Begin with the History Made to Measure of the first paragraph. The political reach from the 1940 to the present is breathtakingly caricatured:
In the 1940s and early 1950s America built a new world order out of the chaos of war. For all its shortcomings, it kept the peace between superpowers and underpinned decades of growth that lifted billions out of poverty. Today that order, based on global rules, free markets and an American promise to uphold both, is fraying. Toxic partisanship at home has corroded confidence in America’s government. The financial crisis of 2007-09 dented faith in markets. America’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan undermined its claim to spread democracy. Today most countries refuse to heed its call to enforce sanctions on Russia. And China’s rise has spurred American politicians to take a more selfish, zero-sum approach to geopolitics.
I’ve highlighted, for the reader, this collection of Atlanticist political clichés!
This next paragraph features Henry Kissinger, as the Voice of Political Reason?
China’s rise has also increased the threat of war. In a conversation with The Economist, Henry Kissinger, who will be 100 this month, warns that China and America are “on the path” to confrontation. “Both sides have convinced themselves that the other represents a strategic danger,” he says. The stakes could not be higher: both are nuclear-armed. Both are also dabbling with unpredictable artificial intelligence (ai). The elder statesmen’s eldest statesman worries that, just as before the first world war, the superpowers will stumble into catastrophe.
Biden advisor, Neo-Conservative Jake Sullivan is next to appear.
Since arriving in the Oval Office in 2021, Joe Biden has developed a new strategy to preserve American pre-eminence and reduce the risk of conflict. Jake Sullivan, the latest of Mr Kissinger’s successors as national security adviser, recently gave the fullest account yet of this Biden doctrine. His narrative weaves together middle-class prosperity, defence and climate change. He repudiates the free-market “Washington consensus” and calls for the government to play a muscular role in society, with a strong emphasis on national security.
Hyperactive Industrial Policy enters Stage Right:
This means hyperactive industrial policy. Big subsidies will catalyse private investment in semiconductors and clean energy. Export controls will create “a small yard and high fence” to keep selected technology with potential military uses out of unfriendly hands. At the same time, the administration is softening its rhetoric. Instead of “decoupling” from China’s economy, it talks of “de-risking”. It wants to find common ground on climate change, African debt and even Ukraine. On May 10th and 11th Mr Sullivan spent eight hours with his Chinese counterpart, the first high-level contact for months.
Behind the doctrine is a belief that a virtuous circle can make America and the world safer. State intervention and protectionism will boost industry, helping the middle class and cooling America’s populist fevers. Less erratic leadership (after Donald Trump’s) will restore America’s authority abroad, even if the Biden team breaks a few global economic rules. The relationship with China will be managed with “strategic maturity”. As a precaution America will keep spending large sums on its military forces to deter China from aggression
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The Economist writers, and or the final Editor, ask the searching questions, with the final two sentences pronouncing the negative on ‘The Biden Doctrine’ as ‘flawed’ and will ‘make America weaker’. That toxic nostalgia for that ‘post-1945 order’ is about an unrealizablepolitical delusion, when pragmatism is about a realism, born of facts, not of deeply held political fictions.
Will the new doctrine work? After the chaos of the Trump years, Mr Biden’s commitment to diplomacy is welcome. It will be on display at the g7 summit this week. He is right that American foreign policy must deal with new challenges, from Chinese coercion to climate change. However, especially when compared with the post-1945 order, the Biden doctrine is flawed. Its diagnosis of America’s problems is too pessimistic, and some of its prescriptions would make America weaker.
The Economist offers this:
The main source of America’s strength is creative destruction and open markets in a rules-based global economy. So although Mr Biden is right to reinforce the social safety-net, his state-led, insular economic vision may ultimately erode living standards and American clout.
The above more of the same resort to cliché: ‘creative destruction’, ‘open markets’, ‘rules-based global economy’, ‘his state-led, insular economic vision may ultimately erode living standards and American clout.’
Some further selective quotations of this essay are instructive:
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Mr Sullivan wants to combine export controls with co-operative trade, and an arms race with collaboration.
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Never mind rules on ai, America and China have no system for nuclear-arms control: China’s arsenal will almost quadruple by 2035.
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Yet America’s unpredictable economic nationalism and unwillingness to offer access to its markets undermines its influence. Europe fears a subsidy race and worries escalating tensions with China will cause it severe damage: our calculations show Germany’s economy is twice as exposed to China as America’s is. The decay of global rules is accelerating the embrace of a transactional approach to foreign policy by emerging economies. The post-1945 order rested on American constancy: each administration was guided by predictable interests. Today allies and enemies know chaos may follow the election in 2024. Trumpian dysfunction is not Mr Biden’s fault, but it makes it vital to be predictable and open now.
