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.
No, the Truss problem was she had removed the Treasury's chief and sidestepped the OBR, leading to market suspicion there must be something bad somewhere that Truss was deliberately hiding from ‘the adults in the room’. This is why Rachel Reeves won't order lunch without noisily flying kites and consulting the OBR.
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.
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).
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.
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?
Littler is the only person there who turned his sport upside down by his talent.
It’s a pub game, so not a real sport.
Can't see that it requires any less hand-eye co-ordination than say archery or golf?
Darts is more of a sport than F1 is.
One of the criteria citied often of whether something is a sport or not is 'Can you play it in a pub'.
Looking forward to next year's race in the Dog and Duck.
Bosanquet (who invented the googly) drew a distinction between games where the ball is still (golf, billiards) and where it is in motion (cricket, football). Extrapolating from that would place darts and archery in the still camp.
There's no clear defining line, but rather a range from the more pure end (athletics) to the peculiar (breakdancing). Olympic sport introduces a further refinement in that it suggests some connection with the ancient games. This brings dressage safely within the fold because equestrianism generally was such a big part of the games back then, even though many today scoff at horses dancing. Many other sports however that we accept at normal would have puzzled the ancient Greeks. Syncronised swimming puzzles me, by any criterion.
Just wondering how popular the pankration* and the chariot racing** would be.
*their form of MMA **IIRC it was the *owner* who got the prize?
Chariot racing was an Olympic sport that was open to women, in the ancient world.
Other than that, womens' sports and gladiatorial contests were considered a form of porn.
Sean, you're a classics whizz. Save me the bother of looking it up. Wasn't it the success of a female charioteer that caused the introduction of a men only rule?
I think it was Cynisca, the sister of King Agesilaos of Sparta, who won a load of prizes for chariot racing, as owner and trainer, in the 390's. But, no woman was allowed to drive a chariot, at the contest. The fact that elite Spartan women took part in their own athletic contests, naked, was a source of fascination to the Greeks.
Thank you, Sean. You are so much better than AI.
I wonder that Robert Smithson has not tried to market you.
Thanks.
The problem with AI is that time and again, it gives plausible-sounding, but wrong, answers. I asked AI to describe the fortress of Masada, and it came back with an answer that was perfect, save for one minor point. It said that Herod the Great built the fortress in 100 BC, 28 years before he was born.
You can usually get an adequate historical answer, if you ask AI a question, for which there is a lot of online content. The less content, the more inaccurate it will be.
But, lazy students will just treat AI as gospel, and get failed accordingly. To my mind, AI should be treated like Sat Nav, or calculators. You should have a fair idea already what the answer should be, and if it comes back with something that doesn't seem right, you should verify it yourself.
I use it for three things:
code generation
reducing word count
generating images for presentations
The most useful is the first, particularly where I'm using a new package/library and not quite sure of the syntax. But sometimes it spits out stuff that is incorrect and other times it does things that do work, but in a really odd way. But as a starting point to save googling or searching the docs, it can be very useful. It's like having someone go look things up on stackexchange or similar for you - and sometimes it's garbage in garbage out but often it's not bad.
For the second - useful for academic journal word counts - I don't copy and paste what it produces, but re-write my original noting where it has successfully lost words by changing sentence structure etc. Again, it misses things and sometimes changes the sense of sentiments, but is good for ideas for phrasing more succinctly.
For the third, sometimes I want a cartoon-like image to illustrate a point. AI is good for that, although the results can also be hit and miss.
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.
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).
How much useful political experience is around them? Who are the heavyweight politicians of the day with 20 years experience at cabinet or shadow cabinet level?
Closest would be Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper ffs! Outside of cabinet/shadow you have just David Davis and IDS.
The career trajectory of our politicians is seriously screwed. They are both promoted and discarded way too quickly.
"My predictions for 2026 are that Sir Keir Starmer will be ousted by his own party, and that his successor – possibly Ed Miliband or Angela Rayner – will soon be exposed as equally useless, and the public will turn against them. This will push our politics to breaking point. It will demonstrate that policy tweaks or the reshuffling of personnel, even PMs, won’t work for Labour, just as it failed under the Tories."
Telegraph
"Equally useless" makes me laugh, there must be some other people called Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner in the Labour Party that I am unaware of. Labour may yet demonstrate that Liz Truss is not the worst possible PM.
Truss is very far from the worst possible PM, She's only the 2nd worst so far - after the Earl of Bute.
