So I’m watching the chute, and then the experimenters chuck down this pellet, which turns out to be some sort of libertarian riffing off my Neo-Edwardians post around the idea that perhaps the move away from a simple, Posh vs. Oiks politics is to do with the rise of post-scarcity, idea dear to the hearts…
Read More Scarcity and political complexityHere’s a really good post about public transport and design. I would add to their account of the genesis of the Boris-bus that it’s not enough to say that Johnson started out by saying he wanted a new Routemaster, rather than saying he wanted a new bus for London and deciding what would be best.…
Read More In which I whine about Boris buses againWe haven’t done one of these for a while, not least because I haven’t been blogging enough. Here are some ideas The Populist Papers: this will probably be either AFOE or maybe Politico Europe, and it’s an effort to define what the key traits of populism (European meaning, negative LaFollette) are. My thinking is that…
Read More Open newslist 10The world is in turmoil. Trump. Brexit. Marine Le Pen. And as very often when this is so, it’s in turmoil about macro-economic policy although this is often less obvious than you might think. MLP, for example, wants to recreate the franc, redenominate the French national debt, presumably devalue/inflate a great chunk of it away,…
Read More An even simpler plan nobody wantsDoes anyone else think Sir Ivan Rogers quit when he did in order to make sure his replacement was someone like Sir Tim Barrow? Rogers’ ostensible explanation for quitting was that his posting was coming up anyway in a couple of months and he wanted to give his successor some time to read themselves in.…
Read More The Rogers LegacyThere’s a common argument around that claims something like this: If Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic candidate, he’d have faced a terrible monstering from the press, and would therefore have lost the election. I think it is seriously misleading. Let’s unpack the argument a bit. The point about the terrible monstering from the press…
Read More You can’t opt out of negative campaigningThis is a cracking piece of work from the Bellingcat gang. It’s also quite possibly the most grimly 2016 thing of 2016 – having to do OSINT verification on a 7-year old girl’s Twitter from the siege of Aleppo, because the trolls are denying she ever existed.
Read More 2016 in a linkOK, so an interesting point came up on twitter regarding former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt, aka Europe’s Mr Brexit Except For The Other One. Isn’t one of the problems here that British politicians are socialised into a relatively simple kind of state? Basically unitary, usually with a strong executive government, powerful party whips, and unambiguous…
Read More The turn to neo-Edwardian politicsSo, on Monday, the Daily Telegraph ran this story on how you too can incorporate your BTL portfolio as a limited company and dodge tax. You’ll note that the story only exists because mortgage broker Kent Reliance pushed a report at the paper. And yes, it’s totally about tax. Kent Reliance, the buy-to-let lender who…
Read More The Daily Telegraph’s personal finance page is depravedHere’s a long read on Peter Thiel’s brilliant scheme to pull brilliant young people out of boring old university and get them to take risks! with skin in the game! on the big technologies of the future. And what have they delivered? The short answer would be the square root of fuck-all. The slightly longer…
Read More Everyone else is whining about Peter Thiel so why can’t I?