Here’s a fascinating post on the Conservative Home Tory Diary from one Paul Goodman, complaining about the fact that No.10 Permanent Secretary Jeremy Heywood wants to have ministerial special advisers brought into civil service line management. The Awesome Whitehall Blog not yet existing, I’ll explain that a special adviser is a political appointee picked by…
Read More A little more on the Project 2.0 and beyondA couple of other Murdoch/Leveson things. Something to thank Rebekah Brooks for: it seems we were spared John Reid as Prime Minister because he gave an exclusive interview to the Sunday Torygraph before speaking to the News of the Screws, and Becky Asbo decided to zap him out of, basically, pique. I remember actively planning…
Read More Leveson linksAdam Bienkov has an excellent piece out on Guto Harri, Boris Johnson, and the Murdochs. Harri was one of the alternative candidates to Andy Coulson for the No.10 press job, of course, then he worked for Johnson, and now he’s off to work for Murdoch. Bienkov points out that there is an increasing tendency for…
Read More The Project 3.0 – where are we going from here?My mental model of the whole Murdoch/political complex, as I’ve said before, is that there have been two projects, The Project 1.0 and The Project 2.0. The first was the original use of “The Project” as Peter Mandelson introduced the phrase – the Blairite settlement, under which there was a transactional, bargaining relationship between the…
Read More The Project 2.0: confirmedEver wanted a map of where people care about the monarchy? Jubilee street parties, per 10,000. The borders are coloured to reflect the number of parties. Darker is more in both cases. Purbeck is the Valley of Loyalty. Next door in the rest of Dorset is the Zero Zone. Ken Clarke’s constituency contains the only…
Read More Monarchism, mappedSpencer Ackerman is depressed about the response to this piece about the MIT Fab Lab team in Jalalabad with their 3D printing of WLAN extended range antennas. Now the funding’s been cut off and the satellite backhaul is going to go down. Well, more to the point, there never was any funding, and the whole…
Read More depressingStafford Beer famously said that the purpose of a system is what it does, the POSIWID principle. Here’s an example of it (if you want some more, try my Politics of the Call Centre series). It’s fairly common for atheists to express amazement at the idea that anyone would expect religious people, especially Catholics, to…
Read More Applying POSIWIDAnd the ones who think the other kind of people ought to be exterminated. Discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s six foundations theory of politics (which argues there are six, innately determined, moral intuitions that define political identity), in which it’s suggested that they actually reduce to two, driven by the emotions of shame and guilt. Now,…
Read More There are two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people…So I went to the TUC’s Netroots UK shindig yesterday. I missed the first session, and chose to not go to the one with Paul Mason in order to go to one with practical content, specifically Richard Blogger and Ellie Mae O’Hagan’s on defending the NHS from within. Having joined an NHS foundation trust, it…
Read More Notes from Netroots UK, and NHS total defenceAndy Coulson’s arrest by Strathclyde police differs dramatically from the other arrests in the great Murdoch scandal. Rather than been asked to come into the station by appointment, he was lifted at zero-dark-thirty without anyone hearing about it in advance. Obviously, 0630 isn’t exactly a dawn raid at 53 degrees North in late May, in…
Read More there’s been a murrrder.