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.

Dismissed with an irresponsible shrug

Online criticism of dominant political narratives can be a headache - it’s too easy. Many luxury beliefs in the developed world are too irresponsibly facile to criticise effectively. Criticism is easily dismissed with an irresponsible shrug until the next luxury belief takes hold or reality intervenes.

Parody, sarcasm and ridicule work to some extent, but it is all uncomfortably close to giving up on more structured criticism as irresponsible beliefs do not invite or respond to responsible analysis. How could they?

It is not that fashionably irresponsible political claims cannot be analysed. The problem is people, as always, they are not likely to recognise their own failure to connect with the world as it is. They have connected socially and politically which seems to be enough and it probably is enough until fashions change or reality bites.

As we know so well, societies engineer consensus and they do that via the ancient processes of approval and disapproval, smile and frown, acceptance and avoidance - or worse. Sceptics must tread warily around dubious and irresponsible social norms or accept the social consequences.

It is much the same online. Yes there is a major advantage in that online luxury beliefs may be criticised or parodied with fewer social consequences. Irresponsible nonsense is still a problem though – social norms have an online presence too. Hence the irresponsible pursuit of official censorship powers

To take one topical example, it isn’t easy to criticise the public speeches and announcements of UK Prime Minister Andrew Burnham. Apart from his lack of honesty, Burnham is irresponsibly facile in the things he says. Yet polls indicate that he is currently the most popular political leader. In his world, that counts as approval. He shrugs and moves on.

One Event, Two Narratives

The i Paper

Democrats rocked by despicable betrayal on eve of midterms vote

Democrat Congresswoman Haley Stevens of Michigan has stunned her party, two days before the midterm elections, by endorsing a Republican candidate in a seat critical to the fight for control of the Senate.

The Telegraph

'Despicable betrayal': Democrat endorses Republican rival

A Democrat congresswoman has caused dismay across the party by endorsing the Republican rival of Abdul El-Sayed, a hard-Left candidate, two days before the midterm elections.

The Duel

A duel as described in his posthumously published memoirs by Marcellin Marbot, a French cavalry officer and general who served during the Napoleonic Wars. The duel would have taken place before or shortly after he was born in 1782, possibly related to him when he was aide de camp to General Augereau, one of the duellists.


As a result of an absurd custom, there existed an inveterate hatred between some units, the cause for which was buried in the past and often hardly known, but which, handed down from age to age, resulted in duels every time the units met. In this way the Gendarmes of Luneville and the Carabiniers had been at war for half a century, though they had not seen one another in this long period of time.

At last, at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, they found themselves in the same camp at Compiegne; whereupon, to show themselves no less brave than their forefathers, the Carabiniers and the Gendarmes decided to fight, and their determination was such that the officers thought it wiser to look the other way. However, to avoid too much bloodshed, it was agreed that there would be only one duel; each unit would select a combatant who would represent them, and after that there would be a truce. The name of the combatant chosen by the Gendarmes would soon be known and after that it was merely a matter of arranging for the two adversaries to meet, when a simulated quarrel would serve as a motive for the encounter.

Augereau had a fearsome opponent, an excellent swordsman, a professional duelist, who as a warm-up, awaiting the contest, had killed two sergeants of the Guards, on the days previously. Augereau, without allowing himself to be intimidated by the reputation of this bravo, went to the cafe where he knew he was to appear, and while awaiting him sat down at a table. The Gendarme arrived, and when his opponent had been pointed out to him, he pulled aside his coat-tails, and sat down insolently on the table, his backside not a foot from Augereau's face.

Augereau was drinking a cup of very hot coffee at the time and he gently eased back the opening, called the ventouse, which existed then at the back of a cavalryman's leather breeches, and poured the steaming liquid onto the buttocks of the impudent Gendarme, who turned round in a fury! The quarrel having now been engaged upon, they went outside, followed by a crowd of Gendarmes and Carabiniers. As they went along, the ferocious Gendarme, to mock the man whom, he felt confident, would be his victim, asked Augereau, in a bantering tone, whether he would prefer to be buried in the town or in the country. "The country" replied Augereau, "I have always liked the open air." "Fine," said the gendarme, and, turning to his second, he said, "Put him with the other two I killed yesterday and the day before."

This was not very encouraging, and anyone but Augereau might have been put out, but determined to sell his life dearly, he defended himself with such skill that his adversary lost his temper and made a false move, which allowed Augereau, who had remained calm, to run him through, saying that it was he who would be buried in the country.

The Memoirs of General Baron de Marbot (1891)