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Unfortunately the Biden doctrine fails to rebut the narrative of American decline and so has not resolved the tension between the country’s toxic politics and its role as the linchpin of a liberal order. Unless America looks out at the world with self-confidence, it will struggle to lead it.
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What The Economist writers and Editors offer is more misplaced toxic nostalgia for that ‘post-1945 order’ , as the sine qua non of an American Future: based on a post WWII American Hegemony, that cannot be exhumed!
This discussion begins at the 01:20 point and ends before the 21:18 point. Katy Balls asks questions of her two guests
Ferguson and Grey act the parts of Political Technocrats, relying on ‘Polling Data’ as a reliable source- the mention, and reliance on the ‘polls’, as some kind of measure of actual reliable information, about outcomes, the cornerstones of both Ferguson and Grey, is utterly misplaced, given this from the Pew Research Center, about the 2016 American Election.
November 9, 2016
Headline: Why 2016 election polls missed their mark
The results of Tuesday’s presidential election came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling, which consistently projected Hillary Clinton as defeating Donald Trump. Relying largely on opinion polls, election forecasters put Clinton’s chance of winning at anywhere from 70% to as high as 99%, and pegged her as the heavy favorite to win a number of states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that in the end were taken by Trump.
How could the polls have been so wrong about the state of the election?
There is a great deal of speculation but no clear answers as to the cause of the disconnect, but there is one point of agreement: Across the board, polls underestimated Trump’s level of support. With few exceptions, the final round of public polling showed Clinton with a lead of 1 to 7 percentage points in the national popular vote. State-level polling was more variable, but there were few instances where polls overstated Trump’s support.
The fact that so many forecasts were off-target was particularly notable given the increasingly wide variety of methodologies being tested and reported via the mainstream media and other channels. The traditional telephone polls of recent decades are now joined by increasing numbers of high profile, online probability and nonprobability sample surveys, as well as prediction markets, all of which showed similar errors.
It isn’t that the ‘insights’ that Ferguson and Grey are not interesting, to a point. This featured quotation from Ferguson, is about his notion of what constitutes a possible ‘Left Wing’ in America?
‘The night that it’s clear that Trump has been re-elected, heads will be exploding on the Harvard campus, in the New York Times offices, in the CNN offices, and the market will be rallying.’
What is left unsaid, by both Ferguson and Grey, is that Trump is a symptom of the complete collapse of the political/ moral legitimacy of both the Republican and New Democrats, as viable political entities.
In the final portion of this interview Katy Balls asks Ferguson who he, as an American citizen, will vote for: the answer is Trump.
Political Cynic opines on the politically jejune chatter of Gail Collins & Bret Stephens.
MAY 16, 2023
Gail Collins and Bret Stephens mutual therapy session, regarding the Trump political phenomenon-selective quotation of this edited transcript is an irresistible temptation:
The introductory exchange:
Gail Collins: Hey, Bret, good to be conversing again. Heck of a lot going on. Before we get to the border or the budget, though, let me admit I’m shallow and start with the Trump town hall on CNN.
Bret Stephens: Not shallow, Gail. But you are depressing me.
Collins searching reply:
Gail: Trump lost your Republican vote a long time ago, but if you were still on the fence, was there anything on display that evening that would have had an impact?
Stephens reply:
Bret: I’m not exactly a reliable gauge of how today’s Republicans think: In November, I wrote a column called “Donald Trump Is Finally Finished,” which I may have to spend the rest of my life living down.
That said, I would guess that if you’re the sort of voter who liked 80-proof Trump, you’re gonna love 120-proof Trump. And that’s what he was in that CNN town hall: more mendacious, more shameless, more unapologetic, more aggressive, nastier. But also undeniably vigorous, particularly when compared with Joe Biden. My guess is the town hall will consolidate his lead as the Republican front-runner.
Your take? Should CNN have given him the platform?
Collins reply
Gail: Don’t see any reason CNN shouldn’t have done the interview. Except that it reduces pressure on Trump to show up for any Republican primary debates. Which he naturally wants to avoid, given his ineptitude when it comes to actual policy questions.
