Duds and Superduds

Rayner calls for Burnham's return and warns Starmer needs to 'set out change'

Angela Rayner has called on Sir Keir Starmer to “set out the change our country needs” as she warned Labour is facing its “last chance” after a disastrous set of election results.

The former deputy leader and Ashton-under-Lyne MP, widely seen as a potential successor to the Prime Minister, stopped short of calling for him to quit but set out a series of steps he needed to take to win back working-class voters.

By gum this is all so embarrassing. Not only has our democracy obliged us to treat Starmer's rabble as the government, but now Andy Burnham, a dud from Manchester who isn't even an elected MP is being touted as the chap to put things right.

Meanwhile we have to accept Angela Rayner as some kind of pantomime dame pundit in the thick of it all, 'thick' being a not inappropriate word.

On reflection though, now I have a fresh mug of coffee to hand, it would not be easy to be worse than Starmer. Possible though, Labour still has enough duds for that. Superduds even - like Ed Miliband.

How Experts Use “Calamities”

William M. Briggs has a fine, light-hearted but trenchant piece on how experts use concocted calamities to find concocted victims and gain undeserved power. A familiar issue of course, but very well presented. 

The whole piece is well worth reading.  

How Experts Use “Calamities” to Find Official Victims & Gain Power

Let’s first remind ourselves of The Poor Have Less Money Fallacy. This is most commonly seen when the price of a thing rises (which often happens because of government “solutions”), and we hear from the “media” or academia something like “This price increase hurts the poor!” That is not the fallacy, because that is of course true. The Fallacy comes in intimating (below the headline) this deprivation ought not to be: that the poor ought not to have less money. That, and you saw this coming, Equity ought to reign instead.

The Poor Have Less Money is yet another false theorem derived from one of the greatest errors of our time: 

Equality.

The solution to the Fallacy is not to do do anything straightforward like remove the previous “solutions” which causes prices to rise, but to subsidize the poor. Which, as you know, continues the cycle of solution-inflation-increase-subsidize-solution…etc.

It’s not only price increases where we see the fallacy, but in any supposed calamity that “impacts” the poor hardest. Anything in which Experts can make the poor into Official Victims. And therefore eligible to be wards of Experts. Experts are the highly credentialed well-titled people under the spell of scientism who know just how to bring Utopia about: by the studied application of Theory.

Could be fun for a while

Who is the Labour MP threatening to oust Starmer?

The MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet has threatened to launch a formal challenge against her party's leader.

Labour MP Catherine West has threatened to launch a leadership challenge against Sir Keir Starmer.

She says she doesn't want the job herself, but after a "disastrous" set of elections for the party, she thinks "new leadership" is required "which understands the urgent and real concerns of people across the UK".

Could be fun for a while, but that may be all we get out of a challenge to Starmer. 

He is a bungling, mendacious, totalitarian globalist, but Labour has ample capacity to come up with someone worse.

Benefit now, consequence later

Logan Lamont has an interesting Quadrant piece on what seems like an inexorable drift to the left in the politics of the developed world. The whole piece is well worth reading.

The Logic of the Leftist Voter

In a recent piece examining why intellectuals are drawn to the Left, I argued that the pattern cannot be explained by idealism alone. Intellectuals may be idealistic, often genuinely so, but they operate at a distance from production and consequence and are drawn to systems that elevate their role and reorder outcomes. That logic does not stop with intellectuals. It extends to voters and, in doing so, answers a more confronting question. Why do voters support a political movement that now stretches well beyond economics into positions that would once have seemed implausible, even self-defeating?

The answer begins simply: benefit.

The modern Left provides immediate, tangible gain. Transfers, subsidies, concessions and publicly funded services deliver outcomes that are visible and personal. The individual voter need not subscribe to a broader ideological framework to understand this. The benefit is real, and it is received. The cost is not. It is dispersed across the economy, deferred into debt, or absorbed by those still operating at the productive edge. It does not arrive as a direct exchange tied to the decision. It accumulates slowly, often invisibly, and rarely in proportion to what is taken. This distinction is central. If the full cost arrived with the benefit, behaviour would change. But when the benefit is immediate and the cost is remote, the voter has every reason to support expansion and little reason to restrain it.

The Global Gravy Train

A recurring impression garnered from even casual internet browsing is that the bureaucratic gravy train is near enough global. North Korea doesn't seem to be involved, but it's an outlier. 