"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"
Also, sounding it, with a wee lass knocking out a decent version of Fairy Tale of New York, and an older black chap doing a passable crooner version of Chistmas classics.
🔥Rep. Bennie Thompson to Noem: “You have put your own interests ahead of the department and violated the law. You are making 🇺🇸 less safe. I call on you to resign— do a real service to the country. That is, if Trump doesn’t fire you first.”
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.
Starmer is the first PM in a long time with direct management experience of a large organisation.
"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"
Italy outside the EU would be an interesting proposition. They would have more freedom to control the flow of people across the Mediterranean and would avoid the euro straightjacket.
🔥Rep. Bennie Thompson to Noem: “You have put your own interests ahead of the department and violated the law. You are making 🇺🇸 less safe. I call on you to resign— do a real service to the country. That is, if Trump doesn’t fire you first.”
The most moreish thing I have had this Advent has been a National Trust olive and smokey bacon flavoured "kiln roasted mixed nuts" (cashews, almonds, peanuts) thing called Pigs in Blankets which comes in a jamjar at a slightly eye-watering price (£7.50 for 150g).
It is dated OK until June 2026. My personal item lasted slightly under 24 hours.
Mm, looks good. The piggy bit seems to be the bacon-type flavour rather than a company name
I see it's not in fact specific to NT so (a) easier to find and (b) it won't trigger our wokefinders-general and major-general, or at least not very much, which you may or may not be disappointed about.
Even hungrier now. Off to find my Quorn pastie and Baxters country vegetable soup.
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 listened to Polanskis interview on The Rest is Politics this afternoon - first time I've bothered to take any notice. I was mostly impressed, he is very bright, personable, engaging and I'd agree with him on about 80% of the analysis of what is going wrong.
But he has zero relevant experience, beyond being media savvy from acting, so nearly all his solutions are fanciful at best, and whilst his superficial understanding of the problems is good, drill deeper and he didn't know any of the detail.
I suspect he will do very well for the Greens, but would be terrible in government.
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.
Truss's problem was that she thought simply cutting taxes would solve the country's problems, and the bond markets disagreed with her. The deeper problem was that she was wrong on the substance of the issue, while the bond markets were right. Starmer lacks the ability to explain to us how he really sees the world, but his government unlike Truss's does have a credible plan to make the fiscal numbers add up. A PM whose views are unclear is still a lot better than one whose views are clear and wrong, IMHO.
Out drinking (again) and who do I see from the hostelry window, just walking along as if the latest Reform scandal isn't happening, but Richard Tice. Luckily for him I was armed only with a disdainful expression.
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 listened to Polanskis interview on The Rest is Politics this afternoon - first time I've bothered to take any notice. I was mostly impressed, he is very bright, personable, engaging and I'd agree with him on about 80% of the analysis of what is going wrong.
But he has zero relevant experience, beyond being media savvy from acting, so nearly all his solutions are fanciful at best, and whilst his superficial understanding of the problems is good, drill deeper and he didn't know any of the detail.
I suspect he will do very well for the Greens, but would be terrible in government.
I suspect all the likely leaders post 2029 will be terrible in Government...
"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"
Should the EU invite California, New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia to break away from the US ?
I saw this earlier with an accompanying map and it was stark how by trying to disrup Poland, Austria and Hungary it creates a very helpful buffer for Russia to try and spread its tentacleswestwards.
"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"
Italy outside the EU would be an interesting proposition. They would have more freedom to control the flow of people across the Mediterranean and would avoid the euro straightjacket.
The EU is a bit of a straightjacket that nobody likes outside of Luxembourg. I think it'll change and be slightly rolled back in certain areas. Brexit wasn't all about benefit to the UK after all (er hang on!) but had some small gains for the revisionists in the EU.
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.
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 listened to Polanskis interview on The Rest is Politics this afternoon - first time I've bothered to take any notice. I was mostly impressed, he is very bright, personable, engaging and I'd agree with him on about 80% of the analysis of what is going wrong.
But he has zero relevant experience, beyond being media savvy from acting, so nearly all his solutions are fanciful at best, and whilst his superficial understanding of the problems is good, drill deeper and he didn't know any of the detail.
I suspect he will do very well for the Greens, but would be terrible in government.
I suspect all the likely leaders post 2029 will be terrible in Government...
Yeah, but there are degrees of terrible and if he tried to implement his current plans it would be worse than Corbyn, maybe even worse than Nige.
