“Ambitious reform” of funding and regulation is needed to stave off financial crisis in UK higher education as competition for students is stopping cash-strapped universities joining forces to cut costs, a review has warned.
Sir Nigel Carrington, chair of the Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce, said the “marketisation” of higher education since tuition fees in England rose to £9,000 in 2012 had led institutions to “operate as islands”.
Last year ministers agreed to increase domestic tuition fees in England in line with inflation for three years, taking the annual payment to £9,535 in 2025-26 and likely above £10,000 this parliament.
But Carrington, former vice-chancellor of the University of the Arts London, said the funding situation was still “unsustainable” as the real value of fees had fallen by about 40 per cent since 2012.
Securing the sector’s future required a “fundamental rethink of how higher education operates at a national level” and a commitment to “ambitious reform” from universities and policymakers, he added.
The review by the task force set up by Universities UK, the main lobby group, called for ministers to stabilise university finances, create a “transformation fund” and remove regulatory barriers to collaboration.
But it added that universities also needed to “urgently” look at cutting costs by integrating services and procurement.
A long-term funding squeeze and softening enrolment of international students has exacerbated a financial crisis in higher education, with universities taking drastic cost-cutting measures to avert a wave of insolvencies.
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Half of UK institutions have said they have closed courses, while one-quarter have made compulsory redundancies in the past three years.
Carrington said there had already been “an enormous amount” of retrenchment in the sector, warning that without more support from government the UK was in “real danger of falling down the global league tables” and compromising the quality of teaching and research objectives.
As well as stabilising the sector’s income, Carrington called for clarification on competition laws around university collaboration and a shift in “philosophy” from the Office for Students, the sector regulator, which had been “built on a foundational pillar of promoting competition”.
The report pointed to examples of collaboration such as the University of London, a federation of 17 institutions that share services, and the joint campus operated by Falmouth and Exeter universities in Cornwall.
Efficiencies could also be made by leveraging sector buying power with a “more strategic, cross-institutional approach to purchasing” in areas such as software, it found.
While mergers “may be appropriate in a few cases”, Carrington said they were not a “quick fix” and were unlikely to be desirable for most institutions.
Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think-tank, said the report confirmed the sector would emerge from the current crisis “looking very different”.
“Universities know they need to balance their past fierce competition with a bit more co-operation,” he said, adding that the task force was right to question whether full mergers would deliver effective change.
“The key test will be following through. There have been past comparable sector-wide initiatives which have gone nowhere.” Baroness Jacqui Smith, skills minister, said that while the government had taken “tough decisions to put universities on a firmer financial footing . . . universities must do more to deliver opportunity for students and growth for our economy”.
Editor: I post this on Sunday 6/1/2025 5:59 PM California Daylight Savings Time: Only 3 comments so far!
But any trust-the-plan case for Trump’s approach underrates how much time can be wasted and policy opportunities lost unraveling problems of your own making. The idea that we’re going to end up with the optimal form of re-industrialization at the end of all the Trump trade drama is, let’s just say, extremely unproven; a scenario where the economy just survives the drama seems more like Trump’s best case, with worse ones still very much in the picture.
And then there is just the inherent danger in living, for three years and eight months more, with a president who we know from the experience of Jan. 6, 2021, doesn’t always backtrack when he enters dangerous terrain.
A contained, checked form of Trumpian aggression seems to be what a subset of Americans want from this presidency. But their support, now as last November, rests on a gamble — that there will be forces strong enough to check him even if he decides not to chicken out.
Editor: the above is an example of the ‘Lowbrow Douthat’ in the ending of his essay at the
The some selected paragraphs of Mr. Doutaht on Gaza :
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How would you weigh the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with reference to a decadent empire’s ability or inability to maintain a Pax Americana?
One could imagine a synthesis of Biden’s Ukraine policy and Trump’s impulses that would be correct. The us overextended itself in making guarantees to Ukraine that it was never going to be able to fulfil; like our failures in Afghanistan, that was an example of imperial overreach. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, it made sense to support the Ukrainians. The failure of the Biden Administration was not recognizing the moment to cut a deal—which is hard to do. But there was a window, when Ukraine had regained a certain amount of territory, when the Administration should have said, ok, this is the frontier of our empire. Ukraine is never going to be in nato, it’s not going to get all its territory back; but they could have cut a deal to end the war in a way that would have allowed Ukraine to retain territorial integrity. There are people in the Trump Administration who want to do that. But there is also an impulse to just wash our hands of this. The outcome will depend on which impulse prevails. But Russia is in a better position now than it was two years ago. A Harris Administration would have ended up pushing in a similar direction. But Trump’s wash-his-hands impulse might leave Ukraine in a more unsustainable position than it should be.
