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David Timoney Profile picture
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6 Oct, 5 tweets, 2 min read
There are two ways of affording higher wages. You can increase the size of the pie (growth &/or higher productivity) or you can more equally divide the pie (distribution of returns between capital & labour). Danny is blissfully oblivious to the latter.
thetimes.co.uk/article/high-w…
This is problematic because the Thatcherite revolution actually led to lower trend growth. In time, her let-it-rip approach to industrial strategy led away from high productivity/high wage manufacturing to a low-wage service economy, which the Tories are now blaming on the EU.
Though he filters it through the business-friendly neoliberal pabulum of David Sainsbury, Danny is really acknowledging the case put forward by Mariana Mazzucato et al, which is actually a return to a pre-Thatcher industrial strategy.
It's interesting to read this in light of Stephen Bush's claim that the Johnson/Sunak dynamic is an echo of Macmillan/Thorneycroft. There is a tension between the corporatists & neo-Thatcherites in the Tory party, but I think this exaggerates Johnson's affinity with the former.
As he proved as Mayor of London, Johnson's economic interventionism & appetite for big projects was largely about garnering PR. The reality was opportunistic spaffing & a free hand for property development. Like most of the Tory party, he remains in thrall to Thatcher.

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David Timoney Profile picture
7 Oct
The focus here is on the retired, but the interesting stat is that the chief objectors to a return are the 25-49 cohort. This probably reflects that younger workers are more likely to be in jobs that can't be done remotely, & that 50+ have fewer outside demands (i.e. young kids).
What this means is that the revolutionary cohort may not be the unattached young but families with young kids struggling with housing costs, child care & diminishing promotion opportunities at work.
If I were the Labour Party, I'd drop the twin track strategy of seducing bigoted OAPs & marginalising radical young singletons & would instead champion young families. It worked for Thatcher in 1979, which should surely impress the current leadership.
Read 5 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
6 Oct
Priti Patel's promise to crackdown on protests is perhaps best read as a distraction from her obvious problems over immigration, but her definition of "our free press" as part of the country's key infrastructure, on a par with roads & railways, is genuinely disturbing.
Like Oliver Dowden's "war on woke" & Nadine Dorries' "Nice BBC you've got there; shame if anything were to happen to it", this goes beyond indulging Murdoch. The press is in decline & the commercial encroachment on public service broadcasting is focused on C4, not the BBC.
The Leveson Inquiry didn't terrify the press as much as it did the Tory party, which realised its informal privilege was in jeopardy. They're now trying to institutionalise it by more fully integrating the media & potential sites of dissent into the state apparatus.
Read 5 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
5 Oct
My theory is that over the historiographical longue durée, the role of Iraq as a contributory factor in Brexit will increase, while the role of 80s deindustrialisation & the 2008 crisis will decrease. The populist backlash will be traced more to issues of trust than economics.
For example, I think it's now more recognised that a major factor in the growing anti-immigrant sentiment before 2016 wasn't just crude xenophobia but the feeling that Blair had misled the country on the likely number of East European migrants after the 2004 accession.
Likewise, the management of New Labour, with Peter Mandelson & Alistair Campbell to the fore, led to a belief that you simply couldn't trust a word any of them said. People expected the Tories to lie, but Labour not so much, hence the bitterness over the expenses scandal.
Read 5 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
2 Oct
The fundamental problem with the police is that it employs the wrong people. This is evident not just in its prejudice & abuse of power against the working class, minorities, activists & women, but in the general attitude of contempt towards the population at large.
This contempt is not just directed outwards, it also festers internally, hence the racism, sexism & classism (often inverted, e.g. contempt for graduates) reported by many who have ended up leaving the police. The question is, where does this spring from?
Given its consistency over time & geography (see the recent news about the ex-French policeman now identified as a serial killer), this milieu has been extensively studied from the political, sociological & psychosexual angles (e.g. Theweleit's 'Male Fantasies').
Read 6 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
29 Sep
The reactions to Starmer's conference speech were predictable, on both the left & right, as were the heckles & the (media) reactions to the heckles. What is noticeable is that there was a distinct lack of zingers all round. The speech isn't going to be remembered.
The narrative of "closing the door on Corbynism" had already been established by the rulebook changes, while Starmer still has little of substance to say on policy (the promise that it will come nearer the election is made by the same people who criticised this approach in 2019).
Most of the announcements were either non-contentious (no party seriously thinks we shouldn't spend on the climate crisis) or retreads of past (mostly New Labour) ideas. There was generally a lack of novelty, hence the old rhetoric: tough on crime, the education mantra etc.
Read 8 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
28 Sep
In the 70s, NASA embarked on a public relations exercise to convince Congress that the space race produced lots of spinoffs, so was worth the colossal investment. This was amplified by urban myths - e.g. Teflon & Velcro were both popularly claimed as spinoffs but weren't.
Most of the actual spinoffs were to do with satellite technology, and most of those were essentially developed in the early stages of the space race. The moon landings themselves produced little.
Any large-scale, hi-tech project is likely to produce spinoffs. A project that focuses on novel challenges (e.g. a green energy transformation) is likely to produce more than one that goes over old ground.
Read 4 tweets

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