Yeah. I'm highly dubious it can work. The bull case would be the one period of the Johnson government that wasn't dysfunctional, the Johnson-Sunak-Gove at CDL era, but the difference was that Johnson was *lazy* but did provide a clear steer.
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Yeah. I'm highly dubious it can work. The bull case would be the one period of the Johnson government that wasn't dysfunctional, the Johnson-Sunak-Gove at CDL era, but the difference was that Johnson was *lazy* but did provide a clear steer.
They have also brought in a new economic advisor - there are a bunch of reasons to do this, all of which you can find advocates for in a divided Downing Street. These reasons don't cohere. As I say, I don't think it is gonna work.
As I wrote this morning, the creation of the new deputy role is not because they think she is underresourced. It is because Starmer wants his own chief secretary who can do for him what the chief secretary to the Treasury (Jones' old job) does for the Chancellor. That's it.
The lack of business experience is IMO a problem for policy but it's not why there is a lack of direction. That just is as simple as the principal doesn't provide it.
Indeed. Getting in a whole new ministerial layer because he doesn't like it when the departments try to get him to act as referee, like, what is being PM actually *for*?
I mean, again, literally yesterday they went for comms director no.4! This is a government riven by doubt and internal division.
Nope, that's not right either! It's really just as simple as: the PM has no politics, so the government drifts towards the path of least resistance, the approach is always 'just need more institutional memory', but the institutional memory disagrees on what to do, so there is drift, rinse, repeat.
Just 1,428 days until this will stop being relevant.
Nope! You can believe this stuff if you want, but it's not true.
Hah!
I mean 1) a bunch of the levers they are pulling are on the left, but also 2) to reiterate, literally yesterday they change personnel.
Weird thing about this is that there isn't even really a pop culture version of Frankenstein who isn't a bit sympathetic! True of the 1931 version, and the canonical 1974 version (Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein).
They literally *just* changed a bunch of people? I am dubious that it will fix the underlying problem but this isn't a government that thinks things are working!
Fifteen years ago, Jon noticed that Penguin's new Modern Classic edition of Nabokov's Lolita had stripped out the foreword by "John Ray, Jr." - who needs this yawnsome old intro! - ...which is actually part of the novel. A contact at Penguin told me the following Monday morning was not a jolly one.
I now support the meteor.
Shocked beyond belief to hear (via the shop’s IG account) of the death of Jonathan Main, the stalwart of Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace. I only met Jon once but we chatted online for years and he was so very funny, interesting, and knowledgable (with apt cynicism) about the book world. RIP Jon.
36) Sorry, Baby. How to describe this? Funny and harrowing horror-comedy about sexual assault, if that makes sense.
Sorry, even by the standards of this exercise- this seems like the best possible signing you could make for “third choice goalkeeper”?
This is the most US sports reporting thing that has ever happened.
Oh this is so so so American Sports Journalism coded, amazing to see. Can then re-rank at Christmas!
They did!
Quite.
Some reserve keeper for someone.
I know I am the problem here, because I clicked on this like a madman, but come on!
Can see why you’d want to.
No, Labour have also had an anti-system leader, from 2015-20.
You can see this with what of the early pledges has survived, i.e. railways renationalisation, the dumb 'what will it take for this meeting to be over?' pledges on the race equality act, etc.
It’s because it’s the only one where breaking it isn’t the path of least resistance.
Yeah, people are obsessed with, e.g. the zero kidders, but actually, it is the later starters, one or two-ers who are actually the thing causing it, and as you say, that feels more like preferences than anything else.
I am much more worried that the political consequences of falling birth rates will have disastrous effects, we see that a bit with the UK's 'no take, only throw' politics.
So, in the long term, I completely agree - I don't believe that falling birth rates are a thing that just keeps happening until TFR hits zero. As you say, it doesn't pass the sniff test. Ultimately, people love to fuck!
You know what, actually, you're right, I'm wrong I think. Have an ideological preference for 'global problem, must have a global explanation' but it ain't necessarily so.
My theory is that there is *one* way to raise birth rates, and it is to normalise hands off French-style parenting. France is the only country in the world where the amount of time parents spend on care has fallen rather than risen, and has the highest fertility rate in Europe
Food for thought from @chrisgiles.ft.com
There's a global fall in having children, I don't think it needs a 'culturally specific' explanation. There are good culturally specific explanations for the booms as it is.
