Reminder for everyone complaining about Justin Webb: Radio 3 exists.
Bourgeois interests, proletarian instincts.
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Reminder for everyone complaining about Justin Webb: Radio 3 exists.
That's the thing. Who knew Mandelson could be so honest?
"It just could not happen in Britain."
on the 'stack, more reminiscences of odd things people say in financial markets backofmind.substack.com/p/songs-my-p...
I couldn't migrate a whole blog. It's easy to c&p individual posts (links, formats and all) into Substack. This gives me a chance to ditch my more embarrassing posts.
Of course. Just because Reform doesn't serve the interests of capital doesn't mean it is on the side of workers.
Reform is backed by the spivviest and most regressive sections of capital. It wouldn't serve the interests of much of capitalism.
Interesting poll. Brexit very likely reduced GDP/head relative to the counterfactual Remain economy but not absolutely. Britons are even more down on Brexit than economists!
Political reporters like "drama". That's why they like the Reform circus just like they were excited by Brexit. What they don't want is to report the dull grind of serious policy.
Yes, I can. Thanks for asking. Will do so when I return from my break.
Hypothesis: Labour's counter-productive obsession with looking tough on immigration is because they've been misled by the media into thinking they should. But the media is an increasingly poor guide to public opinion: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-politi...
It's also a misreading of social science - the idea that demands for change are driven only by prominent individuals, rather than by socio-economic forces. If you really want to know why people want change, don't read a newspaper - just look in an estate agent's window.
Farage's promise of welfare cuts appeal to mean-spiritedness, not to anyone who wants a healthy capitalist economy. Here's one I wrote earlier: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/benefits-f...
Crown Court (repeated on Thursdays on Talking Pictures) was an example of how to do good drama quite cheaply. There's a lesson in for hard-pushed TV companies.
Today's lesson is to not go into politics. It's just not worth the (grossly hypocritical) scrutiny & pressure to resign over petty affairs. And so politics will become even more dumbed down.
Peer effects, I guess: many of the writers I admire are on Substack.
It's getting rid of me: the whole thing is shutting down at the end of this month.
Yes, we can. I'm not sure, though, that Starmer fully appreciates the link between economic stagnation and reactionary/racist politics. Nor, I suspect, do many pols & journos.
Typepad's shutting down, so I've had to move.
Yes.
Thanks. I'll not post any more to S&M. The whole site will disappear after Sept 30th, so the tab will be pointless then.
Well, yes. In its defence, it's easier to move old posts onto Substack than other sites, and it looks nicer than blogger. Also, I'm using it for free for now.
My first new post on Substack; we spend too much time moralizing and not enough thinking about socio-economic failure: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/systems-no...
Thanks. It might appear later.
Not yet.
Thanks. There's 20 years of the blighters, so it'll exhaust my patience to do em all. (Also, there are plenty where I repeat myself). But I'll try to add more.
In going through my archive, I was reminded that there used to be a thing called Gavin Williamson. This improves my opinion of this government.
What the world needs: peace, justice, prosperity. What it's getting: another bleeding Substack: chrisdillow.substack.com This has most of my old Typepad posts (the less execrable ones) since the start of 2021. More may be added.
Greater Manchester has been the fastest growing part of the country in the past decade – measured either by total growth or by productivity growth. I’ve had a look into the data to try to work out what is growing and why. Below are some of the things I have found. 🧵 1/7
"The right of asylum is an untouchable provision of English law" - Roger Scruton (England: an elegy, p8). Yes, we've moved to the right of Scruton.
No thanks. It's OK. I'm trying some other things.
Sorry, I've no idea.
Hi. Question for Substack users. Do you get the message "working offline", and if so how do you fix it? Substack support is not use, obvs.
Thanks.
Oh yes, the public want lots of things banned. But they also want a wealth tax and lots of nationalization. It's odd what bits of public opinion politicians accept and what bits they reject.
Thanks. I'm hoping to shift the archive somewhere, but it's tricky.
Thanks. I might need that: it's proving trickier than I'd hoped.
Here's one from my archive which might help explain why politicians have so little sympathy for migrants, & are so keen to sustain inequality: stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...
Thanks. But I'm running into obstacles wherever I attempt to move the archives. I'll shift the blog to a new platform, but the archive looks like being lost.
Yes. Andrew Oswald has been saying this for years. eg: warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econ...
