The Financial Times hired Anand Menon, the director of UK in a Changing Europe to provide a rather colorless apologetic for Starmer’s newly elected government:
If you’re as old as me, you’ll remember it well. A new prime minister, beaming from ear to ear, charming fellow European leaders and beating them all as they cycled through the streets of Amsterdam. Tony Blair’s diplomatic debut was an unalloyed triumph. Twenty-seven years on, another new Labour prime minister has a chance to shine among his neighbours, this time on home soil.
The European Political Community — that travelling circus of 47 European states — arrives at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire on Thursday. Sir Keir Starmer will be chairing it.
Editor: some selective quotation of Menon’s essay:
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The meeting will give Starmer a chance to showcase a “reset” of UK relations with its neighbours.
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Tone matters, and it will be striking — and perhaps a little discombobulating — to watch the interactions with his European peers of a prime minister who does not see the relationship with the EU as inherently competitive or zero sum.
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Domestically, Starmer rules supreme. While the machinations of Conservative leadership candidates provide some light relief, they matter not a jot for national policy.
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The devil will be in the detail: can the UK persuade the EU to relax rules blocking British participation in schemes such as the European Defence Fund that are intended to foster greater collaboration in the development of military capabilities?
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Will talks over a veterinary agreement drag on as the European Commission haggles over minutiae? Will the EU’s mantra of “strategic autonomy” continue to force it to view the UK as a competitor and a rival?
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For all his charm, Blair ultimately failed the latter test… he promised to run a campaign to persuade the British public of the benefits of EU membership. This never materialised, and we are living with the consequences.
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Editor: Anand Menon trades in political clichés:
Blenheim represents a golden opportunity to begin Labour’s reset with the EU. But a change in tone, while welcome, is merely the precursor to the real work. Winning the bike race is not enough.
Editor: the question that Anand Menon misses is that of Mariana Mazzucato and her political cadre’s very strong twitter presence. And their collective political imperative of re-branding Neo-Liberalism!
Mission-oriented industrial strategy: global insights | policy report no. 2024/09
Authors:
Mariana Mazzucato : Founding Director and Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
Sarah Doyle : Director’s Chief of Staff / Director’s Head of Policy | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
Luca Kuehn von Burgsdorff : Senior Policy Advisor to Professor Mariana Mazzucato | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
Summery
Industrial strategy is experiencing a renaissance. Getting the details right matter. Mission-oriented industrial strategy needs to be more than words if we want to avoid missions becoming part of the problem, not the solution. This report is based on research conducted over the past several years, led by Professor Mazzucato and her team at IIPP. It offers practical insights gained from work with governments around the world – on opportunities ranging from healthy and sustainable housing estates in our local Camden Council to the ecological transition in Brazil – that are advancing new approaches to bring economic, social, and environmental policy goals into alignment at the centre of their growth strategies. The report offers a one-stop-shop for how to design, implement, and govern mission-oriented industrial strategies and examines the tools, institutions, partnerships, and capabilities governments need to deliver transformative change.
Editor: By sheer literary finesse, wedded to historical sophistication Mr. Nelson renders moot the Oxbridger Cult, at The Economist? Or something closely akin to it!
Reader Editor: The Economist first two paragraphs :
Among the questions prompted by Labour’s huge victory on July 4th is whether Britain’s electoral system needs overhauling. The party won 63% of the seats on only a third of the vote, prompting complaints from some smaller parties, and a few smarting Conservatives, that the result was unfair. The case for reforming the country’s first-past-the-post (fptp) system, in which the candidate who wins the most votes in a constituency takes that seat, is becoming ever stronger. But it should not be a priority.
Measured by the difference between share of the votes and share of the seats in Parliament, this election was the most skewed result in British history, and second in Western democracies only to a French parliamentary election in 1993. Because its voters were efficiently distributed around the country, Labour needed fewer than 24,000 votes for each of its seats. Reform uk, in contrast, needed well over 800,000. Under the Scottish system of proportional representation (pr), Labour would have won 236 seats, not 411; Reform uk would have had 94 mps instead of five.
Editor: Fraser Nelson of The Spectator offers this:
Something pretty big is missing from Labour’s historic landslide: the voters. Keir Starmer has won 63 per cent of the seats on just 33.8 per cent of the votes, the smallest vote share of any modern PM. Lower than any of the (many) pollsters predicted. So Labour in 2024 managed just 1.6 percentage points higher than the Jeremy Corbyn calamity in 2019 – and less than Corbyn managed in 2017. ‘But for the rise of the Labour party in Scotland,’ says Professor John Curtice, ‘we would be reporting that basically Labour’s vote has not changed from what it was in 2019.’ And that’s on the second-lowest turnout in democratic history. So where, then, is the supposed Starmer tsunami?
There certainly has been a Tory meltdown. Their vote share dropped from 44 to 24 per cent – by far the lowest in the party’s history. But remarkably, almost none of this seems to have gone to Labour. It mainly went to parties that had no chance of winning seats outright (like Reform) which makes Labour a beneficiary. But the level of enthusiasm for Labour is – well, let’s look at the share of the vote claimed by election-winning parties.
