We Are Ruled By Morons, Part 97

You'll understand that this is not an exhaustive listing

Aluminium is lovely stuff. Who couldn’t drool at this?

So, great, we want to have a secure supply of aluminium to supply The Great British Population. Which is nice, no?

Fortunately, we’ve got people worrying about this on our behalf. Which is also nice, no?

Government seeks green business input to help tackle supply chain risks that are being exacerbated by geopolitical instability, trade protectionism, and worsening climate impacts

With fears growing over the potential impact of escalating conflict in the Gulf region on international shipping routes, the government has today announced plans to set up a new Critical Imports Council to harness business expertise in identifying supply chain risks and bolstering the resilience of key domestic industries such as electronics, batteries, and electric vehicle (EV) production.

That’s from one of those sites that continues to detail the grift - sorry, the government programmes to aid business - that exists in the current economy. A useful place to see quite how stupid our rulers actually are.

So, looking up this programme that is being touted we get to here:

We live in a rapidly changing world which is seeing the system we trade within being placed under unprecedented strain. Simultaneously, innovations in technology are creating new opportunities for economic growth and supply chain resilience. Our mission is to support businesses through these changes, build resilient supply chains and maintain supplies of the critical goods needed for the UK economy, essential services and national security.

Nusrat Ghani MP

Minister of State at the Department for Business and Trade

OK, so that’s the sort of boilerplate that some tax thief drone pumps out for the Minster. No one actually expects an MP to understand any of this shit. Obviously.

And, well, you know. Supply chains, national interest and so on. Maybe. Churchill spent rather a lot of time making sure the Royal Navy had oil supplies as the transition away from coal happened. Lots of effort was put into coaling stations that couple of generations before that. So, you know, OK. It’s at least a useful function of government to think about these things.

A little later in that same document they give us an example of the sort of work they’re doing:

Ah, OK, we have a problem here. You’d need to actually know something about the subject under discussion to spot it but it is there. To all intents and purposes the UK imports no aluminium ores and concentrates at all. It’s not a part of our economy.

Sure, we use aluminium. We even make aluminium - a bit, at least. And we certainly use the material that we make aluminium from to do other things too.

Aluminium is made from alumina - the Al is made from Al2O3. We’ve still a couple of plants that make Al from Al203, alumina has uses other than making Al. So, diversity of supply of alumina, that Al2O3, is something that we might happily have some egghead pondering over.

But alumina is not in HS260600. I’m not going to bother to look it up but I think it’s in HS2700, maybe the HS 2800 series, with the other metal oxides. HS260600 is the ore from which we extract alumina, the other name for which is bauxite.

The UK does not have a single plant nor factory that extracts alumina from bauxite. We’d need a Bayer Process plant for that and we don’t. Ireland still has one but that’s the only one in these Isles. It’s something that tends - in these modern days and tends - to be done where the bauxite is. You dig up the ore, bauxite, boil it in lye (caustic soda), extract the alumina and then ship that.

They’ve managed to get the diversification options right. Roughly - they’ve looked at a list of places which produce bauxite at least.

But the pinheads are studying the diversification of supply of something we don’t import. Haven’t for decades. But there’s a report to write, the Minister provides a foreword, we can see that the business of government is being conducted and so on. None of the fuckers realising that this is entirely, wholly, completely, wasted effort.

By the way, I have not gone looking for an example of where they’re not thinking. This is *their* choice of which commodity to emphasise. They really are saying look, look, we’re looking at security of supply and here’s our example, aluminium ore! That thing the UK doesn’t import.

And now here is our real problem. This pinheads dancing on angels costs us £1.2 trillion a year. That’s £1,200,000,000. One thousand two hundred *million* pounds. 45% of everything that anyone does in the country goes to feed these people.

The result of which is a lovely report telling us how we can have a diverse supply of something we don’t buy.

I did use the word “grift” up above, didn’t I?

So, anyone want to tell me why we built Marble Arch? At least the Tyburn Tree had a use in ridding us of thieving charlatans. No wonder they replaced it with a roundabout. With, of course, your and my money.