Occasional publisher, writer, and podcaster.
England
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My PhD thesis is available as a free PDF. It's an attempt to renovate and democratise Hobbes's account of sovereignty, by putting it into dialogue with contemporary work in social ontology. Something to annoy almost everyone. etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3551…
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The thing that stands out in this clip is that Farage says he wants to nationalise the water industry, but he doesn't want the government to run it, and he plans to use private capital. So ... that's not nationalisation. Why aren't the BBC able to point that out?
"So you don't know how much it would be in any ballpark?" #BBCLauraK asks Reform UK leader Nigel Farage about his proposals to nationalise 50% of the water industry
"Of course not" replies Farage but says "it doesn't need to be a big sum of money"
bbc.in/44WXpgI
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The Chinese have released a LLM that makes a mockery of the UK's plan to build big data centres that use all our fresh water and energy, less than 2 weeks after Starmer warbled on about us becoming an AI superpower. While it's very funny, it also points to something important ...
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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".
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So, illegal parties took place at Downing Street last year and journalists know they took place, either because they were there, or because their colleagues were. If that doesn't persuade us of the need for thorough-going, democratising, media reform, nothing will.
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Lol, the UK government committed £1.2 trillion to save the banks.
Cutting UK emissions to net zero would cost £1tn, says Hammond theguardian.com/environment/…
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We might be an absolute shower in all sorts of ways. But we really, really hate the idea of ID cards in this country, and I think that's beautiful.
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If you are looking at the Conservative party and wondering how they are able to commit the political equivalent of armed robbery year after year with no apparent loss of popularity *it's because the UK media are driving the getaway car.*
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[me drowning to death in raw sewage] ah well yes but imagine how bad it would have been if Corbyn had won.
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The early Labour Party explicitly campaigned against landlordism. Successive Labour governments reduced the size and power of the private rented sector by building public housing at scale. Today a Labour Housing Minister finds all this "wacky".
“They’re just a bit wacky, aren’t they?”
@SteveReedMP on the Green Party’s plan to abolish landlords.
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The first Momentum meeting I went to in 2015 was packed, with many first-timers to radical politics. None of them were given a chance to speak, and they sat in silence while long-time activists enjoyed making speeches to a packed room for once. The next meeting was much smaller.
Hi friends, new article on the often turgid experience of meetings in the UK left and how we could make them better. Please share and critique.
🌱Roots Not Branches making Meetings work for a new left party.🌱
gaoblai.medium.com/roots-not…
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A majority of the jury, having heard arguments from professional prosecutors and defence lawyers, decided they were innocent. A majority of the rest of us, wholly reliant on the media, have come to a different conclusion. It's almost like the media influence their audiences.
By 52% to 23% Britons say it was the wrong outcome to find the four people accused of criminal damage for pulling down the statue of Edward Colston not guilty
yougov.co.uk/topics/travel/s…
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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.
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If a silly dipshit can take over your politics with a handful of inflammatory tweets something might be wrong with the media-political apparatus that is supposed to organise information and coordinate our collective response to it.
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The UK has a large and sophisticated technical base, high performing research universities, and the remnants of an imperial institutional matrix, which could inform public planning. But instead our politicians have been captured by salesman for US-based extractive enterprises ...
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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.
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If CLPs had passed motions of no confidence in a Corbyn-appointed General Secretary in 2019 I imagine that the BBC might have found time to mention in its broadcast news. Has anyone heard anything about what's happening in Labour on BBC TV or radio?
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There was a fun moment on Radio 4 when a presenter asked a central banker why he and his colleagues couldn't just print trillions of dollars to save the world, like they did to save the banks. "I wish it was that simple," came the reply. But he made no attempt to explain.
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Mélenchon: Humans are great! We should all - without exception - have the freedom to live the life we want, to have fun, to love, to goof about, too, if that's what we want. What a world!
BBC: This man is literally worse than Hitler.
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We are now supposed to believe that Corbyn was a ludicrously unpopular aberration from grown up politics. But Cummings is honest enough to admit that, no, he was the most serious threat to the Thatcherite settlement in decades and we had to trash the place to stop him.
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Much of UK policy-making is based on the idea that there is a class of people whose job is to be rich, and the state's job is to make sure they stay rich, no matter how incompetent, or actively damaging, they are.
The weirdest thing about much of British infrastructure is that it is "privatised" in the weirdest possible way where the private company doesn't actually do anything, they just collect the profits.
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This sounds like the sort of thing a smart politician in a party with a left-wing membership would say, if he thought a leadership contest was imminent. And Streeting is smart.