Stephens reply:
Bret: I’m of two minds. The media has a responsibility to cover the Republican front-runner, and I thought Kaitlan Collins, the CNN moderator, handled the responsibility about as well as anyone could have. Yet nonstop media attention is the oxygen on which Trump thrives. The more attention we give him — which is what we are doing right now — the stronger he gets.
Collins reply:
Gail: About the impact: Yeah, if you liked Trump before, you wouldn’t be deterred by his willingness to let the nation default, or his being “inclined” to pardon a lot of the Jan. 6 rioters.
Really would like to hear an everybody-in primary debate, though. Without Trump, I guess the only suspense would be whether Ron DeSantis is capable of being … not terrible.
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Is there anything here that qualifies as particularly insightful? The Reader can continue her journey, into respectable bourgeoise political commentary, that doesn’t emancipate itself from collective cliché, held aloft by the self-congratulation of its participants. I’ll end my ‘commentary’, such as it is, on this exchange, with its final paragraphs:
Bret: Obviously, I don’t support vigilantism. But that’s what you get when police are hampered from maintaining public order. The answer is to give the police the authorities and resources they need to deal with someone like Neely before a tragedy occurs.
Gail, this is too grim a note on which to end — and we haven’t even touched on George Santos’s indictment.
Gail: Now, there’s a high note!
Bret: Before we go, I want to put in a word for Sam Roberts’s obituary for Mike Pride, a former editor of The Concord Monitor, who died last month in Florida at 76 and whom we both knew through his stewardship of the Pulitzer Prizes. Mike showed that you can often make the greatest difference as a newsman by writing about issues that are near to people’s everyday lives. He reminded us that local journalism matters. And that it’s at least one thing that deserves to be made great again.
Political Observer, considers Mr. Colvile, on the Economic/Political Moment, as it passes away…
MAY 14, 2023
Imagine the ‘memos’ that Mr. Colvile’s staff must provide to their boss? In an instructive reversal, might an American think of Woodward’s staff of writers, turning his raw notes into readable chapters? Or is Trollope’s Palliser Novels, in a more vulgarized form, a more apt recreation of a political past/present?
Mr. Colvile’s opening paragraph of this essay demonstrates that he might be a political satirist, of a kind?
Last week the Tories went bananas over Brexit. Bendy bananas, rather. Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, announced that the Retained EU Law Bill would be scrapping only 600 EU rules straight off, rather than the promised thousands — with the rescued laws including the notorious regulation on the “abnormal curvature” of a certain fruit. Backbenchers drew angry comparisons with an advert from Rishi Sunak’s leadership campaign in which a white-shirted office drone fed piles of EU rules into a shredder while Ode to Joy blasted out on the soundtrack.
With this near comic opening, Mr. Colevile then ascends to High Thatcherite Politics:
The row wasn’t just about a clash between pragmatism and principle. It reflected a growing concern among Brexiteers that the government hasn’t done enough to pinpoint areas in which Britain can steal a march on the EU.
There is a slightly farcical element to this — not least the idea that you show virility and purity through the sheer number of rules you axe, never mind the actual detail. But those MPs do have a point. Post-Brexit regulation has been a policy merry-go-round, subject to endless changes of personnel and approach. It wasn’t until years after the referendum that a specific unit was created to marshal progress, and it was pitifully underpowered compared with, say, the legions working on the Cop26 climate conference. Yes, there has been good work done, such as the Edinburgh reforms to financial services. But even then the EU may actually beat us to reforming the Solvency II insurance regime, which has been weighing down our investment prospects.
Yanis Varoufakis in this YouTube video,exposestwo kinds of corruption, relevant to the questions of the long forgotten Virtuous Norther Tier vs. The Profligate Southern Tire of 2014. That asks/answers relevant question, that Mr. Colvile’s scolding of the un-enlightened dare not consider.
The post war Collectivism of Monnet’s Coal And Steel Cartel as a bulwark against Soviet revanchism – (incidentally the product of Yalta Conference that ‘surrendered’ Central Europe to Stalin) that then evolved into the Common Market and the EU.
The expansion of the political/economic actors, who opine on British dwindling economic prospects
In 2012 the economist Andy Haldane gave a speech highlighting the increased scale of financial regulation.
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In other words, the number of regulators may have quadrupled in just over a decade. Likewise, the average FTSE 350 company report is 64 per cent longer than it was five years ago, because of all the extra reporting requirements — which helps explain why so few companies are listing here.
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This isn’t just about finance. As Dyson says, it often feels as if the British state is doing more to deter growth and innovation than encourage them.