And Gaza?
There, too, there’s a version of the Trump position which says we’re broadly on the Israeli side, but we’re not letting them just set the agenda, that could be correct. But the absence of a solution for Gaza is an intractable problem. Biden was in an impossible position, caught between his own base and the Republican Party, and his own senility and inability to be an effective actor on the world stage, which made America basically a bystander. Notwithstanding rising sympathy for the Palestinians, America’s going to retain a basic pro-Israel alignment for the next twenty years, but within that it needs to exert more influence over Israel than Biden was able to do. But toward what endgame, I don’t know. If I knew that, I’d be Jared Kushner.
To describe Washington’s role in the war in Gaza as that of ‘bystander’—given that the us has supplied Israel with tens of thousands of massive bombs and the aircraft dropping them to obliterate the Strip, together with the requisite diplomatic coverage operation at the un and elsewhere—isn’t that a euphemism of the kind you otherwise tend to avoid?
‘Bystander’ in the sense of the Biden Administration not exerting any clear strategic influence over Israel, over the conduct of the war or over the larger regional drama. That largely reflected Biden himself being effectively checked out as a major actor in his own presidency. The us remains a patron of Israel and remains directly involved in the conflict. By virtue of being a hegemonic power, the us is not a bystander in any absolute sense.
Editor: In these paragraphs The Reader discovers that Douthat is just another New York Times Political/Moral conformist, like Friedman, Brooks, Stephens and the rest of the second-stringers at this newspaper. Douthat, in his New York Times iteration, plays the role of just another political mediocrity! Yet Nick Burns interview of Douthat is revelatory of what?
Political Observer.
Added 6/1/2025
Editor : I do recall reading four of Douthat’s essay at the Spectator, which I’m having trouble finding, yet the writer of those essays seemed to be less of The New York Times persona, and more like an actual Conservative voice!
Editor: Another question: what can the reader make of the utterly talentless Douthat, that conflates the iphone as a threat to Men an Women , and the declining birthrate?
Claims that left and right, terms born during the French Revolution in the divisions of the National Assembly of 1789, are becoming, or are already, anachronisms have been a recurrent political trope since the last century. If there is no more reason to credit it now than there was in the past, evidence of confusion between the two has been visibly increasing, in an ideological flux dramatized in Brazil by Roberto Schwarz, historicized by Christopher Clark in Britain, and enacted daily in the cross-cutting populisms of Europe and America. Scenes like these speak to a slow erosion of the liberal order, with no clear-cut alternative to challenge its rule, whose upshot is the jumbled discourses cartwheeling through social media and broadcast politics, open feedstock for clinical scrutiny.
The world of ideas proper, where articulated systems of thought confront each other, is another matter. There, a serious left needs to respond, not with self-segregation or withdrawal to any Abgrenzung of its own, but with open-minded curiosity and principled critique, where these are in order. In that spirit, we lead this issue with an interview with Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist who is the most consistently original mind writing about American politics in the pages of the New York Times. In doing so, the journal continues a tradition of treating thinkers and writers of an outlook antithetical to its own with respect—and, if merited, admiration—that started with Michael Oakeshott in the sixties, and from the nineties onwards continued with Francis Fukuyama, Giovanni Sartori, J. G. A. Pocock, Karl-Heinz Bohrer and others. Author of some seven books on a wide range of subjects, covering class and culture, demography and religion, technical progress and economic stagnation, the organizing subject of Douthat’s writing is the condition of his own country, America, placed within the setting of the world. In the Victorian era there were equivalents in the press of Britain, France, Italy and elsewhere, writers about their time enjoying significant public authority. But today’s Europe lacks any real counterpart, and in the United States itself there is no journalist of comparable imaginative scope. A firebrand of the student right in his youth—incendiary entries in the Harvard Salient, an inaugural salvo of ‘Cheney for President’ in the nyt of 2009—by the time Trump ran in the primaries of 2016, Douthat was one of his sharpest critics. At no point part of what became the Never Trump brigade, Republicans—Cheney’s daughter in the lead, along with Kristol Jr and the like—scandalized by his lack of regard for Cold War pieties, Douthat would develop into one of the astutest analysts of the trajectory of the current President, whose zigzagging threats of an all-round trade war he judges condemned to failure. Here our contributor Nick Burns questions him about his intellectual formation, political evolution, international horizon and the gains and limits of his role as a tribune on America’s leading newspaper. The result is a portrait, perhaps unlike any other so far available, of a far from typical conservative intelligence.
