The Joy of Six 1533

James Ball argues that Labour's social media ban for teenagers is an admission of total and utter failure to govern online spaces: "The UK government has lots of powers to govern the internet that it simply isn’t using. Hosting images of child abuse is a strict liability offence, one that Elon Musk’s X platform blatantly breached with its Grok chatbot. The government gave itself extensive powers to regulate social platforms under the Online Safety Act, which it has never even made an attempt to enforce."

"This week contained two stories, which dominated the headlines. One took place on the streets of Belfast, the other in the hallways of Whitehall. One concerned race riots and the other a defence funding plan. But they were in fact the same story. They both concerned security – one at home, the other abroad. And they were both the result of a prime minister who refuses to lead." Ian Dunt says Keir Starmer's inertia threatens national security.

Anja Krstic and Ivona Hideg find that men's careers benefit when they take parental leave but women’s do not.

"Ten years on from the referendum, the tired stereotype of the 'Northern Brexit voter' is one we should retire." J.P. Spencer has the figures that explode a widespread myth.

"Undoubtedly the most important members of the audience were a group of families from formerly occupied territories affected by the abductions: mothers with teenagers they had recovered from Crimea or elsewhere; families who were still trying to get their children back." Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk on the Kyiv premiere of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers.

Kenneth George Godwin finds innocence and corruption in the films of Alexander Mackendrick: "The clearest expression of Mackendrick’s worldview is perhaps apparent in the three films he made which centred on children: Mandy (1952), Sammy Going South (1963), and A High Wind In Jamaica (1965). Unsentimental, unafraid of the darkness kids face in a harsh world, unafraid to see the potential for darkness in the kids themselves … these are three of the most adult films about children ever made."

"Oligarchs" all live in countries we don't like

A footnote from Sami Timimi's Searching for Normal:

There is a habit of referring to oligarchs as the super-rich in countries we don't like, but not to extend a similar label to such a stratum in our own countries; on the contrary, individuals like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates are often seen in more heroic terms as great innovators.

I'm not sure about the gramar, but the point is a good one.

GUEST POST Lib Dems must be "Tough on billionaires, tough on the causes of billionaires"

Anselm Anon says Liberal Democrats should be concerned about concentrations of economic power as well as about concentrations of political power.

It is axiomatic for liberals that power ought to be dispersed and accountable. The Liberal Democrats tends to be fairly good at articulating this when it comes to political structures – supporting an elected House of Lords, empowering local government, opposing mayors and PCCs who have "dubious democratic mandates and little scrutiny".

In contrast, the party’s approach to concentrated and unaccountable power that derives from wealth, as distinct from politics, is much more patchy. Ed Davey should be credited for his response to the Epstein scandal, and for standing up to Elon Musk on a range of issues. But he has been unwilling to move much beyond a critique of bad individual American billionaires, to the illiberal concentration of power which great wealth inevitably entails.

With reference to tech oligarchs, he writes:

I see it as the fundamental purpose of liberals … to hold the powerful to account and put real power in the hands of ordinary people. That means breaking up concentrations of power wherever we find them.

This is an excellent starting point, but needs to be supported by tangible and far-reaching policies.

The existence of all billionaires* is a structural problem. There are perhaps three broad reasons why the Liberal Democrats have not sufficiently acknowledged this, but each can be challenged. 

First, some billionaires fund worthy causes, from the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, to Sir Chris Hohn’s support for action on climate change. Joseph Rowntree died in 1925, but his philanthropy continues to do a great deal of good, inspired by liberal values. Yet even if they are sympathetic characters, that doesn’t negate the systemic problem that billionaires are inherently over-mighty.

Liberal Democrats rightly reject the ‘good chap’ approach to Britain’s political institutions, which assumes the benign personal qualities of political actors. They are right to insist on robust formal structures, based on a written constitution. We wouldn’t want hereditary peers in the House of Lords, even if they all had the sensibilities of successive Earls Russell. And the same should go for billionaires: however well-meaning, they shouldn’t be allowed to wield unaccountable power, or pass it on to their children, which means that they shouldn’t be allowed to amass wealth beyond a certain point.

Secondly, there may be electoral calculation at play. Liberal Democrat voters, and constituencies represented by the party’s MPs, tend to be wealthier than average. It is sensible to be hesitant about alienating people who earn comfortable salaries and own detached houses. But hostility to the existence of billionaires need not entail this.