Editor : I’ll skip ahead, The Economist eventually answers the question it asked in its first paragraph: ‘But it should not be a priority’.
But the main reason to be judicious is that other things matter more. Labour came to power promising stability: the last thing Britain needs right now is another round of constitutional change. Time and political energy are better spent on the party’s overriding mission of souping up growth. The new government has made a decent start, most notably with a series of measures to liberalise planning, but these are early days. Big battles lie ahead—not just over building, but also over Europe and public services.
Voting reform was not in Labour’s manifesto; it is not likely to feature in its first term. Good. But the election does reinforce the case for a more proportional system. By the time the country next votes, it will be almost 20 years since the av referendum. The two main parties should put commitments to electoral reform in their platforms in 2029.
The Toxic of Myth of Growth, and the imperative to liberalise planningare the standard tropes of an utterly failed Neo-Liberalism. Note that Voting Reform is not, nor will it ever be a priority of Neo-Liberals! @MazzucatoM had yet to appear on the political scene and her: “mission-driven government’’…
Most people won’t know the name Mariana Mazzucato. Yet the economist is about to have a significant impact on their lives.
The University College London (UCL) academic’s signature idea – “mission-driven” government – is about to be put into practise by Sir Keir Starmer following Labour’s landslide election victory.
The new Prime Minister has set out five “missions” across energy, health, crime, education and the economy. Achieving goals across each category will be at the heart of his new government.
Starmer was inspired by Mazzucato, a Left-leaning academic who has spent the past decade championing this “mission” driven approach through lectures, numerous papers and four books – with a fifth one in the works.
She believes governments must tap into the spirit of the Apollo programme – where US space agency Nasa marshalled the private sector to put a man on the Moon – to tackle the biggest issues of the day.
That means a more muscular state that is willing to intervene in a host of industries, an approach that remains controversial among many of Mazzucato’s peers.
Editor: Fraser Nelson offers these enlightening, indeed sobering final paragraphs!
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Anyway, none of that matters now. Vote share will not be part of the conversation. But it is relevant in understanding how illusory Starmer’s majority is: a Potemkin landslide which looks impressive but, upon inspection, does not have very much behind it. And this has implications. It is often said that Britain is an anomaly, parliament swinging to the left when Europe moves to the right. But have the British voters, really, moved left? The Lib Dems have more seats (71) than Reform (5) but Ed Davey’s men won fewer votes (3.5 million) that those of Nigel Farage (4.1 million). So it would be deeply misleading to take this parliament as a proxy for UK public opinion.
I expected Starmer to win a big majority, but neither I nor anyone else expected how low the Labour support would be. This time yesterday, I thought that Labour would be in for ten years. Today, seeing the shallowness of Starmer’s support, I think there is all to play for next time around. The voters have turned away from the Tories but did emphatically not turn towards Labour. Never in a century of elections have the two main parties had a lower combined vote share. All told, the next five years in British politics will be thrillingly unpredictable.
Can Macron’s Anti-democratic ‘retirement age’ be revoked, expunged, etc.? Political Observer speculates!
On paper, the proposal looks simple, but the conditions for its implementation are the subject of intense debate. A few minutes after the initial estimates of the outcome of the legislative elections were released, leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon forcefully reaffirmed on Sunday, July 7, that the statutory retirement age, which was introduced in 2023, will be abolished by decree “as early as this summer” if the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance governs the country. However, the statement by the leader of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party is open to scrutiny, with many experts believing that a law is needed to abolish the provision which is as emblematic as it is unpopular.
This is one of the actes de rupture (“acts of separation”) that the NFP pledges to carry out in the “first fortnight” to “respond to the social emergency” if it takes power. It wants to cancel the “implementation decrees of Emmanuel Macron’s reform” which raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. The left-wing parties’ program focuses on Article 10 of the April 14, 2023 law, which made significant changes to France’s system. It’s worth noting that the article in question also includes a provision for extending the length of employment time required to obtain a full-rate pension for certain generations. Strangely, the NFP has not said whether it also intends to put an end to this provision which could mean additional efforts for the age groups concerned.
Michel Borgetto, a professor emeritus at the University of Paris-II Panthéon-Assas, shared this view, stating that, “A decree cannot go back on the provision of the law gradually raising the legal retirement age to 64, as such a modification or repeal can only come from the law.”
Editor:Legal avenues
However, other experts have a different view. Laure Camaji, a lecturer in labor law at Lyon-II University, argued that “a decree can immediately freeze the increase in the retirement age.” Emilien Quinart, a lecturer in public law at the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, went even further, observing that from 1985 to 2010, the retirement age appeared in the regulatory part of the Social Security Code, before being inserted in the legislative component following a reform enacted under former conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy.
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The prime minister could then ask the Constitutional Council, which rules on the constitutionality of laws, to “delegalize” the retirement age, in other words, to downgrade it and restore its regulatory status, as it was before 2010.
