Two headlines

Blair predicts £50bn Labour tax raid

Sir Tony Blair has warned that Sir Keir Starmer will have to put up taxes by more than £50 billion unless he comes up with radical new ways to improve productivity.


Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivers message to world: Britain is the place to do business

Rachel Reeves has trumpeted to the world that Britain is a “safe place to invest” after political turbulence of recent years discouraged some businesses from doing so.

This drive will be successful

About five years ago I read The Managerial Revolution, a book published in 1941 by James Burnham.

Now the UK general election is over and although many people will have read the book already, a few paragraphs are still worth quoting. The blog post title is taken from the second paragraph.


This transition is from the type of society which we have called capitalist or bourgeois to a type of society which we shall call managerial. This transition period may be expected to be short compared with the transition from feudal to capitalist society. It may be dated, somewhat arbitrarily, from the first world war, and may be expected to close, with the consolidation of the new type of society, by approximately fifty years from then, perhaps sooner.

What is occurring in this transition is a drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class, by the social group or class of the managers (as I shall call them, reserving for the moment an explanation of whom this class includes). This drive will be successful.

The control of the state by the managers will be suitably guaranteed by appropriate political institutions, analogous to the guarantee of bourgeois dominance under capitalism by the bourgeois political institutions.

Outright acquisition by government of rapidly increasing areas of the economy is, however, only one phase of the process. Still more striking, and far more extensive in range, is the widening control by government of more and more parts and features of the economy. Everyone is familiar with this control, administered by the long list of commissions and bureaus and alphabetical agencies.

The actual, day-by-day direction of the processes owned and operated by the government or controlled, without full ownership, by the government is in the hands of individuals strictly comparable to those whom we have called “managers” in the case of private industry: the men of the innumerable bureaus and commissions and agencies, not often the publicly known figures, who may be decorative politicians, but the ones who actually do the directing work.

Yes Blair's back - narrative over reality

British police to be deployed in Europe to fight people smugglers

Hundreds of police officers will be deployed across Europe to stop people smugglers as part of Sir Keir Starmer’s new UK Border Security Command.

Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, announced on Sunday the first steps in setting up the command by kickstarting the search from Monday for a former police, military or intelligence chief to head it.


As pointed out by Sam Vega in the comments yesterday, the focus is to be illegal migration. Specifically the unofficial people smugglers rather than the official ones  in Whitehall. It's to be narrative, narrative, narrative all the way down. As an msn commenter observes -

British police have been in France for quite a while, working with the French police using drones etc to spot boats and smugglers before they leave the beach. There was a whole programme on TV about it. Hasn't stopped many though.

I've tagged this post as 'propaganda'. I think I'll be doing a lot of that over the next five years.

The Fourth Point

Tony Blair wades in to offer advice to Keir Starmer with 3-point takedown of Reform

Sir Tony Blair urged Sir Keir Starmer to come up with a plan for controlling immigration in a bid to tackle the threat posed by Nigel Farage.

The former Labour leader offered the Prime Minister a three-point solution to fight Reform UK.

He said Sir Keir's focus should be on illegal migration with the introduction of digital identity cards, a robust approach to law and order, and avoiding "vulnerability on wokeism".

It's no surprise that Tony's plan avoids the obvious fourth point. Net Zero is set to continue chewing its way through the last sorry residues of government technical competence.

Maybe we'll eventually need those digital identity cards to turn on the central heating.

The decline seems set to continue.

The mind that never finds its way back

Only ‘Lord Almighty’ can tell me to stand down, says Biden

Joe Biden has said only the “Lord Almighty” can tell him to stand down, as he refused five times to say what he would do if his allies in the Democratic Party turned on him over his health.


The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet’s; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic’s.

G. K. Chesterton - What's Wrong With The World (1910)

Cranks

 

Weaponising 'weaponising'

Martin Lewis hits out at Tories for ‘weaponising’ him against Labour

Martin Lewis has hit out at the Conservatives for using video footage of him to make one last desperate plea to voters.

The TV personality and campaigner accused the Tories of “misdirection” by using a short clip of him discussing Labour’s manifesto in its campaign material.

Not only the weather being weaponised, but unprecedented tsunamic of weaponising seems to have become fashionable in the public arena. The very concept of weaponising is being weaponised.

Sunak and Starmer are even attempting to weaponise mendacity. Starmer seems likely to weaponise it more effectively though.