And arguably this terrible phase started around 2013 or 2019 if feeling charitable to the coalition and May, we don't have to wait til 2029.
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 listened to Polanskis interview on The Rest is Politics this afternoon - first time I've bothered to take any notice. I was mostly impressed, he is very bright, personable, engaging and I'd agree with him on about 80% of the analysis of what is going wrong.
But he has zero relevant experience, beyond being media savvy from acting, so nearly all his solutions are fanciful at best, and whilst his superficial understanding of the problems is good, drill deeper and he didn't know any of the detail.
I suspect he will do very well for the Greens, but would be terrible in government.
I've not heard Polanski though in some respects he reminds me of Cameron.
It's easy to diagnose all the country's problems - we do that on here most days - but the problem is or are the solutions which need to be cost effective, practical and legal which rules out 99% of what's offered on here and elsewhere.
Polanski may have an idea of what he thinks will work but I suspect it wouldn't take too long to dismantle his thesis.
"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"
Should the EU invite California, New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia to break away from the US ?
I saw this earlier with an accompanying map and it was stark how by trying to disrup Poland, Austria and Hungary it creates a very helpful buffer for Russia to try and spread its tentacleswestwards.
US foreign policy seems to hv been written by a Moscow-based Chat-GPT module.
And then accepted unquestioningly by Witless. And then by his boss in the White House.
The notion that this stuff is just spewed out - without any Congessional input or oversight - is to say the least, alarming.
"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"
Should the EU invite California, New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia to break away from the US ?
I saw this earlier with an accompanying map and it was stark how by trying to disrup Poland, Austria and Hungary it creates a very helpful buffer for Russia to try and spread its tentacleswestwards.
@Gardenwalker 's header was interesting. A bit of a breakaway of the US East, Canada, no doubt Greenland saying "thank god you've turned up" , well it'd leave the great Trumpeter looking like the Truss of US Presidents.
Scottish politics has certainly been exciting in the last couple of decades - for Westminster at the least they can definitely claim to not just tribally vote in the same people over and over again, which is better than most of the country.
"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"
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.
Truss's problem was that she thought simply cutting taxes would solve the country's problems, and the bond markets disagreed with her. The deeper problem was that she was wrong on the substance of the issue, while the bond markets were right. Starmer lacks the ability to explain to us how he really sees the world, but his government unlike Truss's does have a credible plan to make the fiscal numbers add up. A PM whose views are unclear is still a lot better than one whose views are clear and wrong, IMHO.
Unsarcastically: what is this "credible plan to make the fiscal numbers add up". By when does Starmer plan to drop the deficit to zero?
The deficit doesn't need to fall to zero. The plan needs to satisfy the debt markets that debt is on a sustainable path. As of now the debt markets finds the plan credible. This was not the case with Truss.
"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"
Italy outside the EU would be an interesting proposition. They would have more freedom to control the flow of people across the Mediterranean and would avoid the euro straightjacket.
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).
How much useful political experience is around them? Who are the heavyweight politicians of the day with 20 years experience at cabinet or shadow cabinet level?
Closest would be Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper ffs! Outside of cabinet/shadow you have just David Davis and IDS.
The career trajectory of our politicians is seriously screwed. They are both promoted and discarded way too quickly.
The core competence and career experience of most of our politicians nowadays is some combination of campaigning and communications - aka selling a line as to what is wrong with the current way of things, when you have no accountability for it, and selling a line as to why nothing has turned out any better, once you do.
Missing from the competencies of most of our politicians is how to actually deliver purposeful change working through a large organisation operating in a highly complex and contested environment.
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 listened to Polanskis interview on The Rest is Politics this afternoon - first time I've bothered to take any notice. I was mostly impressed, he is very bright, personable, engaging and I'd agree with him on about 80% of the analysis of what is going wrong.
But he has zero relevant experience, beyond being media savvy from acting, so nearly all his solutions are fanciful at best, and whilst his superficial understanding of the problems is good, drill deeper and he didn't know any of the detail.
I suspect he will do very well for the Greens, but would be terrible in government.
I've not heard Polanski though in some respects he reminds me of Cameron.
It's easy to diagnose all the country's problems - we do that on here most days - but the problem is or are the solutions which need to be cost effective, practical and legal which rules out 99% of what's offered on here and elsewhere.
Polanski may have an idea of what he thinks will work but I suspect it wouldn't take too long to dismantle his thesis.