The sort of affluent citizen in her fifties in Tunbridge Wells, who now votes Liberal Democrat, but previously supported Blair and Cameron, knows all about the malign effects of the concentration of wealth. She knows about her daughter's experience in the rental market, about her father's experience in a care home owned by private equity, and her own experience of a water company which exists solely to amass capital for its investors. 

The party is well able to make it clear to her that hostility to the existence of billionaires is not an attack on her bourgeois lifestyle. And it is an electoral imperative, too, because we want her daughter, and the staff of her father’s care home (and her father!) to vote for the Liberal Democrats, and to become involved in the party.

The third obstacle is perhaps the most deeply rooted within Liberal Democrat thinking. There is a very sound liberal instinct to let people get on with their own personal and collective projects, without impediment or judgementalism. The distinction between public and private spheres of life is essential to liberalism. If someone wants to devote her energies to climbing the very highest Himalayas, or being the greatest ever tennis player, or winning at chess, or studying hard and becoming an eminent professor, then she is welcome to get on with it. 

But being a billionaire is never a private choice: it is inherently public, because decisions about how to invest and spend so much money have an enormous effect, even if the billionaire doesn’t make overt political interventions, such as donating to a political party, or underwriting a newspaper.

And the existence of billionaires inevitably induces some politicians to serve their interests, even if less cravenly than Peter Mandelson. Great wealth is inherently different in kind, not just in scale, from the resources of the bulk of the population, and this is inherently political.

So, one of the central aims of the Liberal Democrats’ economic policy should be to inhibit the creation and continuation of billionaires. I won’t go into the details of this, but starting points would include different approaches to taxing wealth (especially land), to inheritance, to regulating monopolies and oligopolies, and to the offshore tax havens controlled by Britain. 

At the moment, it seems that the Liberal Democrats are willing to be tough on (some) billionaires, but not on the causes of billionaires. This isn’t a call for the class warfare of the far left, or the inchoate left-populism of Zack Polanski’s Green Party, but to work through the implications of liberal insights when applied to economic power, as well as to political structures.

Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.

* I use "billionaire" as a shorthand for "an individual or family possessing so much wealth that it would distort a liberal society". I suspect the relevant amount is much less than one billion pounds, but won’t pursue that here.

The Joy of Six 1470

Timothy Snyder reports from a frightened city: "In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians."

"I think the way he is trying to interfere with our democracy, generally our country, is quite outrageous. For the richest man to come here with his totally unfounded and ignorant comments is shocking." Interviewed by Big Issue, Ed Davey sticks it to Elon Musk.

"The use of armed militia to terrorise the inhabitants of Minneapolis is not just beyond the rule of law, it is fascistic. It’s the final evidential point between what is happening today and the political forces that ripped Europe apart in the last century: and that’s not just me saying this, it’s some of the most eminent historians of authoritarianism." Carole Cadwalladr says what’s happening in the US is technofascism and it could happen here.

Madeleine Brettingham on the difficulty of making a living as a writer today: "The biggest revolution in how writing is distributed since the printing press has decimated all our assumptions about how creative careers work. Somewhere between the noughties and the pandemic everything changed, leaving many (including me) attempting to climb up ladders that no longer exist."

Norma Clarke reviews a book on working-class lives in Charlie Chaplin's London: "Charlie was a gutter child, a 'street arab' in the language of the time: undersized, skinny, his bright eyes on the main chance as he roamed up and down between Kennington and New Cut, where market stalls overflowed with produce he had no money to buy and probably became adept at stealing."

Did a tsunami hit the Bristol Channel four centuries ago? Simon Haslett revisits the great flood of 1607.

The Joy of Six 1369

"If Reform is claiming, as it is, to be a party capable of governing this country, then the media must subject it to the same kind of scrutiny applied to Labour or the Conservatives. Such scrutiny must be applied to the past record of those associated with Reform, its current policies and its performance where it is in power, such as the 10 local authorities where it is now in control." Raymond Snoddy says it's time the media stopped giving Reform a free ride.

Amanda Morcotte argues that the bust up between Trump and Musk was always going to happen: "This conflict was brewing for reasons that run deeper than Musk and Trump's competing egos or Silicon Valley's dependency on government funding, which their leaders disparage. The atheistic world of pseudo-intellectualism that Musk and his minions come from was always going to have friction with the Christian nationalists who actually run the MAGA-ified Republican Party."

Sophia Alexandra Hall on the profound impact of the Welsh government's basic income pilot for care leavers.

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. Your brain is not a computer. Listen to Robert Epstein.