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The option of referring the matter to Parliament remains. Socialist leader Olivier Faure mentioned it on Franceinfo broadcaster on Monday. He suggested that “a bill is needed, which we will table in the Assemblée” and that “the Assemblée will have to make a decision.”
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Editor: Reader pay attention to where Bertrand Bissuel ends his speculations, about possible means to an end, the repeal of the retirement age, that appears to be the strategy adopted by Macon, turned against it-self ? Or should it be named the political nihilism of the long discarded ‘Jupertarian Politics’, as Neo-Liberal chicanery collapsing upon itself ?
In this context, Faure explained that it would be possible to resort to Article 49.3 of the Constitution, an article that allows the government to pass laws without a vote. “Everyone [would] understand,” he argued, pointing out that “80% of the French” were opposed to the 2023 reform, which was passed with the use of Article 49.3.
There is yet another way: the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), which is also against retirement at 64, could add its votes to those of the NFP. RN lawmaker Laure Lavalette told BFM-TV on Monday that her party would “vote for the repeal.”
The first three paragraphs of the Ganesh essay are carefully assembled with Ireland as the key state, in fact, the paradigmatic case for NATO. His talent as a Story Teller is not quite the same as his sometime, once, talent as author of beguiling aperçus! The periphery of NATO becomes in the ‘thought’ of Ganesh its very virtue, in propaganda terms! These three paragraphs reminds this reader of his literary Hero Tom Wolfe Silver Fork fictions.
To Dublin, where “triple lock” has an altogether different meaning. In Britain, it is a rule that protects the real value of the public pension. In Ireland, it is a set of tests the government must pass to send armed forces abroad. If unpicking the British lock is too provocative for politicians to consider, imagine fiddling with the Irish one, bound up as it is with the republic’s non-belligerent self-image.
Yet the government proposes change. Allies have long nudged Ireland to do more, noting that democratic Europe has enemies who might not exempt a “neutral” state from their menaces. (Subsea cables near the Irish coast are candidates for sabotage.) And while Nato membership isn’t even a remote prospect, Ireland has signed up to a new co-operation scheme with the alliance.
In fact, Ireland, where support for EU membership amounts to a near consensus, is a good spot from which to observe one of the under-told stories in the world: the resilience of the west’s two most important institutions. Having been diagnosed “brain-dead” in 2019 by no less an eminence than the president of France, Nato is now wider, in that Sweden and Finland have joined, and deeper, in that member states are spending more on defence. Some are even mulling the revival of conscription. Whatever is missing from the alliance that convenes in Washington this week — a vigorous US president, for example — it isn’t a raison d’être. The Kremlin has seen to that.
Editor: The cast of characters from Irish seedlings, to The Kremlin ( Putin The Terrible), follows in its meandering way of Western Corporate Press hysteria! Ganesh produces a very particular kind of political confection! I’ll proved some selective quotation, of the remainder of this obvious propaganda:
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And Nato might be the second most resilient Brussels-headquartered entity.
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The EU is popular. And has become more so in recent times. Readers who find this implausible should take it up with various polling companies.
Editor: Ganesh offers irreputable polling data? Yet the Polling Data, is bought and paid for by Political Operatives, of many Parties, that use this ‘data’ to secure by the publication of such ‘information’ to ‘massage’ political outcomes. This seems to this writer to be axiomatic!
According to YouGov last month, a referendum on membership would result in a crushing Remain win in each of the large EU democracies. German support for Leave is 18 per cent. In Spain, it is in the single digits. Eurobarometer, a pan-continental pulse check, finds that 74 per cent of respondents now “feel” like citizens of the EU, against 25 per cent who don’t. Those numbers were 59 and 40 around a decade ago. The Pew Research Center reports that supermajorities think well of the EU throughout Europe (save Greece) and as far afield as South Korea, having not always done so.
Survey after confounding survey reveals the same trend: a reputational slump for the EU in the mid-2010s, amid the sovereign debt crises, then a recovery to remarkable highs ever since. It explains some odd twists of events in national politics. To get as far as she has, which isn’t far enough to govern France, Marine Le Pen had to soften her line on Europe. The Italian premier, Giorgia Meloni, has been constructive with an EU that some expected her to fight. The return of Donald Tusk as Poland’s leader happened, in part, because his predecessors’ tiffs with Brussels sat ill with a pro-EU electorate. Across the continent, lots of voters with ultraconservative instincts on immigration, crime, net zero and, yes, Brussels, balk at EU exit, or anything close to it.
Editor: The spot diagnosis’s of the problem:
None of this assures the EU a serene future, or even a future. While populists didn’t sweep the European parliament elections last month, they did well enough to intensify their spoiling role.
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And the idea of an existential crisis for the EU on that front is much harder to stand up now than it was circa 2015, whatever the surge of anti-establishment politics since then. Because, in Britain, someone who is nationalist in general will be anti-EU in particular, the Anglo-American intelligentsia tends to assume the same of Europeans. In fact, millions are able to decouple the two things.
