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Elites – politicalbetting.com
Elites – politicalbetting.com
The concept of a political elite is much in vogue recently. I find it difficult to cope with the recency, because the existence of a group of people above others is older than Britain: the term “privilege” is derived from “privilegium”, a private law. The British class structure which Thatcherism was supposed to overthrow had existed for centuries, and in turn dates back to divisions between clergy, nobility, landowners, etc. We could spend a lively time talking about how this structure grew and evolved over time, with reference to later subdivisions like the professional classes. But I think that’s not relevant here.
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First.
Thanks for a great header.
I guffawed at: "... the concept of the New 10K, sometimes stylised as the “Nu10K” like it was a 1980’s compilation album: “Now that’s what I call Corrupt Cliquism”."
The youtube channel "Art of Law" on Judicial scepticism about the Post-Office-Serving behaviour of Post Office witnesses, even when on oath to tell the whole truth.
Not quite as bad as Trump's Lawyers, perhaps ... but very shoddy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0PLiBRC3aU
So the “NU” is fortuitous.
Yes, very good header.
The idea of the end of the old elite was supposed to be 1911…
Just trudged there & back for my morning coffee. As dawn begins to break, temperature on my humble porch = 15 degrees Fahrenheit, or -10 Celsius, or 264 Kelvin.
Luckily we got virtually no snow in Seattle before the Big Freeze, which by the way is caused by notorious "Fraser River Outflow" itself result of gross inattention by our (allegedly) good neighbors in British Columbia.
Thus its been worse up in Bellingham WA, hard by the BC border, where temps have been colder for days AND where the wind has exacerbated situation, both in terms of wind chill and, even worse, downed power lines leading to loss of power for some residents - brrrrrrrr!
Here in Seattle, one compensation today is that, on my humble trek back from coffeeshop, could see the snowy Olympic Mountains to the west . . . and the snowy Cascade Mountains to the east.
In US most mortgages aren’t portable (@Malmesbury ) but instead banks get paid on refinancings.
Fannie and Freddie take on a lot of the duration risk (@DavidL) but in any event if you hold to maturity you don’t need to mark to market
But generally this is a solution in search of a problem. 25 year fixed rate mortgages already exist in the UK for people who want them
If these people were answerable to anyone and willing to sufffer the consequences of their failings then the situation would be generally workable, for the very reasons you give. But they are not. They believe that their background and beliefs give them a semi-divine right to be in charge and that none of the 'proles' should be uppity enough to question that. They certainly don't think they should be held responsible for their failings until they are forced by overwhelming outrage to reluctantly acceed.
If the system actually worked we would have a lot fewer of these scandals and a lot more of those who were responsible would be ending up behind bars.
The PM and the Cabinet also try to take the praise when something works well, whilst blaming others when it doesn't [inflation is just a recent example, nothing to do with the PM if it rises, all,down to him when it falls].
To my mind, at least some of the issue here is due to the over-centralization of the UK (English) state. The PM and Cabinet take all of the power, including for matters they have no chance of controlling, and the net result is that things that they should be on top of are low down the list. When we have a PM interested in potholes in streets, then there is no chance he is as interested in the major issues that he should be. As a result, many issues, from the NHS to the Post Office are inevitably run by the central bureaucracy. There is no reason why health, most transport, and many other services shouldn't be devolved from central government at least regionally to democratically elected representatives. It is how most other medium to large sized countries work.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Ruling-party candidate Lai Ching-te emerged victorious in Taiwan’s presidential election on Saturday and his opponents conceded, a result that will determine the trajectory of the self-ruled democracy’s relations with China over the next four years.
China had called the poll a choice between war and peace. Beijing strongly opposes Lai, the current vice president who abandoned his medical career to pursue politics from the grassroots to the presidency.
SSI - results according to wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Taiwanese_presidential_election
Lai Ching-te
Democratic Progressive Party 5,586,019 40.1%
Hou Yu-ih
Kuomintang 4,671,021 33.5%
Ko Wen-je
Taiwan People's Party 3,690,466 26.5%
Valid votes 13,947,506 99.3%
(Total votes 14,048,310)
Registered 19,548,531 71.9% turnout
We chose to do this to ourselves, either because we thought it would be cheaper and more efficient, or because of fear of a postcode lottery, or because we don't want more politicians. And maybe it is better, but it does put power in fewer hands.
So if it’s you OLB, hello.
The Tories are fucked, but Labour are still struggling to cut through in such a way we can be certain they'll get a majority.
I was drawn to Goodwin's theory. Russell Group, Managerial and Liberal. That sums me up. I wouldn't get invited onto the Board of a any panel or Board, despite 50 years in business.
Wherever I look, all roads lead to and from Tufton Street. COVID, Post Office/Jujitsu rammed full of Tories. Has anyone noticed the symmetry between Dido Harding/ John Penrose and Michael Keegan/ Gillian Keegan.