"We take these walks through nature, I think, on some deep level, to remind ourselves that the majority of our lives are illusions. That nothing is permanent and eventually the march of nature will stomp right through our assured lies that we are someone separate from it; somehow protected." DaN McKee stares nature in the face.

In 1984 the cult author Derek Marlowe was interviewed by Paul Gallagher: "I didn’t like writing the screenplay of Dandy in Aspic, it was always going to be a failure to me to write the screenplay. It would have been much easier if some other writer had come along to the book and taken it away and torn it apart and told their version of my novel as a movie. Me doing it myself, at that time, I was terribly scared and in awe of people like Anthony Mann and Laurence Harvey and Mia Farrow."

From Liberator: Such people write about Lincolnshire as though they were Victorian explorers or missionaries

The new Liberator - issue 429 - is out and can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

As well as Lord Bonkers' Diary and a book review of mine, it includes this article. I wrote it in response to the local election results of 1 May.

In Search of Their Motives

Why did Reform UK do so well in the local elections? How should parties respond to their rise? Who exactly is voting for them?

Some would tell you to wait for the academics to crunch the numbers, but if you go to the research on how and why Leave won the 2016 European Union referendum then you find, as so often the case in academia, not a body of agreed conclusions but a loose bundle of continuing debates. So rather than wait for a consensus that may never emerge, I’m going to do what I can here to clear what seem to me widespread misconceptions about Reform and their voters.

To begin with, the success of Reform should not shock or even surprise us. Ukip polled more than any other party in the 2014 elections to the European parliament, receiving 26.6 per cent of the vote and electing 24 of the UK’s 73 MEPs. Five years later, the Brexit Party did even better, electing 29 MEPs and receiving 30.5 per cent of the vote, slightly more than Reform UK won in this year’s local elections.

These three successes were achieved by Nigel Farage under three different party names, which reminds us that the far right has always been prepared to form parties, break them up and form new ones until they hit upon an arrangement that attracts voters. It also reminds us that Farage has been key to their successes, but we should have grasped years ago that there is no reason to expect us to be immune to the rise of the far right that has taken place across Western Europe in recent years. Despite leaving the EU, Britain now finds itself with a thoroughly European party system that includes a substantial party that stands to the right of the Conservative Party. This may well be the new normal.

After the EU referendum, Leave’s victory was widely attributed to a desire for revenge by left-behind areas. This narrative had its appeal to some on the left, because you could argue that it made the disastrous outcome of that vote all George Osborne’s fault, but I was never convinced. It seemed rooted in a dated, even nostalgic, view of the working class as white, male and engaged until recently in heavy industry. Yes, big changes have taken place in working class employment, but they took place some decades ago. The Full Monty and Brassed Off came out in the mid-1990s, and both were looking back on a transformation that had already taken place.

Yet a disaffected working-class was the first explanation many reached for to account for Reform’s successes on 1 May. Liberal Democrat Voice, for instance, immediately ran an article that argued Reform is “hoovering up votes across the country by doing one simple thing: articulating the grievances of the working classes”. It was good to see an article on that blog which talked about inequality and social class, but I don’t buy its thesis that Reform’s vote came solely from an aggrieved working class. Even in Durham, where Reform swept away a previously solid Labour majority, the figures show that it won a large slice of the votes that previously went to Conservatives and Independents as well as taking votes from Labour.

What I found most striking about the local elections was the collapse of Tory Midland England. Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire all fell to Reform, while Leicestershire now has a minority Reform administration. Even amid the Liberal Democrat triumph in Shropshire, Reform won enough seats to become the largest opposition group on the new council. While all these shires contain areas of widespread poverty and areas of Labour strength, it was the Conservative Party that took a hammering.

It seems to me that the Reform vote is best regarded as a protest vote – a concept we Liberals should be very much at home with, because we depended upon such a vote for survival and occasional upturns for decades. The late, great David Penhaligon was given to suggesting that a “Stuff Em All Party” would do well at the polls, and that is how Reform is seen by many voters, which is perhaps something we miss in our anxiety to condemn Nigel Farage’s views on race or the latest member found to have once espoused Fascist views on social media.

Whether you blame the economic situation it inherited or its lack of ambition, this Labour government is proving a sore disappointment to many who voted for it, while the thoughts of habitual Conservative voters can only be imagined. They now find themselves faced with a leader who is older than Tony Blair or David Cameron was when they came to power, yet comes over as a spiteful child. The majority of her MPs, meanwhile, hesitate to remove her for fear of who the party’s membership might land them with next. 