We've also found a lot of ways to *increase* the labour. Parents living further away from grandparents, lots of interventions to push childrearing best-practices (breastfeeding, active play, healthy eating etc). You have to do a lot more to clear the bar of good parenting (not in itself a bad thing)
I love my friends' kids, but I also woke up at 11am and went for an expensive breakfast this weekend, you know?
and actual Baumol's disease for the paid labour bits.
I stole this from someone on here, but ultimately, the slump in people having children is as simple as 'Baumol's cost disease for unpaid labour'.
Yeah, and it's very much a thing I know I have an unreasonable position on, but nonetheless....
Yeah - but what I find odd about the Substack people on X is a) they are partly responsible for it becoming so hostile to links! It was a change designed to whomp them! and b) surely they can see the numbers too.
Yeah, it adds another risk factor, but it's IMO well below, say (stealing this from @storywonker.bsky.social) 'something happens in US politics that is highly sensitive for HBO but something every young British actor condemns'.
When I see someone doing, I have an entirely unjustified ick. Just have some goddamn dignity.
Yeah, UK Bluesky is different from US Bluesky, but we do also seem to have managed to get some uh, quite leftwing Americans to notice that we are not in fact just running stories about how Beauregard V Sacking the Third should do more union-busting at Redundancies, Inc.
Yeah, this is what I think is not quite true, I think if you are willing to post through the fact this site runs on some impracticable utopian ideas about onboarding, your audience finds you.
I know it's pointlessly defiant, but I just cannot be doing with the link in replies. I will not do it and I am not going to do it.
Might be one of the legacy blueticks like mine, to be scrupulously fair.
I worry about Bluesky's longterm prospects for the very selfish reason that I care a lot about people reading my work and nowhere else on the social web is that into links these days.
Thanks!
This is very good
A thing I think is surprising, to me at least, is look, if you're a professional pollster, frankly who cares which platform you are on. But if your business is links, frankly why are you not trying to move more people over here? You can always just block the crazies.
Doctors and drug developers who first saw scans from a new targeted form of radiotherapy were amazed. For some patients in the clinical trial, Novartis’ radioligand therapy had — in just six months — completely cleared cancer that had spread around their bodies. on.ft.com/462deTZ
That is why understanding the first principles of your political beliefs is so important. You have to know and be able to reason to yourself why you are taking a position before you can convince anyone else.
As I am literally in the middle of putting in a PowerPoint presentation: Comms is effectively a tactical and operational tool, akin to being the guy who stops your boat leaking or tunes up the engine so it gets you there faster. It is your job not to steer it into an iceberg.
Yeah, I think that is actually a rare example of genuine bad comms, the lack of a BBC theory, as it were.
That we are in this situation should not be a surprise to Labour. It was always a likely if not central scenario. The reaction — scrabbling around for more salami slicing tax increases — suggests that it has come as a surprise.
Only way to break the loop is to break the election pledge. That was likely a year ago. Now it’s certain.
Around a year ago, there was a plausible but unlikely scenario where growth improved somewhat, rates eased and a positive feedback loop emerged. It’s time to accept that we lost that dice roll. Now we have the opposite feedback loop: rates increase, government reacts stupidly, repeat.
Will also be from a fete or something.
And the problem for the government now is they have to change the message from “this huge black hole we didn’t realise was there but chose to do nothing about” to “well, it’s still there and maybe it’s about time to take it seriously”, and the latter seems…much harder to me. But we are where we are.
There are Reform politicians are on the record saying that we should not have got involved!
If the main use you as a politician get out of your flag is Remembrance Sunday, it is not a stretch to say that you are proud of the union jack flying over Singapore in 1945, and that many of the graffiti painters think that 1945 was a defeat.
I think the correct answer is [a line about how they see it at work] which pivots, in my view naturally, to an attack on the people who want to use it to intimidate.
Type of Labour Guy on here who both thinks that the Tories were awful but refuses to accept that any of the problems the government faces might run through things that are difficult or unpopular.
The headroom is not still there and you *have* raised taxes.
Yeah, what's particularly perplexing is, one reason why some politicians struggle is they have literally no cultural hinterland whatsoever. He has bags of it and loads of it is directly relevant to this question.
'To me one of the proudest things was seeing the Union Flag on a Ukraine-controlled drone. Anyway, just subtly going to pivot to the fact that Farage is soft on this stuff.'
What do you mean 'unnecessary (again)'? In the last budget she inherited a huge hole in the public finances and in between Labour tried to force through five billion pounds of welfare cuts!
