Diktat and wads of cash

Ian Williams has an interesting CAPX piece on China’s faltering economy


Xi Jinping’s coercion is destroying his own economy

Football provides a useful way to understand the dead end into which Xi Jinping is leading the Chinese economy. This month, a 7-0 loss by China’s men’s team to Japan in an Asian Cup qualifier marked the colossal failure of a decade-long multi-billion dollar project to turn China into a footballing superpower. When Xi launched his masterplan in 2015, China was 81st in the world; now they are 87th. Dozens of top officials and players have been suspended or jailed for corruption, and much like Xi’s dream of creating a tech-driven ‘innovation economy’, the plan to capture the heights of world football was a top-down project driven by diktat and wads of cash, with rigid plans and targets so beloved of Communist Party bureaucrats.


The piece is short but well worth reading because of what it says about a familiar problem here in the UK and the developed world generally. Politically-driven top-down coercion doesn't work - we know about that too.


Xi’s longer term goal is to build a world-beating ‘innovation’ economy driven by domestic tech, but the most effective way of achieving this – giving more sway to the market and to private companies – runs counter to everything he stands for. He has hobbled China’s most innovative technology companies, which have faced tightening restrictions. Last year, China led the world in the number of millionaires leaving the country, according to the Henley Wealth Management Report.

The demise of Tupperware

Fans mourn popular kitchen brand famous for its parties after cheap copycats - beloved by Gen-Z - fuel its demise

The news that cult kitchen brand Tupperware might be heading for the great storage container in the sky has sparked a wave of nostalgia-tinged mourning on social media.

The iconic American brand known the world over for its plastic food containers, is on the brink of bankruptcy, with spiralling debts of more than $700 million, according to Bloomberg.


Fans mourn? Cult? Iconic? 

Nope, just headline writers. I remember a Tupperware cruet set my parents acquired in the sixties - I think it was the sixties but it may have been the fifties. That cruet set never looked right even to my young eye. 

I always thought Tupperware had an amazing knack of looking grubby as soon as it had been used a few times. Especially sandwich boxes - and cruets. The grubby look was permanent too, no amount of washing would clean it up so that it actually looked pristine.

Apple v Innovation

We have a number of Apple gadgets and quite like them, but I still found this entertaining. I wouldn't buy a folding phone though.

Luxury Malice

As an obvious follow-on from the Luxury Mendacity post, we also have luxury malice. It is not easy to explain Net Zero by technical ignorance, money and fashionable mendacity. Social malice is in there too. If ruling elites attract our contempt, it would be foolish to think it isn’t reciprocated.

We have a governing elite which defines itself by absurd luxury beliefs, but an important factor within those beliefs is fashionable malice one social class exhibits towards another. The word ‘exhibits’ is not chosen lightly, the glinting threads of malice within our UK ruling elites are not hidden.

As in the earlier post, it is worth remembering those well-educated, ambitious people streaming through a university education. There is social ambition in there, and for the amoral among them, the advantages of quietly fashionable, unobtrusive social malice may have its attractions. People do raise themselves from a bed of envy and ambition towards the vastly more nourishing culture of superior social malice. Always have.


The drab street was everywhere; and at the street-corners mean-faced men preached lies, envy and malice.
Arthur Morrison – Fiddle O’Dreams (1913)


Until the glittering possibility of social promotion beckons and –


I am filled by the holy malice of chastisement.
Victor Hugo - The Man Who Laughs (1869)


Now we have career paths for well educated, ambitious but untalented and remarkably unpleasant people. People with the social skills to join a governing elite under the shelter of a fat thumb on the scales of justice plus that little extra - luxury malice.

The dog ate my excuses

Starmer defiant over taking gifts from Lord Alli

Sir Keir Starmer has defended accepting gifts from a millionaire Labour donor who was later given a pass to access No 10 Downing Street.

The Prime Minister suggested he would continue to take gifts from Lord Alli, despite a row over some of his donations not being declared in line with parliamentary rules...

It came a day after it emerged that Sir Keir had initially failed to declare the £5,000 of donations covering the cost of his wife’s personal shopper, clothes and alterations.


By gum, he isn't very good at excuses. Just carry on with the freebies and wave away the raised eyebrows seems to be his intention. 

"Sir" Keir really isn't very good at the international statesman lark, he should try something else such as zooming around on a jet ski.

Luxury Mendacity

As so many of us know, a problem of our time is a governing elite which defines itself by absurd luxury beliefs. Absurd because they make no practical or economic sense or even because they make no sense whatever, because they are simply false. Yet still we create career pathways for the luxury mendacity of our governing elites.

For a number of decades we have created a stream of intelligent, well educated, ambitious, socially competent but untalented people by expanding university education. How does this stream of people fulfil their ambitions without taxing the talents they don’t have? For the amoral among them, a career in mendacity may beckon.

For a number of decades we have also created a complex network of taxpayer-dependent semi-sinecures within an equally complex network of taxpayer dependent organisations. Quangos, NGOs, regulatory bodies, think tanks, charitable foundations, research institutes and pressure groups are just some of them. How do they find people to fill their executive positions? By attracting well-qualified, socially adroit people looking for a congenial career in taxpayer dependent bodies. If mendacity is part of the culture – no problem.

These two broad features of modern life have left us with career pathways we would never have planned. Pathways for a governing class based on mendacity, but not accidental or planned mendacity. A chicken and egg mendacity where people attracted to elite career paths are temperamentally suited to the useless organisations which hatched those same career paths.

Career paths for intelligent, well educated, ambitious but untalented people. Not careers promising enormous wealth, but easily enough to be secure, unaffected by the wider consequences of mendacious incompetence. People with the social skills to join a governing elite under the shelter and congenial protection of luxury mendacity.

Blueberry bandits

Blueberry bandits: Crime spikes as North Koreans forage for survival

"People say this is a world that will gouge your eyes out if you're not careful," a source told The Daily NK

On Aug. 31, two girls from a middle school in Samjiyon went to a blueberry patch in the Mubong area early in the morning and spent the day picking blueberries. While on their way to the blueberry picking area, they ran into robbers. Fortunately, the two girls were not hurt, but the robbers took their buckets of blueberries and their outer clothes.

This quote is particularly poignant -

The source quoted a melancholy local as saying the following while observing the night scene: “The parents’ generation picked blueberries to make ends meet, and now the children’s generation is wandering the blueberry patches for the same reason. It’s said that poverty is inherited. Struggle as much as you want, but life will never get better.”

It's fundamental isn't it? this need to work towards a life which is better than it was in the past. It's the underlying threat posed by our elites, their Net Zero ideology effectively insists that this kind of progress must be taken away from ordinary people, from mere consumers.