Even in Labour Wales, the Welsh National Opera, Dwr Cymru, Natural Resources Wales, and others besides were/are manned by links to CCHQ. There was a time if your name was Nicholas Edwards, Roe-Beddow or Inkin, the invites to join even more ranks of the great and the good must have given the local postie a hernia.
An ex-deputy postmistress from London says she will stand against Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey at the next general election, as he faces criticism over his role in the Post Office scandal.
Yvonne Tracey worked at New Malden post office for more than 30 years and said Sir Ed's attitude "must be challenged".
Sir Ed, MP for Kingston and Surbiton, initially refused to meet campaigner Alan Bates when he was a minister.
He has now said he was "deeply misled" by Post Office executives. . . .
A Lib Dem spokesperson told the BBC: "Ed's heart goes out to the families caught up in this scandal and his focus is on getting justice and compensation for those impacted.
"He bitterly regrets that the Post Office was not honest with him at the time and will fully cooperate with the inquiry to get to the bottom of what went wrong."
They added: "Ed has earned the reputation as a hardworking and tireless local MP, who helps thousands of residents, businesses and community groups every year, which has resulted in him serving the constituency for 30 years."
A public inquiry into the Post Office affair, which was launched in 2021, resumed this week. The Post Office said it aims to get to "the truth of what went wrong".
A spokesperson for Fujitsu, the tech company that developed the Horizon system, said the company recognised the "devastating impact on postmasters' lives and that of their families" and had "apologised for its role in their suffering".
In my opinion Dahl was far more right than Mills, but has lost the political argument in many American colleges and universities.
(Some will prefer Richard Rovere's half-Joking essay, "The American Establishment" to either book.)
I know I would struggle in a lot of jobs that were outside my area of competence. When I see ministers making errors or looking crap I often think there but for the grace of god.
This is why we need, irony alert, strong systems and governance structures so we’re not too reliant on human competence. Obviously the Horizon system isn’t the best example of this.
Escort who cut off eunuch maker’s penis said it was ‘one for the bucket list’
Extreme body modification group conducted amputations on camera for pay-per-view audience, the Old Bailey hears
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/12/gustavson-escort-eunuch-maker-bucket-list-castration/?li_source=LI&li_medium=for_you
Either you treat people like adults - including allowing them to make bad choices and suffer the consequences - or you treat them like big kids and make sure their choices are only symbolic.
We need genuine decentralisation and to trust people to make decisions for themselves, for better or worse.
But at -16C.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/498817
At least indicates they are NOT same person. Perhaps?
I don't deny that there is (as Weber predicted a long, long time ago) a bureaucratic elite, and that elite has significant failings. But to focus entirely on them and ignore the continuing power of big business, corporate greed, the military and so on is to miss a huge wedge of the source of power. Maybe I should write an alternative header.
https://www.libdemvoice.org/should-ed-davey-apologise-for-his-role-in-the-horizon-scandal-74519.html
The comments there (from Lib Dems) seem to be fairly evenly split between "he has nothing to apologise for" and "of course he should apologise".
The latter being Mike Smithson's sage advice IIRC.
I’ll predict Lab 43 and Con 27, which actually is a huge 16% margin for a swingback poll from seasoned firm.
How does one undertake one's civic duty if there's no civitas to undertake it in?
There is no concept of failure leading to exclusion from the elite.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sunil060902
Starmer fans please explain.
A passenger plane has returned to its departure airport in Japan after a crack was found on the cockpit window of the Boeing 737-800 aircraft mid-air.
Rishi Sunak: respectable middle class parents, but can a provincial GP and pharmacist really be considered elite?
Keir Starmer: Father a Surrey toolmaker, mother a nurse. Once again respectable middle class but hardly elite.
To move away from politics, perhaps Paula Vennells? Manchester Grammar School, Bradford University then management trainee at Unilever. Not sure what her parents did, but being born in a coalfield town now incorporated into Manchester doesn't seem elite, so much as middle class.
Perhaps the CEO of the National Theatre? Indhi Rabinsingham, born in Sheffield to Sinhalese Tamil immigrant parents. Doesn't sound particularly elite.
Or the CEO of the National Gallery? Gabriele Finaldi brought up in Barnet and Catford, to a Neapolitan father and Anglo-Polish mother. Doesn't really whiff of elite privilege doesn't it?
How about the CEO of the NHS? Amanda Pritchard was Comprehensive schooled in Somerset, daughter of an Anglican priest who later became a Bishop.
Just to pick a few fairly randomly.
So none from an elite background, but all elite now. All from middle class backgrounds but none obviously benefiting from insider connections.
So is there really a mysterious elite of mutual benefit? Or just a bunch of people with successful careers from a wide variety of middle class backgrounds?
It seems we are defining elite as the people in charge, a meaningless circular definition.
- who lied to him
- when
- what the lies were
- when he realised he had been lied to
- what he did when he realised he was being or had been lied to?
Is he going to provide such details?
Otherwise it's just another "I'm a gullible moron so you can't blame me" defence?
And if he was lied to, did he perhaps make it easy for civil servants to do this to him? He might want to reflect on that.
