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David Timoney Profile picture
David Timoney
@fromarsetoelbow
Autonomous vehicle. Self-assembly required. May contain traces of critical theory. Retweets not necessarily a WTF
May 31, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
New masterly inactivity just dropped ... Obviously those imagining that Starmer will reverse course once he gets in ("The man is a consummate liar & that's why I'm voting for him") are going to be disappointed, but even those advocating the long game are sketchy on how the change in public opinion will come about.
May 31, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Catherine McKinnon has, to use her own phrase, "winged to the Right" on topics such as porn & sex work, effectively providing feminist cover for reactionary politics, but this springs from a critique of liberation rather than a shared censoriousness. That distinction is made clear in her take on trans rights. She has remained consistent in seeing "women" as a social construct rather than a biological essence, a point she makes well here. Image
May 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Lol. There are literally millions of people directly descended from William the Conqueror alone before you start getting down to the churls. Image The problem with "ancestors" is that a lot of people imagine a pyramid with a couple at the top. But it's actually an inverted pyramid. Every generation going back doubles in number: you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents etc.
May 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
As usual, this fantasy is premised on the idea that there are lots of trained doctors & nurses available in the private sector. Leaving aside for the moment that many NHS medics moonlight (i.e. they're the same people), economics 101 tells us that this can't be true. If it were, and at the scale necessary to make a dent in NHS backlogs, private healthcare would be carrying very large deadweight costs that would make it unprofitable. If those resources are fully utilised, this means the NHS will be in competition with private providers.
May 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
That £9bn would cover all students, not just middle-class ones, and it includes maintenance grants, which obviously skew heavily towards students from lower income families. The "middle-class subsidy" is much lower. It is true that the UK's tax burden (all tax as a % of GDP) is historically high, but it's still currently lower than the EU14 & the G7 . A projected high of 37.7% in 2027-28 will simply take us to the G7 average today.
Apr 30, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
We've been building homes for decades. The whole point of the moratorium on council houses was to shift activity/profits to the private sector, not to curtail building. You can criticise the housing industry for land-banking, but the reality is that we're not short of homes. The secular problem is the fall in household density since the 60s (in simple terms, the ratio of people to bedrooms), which is the consequence of easier divorce, greater longevity (& the difference between male & female, i.e. more widow years), and fewer kids per family.
Apr 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Dear me, but this is garbage. Apart from ignoring the facts that a) reform costs money, & b) any injection of resources triggers organic reform (whether you intended it to or not), this fails to explain why reform is necessary. It just assumes it. labourlist.org/2023/04/labour… The proposed alternative is just so much communitarian woo on top of an anti-state animus, thus "investing in those foundational goods which create the social capital that enables us to lead better lives, without state intervention."
Apr 23, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
In his latest column on why identity politics is bad Kenan Malik opens with a note on historical attitudes to race. What this highlights is that there has long been a desire to categorise by race but the boundaries have proven difficult to establish.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… Image The emergence of "scientific racism" in the late 19th century was the most lasting and damaging attempt to do so, inspiring the Nazis, US segregationists & Apartheid South Africa, not to mention contemporary right-wingers and their apologetics for "white self-interest".
Jan 9, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
James Meadway is clearly an optimism of the will kinda guy, which is fine, but there is a danger to the intellect here, not so much of pessimism but of delusion.
newstatesman.com/comment/2023/0… Starmer has no intention of letting the left shape a future Labour govt, hence the purges. For all the talk of his managerialist bent & centrist rhetoric, he cannot be understood other than as an embedded member of the establishment who found the Corbyn years scary.
Dec 28, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Unsurprisingly, Orwell never said that or anything remotely like it. It's also a misquotation. The original, by the American journalist Michael Kinsley, was: "Conservatives are always looking for converts, whereas liberals are always looking for heretics." Ironic, no? A moment's thought would ring alarm bells. It doesn't sound like Orwell, who wouldn't use terms like "right" and "left" like that, and it lacks both his acuity (which bent to finding similarities, not differences) and love of paradox.
Dec 27, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
What is the significance of Chuka Umunna? The quote below is by Tom Nairn ( via Perry Anderson in the NLR - 'Ukania Perpetua' Sep/Oct 2020), though the presiding genius is Ralf Miliband and his critical history of the Labour Party ('Parliamentary Socialism') The problem (as Miliband knew) is that the "betrayal" at the heart of the labour movement was evident from the day it chose the parliamentary road. The result was a PLP that identified with the state, hence the patriotism, the national turn of public ownership & the anti-leftism.
