An odd and atypical politician

Eliot Wilson has an interesting CAPX piece on the odd aspect of Keir Starmer's announcement about renationalising British Steel.


Starmer can barely save his career, let alone the steel industry

• The Prime Minister is attempting to save his skin by completely renationalising British Steel
• Does the Government really believe it can run a successful steel business where the private sector has failed?
• Labour's steel strategy is to deploy public expenditure to give the impression they are being productive

The longer he is in office, the more I realise what an odd and atypical politician Keir Starmer is. With his tenancy of 10 Downing Street under genuine threat after last week’s disastrous local and devolved election results, the Prime Minister is pursuing his own internal form of the madman theory: respond to criticism in a way which is so bizarre and disconnected from reality that even your most bitter enemy will be at least perplexed for a while.


The whole piece is well worth reading, both as another story about Labour incompetence and a further reminder of how strange Keir Starmer is beyond the incompetence.


The government has no plan for a competitive steel industry, nor even a rational assessment of whether one is achievable under any circumstances. Instead Starmer is driven by the politician’s syllogism which Sir Humphrey Appleby and Sir Arnold Robinson discuss with dismay in ‘Yes, Prime Minister’:

1. We must do something.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore we must do this.

What will change? What will the Government do differently next year that it has not done this year? How will global circumstances change and how will they be managed? What does a future British steel industry look like? Ministers have no idea, of course, because they have avoided asking the questions. Instead they will deploy public expenditure to make everyone feel like they are being productive.

Maybe British Steel can respond by feeling like it is a successful and profitable enterprise. It is hard to see what more we can expect.

Political parties promote charlatans

Political parties inevitably promote charlatans and what we might generously term borderline charlatans as parliamentary candidates. Charlatans persuade and adapt easily to the latest shifts in party narratives. They play the language games better than most.

For charlatans, ideology is an adaptable narrative, so are principles and moral imperatives are not imperative. Because they must if they hope to be elected, political parties put power before integrity and charlatans offer that.

Even amid the temporary enthusiasm for a new political leader or new political party, there is still no route towards lasting integrity in the political competition for power. If charlatans are not already on board and climbing towards the top of the greasy pole, they soon will be.

But we know that.

Digital Cars

 

Bad weather in Kenya is our fault, nasty tea is too

Warning climate change could threaten Britain’s beloved cup of tea

The familiar comfort of a British cuppa is under threat, with campaigners warning that climate change could soon deliver a more bitter flavour to the nation’s beloved brew.

A new report from aid agency Christian Aid reveals that rising global temperatures and increasingly extreme weather patterns are set to fundamentally alter the taste of tea.

Key tea-producing regions, including Kenya, India, and Sri Lanka, are experiencing conditions that could lead to harsher, less consistent flavours.


Without wishing to suggest that Christian Aid has merely climbed on a bandwagon here, it does have a "climate adaptation and resilience lead". 


Claire Nasike Akello, climate adaptation and resilience lead at Christian Aid, said: “For generations, consumers have taken for granted that a cup of tea will taste the same, day in, day out."

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.