So you can see why there’s now a ready market for the Stuff Em All Party. Meanwhile, we Lib Dems can choose between being disappointed that our concentration in the affluent South means we are no longer viewed in that light, and taking this as a sign we are beginning to have a more coherent policy profile with voters.

Having managed to fake authenticity, Nigel Farage has made himself a better media performer than either Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch. It’s not so much that he comes over as being more fun to go for a drink with: it’s more that you can’t imagine the other two going for a drink at all. Added to that, now and then Farage does show political nous – he resisted the temptation to court Elon Musk and his money by embracing Tommy Robinson, sensing that one of his weaknesses is that he is already seen as too close to Trump and Putin.

In a thoughtful piece for Compass, Olly Glover, the Lib Dem MP for Didcot & Wantage, wrote of it becoming “increasingly common to encounter voters who are open about their intention to vote Reform. A surprising number of these were choosing between Reform and Lib Dem.”

He continued:

Voters’ reasons for considering Reform are more varied than might be assumed, with scepticism about net zero and climate change commitments now as common as concerns about immigration. 

Uniting them all is widespread cynicism and loss of confidence in the entire political system and the British state. This aspect is shared with many non-Reform voters too, but Reform have captured the bulk of the ‘anti-establishment’ sentiment.

And Dr Nathan Ley, a Lib Dem councillor from Abingdon, has written on his [now vanished] Substack that Reform is now:

The repository for some voters who are angry, dispossessed, downtrodden, as well as lots of people who are actually quite comfortable with their life, but feeling just a bit bored.

Labour is pinning its hopes on recovering these disaffected votes simply by governing better and producing visible improvements by the next election. This ambition does not seem to extend much beyond the NHS: elsewhere the government is continuing the austerity its members devoted fourteen years of their lives to condemning.

I wish Labour well in this endeavour, but they are going to have to find better communicators to put their case across. If Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves gave a fireside chat, you fear the fire would go out.

It’s hard to know what to advise the Conservatives to do. The most significant voting pattern of the 2016 referendum has always seemed to me the way that great swathes of prosperous Southern England voted Leave. You can blame David Cameron – if a prime minister puts a choice to voters in a referendum, they are entitled to assume that both paths are reasonable ones for the country to take – and I wouldn’t discount Dr Ley’s observation that voters were a bit bored. But what happened to all those Southern Tories with a fat stake in the status quo and a determination to keep things pretty much as they are?

I would look to the disappearance of responsible clerical and middle-management positions to technology and cost-cutting, and to the difficulty most people now experience in getting on the property ladder. David Boyle wrote a book about these trends, Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?, back in 2014. [The link is to a radio programme based on the book.]

Beyond this, there has been a collapse in Conservative values to such an extent that it’s possible to argue that the Conservative Party’s fundamental problem is that it’s no longer Conservative. It was said of Margaret Thatcher that she hoped her policies would produce more men like her father, but she ended up producing more men like her son.

And for Liberal Democrats? We should be wary of habits that it is too easy to learn online. One reason I distrust the argument that Reform is winning on working-class votes alone is that it plays into a snobbish view of the working class held by some people who imagine themselves to be left wing. The working class, they believe, is, like anyone who disagrees with them, stupid.

Such people write about, say, Lincolnshire as though they were Victorian explorers or missionaries, complete with a party of native bearers carrying their aspidistra and upright piano, but instead of cleft sticks to send messages, they use smartphones. They paint the county as impoverished, sexist, racist and any other ist you care to mention. This view is backed up by some small-town boys who praise themselves for having escaped it.

Yet Lincolnshire voted in line with the rest of the country in the 1975 referendum on continued membership of the European Economic Community – two-to-one in favour. And, years after that, Liberal candidates piled up huge votes in coming second in constituencies like Gainsborough & Horncastle and East Lindsey. In the latter, which is largely the Boston & Skegness constituency now represented by Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, the Liberal Alliance polled over 20,000 votes at the 1987 general election. 

Politics is rarely as simple as online debate makes it appear.

Now over to Washington for the latest on the Trump/Musk row

The Joy of Six 1362

"For centuries, this country has been synonymous with segregation - by class, education, manners, dress, accents, leisure habits and housing. Since the early 1980s, when Thatcherism began to erase the more integrated and equal postwar Britain, these ancient divisions have been compounded by a further polarisation in incomes and between regions." The least integrated part of British society isn’t immigrants but the elite, argues Andy Beckett.

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling finds that the whole of Trump's team hated Elon Musk: "'Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!' a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing."

Nick Hilton spends a day out at The Podcast Show.