What would make you want to have more children? This week on “Interesting Times,” Ross Douthat speaks with Dr. Alice Evans, a social scientist who is as concerned about the global decline in fertility as Ross is. The two discuss why this isn’t just a gender issue — it’s “a solitude issue” — and whether there’s a way to bring relationships back.
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Ross Douthat: From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.
Fifty years ago, the world feared a population bomb, an explosion of population growth that would yield famine, war and disaster. But for most of my career, I’ve been trying to persuade people that actually, population decline is now the greater peril. And in the last few years, the world has finally caught up with my once eccentric anxieties. We’re undeniably headed toward a period of global population collapse, one that threatens to maroon today’s children — mine, yours, if you have them, and by the way, you really should — in a world of emptying cities and slowing economies.
Our guest today has literally traveled the world studying this issue, trying to answer the hardest question, not just why birthrates have declined, but why they’ve declined so far and so fast in so many different places. Alice Evans, welcome to Interesting Times.
Editor: The above Mr. Douthat at near full screech! Mr Douthay of 2012, you can’t accuse him of inconsistaney !
To characterize Ross Douthat, in his essay of December 1, 2012 titled More Babies, Please, as sounding like some turn of the century Germanic prophet of doom and inevitable decadence. This, as more and more people realize that their lives are important in themselves, set free from a ‘civilizational’, religious, nation state, even biological context: the realization of the possibilities of human freedom, is revelatory of his linkage of the sine qua non of growth, in Capitalism, and the Catholic Church’s belief in unfettered procreation.
Philosophical Apprentice
What I missed in my 2012 comment on More Babies, PleaseDouthat resorts to the crime of decadence, and the rehabilitation of ‘individual choice’: it attempts to hint as some kind of ‘revelation’ that Douthat dare not speak its name @NYT!
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Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.
Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.
Political Observer on Mount’s contining attempts to self-emacipate from his Thatcherism, by means of political prestidigitation wedded to a selective re-telling of American History!
Headline: Conservatives Have Lost Their Grip on the World — and Themselves
September 26, 2024
Editor: in a mere 3151 word essay this Thatcherite continue to self-present as a ‘voice of reason’ in the Age of Trump! The opening paragraphs of his political monster are instructive, in fact act as a diagnosis of a kind?
The British Conservative Party has long boasted of being the most successful political party on the planet. The unimaginable scale of its defeat on July 4, when it won the fewest seats in its history, looks like the downfallof moderate conservatism. It appears to be the final straw for the center-right parties offering pragmatism, prosperity and opportunity that have dominated Western politics since World War II. Almost everywhere conservatism’s brash rival, nationalist populism, is on the march: already in power with its colorful leaders in Hungary, Italy and Argentina; on the brink of it in the United States and France; and eroding the old-style conservatives in Germany, the Netherlands and now Britain. The rivalry on the right is in danger of becoming a rout, with the senior, steadier force swallowed by its insurgent challenger.
These shocks to our established ways of thinking are so violent that we immediately assume that this must be a unique apocalypse, the product of unprecedented social and economic forces. This, I think, is a temptation to be resisted. The reality is that something similar has often happened or nearly happened before, at different times and in different places. Nationalist populism, my umbrella term for the smorgasbord of hard-right forces, always sings the same song. The circumstances that gain it a sympathetic hearing are usually much the same, too: decline of old industries and loss of well-paid jobs for men, undercutting by rising nations and, of course, fresh waves of immigrants from new places. It’s when mainstream conservatism visibly flounders in dealing with the challenge — as it has so clearly done in recent years — that such movements can hope to surge.
The upshot is both concerning and consoling. Conservatism has been here before — and it can get through it again.
Editor: As interesting as the attempt at explication , Trump and Trumpism is the child of the Ameican Tea Party that devored itself in internacine political warfare that Trump exploited! Yet note that Mr. Mount’s ‘The New Few’ was a wan attempt to self-emancipate from his Thatcherite past, and note that on page 154 and 155 Mount uses the epithet ‘Loony Left’twice and the final chapter on ‘The Riots and after’ of August 6 and 10 of 2011: Recall that the collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, 2007-2008 that Mount acted as a co-conspipertor, advocate, even a True Believer took time to manifest itself in the lives of ordinary people. And the fact that The Neo-Liberal apologists like Mount re-wrote a History Made to Measure. And that he had the brass to lecture Americans, about their own History: Oxbrider Brass is Eternal !
