IR 35. The taxman deems them as employees.

This is the creep of tax mentality, the same that has deemed those in the gig economy to be employees as well. It's wrong-headed. If the people start to work as self-employed independent people, how can they then later down the line campaign to force the company to recognise them as employees with paid leave etc?

We need freedom in this country and especially the freedom to work as and how we please. By restricting employment freedom, the government and HMRC have stifled growth. Not for nothing has growth in the UK been minimal since the 1990s. That was the time before government started to force people into PAYE in order to maximise National Insurance revenue.

Russian Spy Ship Yantar in the Public Eye Again.

 Not very stealthy is it, if "Spy Ship" Yantar is in the News again.

After diving on the wreck of the Ursa Major in the Med, Yantar is now off the coast of the UK, ostensibly mapping undersea cables according to press releases.

Now you could put two and two together and regard this is a message from Putin.

If Yantar has dived on the Ursa Major wreck and found the explosion came from something like an Unmanned Surface Vessel, Russia regard the UK as a Major collaborator with Ukraine on the development of USVs, even going as far as to say publicly they know Royal Navy assets are working inside Ukraine helping develop these vehicles.

Now Yantar appears off the coast of the UK, it's a clear signal the Ursa Major was sunk by a USV or some other identifiable method, that the Russians considers heavily linked to UK involvement in the Ukraine conflict and our proxy war with Russia.

Yantar mapping undersea cables and pipelines is a clear message: we know what you did. Yantar is a very visible asset doing a very obvious job. Not the normal mission of a spy ship. This is a message with meaning.

Of course, the undersea assets will have already been mapped covertly. Russia has the massive special-operations submarine Belgorod that is specifically designed for undersea interdiction of cables, pipelines and other undersea assets. It is specifically designed to be very stealthy, close to the standards of NATO subs. A lot of Russian Roubles have been poured into that sub. It is nuclear powered, so it can stay submerged for long periods and travel vast distances without surfacing. 

It can navigate to UK waters in the wake of other Russian vessels transiting the English Channel, then loiter undetected to use laser scanning of the seabed, without making sonar emissions that would be detected. It can then move out of UK waters in the wake of a second vessel transiting the Channel. I did wonder why so many Russian vessels were using the channel in recent years, now I know. 

We have even gone as far as surfacing a UK attack sub close to Yantar. Not standard Operating Procedure, the nature of a sub is to stay stealthy. But in the cat and mouse messaging game, surfacing a sub close to a Russian Intelligence gathering ship sends another message. 

Anyway, if you are in the know, you know hat the Russians know, you know our government know the Russians know, we also know why the Russians want us to know they know and you now you know what everyone else knows, even if you don't know everything I know.