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There was a lot of scoffing about post-Brexit Britain becoming “Singapore-on-Thames”.
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In France global chief executives are whisked to the Élysée Palace.
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Leaving the EU was always going to hit the economy.
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And indeed on pretty much every axis we have done scandalously little to adjust. We have raised corporation tax, sharply.
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I voted Remain, largely because I didn’t trust the British state to get Brexit right. But after the Leave vote I thought it would at least respond to the brute necessity to compete.
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Here, Mr. Colvile reaches full screech:
Instead, the headlines are filled with bosses such as Dyson and companies such as Revolut and Johnson Matthey bemoaning Britain’s attitude to business, or national champions such as ARM listing their shares in New York because they feel London is becoming a backwater. We are about to bring in the world’s most prominent piece of tech-bashing regulation, the Online Safety Bill, and are threatening firms with multibillion-pound fines across several pieces of legislation. Meta is threatening to pull WhatsApp from British phones because of our insistence on breaking end-to-end encryption as part of the bill. Microsoft is furious that our competition authority blocked its attempt to buy the maker of Call of Duty — which, irrespective of the merits of the arguments, surely has very little to do with us, as they’re both American firms.
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This, indeed, is our core Brexit delusion: that we can still carry on as we were, that the world still owes us a living, even as the terms of trade have changed.
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But only £1.6 trillion was invested in this country. And the proportion of share portfolios devoted to UK firms had fallen from 37 per cent to 23 per cent in just a decade.
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Put simply, the smartest investors in the country think we’re a bad long-term bet.
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Badenoch’s package of announcements had good things to say on regulation as a last resort, and on getting regulators to consider the growth impact of their decisions.
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A decade ago David Cameron tried to popularise the idea that Britain was in a “global race”. We still are. And it would help an awful lot if we put on some running shoes.
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The toxic mirage of ‘Growth’, via the utterly exhausted Hayek/Thatcherite Model, within the stark reality of Global Warming, renders Mr. Colvile’s political intervention as antique as Trollope’s political fictions? Though a work of literary art, has value as descriptive of a political time, place and sensibility, not speak of the various moralities of its characters.
The final paragraph of Nathan Pinkoski essay about Americas most notorious intellectual charlatan, that term is old but descriptive of Fukuyama as Political/Moral Prophet: in sum it doesn’t take much to impress American Intellectual Provincials, who swoon at the mere mention of ‘The Old Man’.
Consider the lower echelon of this kind of ‘thinker’: ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ by Allan Bloom, ‘Clash of Civilizations’ by Samuel P. Huntington, and his racist tract ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’that identified the Mestizo Hordes as a threat to Anglo-Protestant virtue. Not to forget the ‘Coddling The American Mind’ by Professor Jonathan Haidt, a New Democratic political operative, inveighing against a radical ‘Ten Percent’ of political malcontents, from the Upper-Classes.
I will just highlight some of the phrases from the last paragraph of Nathan Pinkoski polemic, that takes his model to be, and not too distant from, Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God by Johnathan Edwards.
Today’s leftism may talk in old terms, but it desires neither equality nor justice. It is the slave of the inner self and the puppet of unlimited technological progress.Older liberals such as Fukuyama are unsettled by the regime that results. Yet they are unwilling to grapple with the philosophical and theological problems the new regime poses. Their solution is to turn “liberalism” into an ersatz centrism that gently regrets the excesses of the left while policing the right with great vigor. So, as the transhumanist machine accelerates, liberal centrists like Fukuyama are reduced to pious celebrations of creativity, innovation, and technological progress. They collaborate in the construction of the dystopia their younger selves feared would come to pass. That’s what American liberalism has become. It presides over the abolition of man.
The final sentence postulates ‘the abolition of man’ : The care and maintenance of masculine privilege, is the sine qua non of The Patriarchy and its ‘thinkers’. Senator Josh Hawley postulates on September 15, 2022:
I have not written much about the war in Ukraine lately because so little has changed strategically since the first few months of this conflict, when three overarching facts pretty much drove everything — and still do.
Next paragraph:
Fact No. 1: As I wrote at the outset, when a war of this magnitude begins, the key question you ask yourself as a foreign affairs columnist is very simple: Where should I be? Should I be in Kyiv, the Donbas, Crimea, Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Brussels or Washington?
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No. 2 and Plan B
Which leads to fact No. 2: Putin never had a Plan B. It’s now obvious that he thought he was going to waltz into Kyiv, seize it in a week, install a lackey as president, tuck Ukraine into his pocket and put to an end any further European Union, NATO or Western cultural expansion toward Russia. He would then cast his shadow across all of Europe.
