Last week a number of interesting news items appeared.

Miss Japan 2024

On Thursday, January 25, 2024, The Times reported ‘Ukranian-born woman prompts debate after winning Miss Japan’ (emphases mine):

Carolina Shiino was born to two Ukrainian parents but moved to Japan at the age of five when her mother married a Japanese man. She was raised in Nagoya and acquired citizenship in 2022.

“The moment they called my name, I couldn’t stop crying,” said Shiino, 26. “I’ve had to face barriers that often prevent me from being accepted as Japanese, so I am filled with gratitude to be recognised at this competition as a Japanese person.”

The article explains that her coronation as Miss Japan caused some consternation on social media.

However, it has happened before in Japan, albeit not without complaint:

Half-Japanese winners have also prompted complaints. Ariana Miyamoto, who has African-American heritage, won in 2015, while Priyanka Yoshikawa, who has an Indian parent, was crowned the following year.

It is taken as read that Japan is still a country of low to no immigration, but that has been changing over the past decade:

The number of children with one non-Japanese parent continues to rise in Japan, as does the number of immigrant workers. However, against the background of a shrinking population, the country needs to accept more foreigners if it is to maintain its workforce …

The goalkeeper of the national football team, Zion Suzuki, who has a Japanese mother and a Ghanaian-American father, said on Monday that he had suffered racial abuse on social media after a poor performance against Iraq in the Asian Cup.

The Times has a 2019 article explaining how the late Shinzo Abe, then serving his fourth term as Prime Minister, boosted immigration:

From Japan’s ubiquitous convenience stores to its important rice-growing sector, employers are increasingly turning to overseas workers to fill growing labour shortages. And Mr Abe, 65, whose wife, Akie Abe, owns an izakaya, or Japanese tavern, wants more overseas labour, not less.

As with many of Mr Abe’s policies, the drive to boost migration is fuelled by pragmatism about the economic impact of Japan’s shrinking birthrate and rapidly ageing population …

More than 2.8 million foreign nationals are registered as residents of Japan, an increase of about 40 per cent from when Mr Abe began his second stint as prime minister at the end of 2012, while tourism is also surging.

Mr Abe has amended immigration laws, creating a new category to admit foreign workers. A new visa category aims to attract up to 345,000 workers over the next five years in sectors including nursing, farming and construction.

Japan will face a shortage of 270,000 nursing staff by 2025, leaving it exposed at a time when the care needs of its aged population are greater than ever.

When Mr Abe’s centre-right Liberal Democratic Party pushed the visa legislation through the national parliament, opposition MPs decried the law as exploiting foreign labour.

However, Mr Abe is not changing tack. He describes Japan’s demographic challenges as a “national emergency” and argues that bringing foreign talent into the economy “will pave the way to new growth”. He is also seeking to boost female and over-65 workforce participation.

The article has a chart showing the increasing numbers of foreign workers over the years. In 2008, there were just under 500,000. By 2018, this had risen to 1.5 million people. That said, that number comprised only 2.2% of Japan’s population, small enough to enable new arrivals to assimilate sufficiently.

Bulgarian London Met police volunteer says no Christian songs in public

This news story went viral across England during the weekend.

A well-known online personality, Harmonie London, was playing and singing Christian songs in the capital’s Oxford Street when a foreign-sounding police volunteer told her to stop because Christian songs cannot be sung outside of church grounds without permission.

That is patently wrong.

The Mail has the story complete with photos of the police volunteer, including one of her sticking out her tongue at Miss London. The paper also revealed that she, too, is an online personality — and Bulgarian. This is astounding:

A volunteer police officer who told a Christian singer that she was ‘not allowed to sing church songs outside of church grounds’ before sticking her tongue out was today named as a Costa Coffee worker, MailOnline can reveal.

Maya Hadzhipetkova is facing a backlash after the shocking video footage was shared online by 20-year-old Gospel singer Harmonie London yesterday.

