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With Bio-Waste Spreader: "With the end of the Brexit ‘transition period’ five months away, UK farmers face a chaotic and potentially ruinous switch away from the EU’s monolithic Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to multiple farming, food standards and environmental policies. The new policies will be devised separately by all the UK’s different national governments and regional assemblies. In a belated attempt to avoid policy anarchy, the UK government has now published details of a plan for an ‘internal market’. But with farm, food and environmental standards all ‘devolved responsibilities’, it will be difficult to impose uniform policies in any of these areas…”
With Remote Controller: "Though adapted from novels published in 1993 and 2004, two big new dramas have proved unexpectedly topical for this British summer. Both books concern racial tension. And, in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, set in India from 1951, everyone naturally namastes each other, long before that became Public Health England advice against the virus. And, though Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America came out during the first term of president George W Bush and takes place from 1940-42, a central figure is president Franklin D Roosevelt, whose ‘New Deal’ seems recently to have replaced Winston Churchill as deputy prime minister Boris Johnson’s karaoke political tune. The shows themselves prove less propitious…”
With Old Sparky: "The nuclear industry is frenziedly lobbying for largesse from the government’s upcoming infrastructure review. With China now hugely out of favour, it’s time for a round-up on the three mega-nukes that China General Nuclear (CGN), Chinese military links and all, has been heavily promoting via its joint venture with French firm EDF…”
With Lunchtime O’Boulez: "Freelance musicians have received worrying letters from St Martin-in-the Fields church, where many of them put on concerts, in which vicar Dr Sam Wells warns of the need to ‘respond to the pandemic with alacrity and imagination’. The imaginative response required, it seems, is to stop their concerts. Right now there are no concerts at all, but when things return to normal, the new normal at St Martin’s will be to have everything in-house, run by the church’s own music director…”
With Slicker: "Serious Farce Office director Lisa Osofsky will reach two years as Britain’s fraudbuster-general in August. There are unlikely to be many celebrations. She faces an investigation sparked by criticism of her conduct from Judge Martin Beddoe after she was ‘played’ by an American private detective acting for a prime SFO target, the Ahsani family behind the Unaoil bribe machine. The ever more costly civil action brought by the billionaire owners of another SFO target, Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), with separate allegations of SFO misconduct, rumbles towards trial in June next year…”
With Hedgehog: "While Boris Johnson promises to ‘build back greener’ after Covid, his government has launched a road-building spree officially predicted to increase carbon emissions. Traffic is bouncing back rapidly post-lockdown, partly because the government’s relentless messaging against using public transport insinuated that a fog of coronavirus awaited anyone who gets on a bus or train. That guidance only changed on 17 July, well after English pubs, non-essential shops and cinemas reopened…”
Letter from Abuja
From Our Own Correspondent: "Nigeria, already Africa’s biggest country, is set to overtake China in the world population stakes by the end of the century, according to a study by The Lancet. The prospect does not seem to rattle our short-sighted politicians, but then nor do more immediate challenges: the escalating number of coronavirus cases and a crumbling economy. Reassuringly, our leaders have stuck to their familiar priorities: stealing money and slagging each other off…”