Frank Field, still an idiot, but not a very useful one. The Labour MP, who was appointed poverty advisor shortly after the coalition took power in 2010, delivered his Review on Poverty and Life Chances in November that year. He now says he doesn’t believe the prime minister has read the paper, and despite some…
Read More what is your major malfunction, Pyle?Among the fascinating prospects you poor fools are going to have to suck up is a full dress review of David Harvey’s History of Neoliberalism (shorter me: I think it’s adequate-ish), but before we get to that, a point I’d like to pull forward. In his conclusion, he spends quite a lot of time arguing…
Read More The sources of cupcake conservatismHere’s a post, first of a three-part series, from The Monkey Cage about inequality and power. The point Martin Gilens makes is that where a policy has broadly similar support across US income groups, its chance of being put into effect follows a well-behaved response curve with its approval rating. But a policy on which…
Read More The reactionary Internet predates ‘t other un“Why the Olympic Games mean we should support my politics” is already a sizeable genre, as Chris Brooke pointed out, quoting Daniel Davies in plausibly deniable mode. However, one of the very few pieces in this line that is worth reading is this one by Will Hutton, using the British Olympic team as an exemplar…
Read More The radical consensusYouGov: Best chancellor in last 30 years – Brown 20%, Lawson 10%, Clarke 7%, Major 6%, Howe 4%, Darling 3%, Lamont 2%, Osborne 1%. Well, the usual response to any poll like this is to point out that most people answering it can only name one or two cabinet ministers, and therefore name recognition explains…
Read More chancellorsSomething that came out of the Netroots UK proceedings, and also out of the Crooked Timber open data seminar. One of the sessions chalked up in the open space process was titled “How can we restore democratic participation, and should we?” Well, I thought, quite the headline: TUC Gives Up on 1832 Reform Act, Says…
Read More Reach vs. engagementOther stuff from Netroots UK. Having chugged through my official Brown Bag Lunch (which actually included Ribena, in a disturbingly infantilising touch), I went to the open space group on the Leveson inquiry. This ended up merging with the one on the LIBOR scandal. I was able to contribute by knowing how the LIBOR panel…
Read More Netroots UK catchupHere’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 beyondAdam 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: confirmed