"I'd say to the Israeli embassy, get your own house in order"
Health Secretary Wes Streeting responds to Israel's claims on Glastonbury's "glorification of violence", saying "Israeli settler terrorists" carried out "unwanton acts of violence"
#BBCLauraK bbc.in/4lqTJud
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It gives me no pleasure to say this, because I am a huge admirer of Keir Starmer and the PLP. But they must all stand down and campaign for the Green Party, to avoid splitting the centre left vote.
🚨 | Greens third for the first time in Westminster latest poll
🟦 REF: 32% (-)
🔵 CON: 17% (-)
🟢 GRN: 15% (-)
🔴 LAB: 15% (-2)
🟠 LDM: 12% (-)
via @FindoutnowUK / 15 Oct
Chgs w/ 8 Oct.
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The great challenge is to convert the latent knowledge held by the citizenry into live inputs into the state's use of scarce human and material resources. We cannot afford to waste what we have, or let clueless hacks give it to the Americans. We need deep constitutional reform.
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It's wild reading Starmer's CV against Xi Jinping's. From early in his career the Chinese premier was directly involved in economic development projects at county, city and provincial level. Along the way he helped set up everything from steel cooperatives to Xiamen Airlines.
It’s hard to imagine a politician less suited to a political moment like this than Keir Starmer, a man who- upon becoming Labour leader- had to be given a crash course in economics by Lord Falconer and Ed Miliband.
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wild watching UK journalists react to the French legislative elections, completely misunderstanding what just happened in real time to protect their pickled worldview, in which the centre always wins, just a complete clownshow.
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The BBC coverage of "levelling up" today has been a masterclass in how you can replace the language like "deliberate deindustrialisation to destroy organised labour", "unnecessary austerity" and "class war from above" with "lagging productivity" and "decades of underinvestment."
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A political movement serious about defending and promoting the interests of the majority would turn an image like this into a campaign against outsourcing, graft and social sadism that would destroy Toryism for generations.
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This looks like an extraordinary disparity in coverage: Reform's rise is intimately connected to BBC coverage that frames that rise as inevitable, irresistible, a fact of nature. An actual surge in support for the Greens results in ... silence.
In the two week period where Green Party membership nearly doubled to 130k, number of BBC News articles about the Green Party:
0
In the same period, number of BBC News articles about Reform:
27
ALT last four articles on the Green Party from BBC News
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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 ...
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The rich do not want to compete in dynamic markets for uncertain profits. They want rents, monopolies and state privileges. If we want them to do the job economists say they do, of driving innovation and increasing efficiencies, we have to socialise these sources of easy money.
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GS is trying to network with other streamers/podcasters to push his core argument about wealth inequality into different demographics. If you were trying to build the functional equivalent of a trade union newspaper now like the Herald in the 30s, it's would look like this.
We need a better message for young men – speaking to @jimthegiant
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This is obviously true. And a huge expenditure of effort and ingenuity goes into pretending it isn't. This is one of the reasons why paying attention to public life in the UK is so weird and disorienting: why is everyone pretending that our rulers aren't insane monsters?
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One obvious place to start is the BBC: a relic of the empire that could become the centre of a democratic knowledge regime through a programme of substantive mutualisation. The stakes of charter renewal could not be higher, and the efforts to distract us will be relentless.
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Worrying signs of journalism on the BBC website.
Her aunt's regime 'disappeared' people - so why did Starmer make her a minister? bbc.in/3PPo1sN
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Absolutely here for Remain types mocking the easily manipulated masses, without realising just how thoroughly conned they were by the Remain campaign, which was always about destroying Corbyn, not stopping Brexit, and was a wild success.
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We should never stop being horrified that a political party with hundreds of thousands of members and millions of affiliated trade unionists can be captured by a tiny handful of hand-banging weirdos and professional bung-whisperers, with the assistance of our godawful media.
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Labour strategy meeting after the election in the Netherlands.
An economic and political model that gives such limited hope for the future for so many, while allowing domination and inequality to fester and grow, is bound to produce morbid symptoms. The far right are profiting from the failures of the centrist consensus.
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By the late seventies 25-30% of housing was state owned. The British were adequately housed for the first time since the Black Death. Since then state housing stock has shrunk, private renting has increased, and homelessness and poor housing are roaring back.
1 The state cannot, and never will, be able to afford to house everyone who needs to rent not buy. 2. A flexible work force is essential for a strong economy. 3. Relationships fail, young people needs to move out of home, people move before their sales happens and on & on.
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Adam Curtis take! The BBC has a £3.6 bn budget but we are only allow one solitary archivist-auteur, as a treat. Why aren't they commissioning far more in the way of efforts to make sense of the present? And not just by solitary white men of a certain age.