Ms Hadzhipetkova previously lived in Bulgaria before making the move to Cyprus in 2009 where she lived for five years before moving to the UK, according to her social media accounts.

Since moving to London the officer has held an array of jobs in the capital, including working as a pub manager at the Black Lion in Kilburn, west London, sharing photos of her dressed in a Costa Coffee and All Bar One uniform.

On her now-deleted Linked In page, the woman said she was one of the coffee chain’s Barista Maestros, where she managed a team of workers.

Ms Hadzhipetkova enjoys a jet-setting lifestyle, with trips being made to Dubai, Egypt and Paris, sharing photos of herself outside of the Louvre and the Sphynx in Cairo. Other snaps shared on her account showed her taking Lisbon in Portugal and Amsterdam. 

Others documented a road trip through the West Coast of the US, stopping off at Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and San Diego.

How is that even possible?

Now on to the legality of the situation:

There are no laws against singing on pavements – and Harmonie said the incident breached Article 9 of the Human Rights Act which protects freedom of religion. 

As onlookers watched and filmed outside the John Lewis store, Harmonie protested her innocence to the officer, saying: ‘You are, you are (able to sing church songs).’

But Ms Hadzhipetkova continued to insist that Harmonie could not sing ‘outside of church grounds unless you have been authorised by the church to do these kind of songs’.

Harmonie said ‘that’s a load of rubbish, you’re allowed’ – but the officer then walked away and another said: ‘She’s not saying anything anymore, thank you for your time.’

Those involved in law enforcement took to the airwaves and/or social media to set the record straight:

Among those hitting out at the video was former Conservative minister [Home Secretary, in fact] Ann Widdecombe, who called for the officer to be ‘struck off from the voluntary force’.

She told GB News: ‘She really has got the law completely wrong and she was obviously enjoying herself rather too much, trying to boss this woman around.

‘And there is no basis at all for saying you can’t sing. I could walk down the street singing Onward Christian Soldiers and I would be committing no offence at all.’ 

Norman Brennan, a former police officer and anti-crime campaigner, also tweeted: ‘Folks, this is not a good look. Some of us are trying hard to help policing get back public lost support respect and confidence and this does not help’ …

Former Metropolitan Police detective Peter Bleksley also commented on the video, tweeting: ‘Lawless Britain. The woman in uniform that is…’

And former Home Office special adviser Claire Pearsall told TalkTV: ‘Really should the police be going around telling people they can’t sing, they can’t pray, they can’t think something? Why don’t they go and deal with actual crime?’

Buskers need a licence to perform and without obstructing pedestrians or traffic. The article explains the rules in full. Oxford Street is a ‘light touch’ busking area.

The Met and/or Scotland Yard are certainly taking their time in investigating the police volunteer’s wrong-headed action. As of Monday, January 29:

Scotland Yard confirmed to MailOnline that the video was filmed on Oxford Street at the weekend, with officers now ‘working to understand the context in which these comments were made’. The force said an update will be issued ‘as soon as we can’.

This woman should be suspended at the very minimum.

I also think that people in civic positions of authority should be British nationals who understand and appreciate our nation’s values. I would say that about any country. Their own citizens should have these roles, including those of volunteers.

Office for Budget Responsibility blames government for inaccurate forecasts

When was the last time the OBR — Office for Budget Responsibility — issued an accurate economic forecast?

I cannot think of one.

I’ve been bookmarking reports on the OBR’s inaccuracy since 2018. Most of them come courtesy of Guido Fawkes. Let’s have a look:

April 27, 2018: Capital Economics reported that the OBR’s forecast for borrowing between 2017 and 2018 was completely off track. Government borrowing ended up at £42.6bn — £16bn below the OBR’s projections. It was obvious to Capital Economics that the OBR is much too pessimistic about Britain’s GDP growth prospects.