Editor: Nothing quite prepares The Reader for these 509 words ofHistory that seeks to enlighten The American Reader?
Nationalist populism is not a weird deviation from the natural flow of history. Since the dawn of the nation-state, it has been an ever-present threat, sometimes lurking in the shadows, sometimes derided as a throwback, but never quite disappearing from view. The possibilities for its success are often visible well in advance to keen observers, at times when most people are thinking about something else. In 1922, when the rest of Europe was convulsed by the threat of Bolshevism and Adolf Hitler was still a nonentity, the German chancellor declared “There is no doubt about it: The enemy is on the right.” In 1994, when all of Europe was still celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of history, Edward Luttwak foresaw a “space that remains wide open for a product-improved fascist party.”
It’s in the United States where the most stunning example of something like that has taken place. But the Trump phenomenon did not come out of a calm blue sky. Donald Trump’s discarded guru Steve Bannon saw in his master echoes of earlier populist orators, such as William Jennings Bryan, who could rage against bankers to rural audiences for hours on end. Mr. Bannon prepped Mr. Trump for his inauguration by telling him tales of his predecessor Andrew Jackson, whose inauguration had drawn to Washington thousands of obstreperous supporters who drank the capital dry and outstayed their welcome — echoing what was to come four years later, on a more violent and terrifying scale.
Mr. Trump’s critics, and his fans too, preferred to think of him as a unique irruption into American history. But Mr. Bannon was right in thinking that most of his instincts and his policies have roots going way back. Before the aviator Charles Lindbergh helped lead the America First Committee to keep the United States out of World War II, Woodrow Wilson had used the slogan “America First” in his doomed 1916 pledge to keep America out of World War I. The press baron William Randolph Hearst used it in his campaigns almost as often as he played up the threat of Chinese immigration. (Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,”based on Mr. Hearst, is Mr. Trump’s favorite film.) In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan took up the slogan, and as recently as 2016, David Duke, a former leader of the Klan, ran for a Louisiana Senate seat as an “America First” candidate.
For Mr. Trump, “America First” meant withdrawing from pretty much every international organization. At one time or another as president, he demanded that the United States withdraw from NATO, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Health Organization, the Paris climate accords and the World Trade Organization. He was equally hostile to bilateral agreements, with nations such as South Korea and Iran. This isolationism also has plenty of precedents, going back to the failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and join the League of Nations the year after, under the influence of such implacable America-aloners as Senator William Borah of Idaho.
Editor: Reader only 2333 more words ….
Political Observer
Reader how could I had forgotten Francis Mulhern ‘A Tory Tribune?’ from 105•May/June 2017 of The New Left Review?
A review of Ferdinand Mount’s ‘English Voices: Lives, Landscapes, Laments’ Simon and Schuster: London 2016
Reader note that I do not share inFrancis Mulhern’s generosity of spirit! I offer this revelatory excerpt:
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The great politico-ideological contests of the twentieth century ranged Mount on the side of the bold Western David, of course. The closing words of his appreciation of Hugh Trevor-Roper, from 2005, recall a once-mighty ideological adversary:
The causes for which he battled with such ferocious glee have come out on top, in the Cold War no less than in the English Civil War. In politics as in historiography, the Marxists and the marxisants have been routed. It is easy to forget how their premises and arguments were once taken for granted and how quirky and perverse seemed those who spoke out against them.
And indeed such moments are a reminder of the voices that go unheard in Mount’s whispering gallery. With just a few idiosyncratic exceptions (Greer, Alan Bennett, Le Carré, Arthur Ransome, author of the children’s classic Swallows and Amazons, and the philo-Soviet ecclesiastic Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury), here is a spectrum without a Left. Of course, what is not published cannot be reviewed. But even a very short list of eligible-but-absent voices—salient authors or subjects of the kinds of book Mount chooses to write about—is telling for what it says about the national imaginary as mediated by him: Richard Hoggart, Jack Jones, Eric Hobsbawm, C. L. R. James, Dorothy Thompson, Angela Carter, Tony Benn.