"VAR was introduced with the promise of increased fairness and accuracy. What it has delivered instead, in the case of implementing the off-side rule at least, is an artificial sense of certainty. Football fans and officials have allowed themselves to believe that a line drawn on a screen - based on a particular video frame and assumptions about body positioning - can objectively implement the offside rule down to the millimetre." Kit Yates challenges the belief that technology can enforce football's laws in a way that is both definitive and fair.

A London Inheritance goes in search of the southern entrance to the Tower Subway: "When Tower Bridge opened on the 30th of June, 1894, use of the Tower Subway collapsed. With Tower Bridge, there were no shafts to descend and ascend, no damp, gas lit tunnel to walk through, and the new bridge was free."

"With more people monitoring swifts, we are learning that swifts are less faithful to each other than previously thought. If pairs should arrive back at similar times they may quickly reunite, but if they arrive days apart swifts may be more likely to look for new mates." Jonathan Pomroy watches a tentative courtship in his garden.

Prime minister's questions: Have the Tories given up?

Kemi Badenoch has a problem at prime minister's questions. Every time she attacks Labour on the economy, Keir Starmer simply has to hang the record of the last Conservative government round her neck to win the exchange.

But she has another, as the Guardian live politics blog pointed out. She lacks support from her own side of the House:

Towards the end of the session Greg Smith asked a question that backed up the Badenoch “jobs tax” critique. ... On its own, a single question like this is unlikely to make much impression. But half a dozen of them might.

(To be fair to the Tories, they did not get half a dozen backbench questions. They just got three, and the other two were devoted to Scunthorpe steelworks and the child killer Colin Pitchfork. There is a lottery to decide who gets called at PMQs, and maybe the Conservatives were just unlucky in their allocation this week. But maybe some of them are not bothering to bid for a question. In total just four Tory MPs spoke at PMQs today – exactly the same as the number of Liberal Democrats who got a question.)

You can get strange results from lotteries: the Tories did remarkably badly in the ballot for private member's bills held when the new parliament met after last year's general election.

But this lack of backbench questions may be a sign that the Tories have already written Kemi Badenoch off. Or it could be a sign they are simply demoralised. Or a sign they are too busy on Twitter reading the latest conspiracy theory from Elon Musk.

Whatever the reason for the Tories' lack of interest, it is telling that Josh Self chose to focus his piece about today's PMQs on the exchange between Starmer and Ed Davey on Trump and tariffs - and called it for Ed.

Lib Dems urge government to fund scheme that traces Ukrainian children abducted by Russia

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From the Guardian:

The Liberal Democrats are urging the government to provide replacement funding to an American project that locates Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia, as the party gathers for a spring conference heavily focused on the response to Donald Trump.

British support for the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University could be part of a more robust approach towards the US president, particularly over Ukraine, according to Calum Miller, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson.

Earlier this month, Yale said US government funding for the lab, which has attempted to track the fate of the estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children taken to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, had been ended as part of cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s so-called department of government efficiency.

The paper has spoken to the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson Calum Miller. As it reminds us, he entered politics just four years ago when he became an Oxfordshire county councillor.

But with his background as a senior civil servant and then heading Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, he was given the foreign affairs brief immediately after becoming an MP in July.

Calum will be moving a motion at the the party's spring conference expressing "profound alarm" at Trump’s presidency and urging closer European collaboration in response. 

He is calling for the government to use the £2bn-plus proceeds from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC to help such efforts:

"We’d like to think that some of this Abramovich money could be put to exactly those purposes, so this terrible chapter of children being forcibly removed and almost indoctrinated in Russia, can be brought to an end, but also hopefully when those children return to Ukraine they can be given all the support they need as part of a humanitarian package."

Calum also told the paper that more confiscated Russian assets should be used to aid Ukraine.

He is strongly critical of the Conservative approach to the new international situation:

"I’m genuinely baffled by the approach taken by the Conservatives in this regard, fawning over Donald Trump at his inauguration and declaring a new era in UK-US relations. It looked unwise at the time and events since have proven how ill-advised it was.

"So many people in my area opened their doors to Ukrainian families, like they did across the whole country. Voters can see that the Russians have been emboldened and empowered by the US administration, and they think that’s just the wrong thing."

It's worth reading the whole piece: Calum also talks about the Labour government's approach to US under Trump.

Finally, as a Chelsea fan I cannot help reflecting that, after paying £2bn to buy the club, its new members have invested another £1.4bn in making the team far weaker than the one they inherited.