I'm not one for calling out; too self-righteous for me. But yes, it's wrong, I suspect, as a matter of tactics: it's not clear how it advances worthwhile objectives.
Yes. But the point is that (as with mining villages), market forces alone aren't enough for areas to recover after the loss of their main industry, even over many years. Hence the need for govt help of some kind.
Yes, mitigated by two things - that landlords might not take much property out of the rented sector; or that tenants are already paying the max & so simply can't be milked further.
Yes, thanks for asking. I'll move over to blogger; still thinking of how to archive past blogs, though.
Economists should also do this, esp with statistical work - eg what did you expect to find but didn't? what evidence would you like to have but don't have? what genuinely surprised you? Etc.
I argued here that the government was ignorant of basic economic concepts such as opportunity cost, comparative advantage, regulatory capture, the tragedy of the commons and transactions cost economics. I should have added tax incidence to the list: stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...
I'm not sure. 2007-08 happened under independent central banks, whereas the much less independent BoE didn't see a crisis from 1946 to 1972. The case for independence is rather that it cuts the inflation risk premium, not the threat of crises.
If I were to nail the difference between me as a kid making all sorts of nonsense and me as an adult doing the same, it would be understanding processes, guidelines, notes, restrictions, laws and rules, plus how to monetise it. It’s what makes you a “grown up” maker of stuff. And then there’s tech.
Yes. This is one reason retired people have become more right-wing; they become more atomized by losing the social connections of work and hence more radicalizable by those platforms.
True, they might not be directly interested in economics. But whilst I can't speak for Germany, we've lots of evidence that local decline in the UK fuels the far-right - eg warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econ... or theconversation.com/the-link-bet....
Only at CHRISTMASSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes. In his book Immigration & Freedom Chandran Kukathas showed that immigration controls suppress the freedoms of all citizens. Trouble is, most of the political class aren't keen on freedom, except for themselves.
Agreed. It's a law & order issue, and this govt knows how to suppress protest.
Reupping this from a few weeks ago: you don't beat the far right by indulging their fantasies, but by reversing economic decline: stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...
Spineless, gutless, brainless.
Marx pointed out that in capitalism there is the "conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things". Some things don't change.
All true. But those problems apply whether people are in work of not. My point is merely that it should be easier for the govt to simply create jobs than it is for it to destroy jobs whilst creating others.
BITD the UK right could mobilize large chunks of capital (big & small), many professionals & even some intellectuals. Today, all it can manage is a few billionaire cranks and their gimps, and semi-criminal elements. This is an under-appreciated change.
But they make life easier for the govt! Its easier to get people into housebuilding, care work etc from the dole queues than it is from existing jobs. (Assuming, obvs, sensible policy).
This illustrates the distinction I made here between the politics of lived experience & that of abstraction. Our problem is that our political culture overvalues the latter. stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...
No. I'm retired; my CV days are long gone.
It's mine.
Blogged: how the ruling elite's failure to stand up against fascism is causing a crisis for UK democracy: stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...
The BBC might just as well run stories headlined "Woman says she was abducted by aliens."
"What we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed" - Thatcher www.margaretthatcher.org/document%2F1... She omitted to add that this applies only to organized labour, and not to fascists.
Historians are often tempted to tell you something is "worth about X in today's dollars." Here's why I think you should not do that, and what I think you should do instead buttondown.com/anotherway/a...
My take on the ice cream incident in Barcelona macdonnchada.substack.com/p/ice-cream-...
Possibly, but I'm not sure this explains the regular five-minute hates on Radio 6, whose audience (I'd have thought) was less sympathetic to Reform than most.
"Wyngarde’s story is often considered one of unrealised potential; the career of a great leading man of his era derailed by first his self-parodic turn as Jason King and then definitively by that fateful incident at Gloucester..." @hellothisisivan.bsky.social on Peter Wyngarde: 👇 wp.me/p6lzJb-7Ax
This. BBC bias isn't (just) about how it covers stories, but about the choice of what it covers: what if it gave blanket coverage to (eg) polluted rivers, CEO pay, underfunded public services instead of to migrants?
Some reasonable ideas here: obvs, property taxes need reforming. But the basic economic problem remains - to cut private consumption to free up real resources for govt spending & investment. That's a bigger project (& maybe harder sell) than just tax reform. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
That's another thing that instinctively puzzles this Marxist - that much of the right (MAGA or Farage) seems heedless of the interests of big parts of capital. (Again, we can rationalize this, but it still sits oddly with me).
