The Joy of Six 1516

"The scale of the beating handed to Labour in these local elections is difficult to convey just in words. You need to see numbers and maps, showing seas of red replaced by turquoise and green and yellow; you perhaps need to see the tears and feel the desolation longtime servants of the party are feeling this evening. That this defeat has been suffered in the heartland of the modern Labour Party – the stronghold atop which names like Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Lisa Nandy and Lucy Powell have built their reputations – is all the more harrowing." Lucy McLaughlin and Joshi Herrmann witness the fall of Labour Manchester.

Jonathan M. Winer warns us that Donald Trump is planning to use emergency powers to take control of this year's midterm elections.

Emily Enns on the campaign to deny the abuse of native Canadian children in residential schools. "Even now... there’s not a Facebook post that goes out about Indigenous events in Kamloops where there’s not at least one person in a comment section on a shared post saying something about how our experiences as Indigenous people are fabricated."

"The latest ChatGPT model, released last week, included the instructions: 'Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.'" Alex Nguyen explains why.

"History, in Mad Men, shapes the air around the characters, occasionally intrudes to seize control of the story, and nevertheless slowly changes each person. History is also experienced as something beyond the characters’ control and understanding. Like real human beings, they respond with a mix of bewilderment, accommodation, grumpiness, opportunism, and, occasionally, a full embrace of change." Joseph Stieb looks at the way Mad Men shows history reshaping people’s lives, perspectives and interactions, often without them fully realising that things have changed.

James Warren considers the unexpected evolution of the progressive band Stackridge into the poptastic The Korgis.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A damned shame

Lord Bonkers may have hunted Trotskyists in his younger days, but there's no doubt he's on the side of the working man and woman.

Friday

Freddie and Fiona’s friends will be popping champagne corks, but I think the resignation of Angela Rayner is a damned shame. For an outfit that styles itself “the Labour Party”, the present government is notably short of people who give you the impression they’ve ever done a hard day’s work. 

And given that half the last Conservative cabinet owned more houses then even I do, they should have kept their snoots out of the affair. Who knows what close scrutiny of their paperwork would reveal?

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week

• Dallas and its notorious School Book Suppository
• "He spelt his name with an omelette"
• Streets given over to foxes and feral cats
• A fully-funded scholarship and chauffeur-driven Rolls

The Joy of Six 1407

"The puzzle for me is what drives Labour politicians (and some others) around the ID card loop? What is the enduring appeal of ID cards that always survives facts and logic? Paul Krugman talks about ‘zombie ideas’, ideas that keeping coming back to life no matter how many times they are apparently killed off by reason and experience, such as the idea that the path to national prosperity is taxing the rich less. For New Labour, with Tony Blair still out ahead, ID cards are a beloved zombie." David Howarth on Labour's fixation with the idea of a national identity card.

Tim Leunig argues that Angela Rayner's problems with Stamp Duty shows that our taxation system is too complex: "When Angela Rayner bought her flat in Hove she owned no other house, in full or in part. It seems to me that the government’s own website is clear that Rayner was not liable for the higher rate of stamp duty. None of the further information on that page suggests anything different."

"A student can easily feed a PDF of the assigned book chapter to their AI application of choice and pass off the bot’s lukewarm analysis as their own; construct a study guide by uploading their notes to an AI tool marketed on LinkedIn by their peers; and even generate plausible rebuttals to arguments posed in discussion sections – all without arousing any suspicion from their overworked teaching assistants." Maria Gomberg on AI in American universities.

Marc Morris asks if William I's "Harrowing of the North" should be regarded as genocide.

"The best comedy does not 'feed prejudice and fear' but rather makes them 'clearer to see' he tells his students. But this view is challenged by talent scout Challenor, a smarmy agent up from London who takes a very different line. Comics are 'servants to the audience', not ‘missionaries’ but ‘suppliers of laughter’.  And in those two opposing views, we have the central tension of the play." Gerard Clough marks the 50th anniversary of Trevor Griffiths' play Comedians.

Gardens, Heritage and Planning visits the lost village of Imber on Salisbury Plain.

Labour is carrying out a massive local government reorganisation without any evidence it will work

 Angela Rayner told the Commons in June that: 

"Local government reorganisation will lead to better outcomes for residents and save a significant amount of money that can be reinvested in public services and improve accountability."

But a story on BBC News reveals that the government has undertaken no analysis to back up these claims.

Instead, it has relied upon a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that claimed £2.9bn could be saved over five years.

But then the CCN was never going to come out in favour of smaller councils. And this BBC story seems to be occasioned by that organisation's fear that county councils could be replaced by smaller unitary authorities.

I like district councils, and my five-year spell as a district councillor is one of the things I am most proud of. So I prefer the take of the chair of the District Councils' Network, Sam Chapman-Allen:

"It's astonishing that the government has undertaken no independent analysis before embarking on the biggest reorganisation of councils for 50 years.

"Mega councils, with populations of half a million people or more, could be imposed on areas when there's no independent, up-to-date evidence to justify councils of this size, and many large councils created previously are struggling financially."