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Apart from its co-authorship of the single market in the 1980s, Brexit stands out as the UK’s kindest service to the European project. (Both happened under the Tories, which will gall that party to a degree that no landslide election defeat ever could.) What a parting gift. And how true, on such different levels, when Brussels says: “You shouldn’t have.”
Editor: How might The Reader look to Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in Britain or :
Though not a subscriber to PUCK I keep getting this in my email. Now Puck must be the latest copy, on the once ascendent Vanity Fair, under perennial ass kisser Graydon Carter, now at AirMail, call it a dusty antique!
Though, Julia Ioffe is the strong clear voice of Neo-Conservatism, in its most hysterical registers. No need to read the New York Times trio of @nytdavidbrooks, Bret Stephens or @tomfriedman, she is the most valuable commodity Zionism thrives upon: the Zionist Fellow Traveler!
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Good morning,
Thanks for reading The Backstory, a composite of the best new work at Puck.
It was another extraordinary, truly historic week here at Puck: Peter Hamby unearthed a ground-shifting Biden poll; John Heilemann captured the subterranean politics of the president’s darkest hour; Abby Livingston revealed Biden’s emerging horror on Capitol Hill; Julia Ioffe explained how this is all playing out among the G20 crowd; Rachel Strugatz reported on a $1 billion valuation trap; Lauren Sherman sorted through a Pinault re-org; Eriq Gardner and John Ourand parsed the NFL’s $15 billion nightmare; Marion Maneker discovered a Picasso surprise; and Dylan Byers got to the bottom of the latest Washington media scandal.
Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.
Programming note: Next week, on July 10 in D.C., Peter Hamby will host an exclusive panel conversation focused on shifting voter dynamics ahead of the ’24 election—based on data revealed through Puck’s polling partnership with Echelon Insights—with a special emphasis on the outsize impact of women voters over the age of 50. Peter will be joined by Kristen Soltis Anderson from Echelon Insights, Margie Omero from GBAO, and Nancy LeaMond from AARP. To attend, click here to sign up for Puck, and email Fritz@puck.news for registration information.
Political Observer engages in some Political Archaeology.
Headline: It’s risky, but Joe Biden needs to give way to someone who can beat Donald Trump
Sub-headline: The president had one job: to prove he was strong enough to take on his predecessor. Now Democrats must act, for America’s sake – and the world’s
Mr. Freedland almost makes political noises reminiscent of ‘Morning Joe’ on the burning ‘Biden Question’ : beginning with 3:50 is the maudlin chatter about Joe’s ‘love of Biden, Jill and his family’: Norman Rockwell was better at producing American Kitsch! But this is also about the utter failure of American Broadcast News, as America abandons ‘Morning Joe’ for ‘Joe Rogan’ !
Freeland’s approach is the bloated ‘World Historical’ , as expressed the ‘The Fate of West’ in the sub-headline. But nothing quite matches Freedland’ s particular brand of panic steeped in hysterics:
What was the worst moment? Perhaps when one especially rambling sentence of Joe Biden’s ended in a mumbled, confused declaration that “We finally beat Medicare”, as if he were the enemy of the very public service Democrats cherish and defend. Maybe it was when the president was not talking, but the camera showed him staring vacantly into space, his mouth slack and open? Or was it when he was talking, and out came a thin, reedy whisper of a voice, one that could not command the viewer’s attention, even when the words themselves made good sense?
For anyone who cares about the future of the United States and therefore, thanks to that country’s unmatched power, the future of the world, it was agonising to watch. You found yourself glancing ever more frequently at the clock, desperate for it to end, if only on humanitarian grounds: it seemed cruel to put a man of visible frailty through such an ordeal.
In that sense, the first – and, given what happened, probably last – TV debate between the current and former president confirmed the worst fears many Biden supporters have long harboured over his capacity to take on and defeat Donald Trump. For more than 90 excruciating minutes, every late-night gag about Biden’s age, every unkindly cut TikTok video depicting him as doddery and semi-senile, became real. There was no spinning it, despite White House efforts to blame a cold. Joe Biden delivered the worst presidential debate performance ever.
Is this Freedland’s Gethsemane moment?
Editor: The Reader is left with 963 words of ‘analysis’ I’ll engage in ‘sampling’ from this bloated text:
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Expectations were rock bottom:
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For one thing, Trump’s entire framing of this race is strong v weak: he offers himself as a strongman, against an opponent too feeble to lead and protect the US in an increasingly dangerous world.
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But, no less important, Biden’s inability to deliver clear, intelligible statements meant Donald Trump’s lies went unchallenged.
As the former Obama administration official Van Jones put it after the debate, this is a contest of “an old man against a conman” – but the weakness of the former is allowing the latter to prevail.
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Editor: on Trump:
He is a failed coup leader, nationalist-populist menace and racist who would suck up to the world’s autocrats and throw Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s wolves: he should be allowed nowhere near power.
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Editor: on ‘expectations’:
Indeed, that is why the White House opted to have the debate so unusually early: to allay fears about the president’s age and to reframe the race not as a referendum on Biden, but as a choice.