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Listening to the DC/LK interview for the BBC, it's striking how important a factor the possibility of a Corbyn government was in Cummings' thinking, and how uninterested Kuenssberg is in discussing that.
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What's happening in the UK now - what's been happening - is the result of well-meaning people trusting our truly terrible media. They believed the papers when they said that Miliband was a dangerous radical, believed them (and the BBC) when they said the same about Corbyn.
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If Corbyn doesn't do a weekly catch up from his allotment for YouTube etc this time round, then what are we even doing here? Ten minutes, is all: chatting about plants, and quietly setting the political agenda for the week ahead.
Is this Government going to put the nail in the coffin of the joy of digging ground for potatoes on a cold, wet February Sunday afternoon?
The battle for the grass roots is on!
telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
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2027 marks the centenary of the BBC as chartered corporation. In that year its next charter, its first in an information system dominated by digital media, will be written. It is a chance for British civil society to cohere around a new model of public media, equal to the age.
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"The Labour Party has been hijacked by a handful of hundreds of thousands of people, who are hellbent on stopping it from being awful and useless. After years of principled leaking to the press, and having taken advice from my DVD of The West Wing, I am left with no choice ..."
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Foreign journalist: points out a series of blindingly obvious facts that UK journalists are all refusing to acknowledge publicly.
UK journalist: No UK journalist would say this. Checkmate, I think.
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Millions of voters in 2019 thought that Boris Johnson was fit to be Prime Minister, that the Conservative Party were honest and pragmatic, and that the Labour Party had been taken over by racists. They thought this because the media they trusted lied to them.
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DOOM LOOP by @AndrewMarr9
Why no politician can get Britain out of this mess
The postwar British political establishment is collapsing. The Conservatives threw themselves into a death spiral last year, though it had been a long time in the making. Now in government, Labour is heading in the same direction. The nation’s patience has snapped. The likelihood is that at the next election, almost whatever happens, we will be stuck with a government we didn’t expect. What follows may be bleak.
After Keir Starmer’s victory, I succumbed to that hard-to-forgive journalistic sin: the faint prickle of optimism. With a big majority, it seemed that, perhaps at last, the “grown-ups” were in charge. Starmer promised “to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives, and unite our country”.
But shocks kept coming. Above all, the Labour establishment had underestimated the deeper difficulties of so much it was facing. The intractable problem of ballooning welfare spending and worklessness; the sheer incompetence of much of the state; the pressures on housing and public services caused by the post-Brexit immigration wave. It did not feel as if a new government meant a new start, not in daily life.
For now – perhaps for the rest of our lifetimes – the two-party system lies in ruins. From once-Labour Wales to inner-city London, people who a few years ago would not have given Reform the time of day are privately reassessing, due to impatience and despair. Unless something substantial changes, we are heading for a Reform government.
The Conservatives, underpinned by business, hereditary wealth, the military and the poor old Church of England, are being scattered to the winds. The party of organised labour has gone the same way as, well, organised labour. Yet the old arguments about economic vitality, fairness and cohesion will also be the new arguments. My greatest fear is that we come to feel, before too long, that these past wildly turbulent years were relatively calm and kindly ones.
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It's early days and a lot could happen in the months ahead. But this is starting to look like implosion in office. I imagine the 3rd sector careerists who make up much of the newly expanded PLP will already be feeling nervous.
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.
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You know which politician would never go to a Murdoch party? That guy we all hate, absolutely hate, for reasons that are good, and noble, and nothing to do with the fact that he didn't go to Murdoch parties when he was Leader of the Opposition.
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One of the striking here is that @AyoCaesar is articulating a position that is overwhelmingly popular among the general public, but appears in the circuits of public speech rarely, and from outside the duopoly that hogs electoral representation.
“Your water bills are going towards making foreign corporations rich”
Ash Sarkar hits out at private water companies which spill sewage into waterways, adding it makes ‘financial sense’ to renationalise the water industry
#bbcqt bit.ly/3LY44xB
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In 2019 we were told that Johnson's triumph was so complete that we faced another decade of Conservative rule. Do we think the Conservatives suddenly became much worse, that Labour became much better, or that something else, that reflects very badly on our media, has happened?
MRP Poll | Labour Majority of 250
🌹 LAB: 450 (+250)
🔶 LDM: 71 (+63)
🌳 CON: 60 (-312)
🎗️ SNP: 24 (-24)
➡️ RFM: 18 (+18)
🌍 GRN: 4 (+3)
🌼 PC: 4 (+2)
Via @FindoutnowUK & @ElectCalculus, 14-24 Jun.