The Joy of Six 1337

Susie Courtalt says the rise of toxic masculinity and the war on 'woke' threaten women’s rights around the world: "For whatever reason, and there may be many, a new archetype of leader has emerged in the world and is fuelling this trend. Pressure put on the Romanian authorities to free the Tate brothers and allow them to fly to the USA can only be explained by the new incumbents in the White House and Elon Musk’s continued support of them." 

"The most striking aspect of the new guidelines is the missing subject: class. The word 'class' does not appear once in the document. Nor does 'poverty'. Yet, few issues are more pertinent in evaluating offenders’ social background." Kenan Malik on the real two-tier justice system.

"This is a rollicking good read, written in an informal style, and enlivened by cartoons, which works as a scholarly and accessible account of the so-called reproducibility crisis in biomedical research." Dorothy Bishop reviews 'Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research' by Csaba Szabo.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams celebrates Robert Marsham’s 'Indications of Spring'. This 222-year record of flora and fauna events on one Norfolk estate still informs climate studies today.

Mark Carrigan warns academics that Bluesky will trap them, just as Twitter did in the past.

"It’s my guess that, even within ten years, the painting was an embarrassment to the Perrots - not because it was idolatrous, but because the Book of Tobit was relegated to the Apocrypha . ... The presence of Tobias’s dog, together with the exorcism of an evil spirit by burning a fish’s innards, added to idea that the Apocrypha was full of 'shameful lies, horrible blasphemies, vain vanities, plain contradictions, ridiculous fooleries'." Annette Rubery goes to see an Elizabethan wall painting in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Labour's embrace of Trumpian language just got tighter

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One of my unfashionable opinions is that being a local councillor is a very good preparation for being a member of parliament.

You are forced to apply your instincts and ideology to an agenda that is not of your choosing, particularly if your party is in opposition.

Contrast that with the route to Westminster that the fashionable people approve of - working in a think-tank or becoming a special adviser. In those roles you are not rewarded for finding the weak links in your party's thinking: what gets you ahead us doubling down on its current pet ideas.

So what should you believe if you want to get on in today's Labour Party? The Guardian has the answer:

A radical blueprint for reforming the state is being drawn up by government officials, including a crackdown on quangos and thousands more civil service job cuts, the Guardian understands.

Proposals to restructure NHS England, with entire teams axed to save money and avoid duplication, could be replicated across a range of arm’s length bodies that spend about £353bn of public money.

Separately, No 10 and the Treasury are understood to be taking a close interest in proposals drawn up by Labour Together, a thinktank with close links to the government, to reshape the state under plans dubbed “project chainsaw”.

The project’s nickname is a reference to Elon Musk’s stunt wielding a chainsaw to symbolise controversial government cuts for Donald Trump’s administration.

This is not the first time we have seen Labour adopting Trumpian language. Anas Sarwar, the party's leader in Scotland, has already promised "our own Department of Government Efficiency" if it wins next year's Holyrood elections.

No doubt such language makes ambitious young Labour people feel all macho, but there are few signs that it appeals to voters.

h/t Euan Healey and Steven Fleming.

Anas Sarwar and Scottish Labour find a new inspiration: Elon Musk

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This morning Elon Musk's attack on Volodymyr Zelensky was in the news. Here's the Independent:

Elon Musk has accused Volodymyr Zelensky of "feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers" as the Trump administration continues ferociously lashing out at the Ukrainian president.

The Tesla owner wrote on his X site, without evidence, that Zelensky is "despised by the people of Ukraine" in a post that refuted Kyiv’s claims that the president has a 57 per cent approval rating. Earlier this week Trump had claimed that the Ukraine leader had an approval rating of '4 per cent'.

"If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election. He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukrainian media, so he canceled the election,” the tech billionaire wrote.

Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, was making his speech to his party conference today. Did he take the opportunity to condemn Musk's foul slur?

Not exactly. Over to the Daily Record:

Anas Sarwar has echoed Donald Trump and Elon Musk by announcing Scottish Labour's own plans for a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The Scottish Labour leader said that he would create the department because of "the SNP's wasteful incompetence". He pointed to the ferry scandal at the £1 billion new Barlinnie jail.

Unless things at Holyrood are much worse than I've heard, it's not true that the Scottish government has provided Barlinnie with its own ferry. I'll be charitable and put this error down to the Record rather than Sarwar.

Anyway, he went on:

That’s why we will have our own Department of Government Efficiency to stop the waste and deliver value for money for you, the taxpayer. And that value for money will extend to every part of government."

He continued: "I can tell you now that as First Minister, I will end this culture of waste, respect people’s hard-earned money and get value for every penny."

