In the new NS podcast the team discuss a focus group in Sittingbourne and Sheppey, made up of Conservative to Labour switchers. One presenter, the one who doubted Corbyn had much of a personal vote in Islington, was "a bit taken aback at how punchy and disappointed they were." It's striking that a political journalist needs to go to a structured focus group to find out what people outside Westminster are feeling. But I suppose this reflects the existing balance of power: voters are a background feature in a drama with only a handful of speaking parts.

In my self-appointed capacity as a purveyor of lukewarm takes I have now read That Article. What stands out is the intense focus of the Labour right on media and communications ... 🧵 theguardian.com/politics/2024/… McSweeney seems to have understood that trusted independent left media posed an existential threat to the right's attempt to regain control: if members understood who the Labour right were, and what they wanted, the game would be up.

Politicians can say anything to a nodding journalist, no matter how insultingly stupid and misleading, as long as they use a mind-numbingly banal analogy from daily life to do it. Nation's credit card? Sure. Under the bonnet? Yeah, sounds about right.

https://twitter.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1812408945572556912

A great deal of media culture consists of projecting their own inability to grasp basic concepts onto their audiences: rather than explain how parties interact with the state, which would require thought, they happily go along with framing that is simple, familiar and wrong.

Labour's plans to use public-private partnerships for new infrastructure will create endless chokepoints for rent extraction for large investment funds, raising the cost of living for the rest of us, for no other reason than a reflexive desire to serve the rich. As in health ... ... if the workers and the materials exist, we can afford to do it: the means create the money and there is not reason to cede ownership of vital infrastructure. It's a political choice that the Greens, the Social Campaign Group and the rest of the left should loudly reject.

Just thinking about servility in capitalism when I saw this. If you "dig under the surface" of "centrist dad" as a term of abuse, I'd say it's about having one's opinions shaped - unknowingly - so they're consistent with a relatively privileged place in the social order. A "centrist dad" is a product of domination, inasmuch as he doesn't know why he believes what he believes. There are plenty of liberal capitalists (some with children!) who understand what they are, how it relates to their beliefs. But the centrist dad is made as if from outside.

A month ago I was wondering out loud why the British establishment converged on austerity after 2008 and whether it was part of a coherent class project to protect capital from a population that might have drawn dangerous conclusions from the collapse of economic orthodoxy.

https://twitter.com/danhind/status/1797646574694306129

While warbling about the role of the Treasury I was gently prompted by @aerondavis to read his book on the Treasury, and I did. It's well worth a look. I don't think we can yet say for sure whether the Treasury in the 2010s was as clear-eyed as it was in the 1920s.

We are drifting into another round of PFI boondoggles, in which energy and other essentials will generate rents for the world's laziest plutocrats. A movement for constitutional reform worth a damn would declare this illegitimate and campaign to stop it.

https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1806322976867987805

https://twitter.com/danhind/status/1806282431466525063

We *know* we need to invest heavily in renewable energy, in food security, and in all kinds of public infrastructure. There is no reason to rely on private rent seekers to finance it. To repeat, we should make it clear from the outset that any revival of PFI will be reversed.

Interesting thread on the composition of panels on Question Time. Two points to note: 1. Lucas appeared more often than Farage because the study begins in 2014. An analysis of 2010-15 had a different result. theguardian.com/news/datablog/…

https://twitter.com/Matt_Walsh/status/1802598312547143800

2. There's a startling absence of trade unionists among regular non-politicians, and an overwhelming preponderance of (right-wing) comment journalists. This results from the labour movement giving up its communicative assets after 1945, putting its trust impartial liberal media.

The most important left grouping in France is led by a former Socialist Party politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. I would have thought that a Popular Front in the UK would need the left in the Labour Party, including major figures, to walk away, like Mélenchon did.

https://twitter.com/garyyounge/status/1801556248166383918

There's a very real chance that Labour will implode on contact with office. It's a brittle political project, and its own structures and broader institutional hinterland have decayed into cronyism, much like the Socialists in France. Starmer might be Labour's François Hollande.

🧵 What's always going to puzzle me is why the 2015-2019 leadership team didn't do everything they could to give the Guardian readers in Labour a crash course in what they were up against, especially when their head of strategy had worked at the Guardian for most of his career.

https://twitter.com/DrSchwitters/status/1796858361100603758

They must have known that the Guardian wasn't going to tell their readers what was going on and what was at stake, would do their best to defeat them, so why didn't they do everything they could to displace it as the main source of information for most of their supporters?