Mount’s local party loyalties are more ambiguously framed. No great admirer of politicians in general, Conservatives included, he is damning in his judgements of Harold Macmillan, whose premiership he thinks was an anachronism and a historic mistake, and Edward Heath, the technocrat; the mock-heroic Lord Hailsham he dismisses as an exhibitionist. Among his contemporaries, two of his three touchstones are legends of the Labour right, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins (the other, as always, is Margaret Thatcher); and the plainest statement of political inspiration in the whole collection comes aslant, in a sub-section nominally devoted to religion, in a portrait of a Liberal leader, Gladstone. For an uncomplicated Tory loyalist, Mount’s intellectual presence must be about as reassuring as Matthew Arnold’s higher journalism was for party Liberals in his own time. But Arnold’s free play of mind had a brake, which he applied in a motto from the French conservative thinker Joubert: ‘Force till right is ready.’ Mount’s equivalent statement of limits deserves the same notoriety. ‘There are times’, he wrote in Cold Cream, defending the domestic programme of the Thatcher governments—including the premeditated fight to the finish against the miners—‘when what is needed is not a beacon but a blowtorch.’
Mount did his bit to fuel the blowtorch, and would have done more had not the bearings of the Thatcher government shifted during her second term, now giving priority to the formulation of a new Östpolitik for the last days of the Cold War. As it was, he returned to full-time journalism and writing. If, more prosaically, the ratios of intellectual engagement in public affairs—the exercise of shadow authority—can be calculated from a scale ranging between the extremes of prophecy, or moral leadership, and policy, the formulation of practical goals for duly equipped institutions, Mount’s readings show a continuing pull towards the latter end. This practical bent, in the centre-right zone marked out by Thatcher and Blair, has been most obviously displayed in the book-length works he has written over the past twenty-five years: The British Constitution Now (1992), Mind the Gap (2004) and, most recently, The New Few (2012), an attack on the spread of oligarchy in British political and economic life. But it is present too even when, as often in English Voices, the occasion is not primarily political. Mount’s Gladstone is a working fusion of the two modes, a seer and an effective reforming politician in one. He is, moreover, a figure who defies the reductive polarizing terms of the given ‘political creeds’ and party shibboleths. He is ‘reverent’ among utilitarians, a communitarian in his own day, but tolerant—eventually—in the face of narrow confessional demands, and liberal in his sensitivity to popular conditions of life. There is something in him of Berlin’s philosophy and also Michael Oakeshott’s, two figures whose mutual hostility was unrelenting.
Editor: Should the Mount opening paragraph surprise any reader, who has experience of reading his mouldering prose, that pretends to wide learning and its collection of ‘bad political actors’ ?
It’s puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on the right: campaigners against immigration, Brexiters, the enemies of Woke, aka Anti Social Justice Warriors, or ‘Anti-SJW’, as they proclaim themselves on their black T-shirts, available online for £15. This switch-around isn’t entirely new. Thirty years ago, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Stanley Fish wrote that ‘lately, many on the liberal and progressive left have been disconcerted to find that words, phrases and concepts thought to be their property … have been appropriated by the forces of neoconservatism. This is particularly true of the concept of free speech.’ Today, alleged infringements of free speech that would once have outraged Guardian readers are splashed all over the Daily Telegraph. As I write, the Telegraph front page leads on an apparent threat by the US State Department to scrap a trade deal with the UK, because it was ‘concerned about freedom of expression in the UK’, in relation to criminal charges against a Christian anti-abortion campaigner in Bournemouth. This concern echoed a statement made by Vice President Vance the previous month that he feared free speech ‘in Britain and across Europe’ was ‘in retreat’. The other stand-out feature of the debate today, and something it is hard not to see as ominous, is the growing gap, in law and practice, between the United States and the rest of the world which calls itself free.
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Editor: Mr. Mount’s final paragraph abounds in his collection of evocative/decorative Names, and various ‘bad actors’.
But the case for some laws regulating libel, slander, hate speech, incitement to violence and verbal harassment of all sorts remains as strong as ever, though just as difficult to define and to police with any sort of fairness. So too, does the case for codes of conduct in public institutions, Parliament and the universities being only the most conspicuous examples. The lines are never easy to draw. At what point does ‘political correctness’ cease to be common civility and degenerate into censorship? When does ‘woke’ move from its original meaning of ‘alert to racism’ and turn into self-righteous hectoring? When should an anti-abortion campaigner be entitled to carry a placard outside an abortion clinic, or, come to that, when should a women’s-right-to-chooser be allowed to stake out the home of an anti-abortion campaigner? There is a right to demonstrate, yes, but there is also a right to some degree of personal tranquillity. ‘Watching and besetting’ is an ancient crime under English law, and to this day the courts are still defining its reach. As Dabhoiwala continually reminds us, context is everything, or almost everything. To warble on in an unfocused way about ‘cancel culture’ cannot conceal either the difficulties of the balancing act or its necessity for a flourishing society. The fabric of civility is as thin as gossamer and just as precious. Even John Stuart Mill might have had second thoughts about the innocuousness of speech if he had been shopping at the supermarket in Buffalo or El Paso. And that is even before we tiptoe into the wider political effects. Would the present incumbent of the White House have been able to swim along so effortlessly on his stream of lies and insults without the protection of the First Amendment? Doesn’t Donald Trump ultimately owe quite a lot to John Stuart Mill?
