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.

Remember when a very rich man, humiliated by a leading tabloid newspaper, set about putting it out of business, and in the process we discovered that much of the media were operating as a criminal syndicate, and then it all went away again? Fun times. We have no means to discuss public business as discursive equals. Every now and then a foreign news outlet - Al Jazeera, the New York Times - will document how hilariously bent our media-political institutions are. But at the moment there’s not much we can do.

In 2019 many people were persuaded that a Labour government under Corbyn would be a material disaster or a moral catastrophe, or both. Many more were convinced that he was 'just like the rest of them'. The result was a decline in the Labour vote and a Conservative victory. We ought to have a conversation about what happened, because it really matters that a political party offering an end to 40 years of neoliberal asset-stripping and spivvery was crushed in the polls by a government committed to more of the same.

So much politics this week in Westminster that there was no time to mention publication of the Forde Report, much less to debate its findings, including its claim that the elected leadership was as guilty of factionalism as the unelected bureaucrats who undermined them. At this point everyone who thinks that they are well informed about politics because they read the Guardian and the New Statesman and listen to Radio 4 are as deluded as the most distracted and impressionable Sun or Mail reader.

One of the joys of this platform is that it allows us to compare and contrast the analyses of politics professors at elite universities and anonymous accounts. And, I ask you, which of these two would you go to for political analysis, if your life depended on it?

https://twitter.com/flying_rodent/status/1550019936172507136

And it's not that the professionals of speech only come up short in a few one on ones. Elite discourse around politics in the media as well as academia has converged on a set of assumptions that downplay or eradicate the role of communicative power in shaping outcomes.

There was a flurry of irritation on the timeline a few days ago about all the lovely money the Trash Future podcast makes every month, and I thought I would use that as hook to hang my regular messaging about the need for a structurally left media system. First off, the stakes. If the left wants to win, it has to have its own media. If you don't believe me, ask Victor Orban, who told his conservative allies in the US that to win they had to "have their own media." There's no way round this, no objective material conditions, no charismatic leader.

Fascinating discussion of the Crown and the media in the UK featuring terrific analysis by @Laura__Clancy and comments by @JonnyDymond that are far more enlightening than I had bargained for. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0… JM notes the "public-private nature of the story" and says it means the Royals can maintain a "near monopoly on information .... most of the institutional stuff, the state stuff, even the ceremonial stuff is colourful, but it is not itself interesting, it's actually quite dull."

Some scattered thoughts on the recent elections, with the proviso that turnout was very low in the UK, so we can't learn a great deal about national trends, other than that Labour is failing to reproduce the content-free change-excitement of the mid-90s. The Lib Dems are gaining in ground against the Conservatives in part because a lot of wealthy pro-Remain voters resent the fact that fear of Corbyn and higher taxes made them feel they had to vote for Johnson in 2019, despite his very obvious shortcomings.

No group of institutions have been more poorly served by the political party they created than have the trade unions by Labour. Since 1951 the Conservatives have dominated the politics of the UK.

https://twitter.com/UniteSharon/status/1491482643711594506

The occasional interludes of Labour government have failed to resolve economic change in favour of working people. When, for the first time in decades, Labour had an unambiguously pro-trade union leader the party in Parliament united with the bureaucracy to destroy him.

In the 1945 election Winston Churchill claimed that Labour would need "some kind of Gestapo" to enforce its plans for social reform. The Conservative party has always amplified the far right to smear its opponents when it thought that it would give them a political advantage.

https://twitter.com/wesstreeting/status/1491114867323211777

The idea that socialist planning requires a police state is precisely "a far right meme" - it is the theme of Hayek's Road to Serfdom, for example.

Ordinary people will remain easy meat for manipulators in the media and political parties for as long as the current organisation of knowledge remains in place. The overriding priority for anyone who wants political change is the building of new communicative institutions. Until we design institutions that create new kinds of collective understanding - collective understanding that we do not control and impose, but that emerges from a new distribution of communicative power - most of us will be captive to the definitions and descriptions of others.

Senior journalists attended at least some of the Downing St parties. Hundreds of people were invited or attended. These are not revelations of new information, they are a redistribution of knowledge - we now know what insiders have known for nearly two years. This redistribution of knowledge has tanked the Conservatives in the polls and probably means that Johnson is finished. You could not have a more explicit demonstration of the ways in which the media operate as a constituent element of the political.

Don’t particularly want to dunk on individuals, but this interesting because it shows how political theory goes horribly wrong when it doesn’t pay enough attention to the dynamics of mediation and the fundamentally communicative nature of the political. 1/ How can people be clear-sighted and wise about one thing, while being taken in by media distortion about another? The short answer is that sometimes they have access to relevant and accurate information, and sometimes they don’t. 2/