I'm Lisa Nandy and I'm here to help

Lisa Nandy formally intervenes in Sky’s £1.6bn ITV takeover

The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has stepped in over Sky’s £1.6 billion deal to buy ITV’s media and entertainment arm, asking regulators to examine the takeover on public interest grounds.

Ms Nandy has announced her decision to issue a so-called Public Interest Intervention Notice, which paves the way for the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and regulator Ofcom to probe the takeover.

The two regulators will report back to her on the impact of the deal on media plurality in the UK and free speech by 27 January.

Once their reports arrive, she may then decide to refer the deal to the CMA for a further in-depth investigation.


The post title is of course taken from Ronald Reagan's famous joke from 1986 -

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.

An entertaining Christmas game perhaps - replace 'from the Government' with the name of any one of numerous politicians and political activists. Or even institutions such as the BBC. 

The aim of the game is to come up with the most chilling suggestion. 

We Need You Helpless

 

Labour's class war approach to business

Stephen Pollard has a useful CAPX piece on Labour's failure to venture beyond its traditional class war approach to business. 


Labour’s mangled sixth-form-level Marxist class war

• Labour MP Emma Reynolds told GB News she doesn't think employers are working people
• It's clear that, even as a Treasury minister at the heart of economic policy, she holds 19th century Marxist views about employers
• The misunderstanding of what business owners and landlords do, will discourage investors and lower available rental properties

Emma Reynolds, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is one of the more sensible Labour MPs. She resigned as a front bencher when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader and is firmly in the moderate wing of the Labour Party.

Which is why her comment yesterday that ‘I don’t think employers are working people’ is all the more revealing – and all the more telling about the attitude of the government. Plainly, my description of Reynolds as one of the more sensible Labour MPs is relative. When even someone as relatively sensible as Reynolds believes that employers are a class that don’t work for a living but somehow live off the backs of ‘working people’ then it shows the scale of Labour’s inability to grasp even the basics of wealth creation and growth – and thus the scale of the problem for our economy.


The whole piece is quite short and well worth reading as another reminder that Labour does not intend to base its voter appeal on an enlightened approach to small and medium-sized businesses.


Reynolds is no Marxist. But it’s damning of both her and Labour more generally that such a crude Marxist analysis of employers and employees drives their thinking, with no understanding of the nature of small and medium-sized businesses and how hard most employers work to create wealth and employment for their fellow working people. As one poster on social media put it: ‘It’s 7:41 on a Sunday, and I’m at my desk – guess I’m not a working person. My employees are not doing the same, I can tell you that (and I don’t expect or want them to!)’

Clumsy, vote-farming rhetoric

Burnham suggests cutting benefits would force people into crime

The Prime Minister has suggested that cutting benefits would force people to turn to crime.

Andy Burnham attacked the Conservatives’ plans to cut £36bn from welfare spending, arguing that it would heap pressure on the criminal justice system and the NHS.

Suppose we snip out some of the rhetoric.

heap pressure on the criminal justice system and the NHS.
the utter chaos that they cause in people’s lives
If you just go to brutal cuts
people in absolute crisis
they will be going into other services in a chaotic way.
If you come at it from a numbers game
you’ll throw people into crisis,
you’ll be spending money on people in A&E
and the police, [the] criminal justice system

Okay I'll admit that I quite like doing this. In spite of his 'decent northern bloke' shtick, Burnham is a crude purveyor of clumsy, vote-farming rhetoric.

Comfortable professionals making business for themselves

An interesting video on over-diagnosis of mental conditions. It highlights the much wider problem of comfortable professionals making business for themselves. 

Another diagnosis would be an unhealthy fascination with other people's money.

Two Headlines

UK to fund poorer EU countries in new Brexit deal

Britain has agreed to pay into European Union development schemes as the price for rejoining the bloc’s electricity market, according to a draft text seen by The Telegraph...

In exchange, British energy companies will be allowed to trade freely in the EU’s single market for electricity.

 

 
Electricity prices could double despite mild winter – dark doldrums threaten price shock

Electricity prices in Germany could more than double in January 2027, even with a mild winter. Energy analysts warn of a drastic price increase because high gas prices and low storage levels make electricity generation more expensive. Especially in the event of a prolonged dark doldrums, gas-fired power plants have to take over a large part of the electricity supply. In extreme cold and weak winds, experts therefore consider average exchange prices of up to 260 euros per megawatt hour to be possible. Industrial companies are threatened with considerable additional costs, while consumers must also expect higher electricity tariffs with a time lag.

Visions of a dystopian future

Prisons chief: 'Inmates lie in bed, doing drugs and watching TV'

Inmates in Britain’s overcrowded jails are lying in their beds all day, taking drugs and watching daytime television while crime gangs make a fortune from drone deliveries, the prisons chief has warned.

In a damning assessment of Britain’s jails, Charlie Taylor, whose tenure as His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons is coming to an end after six years, warned that too many prisoners are leaving custody “doomed to come back” because they are not being rehabilitated, despite the average cost of housing a criminal soaring to around £60,000 a year.

Prison is a subject where I have no experiences to relate, but this comment was interesting - both amusing and grim in one sentence. Sets quite a few hares running too, visions of a dystopian future, that kind of thing.

Sarah Pritchard
Stuck in a cell watching Jeremy Vine sounds like a pretty harsh sentence to me.