Editor: Should the carefully constructed persona of J.D. Vance, co-authored by Peter Thiel and his genuflection to Leo Strauss, and the others who acted as co-authores of Vance’s , what to name it? Raymond Chandler, in another but revelent context, named this ‘Hollywood Vomit’!
Editor: Reader aquaint yourself with Mr.Cruddas opening paragraphs:
Who invented the “Big Society”? I suggest Ferdinand Mount. While our MPs couldn’t be seen for dust, his 2004 book Mind the Gap reintroduced class as a political category. Ahead of its time, it confronted the benign take on globalisation dominant in Westminster. The book was a shout out against the “cold indifference” of contemporary capitalism; the disrespect afforded to those who fall on the wrong side of the new class divide. Its focus was on the economically and culturally dis-invented – “the tribes who live in the dark”. A brilliant book, it signalled a new readiness from the right to confront the realities of social rupture, well before the music stopped and Bear Stearns went to Chapter 11 insolvency.
Within the text we can identify the building-blocks for the “Red Tory” Phillip Blond, and the rise of the Cameroons. Mount argued we must “rebuild the little platoons”. The faith communities would be critical in delivering welfare; we need to see greater reciprocity and employee share ownership, localism and community control of the state. We should, in later parlance, “recapitalise the poor” through asset transfers – land and housing, school and health vouchers, in order to help the victims in the new “downer” class.
Here the causes of inequality lie at the feet of the welfare state. It crowds out working-class respect, fraternity and civics; community cohesion, duty and obligation. Ceteris paribus, we confront these inequalities once we reduce the power of the state.
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The New Few then races through some corrosive examples. The still-shocking £9bn HSBC takeover of sub-prime vultures Household, culminating in £53bn set-aside to sweep up this folly; the “festering morass of bad debts” that was HBOS; vainglorious Fred the Shred, and many more. The central concern is the arbitrary power of the CEO and decline of the active shareholder, interlocked with the rise of the fund manager with their top-slice off every transaction: a “croupier’s take”. In short, there was systemic collusion between the two dominant groups. “One set of oligarchs- the fund managers – approve the size of salaries, bonuses and pension pots for another set of oligarchs – the CEOs, board members and senior managers”.
Why so little appetite to confront these excesses? Mount identifies three basic reasons- or excuses, or illusions – that sustain the system. “The market is always right”; “big is beautiful”, and “complexity equals progress”: they echo the dominance of neo-liberalism, of a system too big to fail, due to the sheer complexity of financial products with no appreciation of moral hazard. A brief history of oligarchy follows, and the forces that shape it: war, technology, bureaucracy, forms of ideology – the links between money and power.
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Mount’s book is a brilliant attempt to import rigour and coherence; indeed, the case is better made than by anyone in the current administration. Yet can he really be suggesting across the City, within our hollowed-out party structures, across Whitehall and Westminster, that the Coalition is embarked on a systematic assault on power elites and oligarchy in defence of the little guy? It doesn’t look like that from my advice centre in East London.
The man behind the Big Society has attempted to write the Bible for the Coalition. It demands respect and has to be read. I strongly agree that there is “a sense that society has lost its recognisable moral shape, and with it, its legitimacy”. But it is because of this that people will demand more, so much more, than what is currently on offer.
Editor: ‘The West’ is collapsing from within! The Genocide perpetrated against a captive population in Gaza, and its ever widenning toxic peramiters by The Zinonist Faschest State, and its American and European suppliers of the weapons of Mass Murder. Mr. Mount never mentions this on going Crime, any surprise?
Yes, universities have made genuine blunders that predictably led to a widespread loss of trust. And yes, some corners of just about every American campus, including Harvard, are now subsumed by ideological hogwash. But like other leading institutions that have come under massive attack, Harvard does also remain at the forefront of research in extremely important fields, from semiconductors to artificial intelligence. If Trump was serious about wanting America to outcompete rivals like China over the course of the next decades, he would recognize that it is a very bad deal for the country to turn its advanced capabilities in the industries of the future into collateral damage in a fight against woke professors in, say, the Department of American Studies.