This leads to fact No. 3: Putin has put himself in a situation where he can’t win, can’t lose and can’t stop. There’s no way he can seize control of all of Ukraine anymore. But at the same time, he can’t afford to be defeated, after all the Russian lives and treasure he has expended. So he can’t stop.
To put it differently, because Putin never had a Plan B…
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Putin’s Plan B is to disguise that Putin’s Plan A has failed
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Operation Save My Face.
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Western “globalists and elites
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Putin invaded Ukraine to preserve Russian family values.
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Putin is quite frightened today by two subjects: arithmetic and Russian history.
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in lyrics from the song “Everybody Talks” by one of my favorite rock groups, Neon Trees.
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EVERYBODY TALKS.
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Plan B — starting with subtraction.
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Mr. Friedman seems, from this point to have regained his political/argumentative composure, after his reliance on free imaginative variation, including a quotation from his favorite band ‘Neon Trees’.
I’ll quote from a selection of portions of these paragraphs:
The White House reported last week that an estimated 100,000 Russian fighters have been killed or wounded in Ukraine…
That is a big number of casualties — even in a big country — and you can see that Putin is worried that his people are talking about it, because,…
Putin would not be going to such lengths if he was not fearful that, despite his best efforts, everyone was whispering…
Read the recent essay in The Washington Post by Leon Aron, a historian of Putin’s Russia and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, about Putin’s visit in March to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian…
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“Two days after the International Criminal Court charged Putin with war crimes and issued a warrant for his arrest,” Aron wrote, “the Russian president came to Mariupol for a few hours.
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Aron told me that the Russian media later scrubbed “It’s all lies” from the audio, but the fact that it had been left in there may have been a subversive act by someone in the official Russian media hierarchy.
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Which leads to the other thing Putin knows: “The gods of Russian history are extremely unforgiving of military defeat,” Aron said. In the modern era, “when a Russian leader ends a war in a clear defeat — or with no win — usually there is a change of regime.
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It’s for these reasons that Aron, who just finished a book about Putin’s Russia, argues that this Ukraine conflict is far from over and could get a lot worse before it is.
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“There are now two ways for Putin to end this war he cannot win and cannot walk away from,” Aron said.
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And the other, he argued, “is to somehow force a direct confrontation with the U.S. — bring us to the precipice of an all-out strategic nuclear exchange — and then step back and propose to a scared West an overall settlement, which would include a neutral, disarmed Ukraine and his holding on to the Crimea and Donbas.”
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In the above Mr. Friedman takes the word of a Neo-Con?
It’s impossible to get into Putin’s head and predict his next move, but color me worried. Because what we do know, from Putin’s actions, is that he knows his Plan A has failed. And he will now do anything to produce a Plan B to justify the terrible losses that he has piled up in the name of a country where everybody talks and where defeated leaders don’t retire peacefully.
Plan A and B make a return to the stage, along with Friedman’s ‘color me worried’.
Mr. Colvile’s April 29, 2023 essay ‘Britain’s legal migration numbers matter more than small boats’ ignores the the fact that the ‘Refugee Problem’ that he attempts to ‘diagnose’, might find its actual beginning point, with the murderous political adventurism of the Bush/Cheney War On Terror, that is , if political candor were its starting point. This report from the New York Times, is a stark reminder of what Journalism might resemble:
Sept. 8, 2020Updated Sept. 10, 2021
Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror
Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Colvile’s attempt at Historical Reductivism is self-serving: the diminutive framing is the tool of a propagandist. I searched the essay for mention of that ‘War On Terror’ and its continuing toxic Global legacy, not found. The essay at 1,254 words is true to the Neo-Conservative obfuscation, wedded to a highly politicized logorrhea.
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The American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have been abysmal failures, with long lasting catastrophic consequences. The focus of Colvile’s intervention avoids that toxic legacy, by careful rhetorical procedures of evasion and absence, of a possible broad raging historical faming. As head of a Think Tank, he draws on the power of other employees, to provide viable argumentative alternatives, to actual historical facts.
Mr. Colvile’s concluding paragraph trades in the cultivation of bourgeois political respectability.