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Editor: On Biden as a ‘proud and stubborn man’:
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Some imagine the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having a quiet word, but Biden is a proud and stubborn man who feels he was passed over too long, including by those two.
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Editor: Jill Biden provides a kind of solace as antidote to the glaring reality:
Some say the only person who could ever persuade him to do that is his wife, Jill. But after the debate, she loudly congratulated her husband, albeit in a manner that reinforced the sense of a man well past his prime. “Joe, you did such a great job!” she said. “You answered every question! You knew all the facts!”
Editor: on the possibility of a Biden replacement:
The party could throw it open to a contest fought out at its convention in Augustamong the deep bench of next-generation Democratic talent – the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, her California counterpart, Gavin Newsom, and others – but that could be messy, bitter and rushed.
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Editor: Freedland in his final paragraph repeats the current political wisdom of the Biden as ‘a good and decent man’ : ‘Morning Joe’s maudlin chatter seems to have infected , emboldened other apologists? Yet this reader recalls the Joe Biden of another political time:
CNN —
Joe Biden in a 1993 speech warned of “predators on our streets” who were “beyond the pale” and said they must be cordoned off from the rest of society because the justice system did not know how to rehabilitate them.
Biden, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made the comments on the Senate floor a day before a vote was scheduled on the Senate’s version of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
His central role in shaping and shepherding the tough-on-crime bill will likely face scrutiny in a Democratic primary should he run for president in 2020. His 1993 comments, which were in line with the broad political consensus to tackling crime at the time, are at odds with a new bipartisan coalition of activists and lawmakers who are trying to undo what they say is a legacy of mass incarceration fostered by that era.
Biden’s word choice could also pose a problem with a new generation of Democrats who view the rhetoric at the time as perpetuating harmful myths about the black community.
CNN’s KFile came across the 1993 speech during a review of the former vice president’s record.
President Bill Clinton in 1994 signed the crime bill into law with broad bipartisan support as violent crime rates peaked in the US in the early 1990s. Included in the law was the federal “three strikes” provision, mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes.
“We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created,” said Biden, then a fourth-term senator from Delaware so committed to the bill that he has referred to it over the years as “the Biden bill.”
“They are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale,” Biden continued. “And it’s a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society.”
In the speech, Biden described a “cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.” He said, “we should focus on them now” because “if we don’t, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now.”
Old Socialist’s selective quotation introduces the English Reader to this French nonpareil.
Headline: ‘People hate you’: The French are increasingly rejecting Macron
Sub-headline: The French president is omnipresent, despite having pledged to let his prime minister lead the campaign for the upcoming elections. Yet he has never been so unpopular, even within his own camp.
Editor: Even the first paragraph is alive with political melodrama, of the most breathless variety?
This Sunday, June 23, Emmanuel Macron was toying with a new idea, locked away almost every weekend in the Lanterne residence in Versailles. Those who had seen him recently described him as a lion in a cage. Outside the gates of the former hunting lodge, the rejection of the French president was palpable. In a bid to win re-election in the parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7, MPs from the presidential camp no longer display his face on their campaign posters. “People hate you,” former Renaissance MP Patrick Vignal told him on June 11, when the president called him to find out how his decision, taken two days earlier, to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale, was perceived on the ground. “Emmanuel Macron is like an artist who has gone out of fashion,” said the elected official. Vignal believed the fall from grace was excessive, even if, like most MPs, the former Socialist himself did not understand the president’s action.
Editor: Macron is in fact a dismal failure … the gilets jauneswere the first to realize that Macron, was a Neo-Liberal, bent on turning ‘coddled workers’ into the silent dependents of Capital’s hatred of the lower orders! Macron a graduate of ENA:
Headline: Macron Closes Elite French School in Bid to Diversify Public Service
Sub-headline : The institution had become a symbol of privilege in a society where social mobility has broken down.
Mr. Macron announced on Thursday the closure of ENA, and its replacement by a new Institute of Public Service, or ISP, as part of what he called a “deep revolution in recruitment for public service.”
The decision, one year ahead of a presidential election, is intended to signal Mr. Macron’s determination to democratize opportunity and create a public service that is more transparent and efficient. Earlier this year, he deplored the fact that France’s “social elevator” had broken down and worked “less well than 50 years ago.”
Mr. Macron announced on Thursday the closure of ENA, and its replacement by a new Institute of Public Service, or ISP, as part of what he called a “deep revolution in recruitment for public service.”
The decision, one year ahead of a presidential election, is intended to signal Mr. Macron’s determination to democratize opportunity and create a public service that is more transparent and efficient. Earlier this year, he deplored the fact that France’s “social elevator” had broken down and worked “less well than 50 years ago.”
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Macron is/was but a pretender, that longed for that World Stage, without the necessary – even the unsophisticated vision of a Thatcher or a Reagan longing for the Revolutionary Moment, that eventuated in the 2008 Catastrophe!