Changes w/ GE2019 Notionals.
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Another puzzle for centrists. Macron was willing to risk cohabitation with the right, because he thought they would fail in office and discredit themselves. But he's doing everything he can to stop the left. Why is that? Why doesn't he want the left fall into his trap?
In a desperate attempt to cling on to power, Macron is blocking the French left from government. If this assault on democratic principle is not defeated, it will all but ensure the far-right's victory in the next election. tribunemag.co.uk/2024/08/mac…
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The organised left were happy to neglect political education, as long as they had reflexive, inter-generational support from people with a vague sense that Labour was for people like them. Labour can't blame them now for not understanding the state. It was their job to tell them.
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It is striking how quickly and well the new leadership of the Green Party has made use of digital media. Meanwhile the Labour movement, which has incomparably more money and resources, maintains its principled stance of relying entirely on capitalist media, which hate it.
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Reeves's reworking of Keynes's "anything we can do, we can afford" to "we can't do it if we can't afford it" is not accidental, or evidence of economic illiteracy. It is quite deliberate and is best understood as the declaration of a kind of discursive triumph over the left.
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I'm not one to get carried away, but if Unite disaffiliate from Labour they would be ideally placed to broker an electoral deal between the Green Party and the rest of the left. This would reprise the leadership role the same union took in the 30s.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx24…
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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.
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The UK began a grand economic experiment in 1979. The state was stripped of planning capacity and investment decisions were left to the City of London. The City loaded the domestic economy with debt and sought high returns overseas . The rest of the economy suffered.
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Martin Wolf of the FT acknowledges that Thatcherism is a failure, and must be replaced. The Prime Minister insists that the economic system is fundamentally sound. Something will have to give in the UK elite.
ft.com/content/8a4995cd-1f4e…
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Here's a puzzle. Why don't the UK trade unions, who are hated and feared by much of the current PLP, break with Labour and form a new party, and invite the 7 currently suspended Labour MPs plus Trickett, Corbyn and the other left independents to join? That's 14 MPs today.
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It feels deeply weird that the Guardian's write up of the Green leadership election didn't mention that ZP won 85% of the members' vote on a much increased turnout, leading instead with the claim that his 'the first task' is 'to bring the party with him'. theguardian.com/politics/202…
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Re. the current round of left-wing introspection, it's fair to say the left failed in Labour because it could not resist the temptations of centrist respectability. In hindsight it would have been better to noisily fight moderates in the party, not to court them ...
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The trade unions' decision not to invest significantly in media production (in contrast to the 30s-40s, when it owned 49% of the UK's biggest newspaper) is a disastrous strategic miscalculation. Same goes for the cooperative movement.
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Nelson was a Knight of the Ottoman Crescent, an honour given to him by Selim III Khan. He was so proud of the title that he used it when he signed the armistice after the Battle of Copenhagen.
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Labour under Corbyn made it seem possible that we could talk about politics in a way that wasn't entirely imbecilic. No wonder the man, his policies, and the enthusiasm they generated, must be utterly erased from the circuits of public speech.
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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?
What destroyed Johnson was the press withdrawing their deep indulgence in early November 2021. It was as simple and as stark as flicking a switch on the sound effects panel from “applaud” to “boo” and they wrecked him effortlessly in mere weeks, even if he clung on for dear life.
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For forty years Labour have been relying on a voting bloc built through unionised workplaces and the broader institutional apparatus of organised labour. Thatcher tore this world apart and Labour never bothered to repair it.
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BBC journalists keep quiet about some things (which are true and newsworthy) for years on end, and tweet out some things (which are neither) immediately. Best not to think too much about what they know now and won't tell you for a decade.
It feels like this line might have been useful to report at the time, Laura, rather than a decade later.
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There's a reason why so much time and effort goes into persuading us that the '70s were a dystopian hellscape: we were on the brink of realising that we could take investment decisions away from a handful of capitalists. But we couldn't figure out the politics quickly enough.
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The rich and their friends in the political directorate would rather die alone in their luxury bunkers, secure in the knowledge that they died last, rather than live on a planet of equals. It really seems to be that simple.
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"He lied to them, the suckers, to get what he wanted, but he isn't lying to me, a savvy insider and a real person, who knows the score" is an approach to life that always works out, and is never the prelude to being ruthlessly scammed.
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And then the knockout blow: the idea that the media influence how people see the world is the kind of thing that a "conspiracy theorist" would say. Note that no conspiracy has been alleged, a question has been asked about the media's impact on audiences' beliefs and opinions.