Whenever people accuse the UK of being a backward, prejudiced country, I always point to our extraordinary record of welcoming and assimilating immigration. My children and I are among the millions of Britons who wouldn’t exist without it. But, for all the focus on the boats in the Channel, it is those coming in perfectly legally who are the bigger story — and will do far more to reshape Britain
In his latest essay Mr. Colvile comments on the NHS:
Headline: Robert Colvile Ending strikes is just the start — there are harder problems for the NHS
Robert Colvile Sunday May 07 2023,
One of the joys of the local elections is seeing people scramble on to their hobby horses. It’s clear, they will intone, that the real cause of the Tories’ problems was net zero. Or sacking Boris. Or letting in too many migrants. Or too few.
In fact, the things people are upset about tend to be the same things as they have consistently been telling pollsters. Primarily, as Tim Shipman reports today, that they’ve looked at their bank accounts and realised — to paraphrase the Tory chairman, Greg Hands — that there’s no money left.
But alongside the cost of living horror show another problem has been dominating the focus groups: the NHS. During the recent strikes public concern rose by 8 points in April alone.
On this front there is a chink of light. Steve Barclay, the health secretary, has reached a pay deal with enough of the unions to sign off a national settlement, although some are still aggrieved. There have even been what one insider describes as “constructive” discussions with the junior doctors, who are on a separate deal.
It will definitely help the NHS to have staff on the wards rather than the picket lines. But, as ministers know full well, that is hardly the end of it.
One of Mr. Covile’s may guises is his posing as the voice of reason, in a cacophony of voices. As a Thatcherite Political Romantic of a certain kind, iteration, embodiment… he strikes that perpetual pose , in a newspaper, dedicated to the dismembering of The Welfare State.
What might The Reader make of this?
Headline: 37 NHS GP practices have been sold to a private US health company – here’s what it means
Sub-headline: An American health insurance company has taken over 37 GP practices in London, sparking fears the NHS is being sold by stealth.
An American health insurance company has taken over 37 GP practices in London, sparking fears the NHS is being sold by stealth.
Private Eye magazine reported this week that Operose Health, the UK subsidiary of US health insurance giant Centene Corporation, took over the 37 GP practices this week, adding to the 22 primary care services the company already runs in the UK. The firm now has full control of the NHS-funded contracts to run the London surgeries.
During the 2019 election campaign, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn claimed in a debate that he had seen internal documents showing Boris Johnson had signalled willingness to allow US healthcare companies greater access to the NHS.
Johnson repeatedly denied that the NHS would be “on the table” in any deals between the UK and the US, however.
GP practices have traditionally been owned privately by GPs themselves.
The above article is about the reality of the dismantling of that Welfare State, in sum the NHS, is already a political fact, and that the above report is just confirmation of that reality. Note the cynicism of the opening sentence, posing as a variety of political wisdom? ‘One of the joys of the local elections is seeing people scramble on to their hobby horses.’
A selection of sentences demonstrates Colvile’s argumentative thrust:
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The good news for Rishi Sunak is that waiting lists have stopped rising, sticking at 7.2 million over the past half-year.
For the NHS workforce, it is clear that the problems go far beyond salary. True, the latest staff survey found that only a quarter of staff were satisfied with their pay.
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Barely half felt their organisation would act on concerns they raised, or would recommend it as a workplace.
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The key danger, they say, is a steady erosion of the goodwill on which the health service has always relied. For example, it is thought there has been a significant rise in the amount of “exception reporting” — junior doctors claiming for overtime worked, rather than just doing it unpaid.
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The head of health policy at No 10, Bill Morgan, published a report days before getting the job about the long-term failure to train enough NHS staff.
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But in 2021 more than half of advertised consultant physician posts in England and Wales went unfilled, and three quarters of those had no applicants at all. The more short-handed you are, the more you have to rely on locums and overseas labour.
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The government hopes to address this with its big workforce plan, due later this year, but building capacity takes at least a decade.
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Unless we can keep people healthier for longer, or galvanise GDP growth, we’ll soon be a health system with a vestigial economy attached.
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A Thatcherite like Colvile cares neither for patient care, nor patient outcomes, ideological conformity is his ruling singularity, while sounding the notes of a cultivated bourgeois morality.
Fixing this, in other words, will be a long-term, multi-government project. It will also require flexibility and imagination within the sector. The medical unions are calling for a huge expansion of medical training. But it was the BMA that voted against new medical schools in 2008 to avoid an “overproduction of doctors with limited career opportunities”.