"I've not heard Polanski though in some respects he reminds me of Cameron. "
There's been some stuff on PB over the years!
(Polanski is clearly a plank of very high order. Cameron was ok really.)
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 listened to Polanskis interview on The Rest is Politics this afternoon - first time I've bothered to take any notice. I was mostly impressed, he is very bright, personable, engaging and I'd agree with him on about 80% of the analysis of what is going wrong.
But he has zero relevant experience, beyond being media savvy from acting, so nearly all his solutions are fanciful at best, and whilst his superficial understanding of the problems is good, drill deeper and he didn't know any of the detail.
I suspect he will do very well for the Greens, but would be terrible in government.
I've not heard Polanski though in some respects he reminds me of Cameron.
It's easy to diagnose all the country's problems - we do that on here most days - but the problem is or are the solutions which need to be cost effective, practical and legal which rules out 99% of what's offered on here and elsewhere.
Polanski may have an idea of what he thinks will work but I suspect it wouldn't take too long to dismantle his thesis.
I suspect its the 20% analysis of what's going wrong you don't agree with will be the 100% reason people won't vote for him.
Littler is the only person there who turned his sport upside down by his talent.
It’s a pub game, so not a real sport.
Can't see that it requires any less hand-eye co-ordination than say archery or golf?
Darts is more of a sport than F1 is.
One of the criteria citied often of whether something is a sport or not is 'Can you play it in a pub'.
Looking forward to next year's race in the Dog and Duck.
Bosanquet (who invented the googly) drew a distinction between games where the ball is still (golf, billiards) and where it is in motion (cricket, football). Extrapolating from that would place darts and archery in the still camp.
There's no clear defining line, but rather a range from the more pure end (athletics) to the peculiar (breakdancing). Olympic sport introduces a further refinement in that it suggests some connection with the ancient games. This brings dressage safely within the fold because equestrianism generally was such a big part of the games back then, even though many today scoff at horses dancing. Many other sports however that we accept at normal would have puzzled the ancient Greeks. Syncronised swimming puzzles me, by any criterion.
Just wondering how popular the pankration* and the chariot racing** would be.
*their form of MMA **IIRC it was the *owner* who got the prize?
Chariot racing was an Olympic sport that was open to women, in the ancient world.
Other than that, womens' sports and gladiatorial contests were considered a form of porn.
Sean, you're a classics whizz. Save me the bother of looking it up. Wasn't it the success of a female charioteer that caused the introduction of a men only rule?
I think it was Cynisca, the sister of King Agesilaos of Sparta, who won a load of prizes for chariot racing, as owner and trainer, in the 390's. But, no woman was allowed to drive a chariot, at the contest. The fact that elite Spartan women took part in their own athletic contests, naked, was a source of fascination to the Greeks.
Thank you, Sean. You are so much better than AI.
I wonder that Robert Smithson has not tried to market you.
Thanks.
The problem with AI is that time and again, it gives plausible-sounding, but wrong, answers. I asked AI to describe the fortress of Masada, and it came back with an answer that was perfect, save for one minor point. It said that Herod the Great built the fortress in 100 BC, 28 years before he was born.
You can usually get an adequate historical answer, if you ask AI a question, for which there is a lot of online content. The less content, the more inaccurate it will be.
But, lazy students will just treat AI as gospel, and get failed accordingly. To my mind, AI should be treated like Sat Nav, or calculators. You should have a fair idea already what the answer should be, and if it comes back with something that doesn't seem right, you should verify it yourself.
I was asking AI a specific question about pectin and medlars. It quoted the exact opposite of which has the most pectin (ripe or unripe).
I asked AI to compare US casualties in the Korean and Vietnam war. It got the numbers about right, but in its infinite wisdom gave the smaller number as being larger than the larger number.
AI told me I could book a Premier Inn in Calais (not that I would ever want to). There are no Premier Inns in Calais. It also recommended another hotel that was actually in Spain.
Just 3 examples over the last few months that I spotted were wrong. Goodness knows what was wrong that I didn't know.
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.
The problems private sector businesspeople face going into politics are similar to those they face moving into any public sector role. The public sector is by definition a political and highly complex environment, with multiple stakeholders with competing interests, considerable media scrutiny, public scrutiny, unionised industrial relations, etcetera. Private sector folk are accustomed to working out where they should be going and heading there directly. In the public sector there’s likely to be a minefield in the way, and managing public sector organisations requires far more by way of patience and guile than a management job in a private sector business will ever demand.
