Beyond the Sleaze

It's telling how our local sleaze-fest tends to obscure all kinds of stories about events in the wider world. This one for instance, which may be more significant than we are allowed to know.

 
Behind Turkmenistan’s Neutrality, Quiet U.S. Military Ties Endure

In late January, U.S. Special Envoy for South and Central Asia, Sergio Gor visited Turkmenistan. Accompanying Gor was U.S. Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll.

Driscoll’s presence in Turkmenistan, a country with a roughly 1,150-kilometer border with Iran, sparked some speculation that his visit was related to escalating tensions between Washington and Tehran. But while it is unusual for any top foreign military officials to visit Turkmenistan, U.S. military officials have stopped by Turkmenistan relatively often over the course of the last 30 years...

Much about the U.S.-Turkmen military relationship remains unknown, save to a select few in those two countries, but it is clear these ties are enduring and important for Turkmenistan.

Potential New Labour Leader

Not a person I know much about, but surely Labour must have some decent MPs who could do the job.  One would do.

Mental Capers

PM 'acted in good faith' when appointing paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's friend Peter Mandelson, says cabinet minister

Pat McFadden said "the prime minister [has] acted in good faith" in terms of his appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador and called for him to return his payoff.

'Like ferrets in a sack': Labour at war as Starmer engulfed by Mandelson scandal

A Labour grandee has accused senior party figures of “acting like ferrets in a sack” as Keir Starmer faces his biggest crisis as prime minister over the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Lord Blunkett pleaded with his colleagues to “get our act together” on another grim day for the PM.

Sons of sophistry and grandsons of cant, they had considered themselves capable of proving the greatest absurdities by the mental capers to which they had accustomed their acrobatic intellects.

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916)

The Comfortable Road to Ruin

Paul Lindwall has a very interesting Quadrant piece on an Australian problem we also see here in the UK - the rise of comfortable generations, insufficiently tested by adversity.


The Comfortable Road to Ruin

Freya Leach’s article in the December Quadrant, “How Conservatives Can Win the Youth Vote”, argues that young Australians “may be the first generation in our nation’s history to be worse off than their parents”. It is a striking claim, and one that resonates deeply in an era of surging housing costs, stagnant productivity and pervasive anxiety about the future. Leach identifies genuine problems: delayed family formation, insecure work, declining educational standards and a fracturing tax-transfer system. These pressures are real and deserve serious attention.

But the conclusion drawn from them, that today’s young are materially worse off than earlier generations, is far less secure. It rests on a narrow reading of relative income and asset distribution while ignoring the extraordinary expansion of absolute living standards that now defines Australian life. The deeper danger facing young Australians is not material impoverishment, but something more insidious: the erosion of agency and resilience born of unprecedented comfort.

We are not producing a generation deprived of opportunity. We are producing a generation untested by it. And that is the true comfortable road to ruin.


It's a deep and subtle problem of human behaviour, not unfamiliar, but the whole piece is well worth reading as an issue which isn't raised often enough. It's a problem of what we are, a problem the usual political nostrums can't touch.


If the intergenerational contract is to be restored, it will require more than tax adjustments or housing supply reforms, though both are essential. It will require a cultural recovery of responsibility, resilience and the dignity of difficulty.

We must pass on not only wealth, but wisdom. And wisdom begins with expecting something of the young.

Australia still has time. Rome lingered for centuries after its virtues had decayed. The question is whether we choose renewal now, or whether we continue comfortably, complacently and confidently down the road to ruin.

When they give away what belongs to other people

There can be no doubt that at least one Chuzzlewit came over with William the Conqueror. It does not appear that this illustrious ancestor ‘came over’ that monarch, to employ the vulgar phrase, at any subsequent period; inasmuch as the Family do not seem to have been ever greatly distinguished by the possession of landed estate. And it is well known that for the bestowal of that kind of property upon his favourites, the liberality and gratitude of the Norman were as remarkable as those virtues are usually found to be in great men when they give away what belongs to other people.

Charles Dickens – Martin Chuzzlewit (1843 -1844)


But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Frédéric Bastiat - The Law (1850)

Yet it's much more than money, always was.

Keir Starmer cannot force a General Election

Barrister Steven Barrett explains why in his view, Keir Starmer cannot force a General Election.

Two Headlines

VW and Stellantis urge help to keep carmaking in Europe

Europe’s largest carmakers Volkswagen and Stellantis have called for subsidies to keep carmaking in the EU as they struggle with challenges from US tariffs to Chinese competition, in an article published Thursday.

Electric cars largely made within the bloc should benefit from subsidies for buyers, orders from government as well as a “CO2 bonus” paid directly to carmakers, VW boss Oliver Blume and Stellantis chief Antonio Filosa said.


Four further Chinese car brands announced in the UK

UK car buyers have had to get used to a lot of new brands over the past few years. The introduction of these launches are met with increasing consumer enthusiasm, too.

BYD, for example (which quickly took my advice to stick with BYD and not plaster Build Your Dreams across the back of every car) sold 51,422 cars in the UK last year – giving them a 2.5 per cent share of the market. That’s more than Citroen, Cupra, Dacia, Honda, Mazda and a host of other established brands.