Macron knows he’s misunderstood. On June 21, he recorded a podcast for an entrepreneurs’ website, “Génération Do it Yourself,” defending the rationality of his action for an hour and 45 minutes. The president castigated the political programs of his opponents, “the extremes,” as he labeled them, targeting both the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), on the brink of power, and the left-wing alliance Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP). In his eyes, they will lead “to civil war.” A strong phrase, perhaps too strong? “No comment,” sighed someone at Macron’s Renaissance party campaign HQ, where the president’s public appearances are deemed to be increasingly clumsy.
Macron had pledged to let his prime minister, Gabriel Attal, lead the legislative campaign. But, since June 9, the president has been speaking out every other day. “He’s a man who never loses hope of trying to convince people,” said an Elysée spokesperson. Last Sunday, he wanted to make his voice heard again. But how? According to the Elysée, in a phone conversation with the majority leaders, Macron had been contemplating the idea of writing a “Letter to the French.”
Editor: Reader follow the Subtitles, I’ll assist you by quoting the most flagrant, informative, or even the most melodramatic of these paragraphs. Please post your comments!
When you have nothing to say, should you make it known
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The president’s advisers knew that he was devastated, and they did not try to talk him out of expressing himself, speaking of “impressionistic interventions” which, in their eyes, fit into to the role of a president. It was perhaps a mistake. “The role of a spin doctor is to say things frankly, like a doctor talks to a patient. Communication is a soft science with hard rules,” professed Stéphane Fouks, vice-president of public relations company Havas, recalling the conversation which, according to him, happened in 1988 between communications adviser Jacques Pilhan and former president François Mitterrand. At the time, Mitterrand confided his desire to speak on television. “Yes, but to say what?” asked his adviser. “The French need to hear me,” he replied. “When you have nothing to say, should you make it known?” Pilhan asked. Mitterrand decided against his TV intervention.
Page has turned between Macron and his majority
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On June 20, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who has so often been mistreated by the Elysée insiders, who have spread rumors against him, accused the president’s advisers of having pushed him into a corner. “The parquet floors of the ministries and the palaces of the Republic are full of woodlice (…) they are in the parquet floors, the grooves of the parquet floor, it’s very difficult to get rid of them,” he said on TV5Monde, targeting the architects of the dissolution, in particular Bruno Roger-Petit, the president’s adviser on historical issues. Le Maire had warned Macron on the evening of June 9 that “a dissolution of convenience would lead to a regime crisis.” His warning went unheeded.
He hates us all
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Philippe Bolo, elected and re-elected in Maine-et-Loire since 2017, almost threw in the towel, despite his chances of victory. “I can’t take it anymore, I’ve lost all faith,” he said. “I’m being asked to get back on the train, but I don’t know who’s driving it,” worried MP Elodie Jacquier-Laforge. After a two-and-a-half-hour meeting, Bayrou sat down on a banquette at the Poule au Pot bistro in Paris with a handful of loyal followers, “groggy,” in the words of one of the guests.
Some psychologists and psychiatrists are witnessing increased stress and anxiety among their patients since the dissolution was announced. But the president’s advisers are explaining that thanks to this electroshock, the country is rediscovering “the essence of democracy.” The Elysée insisted that Macron is following in the footsteps of Charles de Gaulle, who decided to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale after the student revolts of May ’68. “Commentators were already criticizing him for having plunged the country into deep disarray,” but this did not prevent de Gaulle from winning a large majority in the Assemblée, the same advisers pointed out, conveniently forgetting that he resigned a year later.
The Hardest part is the beginning
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His near-disappearance in the weeks that followed was intriguing. Macron did not take part in the legislative elections, which ended in failure. The machine was beginning to jam. The leader of a relative majority, then prime minister Elisabeth Borne, who claimed to be left-wing, was tasked with passing, with the support of the conservatives, bills considered right-wing: the pension reform and the immigration law. She succeeded, but the governing coalition was fractured. Historical political figures are choking on these texts, which break with the progressive ideal of the original Macronist vision.
Macron planned to regain favor by appointing Attal, the youngest prime minister of the Fifth Republic, in January. The Elysée boasted that this was new-found Macron audacity. Borne was abruptly dismissed as the new year began, as were several other ministers, without anyone knowing exactly where the president wanted to go. By text message, an MP warned the president that his troops needed “cuddle therapy.” “I can’t do everything,” Macron snapped.
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Five months later, the European elections were a fiasco, leading to the thunderbolt dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale. Did Macron make a mistake, on June 9, by calling the people to the polls again? Not necessarily, said his former classmate at the ENA school for top civil servants, Gaspard Gantzer. “He’s right. The French want a new gathering for democracy,” said Gantzer, a press relations advisor. “But their problem isn’t the Assemblée Nationale, it’s the president.”
Political Observer comments on the Institute for Fiscal Studies link.
Freddy is probably not a reporter, nor a stringer, but a person who complies and edits the work of other, the less important contributors – he is the Oxbridger buffer that filters that ‘raw data’ into usable propaganda!
Of the many links that he offered was this:
Headline: Election 2024
Sub-Headline: General Election 2024: IFS manifesto analysis
IFS researchers and Director Paul Johnson will deliver their analysis of the parties’ manifestos at a live-streamed press briefing.
