Best Of

The Revolution is eating its children.

Which one of Trump or Musk is cast as Robespierre?

On the subject of Citizen Robespierre, I have been listening to a fantastic podcast on the French Revolution. It’s part of a series called “Revolutions”

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/revolutions/id703889772

of which I have completed three.

The first covers our civil war (however people want to name it) which was good, then the American Revolution which was better and the third series is the French Revolution which has been epic.

Absolutely jam packed with detail over 66 episodes (about 40 hours I think) and presented in a deeply knowledgeable but clear and witty way.

The amount of times during each of the three revolutions where I did an eyebrow raise about things that had parallels to today’s world was instructive but for anyone who likes a good bit of in depth history it’s a brilliant series so far. If you only have time to listen to one then the French Revolution is an extraordinary podcast.

"A council chief executive has defied the authority’s new Reform leadership by refusing to take down a Pride flag.

George Finch, the new leader of Warwickshire county council, ordered Monica Fogarty to take down the banner flying outside county hall in line with the party’s manifesto policy to only fly British flags.

But Ms Fogarty, who previously headed the county’s race equality partnership, refused and said: “I am afraid I will not be taking the action that you are requesting.”

Zia Yusuf, the head of Reform’s department of government efficiency, claimed the refusal showed that “a coup d’etat is under way in Britain”. He accused Ms Fogarty of “subversion of democracy” and acting like the “monarch of Warwickshire”."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/30/warwickshire-county-council-boss-defies-reform-trans-flag/

This, in my mind, is a real problem.

We are heading to some very dark places if public servants defy the will of elected politicians because they don't agree with their policies.

It depends on whether the power to decide which flags get flown over the town hall has been delegated to the individual councillor who is leader, which I suspect is most unlikely.

As a Conservative, surely you should be defending having things done properly? Otherwise we are simply on the road to Trumpism.

Iti minority leadership can’t change what was previously desired without a council vote.

Reform has 22 seats there are 57 seats in the council.

The only thing I’m concerned about is the crap reporting which may be because Warwickshire council didn’t say that Reform needed to hold a vote to change council policy and didn’t it may be because the Telegraph missed facts from the story.

Either way Zia is not an elected Warwicjshire councilor and doesn’t seem to grasp simple maths. Reform can easily implement these things in Durham (because the councillors there will vote through the changes) but can’t in Warwickshire because were it to go to a vote Reform would lose by miles

Do we know that there was a vote on the original flag policy?

That’s irrelevant if the policy was X, and it’s going to be controversial (as this was intended to be) you want it approved.

If you think about it (which clearly you haven’t) the end result of any disliked decision would be a vote of no confidence in the Chief executive. And that is a full council vote - which reform can now ask for and lose.

If the chief executive has removed the flags it would be someone else asking for that vote and the chief executive would be losing that vote 35 votes to 22.

No it's not irrelevant, if the policy was merely a request from the previous council leader, or if the policy was never requested by any elected councillors, just a decision to put up some flags, it is rather ludicrous to suggest that a vote is needed to change the policy.

The 'controversial' nature of the change is something you seem to have decided. What's your evidence that it's controversial, or tgat the original policy wasn't?

From Warwickshire Pride:

In response to a request from the acting leader of WCC and member of the Reform party that the flag be taken down, the Chief Executive pointed out that it was not within the acting leader’s purview. The Chief Executive has delegated authority over which flags are flown. WCC councillors would need to amend policy in order to revoke that delegated authority.

https://warwickshirepride.co.uk/2025/06/30/statement-regarding-the-flying-of-the-pride-flag-outside-warwickshire-county-council-offices

That scheme of delegated powers will have been through a council vote. And until very recently, flag days are the sort of thing that was uncontroversial and fairly sensible to leave to.an officer.

Strip away the bunting, and the issue is this. Are the council officers there to do the wishes of the leader, or the council as a whole? If there's a single party majority, it's easy because those two things will coincide. In a minority situation, they don't. The leader might want X, but a majority on the council haven't said that they do. And the Chief Exec is doing their duty by the whole council in pointing that out.