If this reorganisation does result in such mega councils, it will weaken the link between councillors and voters. And which party will benefit from that? Reform UK.

But then if you want to forecast what this government is going to do next, a good trick is to assume that it is actively trying to maximise Reform's chance of winning the next general election.

Labour at the moment puts me in mind of Robert Conquest's Third Law of Politics:

The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Whataboutery won't get Labour far as a defence

When it became obvious that Labour were going to win a general election in 2024 or 2025, commentators assumed that Keir Starmer would be keen to show how different his government and party were from the Conservative Bacchanalia that had gone before.

Woe betide the first Labour backbencher to be found doing something that appears a little dodgy, the commentators said. They would be out on their ear, as Starmer showed he wasn't going to tolerate any misbehaviour.

It hasn't turned out like that. Nothing happened when, to his shock, the poor condition of flats let by the new Labour MP Jas Athwal was revealed.

And now we have Angela Rayner defending accepting a free holiday in New York because she has declared it and didn't break any rules.

I like Angela Rayner, not least because it's such a change to have a Northern and working-class voice in the cabinet, but this won't do. 

Most voters earn a lot less than Rayner now does and manage to pay for their own holidays. Why should she be any different, particularly when the risk of someone buying undue influence over a senior politician are clear? (I'm sure Lord Alli has acted from generous motives, but not everyone is so public spirited.)

If such a holiday is within the rules, then the rules must change. But rich people do like receiving perks.

The Labour reaction to this news story, and to similar ones like that on Starmer's new wardrobe, has been to say the Tories were worse.

The Tories were worse - much worse - but whataboutery won't get Labour far as a defence when voters were led to expect they would be different.

And, deep down, I have a fear that Keir Starmer has more in common with Boris Johnson than we imagined. He's been very good at saying what people want to hear - a gift that deserted him as soon as he became prime minister - but does he have any strong political beliefs of his own?

The Tories' Angela Rayner obsession has come back to bite them

It was predictable - indeed, I remember retweeting someone who predicted it - that the Mail's pursuit of Angela Rayner over her supposed failure to pay capital gains tax would rebound on the Conservatives.

That's because Conservative MPs own more houses than Labour MPs and may be fonder of baroque ways of avoiding tax.

And, sure enough, here is a report from today's Mirror:

Tories making a lot of noise about Angela Rayner and capital gains tax are less vocal when it comes to the profits their own MPs have made from selling second homes.

Four who have raked in £5.4million between them ­from flogging houses funded by the public have repeatedly declined to reveal if they paid any tax on the profits they made. The Tories were accused of ­hypocrisy after pushing for police to probe deputy Labour leader Ms Rayner over a £48,000 profit she made selling a former council house before she became an MP and an alleged capital gains tax bill of a mere £1,500.

The party did not respond to Mirror requests to comment on our ­investigation into whether David Tredinnick, Eleanor Laing, Shailesh Vara and Maria Miller paid capital gains tax on second homes they sold.

No doubt the Labour Party looks forward to this being an issue at the coming general election

In defence of Angela Rayner

I’m going to defend Angela here. So what she struggled at exams. She is smart and well deserves her position. And if you took a minute to see what she overcame you’d be all the more impressed. We don’t always agree. But she has my respect. Shame on you. https://t.co/bA5zYAGEKV

— Layla Moran 🔶 🏳️‍🌈 (@LaylaMoran) September 23, 2019

I'm with Layla on this one.

Education and educational achievement are things to be celebrated, but how you do at school can be as much a measure of your home background as how bright you are.

That's one reason I am so pleased that Layla has placed such a strong emphasis on adult learning as Liberal Democrat education spokesperson.

And there comes an age (with most of us it is about 19) when we stop thinking how you do in school examinations matters much. Churchill used to exaggerate how hopeless he had been at Harrow because he thought it gave him kudos.

I had some small experience myself of home background affecting my performance at school. As I wrote back in 2005:

When I was in the early years of secondary school, geography lessons seemed to be dominated by middle-class girls whose families encouraged them to write to foreign embassies for information about the countries we were discussing. 

Being male and coming from a one-parent family with a busy working mother, I was never going to compete with them. (And if you want real street cred, I got free school dinners.)

One reason for recalling this today is that I discovered three years later that one of those middle-class girls was a young Allison Pearson.

Angela Rayner thinks the Tories are "selling off" the green belt

The gov't should not be selling off our green belt to private developers;we need low cost housing built with the right public infrastructure

— Angela Rayner MP (@AngelaRayner) February 7, 2017

We know Richard Burgon is a laughing stock, but Angela Rayner has been getting good notices - at least from her colleagues.

So how to explain this tweet she sent today?

The government, of course, cannot sell off the green belt because it does not own it. The debate is about whether local authorities should be allowed or compelled to grant developers permission to build on it.

I think we are entitled to expect a member of the shadow cabinet to have grasped that.

But then I am puzzled by all the talk in the media about local authorities being forced to sell their land.

Are local authorities really sitting on large land holding? Maybe large authorities are, but when I was a councillor in a rural district 30 years ago we owned very little land even then.

I suspect a lot of journalists don't understand this debate either