These raw facts are largely ignored by the two main parties in their manifestos. That huge decisions over the size and shape of the state will need to be taken, that those decisions will, in all likelihood, mean either higher taxes or worse public services, you would not guess from reading their prospectuses or listening to their promises. They have singularly failed even to acknowledge some of the most important issues and choices to have faced us for a very long time. As the population ages these choices will become harder, not easier. We cannot wish them away.
Low growth, high debt and high interest payments mean we need to do something quite rare just to stop debt spiralling ever upwards: we need to run primary surpluses. That means the government collecting more in tax and other revenues than it spends on everything apart from debt interest. Not necessarily a recipe for a happy electorate.
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Editor: Low Growth remains the fly in the ointment of the Free Marketeers!
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Editor: Mr. Paul Johnson profession of Faith:
I am an optimist about the capacity of good policy to drive growth. The UK needs effective public investment, more private investment, planning reform, tax reform, removal of barriers to trade – notably non-tariff barriers with our nearest and richest neighbour, the European Union – and education and training policies to deliver a workforce with the right skills.
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Editor: An uninspired conclusion steeped in well worn clichés !
We need more efficient and effective public services. We need a government laser-focused on improving our economic performance. It’s good to see those facts acknowledged. But on the big issues over which governments have direct control – on how they will change tax, welfare, public spending – the manifestos of the main parties provide thin gruel indeed. On 4 July we will be voting in a knowledge vacuum.
If – as is likely – growth forecasts are not revised up this autumn, we do not know whether the new government would stick roughly to the day-to-day and investment spending totals set out in the March Budget, or whether they would borrow more or tax more to top them up. If they were to stick to spending plans we do not know what would be cut. If taxes are to go up, we do not know which ones. We certainly don’t know how they would respond if things were to get worse.
The choices in front of us are hard. High taxes, high debt, struggling public services, make them so. Pressures from health, defence, welfare, ageing will not make them easier. That is not a reason to hide the choices or to duck them. Quite the reverse. Yet hidden and ducked they have been.
In recent weeks political parties have started to announce their policy platforms for the forthcoming general election. Numerous organisations, including the Progressive Economy Forum (PEF), will be offering expert assessments of these policies and manifestos.
On its donations page, the IFS describes its purpose as follows:
“During an election campaign, objective analysis of economic policy is more important than ever…Our commentary on party manifestos and campaign promises leads the public debate, providing individuals with the tools to understand and evaluate complex decisions. What’s more, the IFS is entirely independent of political parties, companies and pressure groups, allowing us to hold politicians of all stripes to account when their numbers don’t add up or their policies are poorly designed.”
The key components here are 1) a commitment to “objective analysis”, 2) providing “the tools to understand and evaluate complex decisions”, and 3) independence from political parties that allows the IFS to hold politicians to account. Its guiding purpose is to show when “numbers don’t add up” and when policies are “poorly designed”.
The meaning of words is quite important here. One can claim “objective analysis” by applying the same assessment criterion to each proposal and still be biased. It is possible for a policy to be “well designed”, with numbers that “add up”, while also imposing devastating social costs. The IFS’s narrow criteria implicitly (or in some cases explicitly) ignores these social costs. This judgment reflects a clear bias in favour of accounting balance over social outcome.
Similarly, the claim of “independence” explicitly refers to no links to political groups. Crucially, however, this does not prevent political bias.
Editor: this essay is worth the time and attention of The Reader! Let me quote the final paragraphs of John Weeks revelatory essay!
Independence and bias
The IFS is regularly called a “watchdog” for politicians’ policy proposals. But it would be more accurate to describe it as an expert in the bean-counter approach to policy assessment.
The basic problem lies not in the political bias or orientation of the IFS. I directed a small research organization for 20 years, which was, as the IFS claims, objective, independent and unaffiliated to political parties or interest groups. Our analytical orientation was clear and well-known. Our studies tended to be critical of mainstream analysis, and organisations came to us with that outcome in mind.
The issue is not that the conclusions of the IFS’s studies are predictable and easily anticipated; it is that its studies are not always as objective as they claim. They often apply the wrong tools, and treat macroeconomic issues as if they were microeconomic. As Robert Chote, the former director of the IFS admitted: “they don’t do macro”.
By ignoring social, political and macroeconomic effects, IFS studies do not tell us whether a policy is a good idea, only whether “the numbers add up”.
Editor: the first two paragraphs set the stage for this act of political shaming of Farage: for his lack of conformity to the received wisdom that Putin is the ‘author’ of the War in Ukraine. Its ‘as if’ 2014 and the machinations of Victoria Nuland, Jeffery Pyatt, NATO, The EU, the Azov Battalion, Right Sector and Svoboda in its later political iterations, has been subject to a convenient erasure. And the fact that Zanny Minton Beddoes is a Neo-Con. Her appearance on The Daily Show of Feb 12, 2024 cements her status on the Neo-Con spectrum! Also the fact that ‘Comedy’ of the Jon Stewart variety, is wedded to a political conformity within a very narrow range of respectable political chatter!