Here for example, we have Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan booking their seats at the global gravy train table.

Opinion: The Regional Ecological Summit and the Making of a Central Asian Voice

On 22–24 April, Astana hosted the Regional Ecological Summit—a gathering of governments, international organizations, financial institutions, and civil society that marked a new level of ambition in Central Asia’s environmental diplomacy. Fifty-eight sessions were held across three days at a moment when Central Asia’s ecological agenda is becoming inseparable from its political and economic future.

The opening ceremony was attended by the presidents of all five Central Asian states. The summit adopted the Astana Declaration on Ecological Solidarity in Central Asia and brought renewed attention to the need to reform the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS). Taken together, these developments signal more than procedural diplomacy. They point to growing political momentum.

The region has never lacked shared history or channels of communication. Russian remains a practical language of intergovernmental exchange, and borders, economies, rivers, energy systems, and labor markets have tied these countries together long before contemporary climate diplomacy gave this interdependence a new vocabulary.

Yes - contemporary climate diplomacy does give interdependence a new vocabulary, that's the idea.

Always degenerating into repetition

Labour MP blames Starmer for ‘soul-destroying’ local election results

• Rebecca Long-Bailey criticised Sir Keir Starmer, describing Labour's recent local election results as 'soul-destroying'.
• Speaking to the BBC on Friday, the Salford MP stated that Labour had been 'squeezed' by both Reform and the Greens.
• This squeeze resulted in the loss of several 'really good' councillors and candidates for the party.
• Long-Bailey noted that many residents felt unable to vote for Labour due to the party's national actions.
• She suggested Labour’s recent slogans, rhetoric, and decisions had not resonated well in local communities.

Man’s life consists in a connection with all things in the universe. Whoever can establish, or initiate a new connection between mankind and the circumambient universe is, in his own degree, a saviour. Because mankind is always exhausting its human possibilities, always degenerating into repetition, torpor, ennui, lifelessness. When ennui sets in, it is a sign that human vitality is waning, and the human connection with the universe is gone stale. Then he who comes to make a new revelation, a new connection, whether he be soldier, statesman, poet, philosopher, artist, he is a saviour.

D.H. Lawrence - Reflections on the death of a porcupine and other essays (1925)

Keir Starmer is entirely unable to offer that new revelation, or as Rebecca Long-Bailey puts it, a soul. His eventual replacement won’t be able to offer it either.

But we already know that.

The remarkable decline of British nuclear capability

James Price has a useful if depressing CAPX piece on the need to regenerate British nuclear capability. 


Britain needs to ignore the Blob and go nuclear

• A groundbreaking American nuclear project puts the UK to shame
• Nuclear power should be a British success story, but it isn't
• Time and again, Nimbyism and bureaucracy have got in the way of affordable energy

Three C-17 Globemasters. Eight shipping containers. The first nuclear reactor in history to be moved by air. While it feels like the opening of one of those special-forces slop series on Amazon that I count as one of my guiltiest pleasures, this is the very real Operation Windlord.

The operation, conducted by the US Air Force in February to ferry a five-megawatt unit from California to a desert lab in Utah, is now in its next phase: engineers are racing to switch it on by July 4, the 250th anniversary of American independence. The reactor was built by Valar Atomics, a three-year-old startup that, like Operation Windlord, takes its name from Lord of the Rings.

There was a time when this story would have been Britain’s. When Queen Elizabeth opened Calder Hall in 1956, we became the first nation on earth to feed grid-scale civil nuclear power into a domestic electricity supply. By 1965, the year of Winston Churchill’s funeral, Britain had built more operational reactors than the United States, the Soviet Union and France combined. We commissioned 26 of them between 1956 and 1971, with sites approved in months and reactors connected to the grid in under five years.

Then, thanks to the usual morass of blob mentality and Nimbyism, we stopped. We have not built a single new commercial reactor since Sizewell B in 1995. The one we are currently building, Hinkley Point C, is on track to be the most expensive nuclear station in human history: roughly six times what South Korea spends per megawatt for the same job. There is a fascinating essay explaining this in Works in Progress that reads more like tragedy than history.

The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how hopelessly adrift we are in the UK. There are moves towards nuclear, but nothing very encouraging. 

The link to Works in Progress is worth following too - it's a complex story.