Letter from London: Offshore Man and the Wages of Foresight – CounterPunch

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Another four people died last week after their dinghy capsized in the Channel. When youre drowning, you dont say I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me, you just scream, once said former Beatle John Lennon. Attempting foresight, our new UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has just announced a Border Security Command (BSC) to combine with a Returns and Enforcement Unit with which she hopes to ensure swift deportations of anyone deemed a failed asylum seeker.

Though waving not drowning, I know a man with professional foresight who lives offshore. He carries in his head one of the darker estimations of the Western world. Hes often right too, said an American who also knows him. We first met when he and the American gave advice on a voluntary chatbot and later machine learning project alluded to here before. This was for a non-vaccine, non-lockdown solution to Covid. Basically, a bunch of us worked our virtual socks off for nearly two years only to keep seeing our government award VIP lane contracts to everyones best friend or barman, to the point where we could no longer keep the project alive. (Another absurd chapter in the UK Covid story.) We donated the earlier version (with about 900,000 data sets) to the NHS. This became one of only a handful of officially approved NHS Covid apps. At least some of us can now enjoy one or two lifelong friendships from it.

One thing trading has taught me is how brutally the reality of economic logic crushes all our dreams and hopes and takes us in directions we never thought possible let alone likely, qualified Offshore Man last week. This was from an Arab country filling with exiles. We were talking about France but for him, it could just as well have been the UK or Germany. Of France, he said the Republic was gone: The Euro is 100% dead bar the shouting, almost certainly means the EU is too, he added. Germany whilst still solvent, he went on, is in economic freefall. What is one to do in the face of such well-informed negativism? In my case, nothing. I court this friends take on the world not because I agree with it I often dont but because his view is rare, original thinking is rare, and he is an independent person.

Our new government continues its honeymoon with a lack of lounging about or posing by the pool. (I dont see this honeymoon lasting as long as I had thought, warns Offshore Man.) These new honeymooners have strict timetables with which to visit local sights. They do not go gentle on harbor walks, so to say, without counting the fish first. It would be incorrect to describe them as the same old, same old. Being of a less pessimistic disposition than my friend, I find it quite easy to warm to, say, Hilary Benns preliminary work on what could be a reuniting Ireland. Okay, I remain circumspect about some of the fresh words dished out in the wood-paneled press room in Whitehall bookended by Union flags. Even the phrase dished out no longer works. Earnestly presented may be better? Offshore Man again warns: This is very different to Blairs first days. Blair got the public behind what he did first and was careful. He did add, though: The noises regarding NHS reform sound promising, Ill say that. Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom might disagree with that. She claims Labours new National Wealth Fund is just PFI (Private Finance Initiative) 2.0 or a way to channel taxpayer money into the pockets of private investors.

In such moments I find I reach for art and was pleased therefore to hear again from sculptor Steve Johnson. Two works of his I had not seen before involve a potent England flag sealing one small window and a blank curtain a second window. They are both called Georges Day SE8. He tells me: Opposite my studio in a social housing high rise, a person has lived behind a curtain/flag on the 15th floor for years and it never opens to let the light in. For me, it conflates Ms Haversham and Enoch Powell, or even todays right-wing Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, in a chilling reality. The second image had a greyer flag: Greyer after years of collecting dust aka Ms. Haversham, he said, adding: If Starmer doesnt level up or cut the waiting lists, Ill make one 2 meters wide [much bigger] in five years. How I wish an artists eye was available more often. The essential insularity of the subject matter in this piece is both vast and helpful. Johnson is showing these to save Acme Studios in South East London which is presently under threat from London property developers who dont appear to share the same art-savvy standards of their peers for example in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. Around 100 artists are showing in support of the studios survival. Acme wants to buy the property themselves, and I am left wondering if our new Culture Secretary Lisa Nanny has been told. A special man, Steve Johnson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors and brings weight to whatever he does. I used to see him ride to his studio on what I always considered the tallest bicycle in London. As an artist with five hammers, around 20 chisels and gouges, and power tools with high-velocity rotating blades, he is dare I say it, given his flags unflagging.

On Russia, Offshore Man says it is a country that can barely maintain its own territory and resources. And with a plummeting population, I dont think Russians could be sold on any further adventures. Not without severe provocation which I hope we arent stupid enough to deliver. This was at the time of the Russian missile attack on the maternity clinic in Kyiv, and a few weeks after debris from Ukrainian missiles intercepted by Russian air defense systems landed on children on a Sevastopol beach. (Once again: To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.) UK military intelligence reports that Russia has lost more than 70,000 troops over the last two months approximately 1200 per day. Offshore Man continued: Putin is old and oil prices are set to drop sharply as a structural glut is slowly forming. Russia is likely to fragment in the coming years. He added: Its true there are some on the right who are misguided and feel a kinship with Russia because it is outside the clutches of the western culture war warriors, etc. But not many, and most realize what a diseased regime it is.

Finally, a people-trafficking gang that smuggled hundreds of Iraqi-Kurdish migrants in refrigerated trucks into the UK has just been convicted. They were charging up to 10,000 $13,000 per person. Now you dont need any foresight to see what a lot of money that can make you if you dont get caught. The people smugglers responsible for the cheap Chinese-made dinghies I used to see flooding into Lesbos from Turkey were sometimes making up to 300,000 close to $400,000 in total per ride. The people smugglers were on as much as 3m $4m per day. Goodness knows which crackpot regimes support the people smugglers.

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Letter from London: Offshore Man and the Wages of Foresight - CounterPunch