Everythingism.

The belief that every policy is a means for promoting every other policy, all at the same time. Everythingism it’s why nothing works.

Defeating Everythingism is the only way we can start to fix everything.

This essay explains how. Because of Everythingism, we distort some policies to further other policies which they are fundamentally unsuited to.

Trains are for protecting bats.

samdumitriu.com/p/have-we-solv…

Lots of speculation about the Chagos deal’s future at the moment.

But if it goes ahead, how does the government justify the £9 billion price tag?

The spending rules we used at the Treasury shouldn’t let them. Let’s look at why 🧵 @georgegylls has reported on how the Government has offered £9 billion over 99 years to lease back the military base on Diego Garcia

We should worry about 'mission-driven' procurement, which in isolation would be a step backwards. Quick 🧵on why this kind of 'everythingism' in procurement is so dangerous.

https://twitter.com/Demos/status/1867524790027776150

1/ £300bn a year spent on public procurement is as much a risk as it is an opportunity.

Successive governments have seen procurement as an opportunity to reshape the economy in the ways they want, without focussing at all on its primary purpose: buying stuff the country needs.

Been thinking a lot about the discussion of 'data in government' after last night's panel 🧵

1/ It is very popular to say "data is the new oil" - this is a bad analogy. Oil is amazingly powerful because it's cheap to get, easily useable, and our whole economy is built around it

https://twitter.com/jo3hill/status/1808411354593698102

2/ Data isn't like that. It costs a lot to ingest, curate, and crucially to maintain it. And most of our economy is not built to effectively use it - certainly not government. The bits of the economy that have seen huge £ from using data are finance, adverts and social media.