Anybody who is actually interested in “Making America Great Again” should be able to keep two truths—that universities have in the last years betrayed their mission in key ways, and that they nevertheless remain hugely important national assets—in mind at the same time. But in a bitterly ironic echo of the postmodern theories that its leading members purport to hate, the administration appears only to be interested in one form of Veritas: that which serves the whims and the wishes, the personal predilections and the partisan interests of its leader.
Editor: Steven Spielberg is a phenominon of Pop Culture Entertainment! Not an arbiter of ‘History’ in any dimention except in its Movie House Iteration:
Steven Spielberg, guardian of Holocaust memory
By Annick Cojean(Los Angeles, special correspondent)
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It was on the plane back to Los Angeles after filming Schindler’s List in Poland, between March and May 1993, that filmmaker Steven Spielberg had the most audacious and ambitious idea of his life. He had just spent three months in Krakow telling the story of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist and Nazi Party member who managed to save nearly 1,300 Jews by employing them in his enamel and munitions factory during World War II. The filming had been intense, complicated and exhausting. Spielberg, who had waited a decade to make the movie – daunted by the enormity of the subject and its connection to his personal history and Jewish identity – was acutely aware of an immense responsibility. For the first time in his career, he was moved to tears while shooting certain scenes, leading his teams and thousands of extras into a highly realistic vision of the Holocaust’s hell.
Yet, the most overwhelming aspect was his encounters with survivors, especially the “Schindler Jews,” as those saved at the last minute by working for the industrialist were called. One by one, they arrived on set, intrigued and astonished that a filmmaker dared to tackle a story many of them had never spoken about. And very quickly, they expressed their desire to confide in Spielberg. “Listen to me,” they said. “I have a story too, me too!”
The director, focused on his film but touched by this trust, listened, took notes and captured ideas here and there, which he later incorporated into the movie. Of course, all these stories were interesting and immensely valuable, he replied. Of course, they deserved to be heard, preserved and passed on. No survivor should disappear without having shared their personal experience of the Holocaust. It was, in itself, a warning and a message to future generations. In essence, each survivor should become a “teacher.”
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Editor: What is it about about the danger that proximity to power, that leads reporters of various levels of intelligence, to abandon their reportorial skepticism, about their subjects? @AnnickCojean meets and exceedes the promise of that ensorcellment!
Editor: Begin your your acqaitenship with the ‘autuer theory’ via two books:
Newspaper Reader offers – Reader never forget that Brooks became the protege of William F. Buckley Jr.: In sum Brooks whole career was the product of that singular advantage!
Editor: It can’t really be a surprise that Mr. Brooks focus in on ‘elite intitutions’ ?
Two examples of Mr. Brooks’ sources: According to a 2023 article by Rachel Shin in The Atlantic, The Atlantic, Rogé Karma and Derek Thompson
Editor: Brook’s attempts to diagnose this vexing problem:
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Maybe the core problem is the overproduction of elites — that we’re churning out more knowledge worker graduates than there are knowledge worker jobs. Or maybe it’s just a feature of online life. It’s easier to apply to stuff, and with more applicants, the competition grows ferocious. According to an article in Business Insider, the average knowledge worker job opening now receives 244 applications, compared with just 93 as recently as 2019. One young woman lamented to me that she wished she’d been young in the 1990s; it would have been easier. I told her I was relatively young in the ’90s, and it was.
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Editor: Look to the storied careed of Walter Lippmann, the student of William James and George Santayana who deified the Technocrat, as a check against Too Much Democracy!
Editor: Mr.Brooks closes his essay/intervention on those ‘golden children’ : Mr. Brooks is a benefactor of the largess of William F. Buckley Jr. …
I should close by reiterating the fact that the people I’m writing about here are the meritocracy’s alleged winners. The valedictorian class. The golden children. Are they just whining through their privilege? Maybe a little. Young Americans who came of age in 1860 or 1916 or 1932 or 1941 weren’t exactly living on Easy Street.
Nonetheless, these conversations — and all the research I’ve read on everything from smartphones to the psychic effects of the meritocracy to the rising mental health crisis among the young — point to one conclusion: It’s just phenomenally hard to be young right now. There must be an easier way to grow up.
Editor: Mr. Colvile’s intervetion, with the help of his staff of underlings is filled with doubt and apprehension!
Ed Miliband might not look like a revolutionary. But he has embarked upon the most radical, ambitious and — to its critics — foolhardy project that this government is pursuing. Namely, to transform the entire basis of the UK energy network, at historic speed.