Does it really make sense for doctors to train for years across a number of areas when they will largely end up in one specialty? Should the same person be diagnosing your condition and cutting you open? What if we trained more nurse associates and sub-consultant doctors to free up doctors and nurses? Shouldn’t we be able to offer doctors better salaries to work in places or specialties that are struggling to recruit? The reaction to such suggestions tends to be frosty, to say the least.
The priority for the government and the health sector is just to get a grip on waiting lists and make the NHS run like a normal service again. But if we can’t fix its long-term problems, it won’t just be the Tories who suffer.
How quickly the ‘Jupertarian Politics’ of Macron was discarded by Macron, and by The Economist. Now rendered as:
Headline: Emmanuel Macron hopes to reinvent himself in 100 days
Sub-headline: France’s president would also benefit from curbing some of his own instincts
During his audacious first bid for the French presidency, in 2017, Emmanuel Macron would scold supporters at campaign rallies who jeered when he name-checked his rivals. “Don’t whistle at them; let’s beat them!” the 39-year-old pretender urged the crowds with a smile, adapting a slogan borrowed from the high priest of political positivity, America’s Barack Obama. French politics, Mr Macron argued forcefully then, was in need of benevolence and collective endeavour not obstructive division. It was time to move an irritable, rebellious country to a more stable, consensual place.
The above paragraph is a re-writing of History, nothing new for The Economist. That now discarded grandiose nomenclature of ‘Jupertarian Politics’ was the blind for the Neo-Liberalization of France. It was abandoned with the appearance of the gilets jaunes protests about fuel prices. The Macron extra-constitutional Pension Reforms have now galvanized the working class and the middle class, into a full scale Rebellion in France. Macron’s ‘audacity’ as argued by this political rag is more self-serving myth-making. I’ve put in bold font the last two sentences of this shit!
The Economist writers/editors are Stalinists by nature, they re-write a History Made to Measure:
Six years later, France seems stuck in an impasse. The French are once again fired up by revolutionary rage and seem convinced that the country is run by an anti-democratic despot bent on destroying the bedrock of all that the French cherish. The opposition trades in a form of declinist misérabilisme. The grotesque effigies of the president’s head in a noose, or The grotesque effigies on the cobbled streets of Paris, glorify violent revolt. On May 1st an armour-clad policeman was set alight by a Molotov cocktail. It was the low point of the 13th one-day strike against Mr Macron’s modest decision to raise the minimum pension age from 62 years to 64, which is now law. Petrol-bombing troublemakers represent a minuscule minority. But 63% of the French want to keep up the struggle against the new law, and 72% say they are unhappy with Mr Macron as their president.
The Economist writer, or writers, produce a collection of hysterical crescendos: the country is run by an anti-democratic despot bent on destroying the bedrock of all that the French cherish. The Rebels are a minority: The grotesque effigies… who glorify violent revolt… armour-clad policeman was set alight by a Molotov cocktail… Petrol-bombing troublemakers …
Read about the historical record of the French Police here :
The Reader is in the melodramatic territory of Sydney Carton as played by Ronald Coleman in A Tale of Two Cities, as he ascends to the guillotine declaiming ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done;’
A selection of quotations from the remainder of this screeching political document:
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The latest instrument of choice for protesters is more prosaic, but no less symbolic: the saucepan. A few years back the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) adopted high-vis fluorescent jackets to mark the fury of those who felt invisible and ignored by the president. This time, protesters stage casserolades, or concerts of banging pots and pans, to signify discontent at his failure to listen.
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Every evening, images of real war and extreme hardship on the European continent are beamed into its living rooms. Yet France has turned the raising of the pension age to 64 into a national psychodrama. Forget the coming upheaval of artificial intelligence, or quantum computing, or the worrying level of southern Europe’s water table. France is heading to the barricades to fight yesterday’s battles. And its re-elected president is portrayed, absurdly, as an autocrat for having gone ahead and done what he said during his campaign that he would.
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Militant unions care little for the culture of consensus. Among the books prominently displayed for sale during a recent day of protest in Paris were Lenin’s “The State and Revolution” and Alan Woods’s “The Ideas of Karl Marx”.
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Mr Macron lost his majority, mishandled his pension reform, alienated even moderate union leaders, and found himself having to push the law through parliament without a direct vote. The advocate of consensus-building between the left and the right ended up driving a bulldozer through the centre of French politics
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Where does this leave Mr Macron, who has four more years in office? Guiding and nudging the prickly French out of their comfort zone is a challenge for any leader. For the president, his “100 days” is a way of buying time, giving people a chance to let off steam and countering the populist charge that he is disconnected.
