Best Of

Labour may yet demonstrate that Liz Truss is not the worst possible PM.

In all honesty, we are pretty much there already.

• Truss had a belief regarding what was wrong with the country and a plan to cure it. Her downfall was her inability to get anybody to agree to it enough to ride out the initial turbulence.
  
• Starmer has no beliefs regarding what was wrong with the country and no plan to cure it. He sees his job as carrying out the law regardless of whether it is right, wrong, or orthogonal to the problem. His downfall is his mental inability to realise this.
  

My understanding is that Truss's downfall was her inability to produce figures in support of the plan. This freaked out the City.

True dat. It was a leap of faith on her part that growth would appear. It may have. It may not have. But the fact that the City freaked out and killed her was an indication of who holds the power.

Whether it is Truss and the City, Starmer and the SC, or Burnham and the hedge funds, our politicians have become infantilised, lacking the power to change things or even to realise that things can be changed.

The latest example is Starmer's request that the EHRC be changed so that he can do things. Does he even realise he's Prime Minister? Or does he just sit upright fully dressed in the dark, waiting for somebody to switch him on so he can perform his daily tasks?

I agree that politicians have become infantilised, to the extent that they seem to have persuaded themselves that they are incapable of doing things. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" seems to have been the motto for at least the last decade.

This is despite the fact that British cabinet ministers and prime ministers are among the least constrained executive officers in any democratic government (witness Starmer just appointing 25 new members to the upper house). A prime minister with a majority in the commons is an "elective dictator", to paraphrase Lord Hailsham: there is very little that he or she cannot legally do, especially (though not only) with a manifesto commitment to do it in place before election.

Ministers can arbitrarily reorganise, close down, or set up departments. Whole new ministries can be created, merged, or abolished at whim. For all of the claims of civil service obstructionism, this includes the very departments those civil servants work in, and the management and incentive structures that govern them.

My guess is that our government ministers have simply forgotten how to govern. You can get a sense of it from Michael Gove's complaints about "the blob". A competent administrator would be able to describe the system they're in charge of, its internal structure, long-term strategy and short-term goals, incentives, distribution of power and decision-making capacity, and so on. Such a description would be detailed and fine-grained. Instead, Gove (and others, I only single him out because he so readily admits this in public) have only a coarse-grained understanding of what's going on, hence the "blob", a thing that lacks any detail or distinction between its various parts. They can write essays and give speeches about the kind of world they'd like to live in, but have no real idea about how to organise a group of more than about 5 people to do anything about it. (Some of them can't even manage that).

The ECHR and international treaties is one area where I have a bit more sympathy, if only because there really are consequences to weigh up. If we think of Starmer as the CEO, he has complete power of hiring and firing over his employees, and the products his firm produces, but he might want to think carefully about breaking off contracts with suppliers and customers. That said, even there the doctrine of "efficient breach" says that if keeping to a deal costs you more than whatever you lose from withdrawing from it, you may be well advised to simply go ahead. The only tricky point here is that sometimes our estimates of the costs and benefits haven't been as accurate as we might like! If Starmer really can get an agreed change to how the ECHR is applied, then that seems like a strictly better outcome than unilaterally breaking the terms. (Time will tell if he can, of course).

Perhaps more that the politicians haven’t any experience in running large organisations. So they don’t know what to do apart from make a speech and bang on a desk.

I disagree.

Politicians are not Chief Executives - they are the Board of Directors. I spent a lot of my working life in local Government and one of the councils for whom I worked was a billion pound organisation which, unlike larger and more homogenous entities, covered a huge diversity of activities from social care to highway maintenance and from making dresses to running schools.

The change in governance to a Cabinet structure created a small tranche (cabal or clique also work) of Councillors who were basically full time and worked closely with the Chief Executive and Service Directors across the range of activities. The remaining backbench councillors were usually only interested in what was happening in their patch.

The lines between Cabinet members and senior officers weren't always clear and the personal relationships (or lack of them) played a big part in the effectiveness of the decision making process within the Council.

If a County Council or London Borough Council leader got into Parliament - one example being my local MP Sir Stephen Timms, they would have a much fuller knowledge of how local services work and what to do when they don't.

The problem with business people in politics is they are used to command and cajole - their word is law and the flunkies run round after them. In councils, command and cajole doesn't work - it's more argue and persuade primarily colleagues but also powerful local interest groups. It's my experience senior business people coming into local Government think they can get their way by shouting and screaming and when that fails they end up retreating into blustering.

On the subject of AI, several NHS Trusts near me are planning to use AI to listen to consultations in outpatients, and produce a summary for the electronic notes and for the patient in printed or electronic form.

I am not sure how well this can work (how does it record examination findings, imaging and other investigations?), but I would be interested in PB's thoughts on consent and related issues. How would people feel about similar technology being used in other professional contexts such as discussions with lawyers, accountants, clergy and police?

The company says that the recording will be erased after 30 days (giving time for corrections to be made) and only the AI summary to be part of the records.

All of our team calls are already recorded and summarized by AI. I am not aware of anybody that has ever looked at one of the recording, or read the summary.

My last workplace uses Copilot to summarise Teams calls. The summaries are accurate and on balance useful. They are massively verbose when all you want is a few bullet points. On the other hand not having to take notes allows you to focus on running the meeting. And the summaries are better than no notes at all.

You can then ask Copilot to summarise the summary. Then summarise the summary of the summary.

I just pull out the bullet points myself. The purpose is that you can beat up colleagues on the next call if they haven't done what was agreed. Even better and with a small amount of organisation is send the previous meeting notes a couple days ahead of the next meeting so they get reminded and might actually do whatever was agreed.

Completing action ahead of the next meeting? What kind of crazy organisation is this?

Errr, you what?

"Leaked files ‘show US wants to persuade four nations to leave EU’

The countries seen as targets to follow Brexit are Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland, according to leaked details of the US national security strategy"

https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/us-mega-eu-trump-pqhz8gplr

Is that how it read in its original Russian?

Not that Hungary would be much of a loss.

Meloni toned down her anti-EU rhetoric the minute she got into power, and most Italians instinctively understand that having Europe running things is preferable to giving free rein to the tendency of its domestic politicians toward corruption. Poland isn’t going to go anti-EU any time soon, given the leading role the EU has played in transforming Poland into a country now snapping, economically, at our heels. Why Austria is in the list is a mystery. Hungary would be no loss, as you say, although there is a strong anti-Orban movement in the capital, at least.

The Trumpy Republicans appear to have shape shifted from being American isolationists to wanting to actively intervene around the globe to either reshape other countries in their own image or turn them into impotent clients. Thats not a positive development.

Under Trump the US has gone from being a largely benign hegemon to an extremely malign (but also inept) one with alarming speed. I think a coalition of willing liberal democracies needs to get its act together asap or face the destruction of our way of life.