For decades, the UK powered itself by coal, and then by gas. Miliband wants to move us, as rapidly as possible, to a system dominated by wind — and, in particular, offshore wind, which will become by far our largest source of power.
This is far more ambitious than the coal-to-gas transition, for three reasons. First, we can’t use as much of the existing infrastructure. So we need a huge amount of new cabling, not least off the coasts.
Second, we also need to hugely increase the amount of power, because we are simultaneously trying to electrify both transport and home heating. Third, we need back-up provision for when the wind doesn’t blow.
In short, for Miliband’s plan to work, an awful lot of things need to go right. But last week something went badly wrong. The Danish energy company Orsted announced that it would not be building a 2.4GW wind farm off the coast of Hornsea in Yorkshire, despite having planning permission in place and a price agreed.
To understand why this is such a problem, it helps to understand how the renewables revolution has been funded.
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Editor: Yet what caught my eye: ( Colevial pales with time, and the reader’s patience longs for a change of pace, from his usual ‘Techo-Chatter’: note too that those ‘Ubiquitous Gamers’ have now commedeared the notion of ‘Palate Cleanser’ from the world of Connoisseurship!
Headline: Should we blame the US for the Cold War?
Sub-headline: The Russian-born historian Vladislav Zubok makes the provocative case that western leaders exaggerated the threat from cautious and conservative Soviet leaders
Editor: I should have read this whole review. Yet Mr. Sandbrook’ quotes extensively from General John Hackett’s book of 1978: ‘The Third World War’. Mr. Sandbrook knows his Times readership!
The Third World War broke like a storm over the fields of central Europe. Moving with ruthless speed, the communist forces smashed through West Germany’s defences and advanced on the Rhine, while Soviet commandos landed in Norway and Turkey. Then the pendulum swung as Nato troops mounted a heroic stand near the German town of Krefeld, while American sailors and pilots began to wrest back control of the seas and the skies.
As the Warsaw Pact’s armies stalled and began to retreat, the hard men in the Kremlin faced an awful decision. With a conventional victory out of reach, perhaps only the ultimate weapon would stave off the spectre of defeat and force their opponents to come to terms. So it was that on August 20, 1985, the masters of the Soviet Union realised the dream of a generation of British town planners. They dropped a nuclear bomb on Birmingham.
An illutration of book ‘The World of the Cold War, 1945-1991’ by Vladislav Zubok iterupts the narrative flow. Excerpts of General John Hackett’s ‘The Third World War’ provides the two opening paragraphs of Sandbrook’s maladriot essay.
Editor: Mr. Sandbrook on Vladislav Zubok:
Yes, the Russian historian Vladislav Zubok says in his readable short account of the Cold War. In crises like the Cuban missile standoff of 1962, he writes, “humanity was extraordinarily lucky”. With different leadership the world might have faced nuclear Armageddon. Thank goodness, then, that we have such impressive leaders today.
Why are there are so few gripping histories of the Cold War? One explanation is the subject is just so vast, but the fact remains that many standard accounts, such as the one by the American historian John Lewis Gaddis, are sensationally boring. This book is much better: brisk, spiky and unafraid to make provocative judgments.
Born and educated in Moscow with a close knowledge of Soviet sources, Zubok doesn’t blame Stalin for the Cold War. Although he is clear-eyed about the dictator’s atrocities, he thinks he was more cautious and pragmatic than we appreciate and he places the lion’s share of responsibility for the ideological conflict with the US.
Editor: Sandbrook begins his anaysis of Vladislav Zubok’s History: selectice quotaton is the only viable defence against Mr. Sandbrook proferred self-asaurance.
With different leadership the world might have faced nuclear Armageddon. Thank goodness, then, that we have such impressive leaders today.
…that many standard accounts, such as the one by the American historian John Lewis Gaddis, are sensationally boring. This book is much better: brisk, spiky and unafraid to make provocative judgments.
Although he is clear-eyed about the dictator’s atrocities, he thinks he was more cautious and pragmatic than we appreciate and he places the lion’s share of responsibility for the ideological conflict with the US.
Editor: With just 804 words left in this essay, in self-defence, The Reader need only consult Sandbrook’s in his final tortured paragraph, that presents Putin as ‘smoulders with so much resentment’
The Reader need only listen to Putin address, his Victory Day Speech see that Sandbrook is a ‘Cold Warrior’!
We know how that story played out, and for anybody trying to understand why Vladimir Putin smoulders with so much resentment — and why, sad to say, tens of millions of Russians support him — this book is an excellent place to start.
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