Politics
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Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister & Elective Dictatorship
Several friends have written from around the world to ask if I have broken open the champagne to celebrate. I have not. Johnson is still PM, he is still in power. Some of the candidates to replace him would likely be worse than Johnson. Liz Truss is a liability.#battleforno10pic.twitter.com/ra7XbD0VEp — Angela Rayner 🌹 (@AngelaRayner) August 4, 2022 Already the dominant refrain is tax-cutting – with no transparency about where the spending cuts would fall. Steve Baker’s parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group has been chipping away at the green agenda. As Helen Horton describes in The Guardian “the green Conservatives, … seem incredibly disorganised and weak, … squabbling over whether to use…
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Exceptionalism and Entitlement
01 August 2021 Financial Times published revelations on Johnson’s and Party’s finances. Peter Oborne is fundraising to establish a website “which will record, sift and analyse the numerous lies, falsehoods and misleading statements of Boris Johnson and his colleagues. The website will also chronicle the role of the British media in aiding and abetting the culture of mendacity in Downing Street. Ahead of the 2019 general election we set up a website to make a record of the exponential rise in public lying by government ministers and spokespeople which followed Boris Johnson’s appointment as prime minister in July 2019. It was a full time job. However, we were obliged…
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Maybe economic efficiency is not all it’s cracked up to be
Neil Irwin writing in today’s New York Times has suggested that the chasm opening up on both sides of the Atlantic is between the economic elite who favour a “dynamic globalized economy” – bankers, trade negotiators, international business people and mainstream political leaders. “Efficiency sounds great in theory. What kind of monster doesn’t want to optimize possibilities, minimize waste and make the most of finite resources? But the economic and policy elite may like efficiency a lot more than normal humans do.” ” Perhaps the pursuit of ever higher gross domestic product misses a fundamental understanding of what makes most people tick.” There has been a rejection of expert opinion in the…