A point. Here are five major issues. The News International Crisis. The UNITE/Falkirk fuck up. Are we going to war with Syria? Austerity. Recreational benefits cuts. They have in common that Ed Miliband got them all right. On some of them, he got an undivided, absolute win – applying the humane killer to the News…
Read More Moderately satisfied with the Ed.OK, so Lynton Crosby is all better now so long as conditions. What are these conditions? After all, they define the limits of acceptable behaviour in our society. It looks like he’s not allowed, or won’t be allowed, or shouldn’t have been allowed to take part in ministerial meetings or sight government documents. The interesting…
Read More Lynton Crosby briefs the Cabinet. Vomit now, it will save timeWe are ignorant and we are wrong and even pathologically ignorant. Or perhaps, following Dan Davies, we can’t do percentages. Either way, the Royal Statistical Society poll is bracingly depressing. I occasionally talk about the “deficit model of ignorance”. In the light of the poll, I thought I’d set it out more clearly. The deficit…
Read More The ignorant cannot be given fact pills. We’d better deal with itIt looks like people want to discuss “fiscal rules” again. seems in @hopisen & @anthonypainter 's view Labour can only earn fiscal credibility by putting someone else in charge http://t.co/0zjXz3kH9M — Declan Gaffney (@djmgaffneyw4) June 23, 2013 The first problem here is the obvious one. As in this post, the period when the “fiscal rules”…
Read More Avoiding the Last Social Democrat. The last thing we need are new fiscal rulesSo, did ya ever want to know social network analysis metrics on the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport’s special advisers during the spring of 2011, as Rupert Murdoch’s interests in the UK feverishly lobbied Jeremy Hunt and his staff and we raced towards the epochal eruption of Hackgate? ‘Course you did. In June, 2011,…
Read More Hunt, through a non-sexist prismYes, this is funny. But oh, for fucksake. Put council houses on EBay. I am not kidding. This is the pitifully vacuous snackthinking the mother of parliaments has to offer. Meanwhile, remember all that tebbly tebbly serious chinstroking about party financing and the difficult position of Labour’s link to the trade unions? Here’s random Twitter…
Read More internet commenters > parliamentI don’t read Hopi Sen but apparently he reads me, as evidenced by this blog post regarding the idea of a “fiscal policy council” analogous to the monetary policy committee, but with a substantially wider remit and membership. I can remember when this was floated in the late 90s in a wave of cheer about…
Read More The troika in one countryI already dealt with this on twitter, but I thought I’d hammer home the point. Mr Bailey, who was paid a salary of £60,000 to advise the Prime Minister on youth, crime and race issues, is the first insider to raise concerns about the elite backgrounds of those in the inner core of No 10. His…
Read More Shaun Bailey, and hating the youngA bit more UKIP. There are two groups of people who think the Labour Party should take UKIP seriously: the Blairite former-regime loyalists, and some of the radical Left. Group one is easy: for them the answer always seems to be nice cuts and flogging immigrants, and what was the question? Further, they were always…
Read More It’s That Bloody Harold WilsonThere is a small industry developing in articles about why Labour should take UKIP seriously. Here is one, and now, here is another! I do not think Labour should take UKIP seriously. Why should they? UKIP voters are basically very like Tories. Nottingham University’s politics blog makes an important point here and here, which is…
Read More Labour should do anything but take UKIP seriously