Nearly everyone parroting this BS is either from the old elite or were bought and paid for by said elite long ago. It would be tragic if it was not quite so pathetic.
Oddly she didn’t seem to post anything about the PO scandal until this month.
These days the first thing I look for is the safety card. If it states A310, A321 for example, I am good to go. This happened on Delta last month. Blessed relief that the doors are unlikely to shut fast or fall off.On a later flight on BA and I was scratching my head, which is the dodgy one, 737 or 777?
Other Old Girls include the Pankhursts, Emma Barnett, Judy Finnegan, Louise Ellman and the woman who played Emily Bishop.
If you define elite as anyone ambitious who had a successful post University career then it is a pretty useless concept.
If you define it more narrowly as the Notting Hill Set or friends of the Spectator editor then you might have a point, but they have only fairly narrow bounds of elite privilege.
Many of them did indeed go to private school. Indeed, some of these schools must be astonishingly good at getting teenagers through exams, judging by the results, but unfortunately they don't seem to have thought critical thinking, intellectual curiosity or personal humility en route.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-67920532
Not a particular friend of China.
Anaemic growth since 2010 is down to local Councils and charities.
The idea that the U.K. military has any significant political pull is belied by the way that every government since the end of the Cold War has tried to cut military spending as the politically cheap option.
In the U.K. we have a Medical Industrial Complex and a Social Protection Industrial Complex.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/UK_Government_spending_for_2023-24.png
Then there are those who enjoy elite positions during their working life with little or no hereditary element. There is definitely a sense that once at certain levels of managerial responsibility people become established, such that their success starts to diverge from their talent or competence. But it’s a more ephemeral thing. More about the structure of the economy and government than the person’s background.
1984 was, of course, a work of fiction.
Just one example of how FAA has been pimping for airlines rather than doing its job: flight recorders that tape over existing records after TWO HOURS.
NOT helpful, for example, to National Transportation Safety Board investigators who are investigating Boeing's new Open Door policy.
Veterinary practices used to be one of the most decentralised, unconsolidated industries. They had little pricing or buying power. In the last few years, as with their close cousins dentists, they have consolidated massively. Most vets are now large chains and franchises. It means they have more buying power with their suppliers, and vastly more selling power with customers and insurance companies.
Maybe they read my posts on here and their confidence is blown?
https://x.com/esthermcvey1/status/1746154516137849077?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Was Bradford University a top university when she went there in the late 1970's, or even now?
Is there any evidence that she was incompetent in any of her jobs prior to the Post Office? Or was she pretty good at them?
Posted without comment.
She is also accused of leading an organisation that indulged in false accounting due to not understanding the rules around compensation.
That sounds like incompetence to me.
A bit like your posts.
Another great piece, but you misquoted Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban) in Star Trek II.
He said, "He tasks me! He tasks me, and I shall have him!". He doesn't mention his sidekick Joachim's name.
Joachim himself isn't listed in the credits, making this an uncredited performance by Judson Scott. Apparently a dispute about whether he should receive top billing.
"...but the salient point here is not the elites but his concept of “elite overproduction”: the creation of people who have sufficient time and money and intelligence to wield power but who are stymied by the lack of posts".
This is not, I think, correct, and is a case of the 'lump of labour' fallacy. If the UK were overproducing this sort of talent we would be overrun with UK people creating large numbers of mighty and powerful enterprises of all sorts. While in truth a huge proportion of the most enterprising have come into the UK from abroad. Ask any active UK investment manager.
> Is "victim" of dread Peter Principle?
> Was one of her competencies, burying what her bosses wished buried?
Hardly exhausts possibilities. Or preclude both of the above being true, in part if not in toto.
Speaking of the later:
Toti and Twister - Wizard of Oz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awL4PJRrp9Q
Spot character who MOST resembles Paula Vennells? In eyes of Great British Public, for now anyway.
I agree that counter was OTT, and having just watched another version of the interview, McVey’s one is indeed heavily edited.
https://x.com/bbcbreakfast/status/1745732442789409022?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
All I want is the circle to stop. Ok, unlike the Head Count, when you kill someone, no manslaughter. You are Ubermensch, after all.
But you go home with your Golden Goodbye and that’s it. No turning up in the next job.
They are primarily privately-educated, they primarily live in London, and they are susceptible to the same sort of groupthink.
There is a left-wing elite, who run the civil service, the public sector, the universities, broadcasting and the arts. There is a right-wing elite, who run the finance industry and certain influential news outlets.
All countries have elites, Britain’s issue is that they are primarily drawn from the same class, universities, and geography.
One is well-meaning cluelessness leading to disaster (think Frank Spencer). The other is doing bad things after mislaying one's sense of right and wrong.
In the second case, incompetence is a bit of a relief.
Tom Tugendhat
@TomTugendhat
·
57m
It’s extraordinary to watch young men and women - who I’m sure would tell you they believe in freedom and equality - supporting groups like the Houthis who have reintroduced slavery, and systematically violate the rights of women and girls.
Can you cite anything in support of that allegation?