Birthday And Dark Money

My Birthday

My birthday in Scotland was great. I’d booked to fly by Ryanair for economic reasons and also because that was the most convenient flight, although the flight was to Edinburgh rather tha my eventual destination of Glasgow. L had the usual caveats one has with Ryanair but, in the event, all went well both coming and going. I spent the afternoon happily and interestingly after my early arrival with friends in Edinburgh and then continued to Glasgow and my family in time to see my grand-daughter, my daughter and son-in-law in the early evening. Mission accomplished!

I was taken out by Nat and Andy to lunch on my birthday, the following Monday, to a tapas restaurant which was excellent and spent the rest of the 10 days with my family doing nothing much of consequence other than visiting the Kelvingrove museum/art gallery and the house for art lovers of MacKenzie. Both were good experiences but the best experiences were with my family. I also did some shopping (my daughter characterised it as intensive) to get items hard or expensive to find in France and presents for my French friends here. I’m pleased to say that all the presents were well received, plus one to come, a kind of French Burns evening which we will do with the haggis I brought back. All good, photos included.

 

Back to reality in France has proved easy. Daniel and Evelyne picled me up from Marseilles airport and I was home in under two hours with all my merchandise. It took me 2-3 days to get myself together but then life resumed as normal. I had arrived in Marseilles somewhat to my surprise in the middle of a rain storm as in the six weeks prior to my departure we had had only 5cm of rain in 6 weeks. What the hell, the rain was welcome.

Now, having got myself together, I’m back into the morass of documentation demanded by the French for the right to stay and for citizenship. I’m also, it seems, into a general election because I still have the right to vote in UK elections, not that in my case that will serve much purpose When I was in the UK my constituency was Reading east, which was swingable; I now find myself, for reasons unknown, in Wokingham which has something like a 20,000 Tory majority. Nonetheless I will try to reduce that by at least one vote.

I’ve no idea what the outcome of the election will be but hope that it will be for the good of the UK, which is most certainly not Johnson in my opinion. My hopes rest on one statistic that I’ve seen, that if 40 percent of Remainers vote tactically then Johnson doesn’t win. All the media messages to Remainers are to forget party loyalty and vote tactically so I have to hope they do that correctly. Fingers crossed.

Dark Money

I’m increasingly preoccupied by the directive given to the Watergate investigative journalists to «follow the money». Dark money is money that arrives somewhere from no currently identifiable source. We know that it played a part and was used illegally (and unprosecuted) in the Leave campaign and that Boris Johnson is sitting on and refusing to publish a report that would at least shed some light on the matter.

We also know that it arrived in northern Ireland and that northern Ireland has different electoral rules to the rest of the UK. That may surprise some people but the source of money used in democratic electoral campaigns has to be declared in all of the UK apart from northern Ireland. The obvious question here is why that situation persists and the only obvious answer is because it suits some power-seeking group to have it that way.

The EU directive due to come into force next year aimed at reducing tax avoidance will, incidentally, curtail the movement of dark money, including money being laundered. Officially, countries in the developed economies are united in trying to prevent money laundering so why are anomalies like northern Ireland allowed to continue? As suggested above, it must suit some power-seeking group; it also, incidentally, suits the funding of the IRA. Which opens up the question of security and terrorism and what security agencies know about the movement of dark money and what governments allow them to say and do about it. Now enlightenment there could be really interesting, such as what happens when dark money is useful to the government.