"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"
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.
"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"
Italy outside the EU would be an interesting proposition. They would have more freedom to control the flow of people across the Mediterranean and would avoid the euro straightjacket.
Got to ask how they would have more control of the flow of people across the Med. It's down to a few warlords looking at who is paying the least and pushing x,000 in their directions until that Government starts paying more..
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.
Yes, I should have qualified it - experience of running large organisations *without a strict hierarchy*.
But most politicians, now, have experience of neither.
One day, an ex-Deutsche Bank manager will get into government. Given Douche Bank’s non-system for hierarchy (think - anarchy), they will go through government like a chainsaw through cheese.
"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"
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.
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.
Yes, I should have qualified it - experience of running large organisations *without a strict hierarchy*.
But most politicians, now, have experience of neither.
One day, an ex-Deutsche Bank manager will get into government. Given Douche Bank’s non-system for hierarchy (think - anarchy), they will go through government like a chainsaw through cheese.
Out drinking (again) and who do I see from the hostelry window, just walking along as if the latest Reform scandal isn't happening, but Richard Tice. Luckily for him I was armed only with a disdainful expression.
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.
Yes, I should have qualified it - experience of running large organisations *without a strict hierarchy*.
But most politicians, now, have experience of neither.
One day, an ex-Deutsche Bank manager will get into government. Given Douche Bank’s non-system for hierarchy (think - anarchy), they will go through government like a chainsaw through cheese.
I think we've gone beyond that already, and even beyond the Northern Rocks.
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).
How much useful political experience is around them? Who are the heavyweight politicians of the day with 20 years experience at cabinet or shadow cabinet level?
Closest would be Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper ffs! Outside of cabinet/shadow you have just David Davis and IDS.
The career trajectory of our politicians is seriously screwed. They are both promoted and discarded way too quickly.
The core competence and career experience of most of our politicians nowadays is some combination of campaigning and communications - aka selling a line as to what is wrong with the current way of things, when you have no accountability for it, and selling a line as to why nothing has turned out any better, once you do.
Missing from the competencies of most of our politicians is how to actually deliver purposeful change working through a large organisation operating in a highly complex and contested environment.
There's also the "customer service" role of the MP, which apparently takes up a lot of time now. MPs are expected to hold regular constituency surgeries, and to advocate on behalf of their constituents in disputes with various branches of the government, or even with private companies.
This is undoubtedly helpful in building a local fan club, who can then be pressed to deliver leaflets or pose for photographs. I don't begrudge the MPs for doing this. But it is definitely a problem that they are much more directly rewarded for this activity than they are for, say, learning about how government and the public sector works, reading research papers, scrutinising legislation or preparing for committee meetings, engaging with new ideas, or generally building the skills and knowledge necessary to govern effectively. Outsourcing all of the thinking to think tanks seems like a great idea at first, but it leaves us with ministers who have to do a lot of on-the-job learning very quickly, before being replaced with someone else equally unprepared.
"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"
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.
Re Austria haven’t they had quite a few recent far right politicians in senior roles? Also it’s currently neutral but wothin the EU there mighh be pressure to change that stance so by dragging them out Trumputin hopefully gets a non combatant in proximity to Russia rather than a potential adversary.
"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"
"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"
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.
If only there was some organisation of democracies across our continent that could act together as some sort of union.
"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"
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.
If only there was some organisation of democracies across our continent that could act together as some sort of union.
Perhaps we should start one.
The British Commonwealth would be a good starting point....
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 listened to Polanskis interview on The Rest is Politics this afternoon - first time I've bothered to take any notice. I was mostly impressed, he is very bright, personable, engaging and I'd agree with him on about 80% of the analysis of what is going wrong.
But he has zero relevant experience, beyond being media savvy from acting, so nearly all his solutions are fanciful at best, and whilst his superficial understanding of the problems is good, drill deeper and he didn't know any of the detail.
I suspect he will do very well for the Greens, but would be terrible in government.
I suspect all the likely leaders post 2029 will be terrible in Government...
The career pipeline was serious borked by Corbyn and Boris and Brexit. In any normal timeline, Sunak would be finding his feet as LotO, Badenoch would be a feisty shadow cabinet member, Starmer would be AG and much happier than he is... flip knows who would be PM on the Labour side.
