Starmer Legs It

Keir Starmer resigns and sets out departure timetable as London MPs surge behind Andy Burnham

Sir Keir spoke to the nation from Downing Street as he became the shortest serving Labour Prime Minister

Cheer up old chap, you are well out of it and at least you didn't descend to this level -

 

Old enough to vote but...

Students excluded from university free speech complaints system

A new freedom of speech complaints system for England’s universities has come under fire for excluding students...

The scheme was proposed in 2023 by the previous Tory government under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act and was intended to apply to students, as well as staff and visiting speakers.

Key parts of the act – including the complaints scheme – were set to be introduced in August 2024 but were shelved just days before by Bridget Phillipson in one of her first moves in Government.

Although the Education Secretary later revived the act after facing legal action from the Free Speech Union (FSU), several key elements were watered down, including the use of the complaints scheme by students.


Modern education means handing down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority.

G. K. Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World (1910)

Old cars with big engines

 

Political theatre collides with reality - reality wins

Mannheim says goodbye to the 2030 climate target – political target fails due to reality

According to a recent assessment by the city administration, Mannheim is saying goodbye to its climate target for 2030. The Committee for Environment and Technology was informed about this on 9 June 2026. The city wanted to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent compared to 1990. By 2023, however, it had only achieved a reduction of 40 percent. Now there is a lack of money, personnel and sufficient possibilities for intervention. Industry in particular is largely evading municipal control. Existing projects are still running, but the central target no longer has a reliable basis.

Climate target was based on political assumptions instead of secure planning

The municipal council adopted the climate protection action plan in November 2022. At that time, SPD Mayor Peter Kurz led the city administration. The plan included 81 measures and more than 300 individual activities. Mannheim wanted to become a European pioneer city. However, neither all the financial resources nor the necessary technical capacities had been determined. Politicians declared a desired result to be the goal before they had fully secured its implementation.

Reality wins, as it will in Ed Miliband's shabby little huckster's theatre, but we're still paying the price of admission. Maybe he'll change the scenery and rewrite the ending if the audience becomes too restless.

Or maybe Andrew Burnham will do something constructive.

Or maybe pigs will learn to fly.

Politics as Theatre

Sometimes a viewpoint solidifies while alternatives fade away. To my mind, one of the solidifying viewpoints is an old one – politics as theatre. To take a topical example, the UK power struggle between Keir Starmer and Andrew Burnham is mostly theatre.

We've always known it too. The need to analyse doesn't go away, but even Burnham’s preference for ‘Andy’ over ‘Andrew’ is obvious theatre. Unfortunately for Starmer he isn’t a very good actor – he only does Awkward Lawyer.

The Starmer/Burnham performance highlights the problem though - what we are presented with is mostly theatre. As theatre it has little room for analysis apart from analysis of the performance, the stories, setting and perhaps the cost. Critics have no secure place from which to criticise – the performance must go on as the old cliché has it - and it does.

Politics as theatre is not even a remarkable political conclusion because much of the public arena is theatre, even in our supposedly technocratic age. From the World Cup to Davos, from the arts to soap opera, from TV news to activist stunts, theatre dominates, critical analysis doesn’t.


Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom. The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

F. Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise (1920)

The sound of scraping barrels

 

It isn't easy to know what to say about the current UK political situation. 

We may treat it seriously, or as an absurd circus or we may treat it as something in between, but these two chaps on the left shouldn't be there.

Neither man is anywhere near to possessing the ability required. Neither has the capacity to take a firm hold of the prime minister's role and stave off further decline. 

With Starmer we already know this is so, with Burnham we are close enough to knowing, close enough that finding out for sure isn't worth the risk.

Cheaper Screens

Good news for cheaper OLEDs: China's huge screen factory is finally rolling at full speed

• BOE has started mass production at its huge new factory in China
• It's cranking out OLED panels for use in monitors, laptops and other devices
• These OLEDs will be more affordable, and provide competition to drive down pricing with the dominant players, LG and Samsung

In a move that's set to usher in more affordable OLED monitors and laptops, BOE has officially flicked the switch to crank the production lines into action for its Generation 8.6 panels.

The Elec reports that mass production of Generation 8.6 OLEDs began this week at BOE over in China, with the manufacturer holding an event in Chengdu to celebrate the milestone.

Apart from the technical interest and a further indication that China is doing things that Europe can't, perhaps there is another hint that the world may still be moving away from the written word.

There are two videos and a picture embedded in the above article and the previous blog post to this one was a parody video which said things in a way that the written word never could.

Major politicians may emit spoken words that make little or no sense, but in doing so they may also have their faces transmitted to millions of screens. The words are heard, the screens are seen. Politically, which matters more?