Head of Education @IEALondon, historian, book lover, individualist, and Man City fan. Opinions my own. There are no dumb questions, there are only dumb answers.
Aug 25 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
🧵 I have the increasing reeling that UK politics is in a holding mode with lots of people desperately trying to keep the circling plane flying. 1. The Starmer government is best understood as representing the technocratic consensus that emerged after 1990 and consolidated under
Blair/Brown. Almost certainly the last stand of the conventional wisdom de jours. Will it succeed? Not impossible but unlikely because. 2. We are facing intensifying crisis on a number of fronts, public finance, public services, community relations, state capacity&effectiveness
Aug 5 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
🧵 Several people I follow such as @paulmasonnews are arguing that the trigger for all the riots was the Tories losing the election, on the analogy of January 6th in the US - Paul's argument is that these people feel they no longer have cover or support from a governing party. I
think it's much more serious than that. The rioters on Jan 6th had mostly voted for Trump but I would bet serious money that the people rioting in Sunderland etc did not vote Tory and hate and despise the Tory party. They either did not vote or voted Reform I would guess. This is
Jul 8 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
🧵Economists and most politicians think that the answer to the question “Do you want to be richer/better off?” Is always and obviously “Yes!”. That is one of the main reasons why, since about 1946, politicians everywhere have made economic growth the central goal of their policy
They believe (historically with good reason) that this will bring electoral rewards. They also believe it will make life better. I now believe that increasingly the first, electoral, calculation isn’t true. For many voters they don’t care about growth, or they do not like what it
Jul 4, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
🧵One of the benefits of age is that you can discern trends in eg politics over the course of your life, as you look backwards. I can make out four such megatrends over my adult life. I don’t know if they will continue but in a couple of cases I strongly suspect not.
The first is the politics has become steadily more middle class
but in a very specific way. To a much greater extent than before it is dominated by people from a professional middle class background with a common educational experience. On the right fewer people from business or
Sep 28, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
🧵A couple of months ago I tweeted that we and other developed countries were headed into an age of disillusionment. This is now clearly underway. Over the next 15-20 years a whole series of ideologies will be given a runout. Each one in turn will crash - nothing will work. 1.
This will lead a succession of groups to experience severe cognitive dissonance as their cherished ideas slam into reality. The result will be even more turning to conspiracy theories to try and make sense of the world or to disillusionment and turning off. 2.