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A new prime minister would make sense only if he or she could reboot the government. Without a formal coalition, bill-by-bill negotiation will render tricky anything but the most uncontroversial reform.
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The Economist offers in its final paragraph – confronts Macron as an insufferable Anti-Democratic Neo-Liberal… its too late for a mealy-mouthed political character analysis, of this utterly failed Technocrat. Just more shit!
Mr Macron is a serious, intelligent, ideas-driven leader, who thinks ahead and knows where he is trying to take France. But he is also someone who reckons he knows better than everybody else, and has trouble concealing it. This makes his connection with the French tense, and his governing style solitary and abrasive. In this respect, the saucepan-banging is a broader metaphor. For there is a big difference between talking and listening, not to mention believing that your interlocutor has something useful to say. If a reinvented president is to emerge from the “100 days”, it might usefully be one who has also learned to curb his own instincts
The last few Politico commentaries on Trump, by Lowry, read as if it were written by a Trump advocate/apologist/tactician. The latest is no exception:
Headline: Opinion | Trump’s Election Denialism Is Already Winning
Sub-headline: It’s up to Republican opponents to make it a vulnerability rather than a strength
Presidents of the United States who have lost elections generally don’t go on to dominate their parties and win the office again.
Donald Trump has found a work-around, by denying he was defeated in 2020. This effort has been overwhelmingly successful among its target audience of Republican voters and has tilted the playing field of the 2024 nomination battle in his favor.
Trump has made himself the incumbent in exile, the sitting president in the hearts and minds of his supporters, the martyr of shadowy forces (so shadowy, in fact, that they can’t be readily identified) and the true heir chiseled out of his rightful throne by an unscrupulous pretender.
This creates a terrible dilemma for Trump’s opponents: How do you run against a defeated president without noting the highly relevant fact that he was, ahem, defeated?.
This followed by polling data, an abundance of political speculation, and ending here:
Give Trump this: He doesn’t necessarily accept public opinion as it is but tries to shape it. Although there’d be widespread Republican doubts about the 2020 election no matter what he said, the belief that it was stolen wouldn’t be as deep and pervasive without his persistent (and deceptive) advocacy. He’s changed the landscape in his favor, and his opponents simply accept it at their peril.
For Trump to lose the nomination, what should be his chief vulnerability needs to be a vulnerability — and his Republican opponents must try to make it one.
What never occurs, within Lowry’s imaginative political speculations, is what Robert Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson might offer to the American electorate: that might render the myth of the ‘stolen election’ moot, or at the least tangential, or even irrelevant, in the face of four more years of Senile Old Joe: AIPAC groveler Kamala Harris, and her bloodthirsty Neo-Con political allies, a clear and present danger to what remains of The Republic?
Let me offers a selection of some of the comic moments from Mr. Ferguson’s 3, 893 word Encyclical – like all Neo-Cons he attempts to drown The Reader in his self-congratulatory verbosity. How might that Reader approach this rhetorical monstrosity?
So let me offer a disinterested view. I have zero skin in this game. I have no investments in AI, nor does it threaten my livelihood. Sure, the most recent large language models can generate passable journalism, but journalism is my hobby. The AI doesn’t yet exist that could write a better biography of Henry Kissinger than I can, not least because a very large number of the relevant historical documents are not machine-readable.
Mr. Ferguson garnishes his essay with Literary, Movie adaptations/quotations:
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I am reminded of Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest, which describes the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans.
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Another sci-fi analogy that comes to mind is John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), in which most of humanity is first blinded by rays from satellites and then wiped out by carnivorous plants genetically engineered — by the dastardly Soviets — and farmed for their vegetable oil.
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Not by producing Schwarzenegger-like killer androids, but merely by using its power to mimic us in order to drive us individually insane and collectively into civil war.
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We are already well on our way to Raskolnikov’s nightmare at the end of Crime and Punishment, in which humanity goes collectively mad and descends into internecine slaughter.
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While Mr. Ferguson was still in swaddling clothes, in 1968, he missed Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey ? ‘We’ watched HAl ‘malfunction’ the beginning of AI hysteria? Or might ‘we’ look to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis ?
That arbiter of American bougsiouse taste, The New Yorker, offers this collection of quotations from various critical commentaries, on Kubrick’s cinematic ‘Nietzschean pastiche’…
“2001: A Space Odyssey”: What It Means, and How It Was Made
Fifty years ago, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke set out to make a new kind of sci-fi. How does their future look now that it’s the past?
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