Dec 8, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is bizarre. How can you claim that only Tories view being an MP as a selfish career move after the likes of Chuka Umunna, John Woodcock & Angela Smith?
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… "To be an MP is not a career, a job or a performance art. It really is a vocation, and a very hard one." Polly's objection is to Hancock's 'bringing the game into disrepute', but must we give Ed Balls a pass because he was an ex-MP? Can you drop your vocation as an inconvenience?
Dec 5, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The reason Freeman has parted ways with the Guardian Media Group is not to do with any dispute over subject matter (and thus "censorship") so much as her style. Rustin, Sodha & other GCs are still there, and both papers were at the forefront of the great antisemitism flap. As the voice of British liberalism, the GMG prides itself on its objectivity. This requires a performative commitment to chin-stroking and a calm demeanour on the page. This soporific tendency exists in tension with the commercial imperative of partisanship (be more Daily Mail).
Nov 6, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
What struck me about Starmer's comments on the NHS is that its reliance on migrant labour since 1948 is hardly unknown. There are literally shelves of books on the subject. I recall various Brexiteers in recent years disingenuously bemoaning the UK's habit of depriving developing countries of their trained medical staff & insisting that growing our own would be a win-win, which showed not only their dishonesty but their ignorance of history.
Oct 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Genuinely baffled why no one has ever attempted The Bridge of San Luis Rey, particularly given the magical realism vogue in the 80s. Thornton Wilder's book is much more about interior life in the American, late 19th century mode, but you would have thought that that would have made it cinematic catnip in the 80s or even 90s.
Sep 29, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Keynesianism has been reduced to "Don't be an utter douchebag": an expression of progressive virtue. There is little recognition that Keynes v Hayek was actually a fight between theories of liberal political economy, not social democracy v conservatism. Keynes has little to offer the UK now because the problem is not under-utilised resources (a "slump"), where boosting demand would be appropriate, but supply deficiencies, notably poor productivity & structural imbalances (weak manufacturing, too much capital in housing etc).
Sep 29, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One of the myths of the financial markets is that they are highly sensitive. This is correct insofar as they are sensitive to market movements, but not insofar as they are sensitive to "the real economy". You can see this in the periodic "corrections" that occur. What we've witnessed this week looks very much like a correction. In other words, the mini-budget has led to a re-evaluation of the UK's medium-to-long-term position. As such, this is austerity & persistent under-investment coming home to roost.
Aug 18, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
There have been various iterations of what we now call Labour, such as the Labour Representation Committee (a committee to represent organised labour, i.e. the people able to go on strike) and the Independent Labour Party (i.e. distinct from the anti-strike-Liberal Party). The common theme is that they believed not only in the right to strike (which the modern party obviously doesn't dispute in theory), but also in the idea that without strikes (which were simply the emblematic form of organised labour's legitimacy) there would be no progress.
Aug 18, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
OK, let's leave aside the gratuitous nature of the sideswipe at Corbyn (just O'Brien's way of admitting he didn't vote Labour), and the idea that Truss is continuity Johnson (a lazy journalistic trope), and focus on the use of "cultish" and "didn't understand". The two most egregious examples of personality cults in modern British politics have been Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. The former remains canonised by many on the right; the latter continues to be indulged by our media in his ceaseless haunting of the public sphere.
Aug 18, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Every govt oversees redistribution simply bcause that is baked into fiscal policy (we take more from some and give more to others). The question is one of relative movement and the last Labour govt oversaw widening inequality - i.e. worsening redistribution. This was because the preferred mechanism of redistribution was (as famously articulated by Peter Mandelson) letting the rich get a lot richer through banking deregulation & business-friendly policies while hoping that greater tax receipts would fund improved public services.
Jun 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This is a good assessment of where we are today, but I have to quibble about the claim that "Profits in the 1970s fell sharply as higher wages and salaries ate into companies’ cashflows." I appreciate the constraints of space are always going to flatten the argument, but this crucially omits the point that the crisis of profitability in the late-60s & early-70s was mainly due to the increase in global competition rather than domestic pressures.