Starmer may be gone by then

Olympic Games could come to north of England under Labour plan

A bid to stage the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the north of England in the 2040s is to enter an initial assessment phase, the government has announced...

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said: “London 2012 showed what the Olympics can do for our country. It inspired a generation through sport, attracted huge investment and showed the best of Britain to the world.


A chap is bound to wonder which new sports will be included in the Olympic Games by the 2040s. 

Robot or bio-engineered cyborg athletics.

Competitive virtual reality games where even couch potatoes take part.

Cloud racing in sentient rocket suits...

Nope, by then it will be all fake.

Wes aims to make voting even more pointless

Streeting’s call for UK to rejoin EU pulls Labour back into Brexit war

Wes Streeting has called for the UK to rejoin the EU as he laid out his bid to No 10 in a much anticipated speech this weekend.

The former health secretary said he will be running for Labour leader after dramatically quitting his role as a Cabinet minister earlier this week.

He said leaving the EU was a “catastrophic mistake” as he stressed it was time for the UK to build a new “special relationship” with the Union, adding that Labour risks risks becoming “handmaidens” to Nigel Farage in the next general election.

Streeting doesn't seem to be suggesting a formal request to become a member of the EU here. It's more of a slogan pandering to the traditional Labour determination to keep a firm lid on the aspirations of working people. The EU does that for them, it curtails the point of voting to an even greater degree than national politics.

If Streeting grabs the top job, there are sound reasons to anticipate someone worse than Starmer.

The reality of the situation has begun to dawn on those who created it

Charlie Napier has a Critic piece on what is now a permanently topical issue, the predictable growth of sectarian politics in the UK. Napier identifies three possible outcomes.

• Management of sectarianism 
• Failure to manage sectarianism
• The victory of one group over the others

The whole piece covers familiar ground but is well worth reading as an issue our political establishment has created and cannot manage.

The disunited kingdom

The establishment must confront the disturbing realities of sectarian politics in the UK

Slowly, and by no means surely, the British political establishment is being forced to acknowledge the divided nature of the country over which it now presides.

This process has not been without significant resistance and self-delusion. Having ignored the doubters when they embarked on a policy of mass migration during the 20th century, the ever-more frequent case studies which proved the folly of this project were, one-by-one, ignored.

The vote-rigging scandal amongst Birmingham’s Muslim community in 2004 was largely written-off as a unique case. George Galloway’s by-election victory in Bradford West, 2011, was written off as well — this time, as an isolated case of public frustration with Western foreign policy in the Middle East.

The Lutfur Rahman case in 2015 was likewise treated as an isolated incident. The fact that a local mayor was able to win elections by exploiting family networks amongst the Bangladeshi community, should have been the canary in the coal mine — but it wasn’t.

On, and on, and on — but slowly, the reality of the situation has begun to dawn on those who created it.

Mendacious, incompetent, evasive and dull

Suppose we invent a Ruritanian character called Erik Merstar who after a successful legal career enters the Ruritanian political arena. Via rapid promotion  he manages to become party leader then after a fortuitous collapse of the governing party he becomes Grand Minister of Ruritania.

Unfortunately for the people of Ruritania, Erik Merstar turns out to be mendacious, incompetent, evasive and dull. Suppose we try to find out why that is by considering his upbringing, beliefs, character and personal circumstances.

We might begin by asking people who know him quite well. They generally say he is intelligent, quite personable away from the political arena and committed to the heavy responsibilities of Grand Minister. Others say he is rather odd and inclined to be cold at times, but nothing out of the ordinary, yet they are part of his social circle with all that this implies.

We might go on to ask a few pundits from various sections of the Ruritanian media and political spectrum. As expected, they give differing views about his ideology and motives, some saying he has no ideology and his motives tend to be swayed by the strongest consensus. Ruritanian pundits prefer to maintain a consistent narrative though, what they say has to bear some relation to what they say more generally and have said in the past.

Other pundits say Erik Merstar is an ideologue with a strongly globalist outlook which doesn’t necessarily put Ruritania at the centre of political debates. They say this ideology is rooted in his days as a student radical while doing his law degree at Ruritania State University. These pundits prefer to maintain a consistent narrative too though.

Yet what Ruritanian people still see is a mendacious, incompetent, evasive and dull Grand Minister. That’s it for Erik, there is nothing deeper, it’s all there on the surface. Apart from what we see, we just have stories about character and influences, but they are just stories which vary significantly depending on the storyteller.

Mendacious, incompetent, evasive and dull – beyond the stories that’s it.

Waymo Jam

 

Wes "backs" Andy

Wes Streeting backs Andy Burnham for Makerfield by-election

Wes Streeting backed Andy Burnham as Labour’s “best chance” of winning the Makerfield by-election, as the former health secretary’s allies said he would still contest any battle for the party leadership.

Mr Burnham declared he would seek permission from Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) to contest the by-election after the current MP, Josh Simons, announced on Thursday he would quit Parliament to make way for the mayor.

If successful, Mr Burnham is widely expected to challenge Sir Keir Starmer for the party leadership.

In a tweet on Friday, Mr Streeting backed his potential rival’s bid to fight the impending by-election, saying Labour needs “our best players on the pitch”.


Imagine three texts from Wes to Andy -

Sorry you lost Makerfield Andy, Reform stole it, you were the best candidate by far. Now you are out of the race I'm prepared to carry the flag for change though.

Sorry Andy, for some reason I posted the last message before the result came in.

Just seen the Makerfield result. Bad luck Andy. Good guess on my part though.

Government AI chatbot

Government AI chatbot goes live across GOV.UK App

Hundreds of thousands of users of mobile program for accessing a comprehensive range of government services will now also be able to interact with automated system powered by Claude LLM...

Having been launched in July last year, as of this week the app has 563,000 registered users. Those signing into the mobile app via their One Login account will now be able to opt in to use the GOV.UK Chat tool. The AI system is designed to enable citizens “to ask questions in plain language and receive instant, clear and reliable answers drawn from official government information”...

Responses provided by GOV.UK Chat – which GDS recently claimed have demonstrated 90% accuracy in tests – are drawn from data contained in the 80,000 pages of government guidance featured across the 700,000 pages of the wider GOV.UK site, according to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.


Suppose we assume that 90% response accuracy is better than the response accuracy of the average Minister, MP or even government 'experts'. Not an outrageous assumption when we consider how often politicians do not respond to questions, preferring instead to respond to questions which were not asked.

The system will give official government responses of course, not necessarily responses people might look for and rely on in the wider world. At least some users are bound to make comparisons such as comparisons with official data and statistics.

It all sets many hares running, one of which could be comparisons with the veracity of politicians and government 'experts'.

We live in interesting times.