That Starmer fella...

It's fucking insane that being "pro" whatever, in that just being accepting of and understanding is being framed as anti anything else. You can just let other people live their lives how they want without it being against how you want to live yours and celebrate both. Kids being happy and aware that their friends and family can be themselves isn't going to do anything other re-enforce their belief that they live in an understanding society. That flag is purposely as inclusive AF.

Amidst the crowing in this week's Staggers, Gray plays Cassandra..

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/conservatives/2024/07/tory-centre-will-not-hold-john-gray

Nicely written, but are any of those statements or insights backed up by anything other than needing content for paycheck?

E.g. Do we yet know what Reform's total votes received was? In 2015 UKIP got 12.6% and 3,881,099 votes. What was Reform's improvement both as a % and total numbers?

In the last election the Red Wall crumbled with trad Labour voters turned blue for at least a decade to come.

.... That is until we all experienced a never ending shit show of incompetence in the years that followed. I know it's an incredibly hard counter-factual, but if a Tory government with Cameron-levels of ability and ethics* had been in charge would it have been such a landslide? I doubt it.

My 2p is regardless of political conviction there comes a point where a population gags on the stench of incompetence and accept a change must come. I don't discount all the various shifts and other factors, but honestly this election boiled down to:

the Tories are shit and need to go X Starmer is a viable alternative

You can make it more complicated, try and draw out some interesting hot takes to save endlessly rewriting the same article since Partygate. But sometimes it just isn't that complicated.

*hilarious that is their high watermark

Cameron-levels of ability and ethics*

what ability and ethics? Surely Brexit and Greensill are evidence that neither existed.

Windrush too.

A low bar I admit.

Cameron didn't believe in anything other than that his class status entitled him to lead. He has no achievements to point to.

I agree with your overall take though.

It will be interesting to see what the electoral response is when Labour also fail.

• Olympics
  
• Royal Mail privatisation
  
• Immigration processing
  
• Same sex marriage
  
• Expansion of green economy e.g. Green Investment Bank
  
• Education reforms
  
• Austerity
  
  

Whether you see all of them as a positive is another matter. But I would argue that there was a level of ability and competence that disappeared after May (giving her the benefit of the doubt given the impact of Brexit).

.... anyway this boring ppt won't write itself!

He didn't have any beliefs aside from "I guess I'll position myself halfway between Thatcher and Blair" but he definitely had more political ability to run a tight ship and to appeal to voters, and he didn't completely disregard the law, precedent, expert advice like Johnson/Truss.

But there's a gulf between Johnson/Truss and Cameron in terms of leadership qualities, and even between Johnson/Truss and May/Sunak. (It's a very low bar)

Same sex marriage

A Lib Dem policy that passed in spite of the Tories, not because of them, but Cameron gets a microgram of credit for allowing it to happen I suppose

They got 13.something % and about 4 million votes. Not a massive uplift, bearing in mind they stood in far more places than previously.

Nicely written, but are any of those statements or insights backed up by anything other than needing content for paycheck?

John Gray is pretty consistent with his analysis on liberal extremism and technocracy. Sure, some of it is speculative and therefore prone to miscalculation, but it seems to me at least that he's correct about the ideological contradictions inherent to centrism, as well as the political space that Reform are moving into.

If Starmer's project is bureaucratic and managerial about growth alone—and it seems to be—then these forces don't seem like they're going away.

For a slightly more historical/economic analysis on broadly similar themes of governance and democracy, this is pretty good:
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/07/global-economic-governance-whats-growth-got-to-do-with-it?lang=en

Far from society’s purchasing power chasing too few goods and services, there are in aggregate terms too many goods and services chasing too little purchasing power. This imbalance has led to high levels of private debt, as the 99 percent borrow money for housing, healthcare, and food at the same time as firms (which cannot sell all they produce) borrow to compensate for falling sales.

The consequences are the reverse of most conventional economic commentary: overproduction, high levels of private debt, and falling incomes. Experience has shown that all of these elements lead to global financial crises.

And Keynes' intention in 1944, just to show how different our current economic conversation could be:

"in [the] future, the external value of sterling shall conform to its internal value as set by our own domestic policies, and not the other way round. Secondly, we intend to retain control of our domestic rate of interest, so that we can keep it as low as suits our own purposes, without interference from the ebb and flow of international capital movements or flights of hot money. Thirdly, whilst we intend to prevent inflation at home, we will not accept deflation at the dictate of influences from outside. In other words, we abjure the instruments of bank rate and credit contraction operating through the increase of unemployment as a means of forcing our domestic economy into line with external factors."