I get it that Labour wants to attack the SNP's record in government. But why, even before his remark about Zelensky, drag Musk into it? It's not as though he's popular with British voters.

Perhaps Sarwar has a secret crush on him? Perhaps a teenage spin doctor thought they were being clever by hooking the speech to something already in the news?

Or perhaps we're right to conclude that Labour no longer believes in much beyond getting into power.

It's the Liberal Democrats who are taking on Trump and Musk

Josh Graham writes on politics.co.uk:

The Lib Dems, after a historic general election campaign under Ed Davey’s buccaneering leadership secured 72 MPs, have found their voice in a crowded UK political scene as the prime critics of Trump’s revolution.

The Lib Dems have assumed this anti-MAGA mantle largely by default, that said. The Labour Party, a natural ideological opponent of Trumpism, has been silenced by its government duties and diplomatic responsibilities. The Conservative leadership has positioned itself as supportive of Trump’s general initiative. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is MAGA’s British spin-off. Meanwhile, the Green party - whose criticism might even trump Davey’s - still struggles to cut through the Westminster noise.

The bottom line is this: political circumstance, on both sides of the Atlantic, has conspired to carve a neat niche for Ed Davey’s party - one it is excitedly exploiting.

The video shows the first of Ed Davey's two questions to the prime minister on Wednesday.

The Joy of Six 1321

"In the past two weeks, Elon Musk - a man no one elected to any office - has gained unprecedented access to Social Security payment systems, fired federal workers, shuttered entire agencies, and installed his loyalists throughout the government. If this were happening in any other country, we'd call it what it is: a coup." Parker Molloy complains that the media is treating this outrage like standard political news.

Rachel Coldicutt asks what Musk's rampage through Washington means for Britain's technology policy.

"Something significant happened last week. The UK government forced the chair of the Competition and Markets Authority to resign. Marcus Bokkerink’s crime? Not being sufficiently 'pro-growth'. The chair of a regulator who is supposed to ensure a level playing field for businesses has been replaced by a former Amazon executive." Sue Hawley argues that Keir Starmer's drive to cut red tape could unleash a new wave of dirty money and corporate bad behaviour.

Jonathan Mills draws parallels between British universities today and British Leyland in the Seventies: "When an organisation's revenues fall, or look like they will ... panic sets in. The organisation starts looking at profitability and because it's all set up around departments in the first place, that's how management think in a crisis. Unproductive departments must go, so they look at the department accounts and pick a productive department with the least "profit", and close it. Wonderful! Next year will see a return to profit! Except that it doesn't."

José Vela Castillo introduces us to the revolutionary immigrant architects whose stories inspired Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist.

"The rest of the cast exited and still we waited. Frankly, having stood there like lemons for nearly an hour we were on the brink of giving up but then we heard her trademark voice – a cross between an exultant yell and a prowling growl – and she came bowling out of the theatre, extravagantly gesturing and slightly fried. Correction: slaughtered. Thrilled, it seemed to us, to see two schoolboys anxious for her autograph, she threw herself upon us and to our amazement, we wound up walking her back to the Savoy." David Benedict on his meetings with Elaine Stritch.

Ed Davey: Britain needs to call out these overpowerful billionaires

The blurb on the Liberal Democrats' YouTube account runs:

Ed Davey claps back at Elon Musk over insults made, calling for the UK to lead with its' international allies in Europe to hold Musk and other billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg to account. 

"If Donald Trump won't, then Britain, with our relationship with Europe, needs to call out these over-powerful billionaires.

"We can't allow them to get away with what they're trying to get away with. It is too damaging."

Apparently "claps back" is something the young people say.

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"Regulation is one of those words used by politicians that is nearly always bad in the abstract and good in the specific. They rail against bureaucracy, red tape and pettifogging rules that get in the way of innovation and efficiency. But the moment something bad happens, they immediately accept that more regulation is the only way to avoid a recurrence." Sam Freedman explains why governments struggle to turn anti-regulation rhetoric into an agenda for the real world.

Peter Jukes says Russia'a information warfare primed the world for Trump and Musk: "There has been a decade-long war against ‘one person, one vote’, and the concept of a transparent media to inform our citizenry. If we are ever to protect our democracies from this synergy of autocracy and tech, we will have to unravel these alliances of money and information and their traffic of hatred and falsehood."

Ginny Smith on the battle to retain village life in Sussex: "There are many examples ... of villages where people have come together to fight the 'hollowing out' of their community. They have clubbed together to buy the local pub or village shop, they have fought the threatened closure of their school, raised funds to build a village hall and created community orchards and wild spaces."