November 26, 2020: Late in the first year of the pandemic, the OBR issued a pessimistic forecast for recovery in 2021, which then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak downplayed. The OBR suggested that a new forecast would appear once there was more news about vaccines. Yet, as Guido points out, news about Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had already been out for a while and the OBR would have known about them when making their forecast.

July 9, 2021: The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) criticised the OBR for overly-optimistic projections of the cost of the Net Zero transition. Guido says that the OBR got their figures from the Government’s Climate Change Committee, which is known for its unfounded optimism. However, the OBR is supposed to be giving their expert projection, not the Government’s.

October 2022: After then-PM Liz Truss sacked her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng in favour of Jeremy Hunt, the current incumbent, Facts4EU pointed out that any new tax rises would be based on ‘wildly inaccurate forecasts from the OBR and IMF’.

November 18, 2022: Guido Fawkes told us of the left-leaning mindset of some OBR members. It is possible that is why Kwarteng gave them short shrift during his brief time as Chancellor. The OBR’s chairman is Richard Hughes, who used to work for Torsten Bell of the left-leaning Resolution Foundation, known for opposing Conservative policies, including Brexit. Guido reported on Hughes’s ‘fireside chat’ with Bell at the Resolution Foundation just a day after Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement.

July 4, 2023: Guido told us of the latest OBR appointment, another leftist, Rita de la Feria, a law professor and author of the book Taxation and Inequality who said that Nigel Farage and Donald Trump are ‘the extreme right’.

September 21, 2023: Just as in 2018, between August 2022 and August 2023, Government borrowing was once again well below the OBR’s forecasts. The actual figure was £69.6bn, ££11.4 billion less than the OBR predicted.

November 21, 2023: Exactly two months later, the OBR forecasts for the new financial year were off yet again. Government borrowing was 15 per cent below OBR projections. Guido says that an OBR report to Jeremy Hunt says that he has £20bn of ‘fiscal headroom’.

December 8, 2023: The OBR’s chairman struck out at the Government for its — the OBR’s — inaccurate forecasts. The OBR were out by £30bn in November, and Hughes said they would also be out by a similar margin in another, more current, projection. Guido reminds us that Labour think that the OBR should run the economy!

December 16, 2023: The Telegraph unearthed comments that the OBR’s new lead economist Scott Bowman made in 2017, showing him to be a Jeremy Corbyn supporter: ‘Chief OBR ecomomist backed Corbyn’s £250bn debt plans’. Dear, oh dear.

January 9, 2024: A group of Conservative MPs and peers got so fed up with the OBR’s inaccuracies that they wrote a report about them and gave it to Jeremy Hunt. The link has the full report. The Conservative Way Forward Group of 46 MPs and four peers includes Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel. Guido reminds us that the OBR first admitted in the summer of 2023 that its forecasts are often woeful. Because the OBR do not use dynamic modelling — surely they should? — they always conclude that tax cuts will fail. Very left-wing.

The latest from the OBR came on January 24. Guido reported that chairman Richard Hughes (red emphases Guido’s):

went gung ho in criticising the government at yesterday’s House of Lords economic affairs committee and blamed the Treasury for the OBR’s “work of fiction” forecasts. Not the first time he’s pointed the finger at Sunak and Hunt…

Hughes said the OBR’s forecasts are flawed because they are based on “questionable assumptions” and a lack of information from the government:

Some people call [the forecasts] a work of fiction, but that is probably being generous when someone has bothered to write a work of fiction and the government hasn’t even bothered to write down what its departmental spending plans are underpinning the plans for public services.

The forecasting chief wants the margin for error in debt-reducing fiscsal rules widened and warned that Hunt has given himself a “tiny” corridor in which to operate. It’s probably not a good idea to tie your budgets to a forecaster that has misjudged UK public sector net borrowing by £53 billion every year since its formation…

I do wish we could disband the OBR. It came in under a Conservative chancellor (George Osborne) to promote transparency and it has been working against a Conservative government ever since. Labour love it, which is all the more reason to put it out to pasture.