It's going to be a decade for normality to return. In the meantime, we might be better off phoning an agency to get some interim politicians in from somewhere else.
"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"
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.
If you take Italy, Austria and Hungary you cut the EU in two. If you then take Poland you cut it in three. And then you close the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwałki_Gap and take the Baltics.
Whilst all this is happening we are doing nothing but gawping like landed fish and banging on about lanyard wearers.
"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"
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.
If only there was some organisation of democracies across our continent that could act together as some sort of union.
Perhaps we should start one.
The British Commonwealth would be a good starting point....
"...Even if it wins Ukraine will need help: with its crops wrecked, children stolen, and its cities bombed it will not be able to cope by itself for many years. But who can help them? Germany is on the back foot, and although it will help it will be little and late. Poland is on the front foot, is motivated, able to assist, and can scale.If the UK cannot intervene directly it should at least support Poland, as Boris intuited in his proposed “European Commonwealth” and Truss’s trilateral pact..."
Littler is the only person there who turned his sport upside down by his talent.
It’s a pub game, so not a real sport.
Can't see that it requires any less hand-eye co-ordination than say archery or golf?
Darts is more of a sport than F1 is.
One of the criteria citied often of whether something is a sport or not is 'Can you play it in a pub'.
Looking forward to next year's race in the Dog and Duck.
Bosanquet (who invented the googly) drew a distinction between games where the ball is still (golf, billiards) and where it is in motion (cricket, football). Extrapolating from that would place darts and archery in the still camp.
There's no clear defining line, but rather a range from the more pure end (athletics) to the peculiar (breakdancing). Olympic sport introduces a further refinement in that it suggests some connection with the ancient games. This brings dressage safely within the fold because equestrianism generally was such a big part of the games back then, even though many today scoff at horses dancing. Many other sports however that we accept at normal would have puzzled the ancient Greeks. Syncronised swimming puzzles me, by any criterion.
Just wondering how popular the pankration* and the chariot racing** would be.
*their form of MMA **IIRC it was the *owner* who got the prize?
Chariot racing was an Olympic sport that was open to women, in the ancient world.
Other than that, womens' sports and gladiatorial contests were considered a form of porn.
Sean, you're a classics whizz. Save me the bother of looking it up. Wasn't it the success of a female charioteer that caused the introduction of a men only rule?
I think it was Cynisca, the sister of King Agesilaos of Sparta, who won a load of prizes for chariot racing, as owner and trainer, in the 390's. But, no woman was allowed to drive a chariot, at the contest. The fact that elite Spartan women took part in their own athletic contests, naked, was a source of fascination to the Greeks.
Thank you, Sean. You are so much better than AI.
I wonder that Robert Smithson has not tried to market you.
Thanks.
The problem with AI is that time and again, it gives plausible-sounding, but wrong, answers. I asked AI to describe the fortress of Masada, and it came back with an answer that was perfect, save for one minor point. It said that Herod the Great built the fortress in 100 BC, 28 years before he was born.
You can usually get an adequate historical answer, if you ask AI a question, for which there is a lot of online content. The less content, the more inaccurate it will be.
But, lazy students will just treat AI as gospel, and get failed accordingly. To my mind, AI should be treated like Sat Nav, or calculators. You should have a fair idea already what the answer should be, and if it comes back with something that doesn't seem right, you should verify it yourself.
I use it for three things:
code generation
reducing word count
generating images for presentations
The most useful is the first, particularly where I'm using a new package/library and not quite sure of the syntax. But sometimes it spits out stuff that is incorrect and other times it does things that do work, but in a really odd way. But as a starting point to save googling or searching the docs, it can be very useful. It's like having someone go look things up on stackexchange or similar for you - and sometimes it's garbage in garbage out but often it's not bad.
For the second - useful for academic journal word counts - I don't copy and paste what it produces, but re-write my original noting where it has successfully lost words by changing sentence structure etc. Again, it misses things and sometimes changes the sense of sentiments, but is good for ideas for phrasing more succinctly.
For the third, sometimes I want a cartoon-like image to illustrate a point. AI is good for that, although the results can also be hit and miss.
When I have used it I have found it useful for first drafts, and for the final 10% squeeze to tighten up a letter or a piece - which makes it punchy and succinct (like my comments).
"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"
That's a USA Christian Nationalist geopolitical theme, which I heard some months ago from a USA commentator suggesting that from analysing the views of someone like Scott Bessant or Eldridge Colby or JD Vance. But I can't put a name to the commentator. It was discussed in the Ukraine the Latest podcast earlier.