Yep, that's definitely what happened. No need for further analysis, let alone investigation. Another layer of journalistic lacquer on what happened in 2019, and we're left with half-formed questions and a vague sense that something untoward is going on. theguardian.com/books/article/…
Gosh, why would that be, and what does it tell us about the recent behaviour of both the duopoly parties? Fragmented and politically complex in what ways? Again we are left surrounded by question marks, like a concussed duck in a Loony Tunes cartoon. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Reform won 2 councillors in a Conservative borough this week, & lost their one councillor in a Labour city. The Greens beat Labour in every ward in central Bristol. They're the real opposition to Labour in many places, where's their BBC piece??bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi… Labour were also defeated in many places by independents, some of whom are former Labour councillors. Again, they look like a much more plausible "real opposition" than Reform. Where is the reporting on this, and on its implications for the general election?

We should never get tired of repeating that politics and the media in this country since the financial crisis has been monopolised by people who think that everything is basically fine, and that those arguing for an alternative to Thatcherism are dangerous extremists. This means that the pool of competent people to draw on to populate government and political journalism gets shallower all the time. Since 2010 our PMs have been a daft posho, an authoritarian weirdo, another daft posho, whatever Liz Truss was, and now a libertarian nitwit.

"As we did at the end of the 1970s, we stand at an inflection point ..." There's a bit of rote Democrat-copying going on here as usual: Reeves is referencing Thatcher as Obama referenced Reagan - working with the grain of media-induced amnesia ...
theguardian.com/business/2024/… But it is useful to remember what Thatcherism was: a carefully planned project to revive the investing class at the expense of the working majority. It was given space by the refusal of the centre left to recognise the limits of postwar social democracy, and move beyond them.

The UK Chancellor today is doing what Chancellors always do in the face of economic stagnation and declining living standards: giving state subsidies to private investors. The stated purpose of this is to encourage them to invest more and so improve productivity, wages etc. 🧵 The problem is that UK private investors aren't interested in, or good at, directing real resources towards domestic projects that will increase living standards for the majority who work.

The current mainstream debate on the economy mostly revolves around whether the BoE was too slow to raise interest rates, which sounds much like one 18th century doctor complaining that their rival waited too long before starting to bleed the patient. Inflationary pressure isn't coming from the great majority of middle and low income earners. Increasing the mortgage interest payments of people who are already have less discretionary spending won't do much to dent inflation caused by supply shocks and corporate price-setting.

Thatcher's reckless pivot from industry to finance in the 80s was paid for by North Sea oil. We could have been the largest country in Scandinavia but those vandals turned us into a world leader in money laundering and real estate fraud, held together by vicious right wing media. Nigel Lawson is being talked about today as if he put us on the road to prosperity. And you only have to look around to see how preposterous that is. Until we can discuss the vast scale of his failure, our politics will be victim-blaming bullshit.

Further to this, we need a Community Health Building approach. Publicly funded R&D would test large scale interventions that don't conform to the Pharma's patentable molecule approach. This could be funded by the surplus from NHS Generics (an idea proposed by Corbyn).

https://twitter.com/danhind/status/1601954118226137091

These experiments, in diet and lifestyle interventions and innovations like universal basic services, as well as Virchow-type interventions in democratic self-determination as a treatment for diseases of despair, would provide an evidence base for broader policy-making.

One of the striking things about this graphic is how it shows that an excellent healthcare system can be embedded in an extremely unhealthy society. Until 2013 we were very well looked after, while many of us were incredibly unwell.

https://twitter.com/localnotail/status/1601601961950081024

Constant attacks on the NHS (billed as "reforms") serve as a distraction from the key question: what drives ill health at the level of the population? And the answer to that is economic, political and communicative oligarchy, which is to say Toryism in all its forms.

The Conservatives have been in power since 2010 and 100s now die every week because the NHS is understaffed and underfunded. The media have supported them all the way. If that doesn't fill you with dread, anger and zeal for a new way of doing politics, I don't know what to say. We are now in the media consensus comfort zone, where we can only get rid of the Conservatives by consolidating the power and laundering the reputations of the same people who undermined effective opposition to them in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019.

This is a fascinating exchange. A journalist asks how come everything is on fire. Someone asks if maybe the media's treatment of Labour 2015-19 had something to do with it. This, we are told, is "naive". We now learn that blaming media is naive because "it assumes that people are idiots." Note that no one has said this, and the argument that the media are influential absolutely does not depend on the idea that people are idiots. Saying it does is amazing. Amazing.