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In the late 70s the British right looked round and thought, "the people who forced us to concede some of our wealth and power after WW2 are retiring and dying off; maybe we can get back what we lost, a world of exorbitant privilege and hungry children."
This is the opposite of new news, but the surge in child poverty in Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s is staggering.
From Cooper&Szreter, After the Virus (2021)
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It would be funny if a big union hired the COU and deducted the cost of taking them on from their donations to the Labour Party.
Labour has told its community organising unit, introduced under Corbyn, that their contracts will not be renewed from May.
Another key moment in Keir Starmer's battle to transform the party and remove Corybnistas from HQ
And a lot of anger to have done it during the pandemic
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The scandal of Corbyn was that he did everything by the book - he was fairly elected by Labour Party members, presented a social democratic programme to the country and reversed his party's decline.
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Post-1979 the British state's planning capacity, based on Keynesian public service, was dismantled and replaced by a dogmatic insistence on the primacy of self-interest expressed through markets. We need to restore our ability to plan, and democracy is the only mechanism left.
The BBC says England is facing nationally significant water shortfalls "due to a dry spring and multiple heatwaves"
Can I also suggest that the end to new water reservoirs when Thatcher privatised water services in the 1980s is also a factor?
1/2
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czer…
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The far right has created a parallel, hallucinatory, account of reality through its media operations. This much is obvious. But the liberal mainstream has done exactly the same thing. Its fantasies are a little more polite, but they are every bit as dangerous.
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Starmer's speechwriters: how about we reheat and serve you some of that Biden 2020 slop, about not having to think about politics any more?
UK media: really interesting.
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Central banks could create trillions and spend it on rapid decarbonisation via a new industrial base owned by all of us. And that's where the complexity lies; saving human life would deprive the rich of their industrial rents and is therefore "not that simple".
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I'm just a simple poster, but this sounds like truly terrible political analysis to me. If you run away from core principles because you're afraid of fighting for them you demoralise your supporters and you discourage converts, because everyone can see that you are running away.
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Fun facts! Labour won fewer votes in Bristol West in 2010 than the Greens won in 2019. In 2015, before the Corbyn surge, the Greens were only 5700 votes behind Labour in that seat. Debbonaire's current majority was created by enthusiasm for a politics she utterly rejects.
The message from Thangam Debbonaire & Labour here: asylum seekers cost us money & are dangerous. Be angry and afraid.
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It's worth pausing to note just how disconnected from our best available accounts of media power this response is, and to note how the media's inability to talk sensibly about itself is only an extreme example of its inability to talk about power more generally.
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Recent UK history is pretty much a matter of powerless leftists begging powerful liberals to register the threat posed by the right, interspersed with expressions of shock from powerful liberals, when they notice something else that the right is doing.
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It's always worth reminding ourselves that the liberal centre's media assets strained every nerve to discredit Corbyn's Labour between 2017 and 2019. They chose a side and that side won. If you don't like what's happening, best stop listening to the people responsible.
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When Corbyn's own MPs and bureaucrats failed to stop him in 2016-17, the rightwing establishment installed an incompetent chancer as PM and ran an election campaign built around insulting lies, while the media loudly insisted that Corbyn was a racist.
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Just an incredible story. Such a shame that there's no way to investigate the relationship between police, politicians and media in this country, a sort of follow up to Leveson, if you like.
First Murdoch papers targeted me. Now there is evidence they falsely implicated me in a cover-up | Gordon Brown theguardian.com/commentisfre…
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It would have been risky to break with Starmer when doing so might have done some good. Now that everyone else in the commentariat is running away from the shambles they helped create, Dunt is right behind them.
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Private companies paid £7.6bn to buy the public's water infrastructure. The government gave them back £1.5bn and took on £5bn of outstanding debt. So the govt's net receipts from privatisation were about £1bn, and shareholders have received about £60bn in dividends since.
That money has gone; it was in any case mostly the cost of capital invested since 1991 – where is the money to come from in future?
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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.
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The left: we want to work with the centre to defend democracy and human rights from the threat posed by the right.
The right: we want to smash the centre, who are traitors to the nation.
The centre: these two are the same.
"Pour moi, la France Insoumise est un danger pour la nation, comme le Rassemblement national est un danger pour la République", plaide @BrunoLeMaire. #le710Inter
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I wonder if the heroes of centrist moderation will pause for a moment and ask themselves what this implies for their worldview in general, and for their attitude towards 2015-19 Labour in particular.
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The response to this so interesting. One of the very few people who has worked at the point where high politics and the mass media intersect sets out a plausible explanation for why the Sun pressed the button the Hancock story when they did. Worth considering, you might think.
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