"'What I tell you now doesn’t go past this room,' the colonel said. 'You’re going to London on Saturday on the boat-train, and you’ll be playing at Churchill’s funeral.' 'But he’s not dead,' protested King, and the colonel replied: 'He will be by Sunday.'" Alwyn Turner recalls the trumpeters who played at Churchill's funeral.

It was only possible to begin production of The Mirror and the Light - the third part of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy - when the producer, writer, director and  leading actor gave up a significant proportion of their fees, Ellise Shafer reports on the economics of quality television.

Sven Mikulec watches the Coen brothers' first film, Blood Simple (1984).

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Emma Burnell on the new Conservative leader's poor start: "Badenoch is going to have to do something reasonably soon to show that she has a grip on at least one of the three roles she has. Because the Tories may have made it harder to get rid of her but, as the manoeuvrings of Robert Jenrick show, not all of her party believes it is impossible to do so."

"The coronarvirus outbreak showed the dangers of an inadequate sick pay system. Lots of frontline workers were forced to choose between falling into poverty because they got no or little sick pay, or continue to work and risk spreading the virus." Tim Sharp calls on ministers to act on their expressed view that no one should be faced with such a choice.

Tegwen Haf Parry says the similarities between police uniforms and those worn by people working in many other fields can create confusion about the powers they wield.

"Heinlein filled his fiction with loudmouthed men who claim to be accomplished polymaths. They boss everyone around, make decisions on a whim and ignore advice regardless of the consequences." Jordan S. Carroll argues that Robert Heinlein's Sixties SF novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the key to understanding Elon Musk's politics.

Ray Newman finds the post-war British new town, as presented in the films of that era, is an uncanny space - heaven, hell or somewhere between, but certainly not quite real.

"How long before the red-ball game becomes properly marginalised by those top-down forces? How long before Ashes cricket is essentially a kind of morris dance meets the Ryder Cup, an exhibition event staged off to one side in strange traditional dress?" Barney Ronay asks if next winter's Ashes series could be the last.

Ed Davey: Summon the US ambassador over Musk comments

@libdems

People have had enough of Elon Musk interfering with our country’s democracy when he clearly knows nothing about Britain. It’s time to summon the US ambassador to ask why an incoming US official is suggesting the UK government should be overthrown.

♬ original sound - Liberal Democrats

Well said, Ed.

There's also a party press release on this:

Responding to Elon Musk’s latest post on X in which he suggested that America should “liberate the people of Britain” and overthrow the government, Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey said:

"People have had enough of Elon Musk interfering with our country’s democracy when he clearly knows nothing about Britain. It’s time to summon the US ambassador to ask why an incoming US official is suggesting the UK government should be overthrown.

"This dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric is further proof that the UK can’t rely on the Trump administration, and it’s in our national interest to rebuild trade and security ties with our allies in Europe."

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"Any pleasure I may take in the distinction of the honour of an FRS is diminished by the fact it is shared with someone who appears to be modeling himself on a Bond villain, a man who has immeasurable wealth and power which he will use to threaten scientists who disagree with him." Dorothy Bishop explains her decision to resign as a Fellow of the Royal Society - she's talking about Elon Musk, of course.

Jim Sleeper uncovers the Classical roots of the US Constitution: "The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was hot off the presses in the 1770s. We should read Gibbon now, too, paying close attention to his account of how the Roman republic slipped into tyranny when powerful men had seduced or intimidated its citizens so that they became a stampeding mob, hungry for bread and circuses."

Amy-Jane Beer is excited by the rewilding project at Castle Howard: "While most authorised beaver reintroductions in the UK have been in small enclosures, here the plan is to give them 450 acres to work with, alongside pigs and large grazers that will churn and prune and trample and further invigorate ecological processes. I cannot wait to see it."

During the Cold War, philosophers worked together to aid dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. Cheryl Misak was part of a movement that included both Jacques Derrida and Roger Scruton.

 "Wicked makes its cinematic premiere at an awkward time, so soon after so many American voters acted against virtually every moral idea the production unsubtly espouses," says Luke Buckmaster.

Tim Rolls on the day in 1966 that Bobby Tambling scored five goals at Villa Park: "Looking at the TV footage a couple of things strike home. The quality of Chelsea’s accurate, incisive passing (particularly Osgood and Cooke) and speedy breaks, and the sheer inability of the home players to shut down their breaking opponents."