I got my understanding of libertarianism not just from Hayek & Friedman but from Nozick - & he was big on self-ownership which obvs implies a hatred of any form of slavery.
Sure. Many were insincere (eg support for Pinochet). Logically, I can see why the shift occurred: it just feels strange. But, then, politics isn't only a matter of rationality.
To those of us in the Thatcher/Reagan generation, the shift in the right from libertarians to slavery apologists/ICE supporters etc will always seem freakish, however explicable it may be.
Hypothesis: when there's more than usual labour reallocation (eg after recessions), job mismatches can temporarily raise the Nairu, giving higher inflation for a given level of joblessness. This is what we might be seeing now; the reallocation being from consumer jobs to public sector ones.
'Thanks to shows like Homes Under the Hammer, a sizeable chunk of the population see themselves as temporarily embarrassed property tycoons.' New piece by me on Britain's favourite property programme: www.forthedeskdrawer.com/p/tenants-un...
Blogged: street protests aren't very effective, so perhaps we should consider other forms of political action: stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...
It'd be nice if she pointed out that her constituents can't afford a week in a hotel because neoliberal capitalism is failing them. But then, it's so much easier to punch down than up.
Also, very many married women historically have worked: where did cotton mills get their workers? (eh.net/encyclopedia...). There's a selective use of "trad" here.
Half of new businesses cease trading within their first 3 years (www.experianplc.com/newsroom/pre...) Is Fraser also opposed to entrepreneurship?
Tell me you've never heard the story about the Israeli kindergarten without telling me etc www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
The anti-Marxists of the 70s & 80s claimed to support liberty, free trade & the rule of law & oppose tyranny & the use of murder as a political tool. Which shows how much the right has changed in my lifetime.
Please do. I go into charity shops wondering "has anyone recently died who had good taste & stupid children?"
Any idea why that was? I mean, Keynes thought inflation bad because it caused an "arbitrary rearrangement of riches". Was that really what they had in mind - or something less rational?
I suspect what voters hate most isn't inflation but adverse changes in relative prices, eg utility bills rising faster than wages. That can be solved by taking a less spineless approach to regulation.
Yes. Cf too Labour's Child Poverty Act. You can't use the law to solve a political problem.
Yes, bubbles often leave a legacy of useful infrastructure - most obviously the railway boom of the 1840s.
Put these facts alongside mass arrests of Palestine Action sympathizers & the repressive police protection of JD Vance, & you have a picture that tells the nasty truth about "law & order".
Arms race? Fear of falling behind is leading to behaviour that's individually rational but collectively self-defeating. (In the 90s, people were right to foresee a take-off in internet retailing, but even so much of the investment in it lost money).
Partly coz it's an imperfect world. Also, the quality of UK management has been poor for years - exacerbated by insufficient competition & (at least til recently) the ability to use cheap labour rather than think about raising efficiency.
True. Problem is that politicians are living in the past & want to believe that our comparative advantage is still in manufacturing, when in truth it lies in universities & the creative industries.
There is a case for having it in the private sector (tho the govt will never make it!) Part of this is that the industry will be badly managed whoever owns it, so it's better for the govt that the private sector gets the blame.
In a gold rush, you don't get rich by digging for gold; you get rich by selling shovels.
If the government is going to act like a distressed assets fund, then it has lost any interest in the question of what should be done by the private sector and what by the state.
Marx famously said that English Tories imagined that they were enthusiastic about the Constitution when in fact they are enthusiastic only about ground rent. The American equivalent is that the right is enthusiastic only about inequality. davidallengreen.com/2025/08/what...
I'm relaunching my website, Set Yet Speaking, which will host my translations of medieval literature. In this first post, I discuss why I'm giving this another go, why translation matters, and how a short extract from Beowulf inspired the name of the site. nikolasgunn.wordpress.com/2025/08/12/w...
There's a lesson here for everyone: Never interpret economic data with partisan political prejudice. Monthly data won't always/often show what you'd like: admit it.
The fact that this woman is barking mad is merely a matter of individual psychiatry. What's of political importance is that many members of the ruling class and much of the media thought she was fit to be PM.
Yes! I've written on this several times, eg here: stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...