Perhaps a better quote:

Thanks to capital mobility, private actors in the international financial system exercise undue influence over policies vital to the economic stability of states, including exchange rates; interest rates; and global flows of investment, capital, and trade. This loss of public authority over both the global and domestic economies has led to disillusionment with democracy.

Nailed it

You can disagree with the ideology, but it is another thing The Sovereign Individual got right.

If Starmer's project is bureaucratic and managerial about growth alone—and it seems to be—then these forces don't seem like they're going away.

Obviously race played a factor, but Obama > Trump pretty clearly shows the perils of being technically competent but not managing to win hearts and minds

Obviously race played a factor

Perhaps this is nit-pciking, but how did race play a factor in Trump beating Hilary Clinton? Obama was a two-term president beating white opponents in both elections, and he probably would beat Trump even now if he could stand for a third term.

This despite the fact he didn't really change the status quo.

Obama was a strong enough candidate to overcome the bias but once you had an "average" candidate in Hillary, the bias to the right showed - although I'm sure there were other factors also

Starmer’s Never Ending Insurgency

https://www.ft.com/content/0273a62a-cba2-41dd-98bf-973358b378f4

wtaf?

1 Attachment

In Reeves as chancellor, Wes Streeting at health, Liz Kendall at work and pensions, Shabana Mahmood at justice and the imaginative but risky appointment of the campaigner James Timpson as prisons minister, Starmer has signalled a readiness to embrace politically difficult reform.

🍄🍄🍄

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9x8j5p0992o

In response to their claims, the new health secretary launched an independent review led by Prof Appleby which analysed data from NHS England on suicides of patients at the Tavistock clinic, based on an audit at the trust.

Covering the period between 2018-19 and 2023-24, he found there were 12 suicides - five in the three years leading up to 2020-21 and seven in the three years afterwards.

"This is essentially no difference," Prof Appleby says in his report, "taking account of expected fluctuations in small numbers, and would not reach statistical significance."

This is such a frustrating bit of reporting. If your data doesn't reach statistical significance, it doesn't mean you accept the null hypothesis, it means you don't have enough data to tell either way.

(And this is before we even get into the deeper issue that by restricting the data to only those at the Tavistock center, which was already notorious for not having the needed capacity, means that you're almost certainly excluding the a large proportion of those who are most likely to be effected)

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1814364410720219323.html

Jo Maugham from the Good Law Project has also tweeted about this.

Ah, that's great to see, thanks

https://x.com/jack_turban/status/1814446589924258276

This thread is quite good on how a lot of this research/ medicalisation is wrongfully interpreted for sake of a correct, politically convenient conclusion

The reports comments of, essentially “the improvement of mental health is due to co dependent mental health issues” is bonkers. as the poster comments, the way the independent report uses this data is incorrect, but to then incorrectly use it in this way shows the reading is made by someone with 0 interaction with trans patients. It in itself is conversion therapy, the idea that simple psychiatric intervention alleviates a persons need to transition. That gender dysphoria in itself is not a defined condition itself, but a symptom of other issues.

I say this as someone’s who depression all but disappeared post transition. My quality of life improved greatly as I did not have depression, but 10 years of intervention over that depression failed, it was simply taking a gnrh blocker that cured it. It was being allowed access to gender affirming hormones. Knowing I wasn’t locked into a path that I hated, was killing me, and showed me no hope for myself long term. A story echoed by literally hundreds of trans people I have met over the last few years.

Those who take gender affirming hormones and still persist with depression or other barriers to their life, which do not meat case’s insane “judging by employment statistics”, are not proof of hormone treatment effectiveness. But more reflective that post transition these people are facing constant harassment, abuse and dealing with either depression at how they could not do this sooner and are living with the impact of blockers being denied to them, abuse from the world around them, or watching theirselves being debated in the news with little to no representation.

A constant failing of these reports, as with all healthcare that deals with informed consent and wholistic care, is the minimising or misunderstanding of the opportunity cost. This is most clear in womens care. Often white, male, cis advisors and researchers do not acknowledge their lack of experience or bias in the barriers of these people. They simply cannot comprehend generational trauma, gendered trauma or racialised medicine. These barriers are dismissed or filtered through perspectives they do understand (such as depression, which itself is a minefield of medicalised bias) , or written off as irrelevant or “emotional not factual”.

Any woman who’s ever had to haggle with a doctor over the level of pain they’re feeling, or how “yes they want intervention regardless of the risk to future conception chances” will immediately understand this.

Child poverty is good, actually.