But they don't have to give normal answers because they do not have a normal job. Like, I'm sure that Yvette Cooper does have flag bunting, she almost certainly has done like, a fete or a coffee morning or something for Remembrance Sunday with it.
The British electorate loves electing elitists!
'When I am travelling the world, as I often do, of course, being prime minister, that feeling when I get to Heathrow and I see the flag logo and I know that I am home.'
e.g. 'Every year of course I lay the wreath at the local memorial so actually I have quite a few flags in the attic! That's what it really represents to me: that ultimate sacrifice to save the world from fascism'
They do actually have plenty of good answers that only they can give because they *see* the flag more than basically anyone else.
It's really hard to cast kids! They did a terrific job in those films just because they kept the cast together.
Just lunacy for Labour to think that UK's problems can be solved while keeping their manifesto promises intact:
No apology needed!
A sign that a setup is dysfunctional is if you keep going through comms directors, because it is a sign that what happens is that, at the point Sean describes, instead of going 'so we need to change the approach' you go 'bad comms. Need a new comms director!'
This is exactly my experience of doing comms. Generally an organisation’s policy problems and disagreements come out in their comms, because you can’t paper over the cracks anymore. You have to say *something*.
Not all leftwing politicians have that discomfort, but it doesn't mean that it is not present on the left.
Which wasn't what he was doing either. You just repeatedly make statements about the inner life of governments that just aren't right on the basic facts of what is going on.
You need to adjust this perma-take. Until yesterday, the most powerful bit of the team thought that 2005-10 was a mistake!
This is a good illustration of what I mean by 'it is never comms'. Ultimately you have to start with the principal - i.e. when has this minister actually ever put up a flag, and why? What does the flag actually mean to them? These aren't vulnerabilities that you can 'comms' your way out of.
Nope! You did this with Levido, just imagining dynamics that aren't at play and creating ideas of the spinners that aren't right.
Which team? Sorry you are just hallucinating things that aren't true here!
It's never the comms, it is always the policy or the principal.
I did laugh out loud at 'Michelle Obama did not comment when approached'.
Think the reasons the government is fumbling on this one is: a) they can't or won't name the problem with the last one and b) they don't actually like the flag
That piece was a real 'Oh, I'm sure that's just a bad headline', and nope!
Yeah - but have to compare to 'the same press in the 90s' and 'what we have now'. It was a dreadful decade to make those films given that but also probably the least dreadful decade to make those films?
Yeah, I think the 2000s were in so many ways the perfect time to make it, in that while there was a lot of old media creepiness it was in retreat, and what we have now is so much worse.
Yeah - there's a type of person who defends the HP series to me who really doesn't seem to appreciate that since the movies were made, the media environment has become a thousand times worse.
Because I am a mean and catty theatre kid still, I howled at your number two. Mine would be - really really boring as they seek to pad it out to eight hours - one of the kids is even worse an actor than EW - constant delays and logistical fuckups - due to 3) it looks terrible - intra-cast feuds
Thanks so much!
“History shows that when governments see ‘reform’ as a money-saving exercise, they end up with neither reform nor more money.” Brilliant column
This is a good question. There are no good answers. If you are working with child actors is, essentially, if you don't them build up a social media profile, you are failing in your duty of care because casting decisions do sometimes get made on e.g. number of Instagram followers.
The show will likely be incredibly profitable in its first season. No doubt. That's why the plan to do all 7 books in one season is so good because it means...(aide whispers something in my ear) oh golly. oh man
My read is HBO leadership sees all the logistical questions as people litigating their feelings about JKR by stealth, so the decision tree is 'well, she actually is pro free speech and that's our contract' rather than 'hmm, is there any other reason we might want to gag the actors?'
The politics of trans are v easy for HBO (some of the actors disagree with JKR, she couldn't and doesn't want to stop them, visibly the Potter audience does not care). The politics of 'whatever random thing c50 teenagers might fall out over in 2031', uh, maybe not so much.
To take another artistic institution, one reason why the Royal Opera House's leadership embarrassed themselves is they basically had a 'we have politics when it is easy' position and that then meant they ended up in this pretzel of a position when the politics were hard.
Yeah - a large part of the media covers Harry Potter like it is a political party (I remember a ridiculous spread literally doing Kremlinology on a statement from one of the cast that was seen as 'coded support' -WTAF). Parts of the Hollywood press will want to find Zegler/Gadot style beef.