Zanny Minton Beddoes was also a member of Jeffrey Sachs team in 1993. Her animosity toward Russia is of a perennial variety. The Reader need only look:
Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist
By Peter Passell
June 27, 1993
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Sachs’s message of urgency is not universally accepted. Plenty of Western as well as Russian economists contend that a more gradual approach is not only possible but necessary. “Economic reform is a political process,” says Padma Desai at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. “First, you must build consensus.”
And even his sympathizers acknowledge that Sachs’s high profile and world-class impatience could generate a backlash in a nation still adjusting to the reality that it is no longer a superpower. “There’s a real dilemma here,” says Stanley Fischer, an international economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to make a lot of noise to get the attention of the West. But the more noise you make, the more you make it seem that the reform program is a Western program. And that could be the kiss of death.”
Still, Sachs’s brand of “shock therapy” has worked elsewhere. And there is good reason to believe that Russia’s future will turn on how well its leaders learn the catechism of change that he has worked so hard to promulgate.
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Editor: Mr. Sachs has tried to re-invent himself in the political present, I’ll call it unconvincing! Japhy Wilson’s book provides a necessary history :
When The Reader considers the framing I offer, as revelatory to the public chastising of Farage, by a powerful news magazine: stepped in a self-proclaimed ‘Liberalism’,‘Free Markets’, and the other adaptations, tinctured in Hayekian faith in The Wisdom Of The Market , as political/moral singularity. Yet Reader look to the Economic Collapse of 2006-2008, that was the direct result of that ‘Liberalism’ and misplaced faith in ‘Free Market’ nostrums!
Mr. Farage crime is in not reiterating The Party Line on Putin. Farage is the leader of Reform UK since June 2024, his statement reveals that both New Labour and the Tories are dismal failures
Our country has so much potential, but both Labour and the Conservatives have broken promise after promise for the last 30 years.
You are worse off, both financially and culturally. Wages are stagnant, we have a housing crisis, our young people struggle to get on the property ladder, we have rising crime, energy bills are some of the highest in Europe, the NHS isn’t working, both legal and illegal immigration are at record levels and woke ideology has captured our public institutions and schools.
The Conservatives have failed and Labour will fail too. A vote for either is a vote for more incompetence, dishonesty and failure.
We are ruled by an out of touch political class who have turned their backs on our country.
Reform is the alternative.
Only Reform will stand up for British culture, identity and values. We will freeze immigration and stop the boats. Restore law and order. Repair our broken public services. Cut taxes to make work pay. End government waste. Slash energy bills. Unlock real economic growth.
Only Reform will take back control over our borders, our money and our laws. Only Reform will secure Britain’s future as a free, proud and rich nation.
On june 21st Nigel Farage acknowledged that the war in Ukraine was the fault of Vladimir Putin, but told the bbc that Russia’s president had been “provoked” by nato and the European Union. The leader of Reform uk, the populist party snapping at the heels of the governing Conservatives in pre-election polling and threatening to push them into third place, was echoing Mr Putin’s own arguments. The Russian leader is focused mostly on nato, which provides the hard security that makes the eu safe. He complains that the alliance’s expansion into central and eastern Europe after the cold war made Russia’s position intolerable. Some Western scholars concur.
Mr Farage and Mr Putin have the argument upside down. Countries join nato not to antagonise Russia, but because they are threatened by it. To understand how the arguments have shifted, you need to look back to the unstable politics of Europe in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Editor: The Critical Reader might ask what % of the voting population does Farage represent? Politico provides an oblique answer:
Headline: The Nigel Farage effect is real
Sub-headline: Conservatives lose out while Farage’s Reform UK is projected to win 5 seats in latest in-depth model.
Nigel Farage’s entry into the U.K. election race seems to have finally put his Reform party on the map.
Pollster YouGov released its latest in-depth seat projections Wednesday as the July 4 vote looms. It’s the company’s first MRP model projection since Farage, now at the helm of Reform UK, announced he would be running in the election after all in early June.
Things have gone from bad to worse for the Conservatives, with the model projecting the party’s lowest seat total in its history. Coming in at just 108 of the total 650 up for grabs, the party is 257 seats down on its triumph under Boris Johnson in 2019.
Nigel Farage’s entry into the U.K. election race seems to have finally put his Reform party on the map.
Pollster YouGov released its latest in-depth seat projections Wednesday as the July 4 vote looms. It’s the company’s first MRP model projection since Farage, now at the helm of Reform UK, announced he would be running in the election after all in early June.
Things have gone from bad to worse for the Conservatives, with the model projecting the party’s lowest seat total in its history. Coming in at just 108 of the total 650 up for grabs, the party is 257 seats down on its triumph under Boris Johnson in 2019.
With at least 5 seats hanging in the balance, The Economist is making political war on Farage. The Reader might wonder, if any of the potential voters in this election will read this diatribe? Upper-Crust Tories and New Labour voters, might but Farage’s constancy is working-class, or those on the political margins!
I’ve presented what I think is relevant to the questions that animates this political polemic, without creating too much boredom?
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