I blame the poor quality of citizenship education on our schools.

“Kill the IDF” and “fuck the British” rappers Bob Vylan have had their visas revoked and can’t tour the USA. They have also been abandoned by agents and management.

Go woke, go broke

I’m all for free speech and I’m also all for capitalism teaching stiff lessons to hateful morons

I wonder if Glasto will ever quite recover from this

You're falling into the same trap that many 'anti-woke' idiots do: "If I don't like it, it's woke'

What they're saying is in no way woke. If it has any purpose, it is to get them publicity.

"Kill the IDF" and "Fuck the British" is pretty much textbook woke. They just need a "trans women are women" and they've covered all bases.

Trump's America tying itself to the albatross of fossil fuels as China advances at pace into the middle 21st century:


Chris Murphy 🟧

@ChrisMurphyCT
Ok, so Republicans just introduced a 900 page bill none of them have read. But my team is going through it line by line and on this 🧵you can see the hidden provisions we found. Will update all day.


Chris Murphy 🟧

@ChrisMurphyCT
·
2h
2/ It was bad enough they cut all the tax incentives for wind and solar energy - they added a NEW TAX on these projects to make sure America never builds any new renewables.

Remember, Trump promised the oil industry provisions like this in exchange for a $1B campaign donation.

https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1939702968409866471

Wind and solar were the two fastest growing job sectors in the US, IIRC. We should offer a four-year visa for renewables technicians with a possible extension to match this stupidity in the US.

We've got 40GW in the pipeline in Scotland alone - let's get it built now with ambitious young Americans.

FPT:

A stupid version of Cnut.
Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.

Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496

Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?

All authoritarians of right and left have a fetish about Really Big Industry. Something about half naked men pouring STEEEEEEEEL. Dirty faces, BIG CHIMNEYYYYYYYYSSSSSSS!

Which is nuts because the industries of the future will be huge, they are the Really Big Industries of the 2050s and beyond. By which time in any non-mad country the idea that you burn stuff to get electricity when you can get if for "free" from the sky will seem very silly.

Do you expect all energy-intensive industry to move to countries close to the equator?

Solar cells have already fallen in price so far as to ruin the economics of various long distance transmission schemes.

The bit that costs money is the power electronics - but that is scaled by the output, not the number of cells.

So 100 panels in the U.K. doesn’t cost that much more than 10 panels in Morocco. And the differential is still falling.

By some quotes, solar panels are now cheaper than some grades of plywood to cover things… so making a surface to keep the rain out may well default to solar quite soon.

FPT:

A stupid version of Cnut.
Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.

Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496

Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?

It's more the insane economics that impresses me.

But granted, Trump has zero taste, too.

The economic damage Trump is doing is of a scale that might be comparable to a war. Essentially Trump is betting everything on the industries of the past, and hobbling the industries of the future. Short term this might look okay, and will please some areas of industry. Long term the US will be far behind in renewable energy, grid energy storage, electric vehicles, and the industries that underly them; like power semiconductors, batteries, power transmission systems, magnetics, etc.

As the damage is something that is accrued rather than immediate Trump can get away with it, for now at least. Long term he is doing trillions of dollars in damage to the US economy, and handing a huge amount of control to China, who are by far the best positioned country to reap the benefit of America's follies.

Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT

There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.

“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/06/30/entry-level-jobs-in-free-fall-after-launch-of-chatgpt/

I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.

My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management.
Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.

Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.

There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.

And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.

Did you know that Disney has its own management education center that gives out qualifications: they truly can be called Mickey Mouse degrees.

Morning all! Back after 3 days away at Tankfest.

An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.

I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.

We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/29/britain-in-2025-sick-man-of-europe-battling-untreated-illness-crisis

Morning, PB.

Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.

The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card

Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.

Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.

The problem they had was a structural deficit.

The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.

So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.

Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.

Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?

For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.

How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.

The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?

My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".

None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.

Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.