It is based on their idea that UK France Germany Sweden etc are going Islamist in 30 years or so (obvious nuts, but they ARE nuts), and that to contain Russia they need an Eastern chain of still-Christian (ie still white) countries from N-S along the borders of Russia - so Poland etc. And then they can ignore anything West of that.
It is BS because their analysis of Europe is based on their assumptions themselves based on USA white nationalist culture - like the nostrums about no free speech in Europe, London the Islamist city because it has a Muslim mayor about whom Trump has tantrums, abortion being an existential evil and so on.
They take their own commonplaces viewed from inside the Usonian silo too seriously, but Yanks always have done.
It will fail because the Eastern Europeans know that Europe requires unity throughout, and we can't afford to be divided - even if in their view Western Europeans sit on our arses.
"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"
That's a USA Christian Nationalist geopolitical theme, which I heard some months ago from a USA commentator suggesting that from analysing the views of someone like Scott Bessant or Eldridge Colby or JD Vance. But I can't put a name to the commentator.
It is based on their idea that UK France Germany Sweden etc are going Islamist in 30 years or so (obvious nuts, but they ARE nuts), and that to contain Russia they need an Eastern chain of still-Christian (ie still white) countries from N-S along the borders of Russia - so Poland etc. And then they can ignore anything West of that.
It is BS because their analysis of Europe is based on their assumptions themselves based on USA white nationalist culture - like the nostrums about no free speech in Europe, London the Islamist city because it has a Muslim mayor about whom Trump has tantrums, abortion being an existential evil and so on.
They take their own commonplaces viewed from inside the Usonian silo too seriously, but Yanks always have done.
It will fail because the Eastern Europeans know that Europe requires unity throughout, and we can't afford to be divided - even if in their view Western Europeans sit on our arses.
They do forget that for a few in living memory and many in cultural memory in Eastern Europe have been brutalised by Russia and Germany and so they know the perils of being left to hang.
The US, being insulated in both World wars and forgetting the British burning down the White House are complacent - their geographical position makes the Channel look like a mere trifle.
Their perception of how keen Eastern European and Central European countries are to be in permanent peril is way off.
"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"
Comments
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).
- code generation
- reducing word count
- generating images for presentations
The most useful is the first, particularly where I'm using a new package/library and not quite sure of the syntax. But sometimes it spits out stuff that is incorrect and other times it does things that do work, but in a really odd way. But as a starting point to save googling or searching the docs, it can be very useful. It's like having someone go look things up on stackexchange or similar for you - and sometimes it's garbage in garbage out but often it's not bad.For the second - useful for academic journal word counts - I don't copy and paste what it produces, but re-write my original noting where it has successfully lost words by changing sentence structure etc. Again, it misses things and sometimes changes the sense of sentiments, but is good for ideas for phrasing more succinctly.
For the third, sometimes I want a cartoon-like image to illustrate a point. AI is good for that, although the results can also be hit and miss.
Closest would be Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper ffs! Outside of cabinet/shadow you have just David Davis and IDS.
The career trajectory of our politicians is seriously screwed. They are both promoted and discarded way too quickly.
"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
Also, sounding it, with a wee lass knocking out a decent version of Fairy Tale of New York, and an older black chap doing a passable crooner version of Chistmas classics.
@atrupar.com
GOLDMAN: If your department deports anyone with an ongoing asylum application, you are violating the law, correct?
KRISTI NOEM: Joe Biden left us--
GOLDMAN: I'm not asking about Joe Biden
NOEM: *keeps talking over him*
GOLDMAN: The answer is yes
MAGAZINER: How many veterans have you deported?
NOEM: We haven't deported veterans
MAGAZINER: We are now joined on Zoom by a combat veteran you deported to Korea
@thetnholler.bsky.social
🔥Rep. Bennie Thompson to Noem: “You have put your own interests ahead of the department and violated the law. You are making 🇺🇸 less safe. I call on you to resign— do a real service to the country. That is, if Trump doesn’t fire you first.”
https://bsky.app/profile/thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3m7pyuwpees2h
Trump too, to have an international view.
Neither seems to be doing very well.
But he has zero relevant experience, beyond being media savvy from acting, so nearly all his solutions are fanciful at best, and whilst his superficial understanding of the problems is good, drill deeper and he didn't know any of the detail.
