It’s that time of year again! It seems quite odd that we’re actually having one, given the utterly unrecognisable swirling madness of 2016, but the public finances are one of those things that keeps going under the most unlikely of circumstances. So let’s pretend everything is normal. Here are my considered predictions for the 2016…
Read More predictions for the #autumnstatementSo my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved so…
Read More Blitzed: the Third Reich as a society on drugsA thought: every political party contains what Karl Popper would call a closed system of knowledge, rather as Lloyd George said each man has a House of Lords in his own head. This system incorporates the symbols of its identity and the tropes of its internal culture. The party also, however, must needs contain an…
Read More The closed systemSo here’s the disgraced Liam Fox being all rah-rah about globalisation and free trade. You’d think in that case he’d be pretty keen on: A single market without barriers—visible or invisible—giving you direct and unhindered access to the purchasing power of over 300 million of the world’s wealthiest and most prosperous people. Bigger than Japan.…
Read More I know, let’s put the Work Programme in charge of BrexitTurned down by Politico Europe for being too local The populist threat is on everyone’s mind, whether from Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, or the AfD. In the UK, it’s been argued in a classic twitterstorm that Labour’s Northern heartlands are especially threatened, precisely because they’re “the heartlands” – ultra-safe parliamentary seats and city councils where…
Read More Bradford: Populism And AfterSo I should have done this almost a year ago, but I’m going back to the notes I made because I promised Owen Hatherley I’d eventually write it. Owen Hatherley, I hereby collect your TYR cookie and return you one unit of blog. Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries is probably the definitive history of Project Cybersyn,…
Read More Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Belated ReviewI wrote this for Politico Europe, but they weren’t interested after much editing about. Apparently there were too many charts. A clear statement about migration, says Theresa May of the vote for Brexit. The last thing you’ll find in the data is clarity. Or migration. There has been a wealth of efforts to understand Brexit…
Read More A clear statement about migrationThere are some books I re-read regularly. Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is one; I read it every time there’s a presidential election on. In 2008, the first time around, it was a ghastly memento mori for the failure of a great movement campaign, and also a reassuring reminder of…
Read More Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972, in 2016Chuka Umunna is apparently off to Boston, Lincolnshire to understand Brexit. He should save himself the journey. You can understand Boston really well from the simple fact that it has elected a Labour MP – indeed anything other than a Conservative – precisely once in history, immediately after the First World War. It’s really conservative.…
Read More Please stop looking for Labour voters in the Fens. They never existedHere’s a translation of the Israeli Defence Forces’ new strategic concept, from the Belfer Centre at Kennedy School of Government. From the section on “Characteristics of the Operating Environment”: Increased threat of fire on the home front (volume, pace, accuracy, size of the payload, survivability) and an attempt to create a strategic threat against national…
Read More Wild speculation rides again!