I suspect he will do very well for the Greens, but would be terrible in government.
I saw this earlier with an accompanying map and it was stark how by trying to disrup Poland, Austria and Hungary it creates a very helpful buffer for Russia to try and spread its tentacleswestwards.
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.
And arguably this terrible phase started around 2013 or 2019 if feeling charitable to the coalition and May, we don't have to wait til 2029.
It's easy to diagnose all the country's problems - we do that on here most days - but the problem is or are the solutions which need to be cost effective, practical and legal which rules out 99% of what's offered on here and elsewhere.
Polanski may have an idea of what he thinks will work but I suspect it wouldn't take too long to dismantle his thesis.
And then accepted unquestioningly by Witless. And then by his boss in the White House.
The notion that this stuff is just spewed out - without any Congessional input or oversight - is to say the least, alarming.
I think we should do it.
Not that Hungary would be much of a loss.
It's aged reasonably well
Missing from the competencies of most of our politicians is how to actually deliver purposeful change working through a large organisation operating in a highly complex and contested environment.
There's been some stuff on PB over the years!
(Polanski is clearly a plank of very high order. Cameron was ok really.)
I asked AI to compare US casualties in the Korean and Vietnam war. It got the numbers about right, but in its infinite wisdom gave the smaller number as being larger than the larger number.
AI told me I could book a Premier Inn in Calais (not that I would ever want to). There are no Premier Inns in Calais. It also recommended another hotel that was actually in Spain.
Just 3 examples over the last few months that I spotted were wrong. Goodness knows what was wrong that I didn't know.
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.
Got to ask how they would have more control of the flow of people across the Med. It's down to a few warlords looking at who is paying the least and pushing x,000 in their directions until that Government starts paying more..
But most politicians, now, have experience of neither.
One day, an ex-Deutsche Bank manager will get into government. Given Douche Bank’s non-system for hierarchy (think - anarchy), they will go through government like a chainsaw through cheese.
This is undoubtedly helpful in building a local fan club, who can then be pressed to deliver leaflets or pose for photographs. I don't begrudge the MPs for doing this. But it is definitely a problem that they are much more directly rewarded for this activity than they are for, say, learning about how government and the public sector works, reading research papers, scrutinising legislation or preparing for committee meetings, engaging with new ideas, or generally building the skills and knowledge necessary to govern effectively. Outsourcing all of the thinking to think tanks seems like a great idea at first, but it leaves us with ministers who have to do a lot of on-the-job learning very quickly, before being replaced with someone else equally unprepared.
Borrowing a lot of money to open a loss making airport won't end well. It seems we are all collateral.
NEW THREAD
Perhaps we should start one.
It's going to be a decade for normality to return. In the meantime, we might be better off phoning an agency to get some interim politicians in from somewhere else.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/royal-mail-fires-postman-under-36380655
Gnomophobic postpeople…..
Whilst all this is happening we are doing nothing but gawping like landed fish and banging on about lanyard wearers.
- Viewcode, "The Intermarium", 2023/01/29, see https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/01/29/the-intermarium/
See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ClgqPF7UOI
It is based on their idea that UK France Germany Sweden etc are going Islamist in 30 years or so (obvious nuts, but they ARE nuts), and that to contain Russia they need an Eastern chain of still-Christian (ie still white) countries from N-S along the borders of Russia - so Poland etc. And then they can ignore anything West of that.
It is BS because their analysis of Europe is based on their assumptions themselves based on USA white nationalist culture - like the nostrums about no free speech in Europe, London the Islamist city because it has a Muslim mayor about whom Trump has tantrums, abortion being an existential evil and so on.
They take their own commonplaces viewed from inside the Usonian silo too seriously, but Yanks always have done.
It will fail because the Eastern Europeans know that Europe requires unity throughout, and we can't afford to be divided - even if in their view Western Europeans sit on our arses.
The US, being insulated in both World wars and forgetting the British burning down the White House are complacent - their geographical position makes the Channel look like a mere trifle.
Their perception of how keen Eastern European and Central European countries are to be in permanent peril is way off.
I'm not sure on the level of discipline - maybe blunt words of advice would be better ie being torn off a strip, but I am sure it needed addressing.
I'd say the same if a postman legally pulled down a nationalist flag; it's just outside the acceptable behaviour for such a job position.
It's worth a note that he was an agency worker, not salaried staff.
Budapexit
Romexit
Exit Pole