simonparker.bsky.social
Public servant in search of a better future. Communities and service users first. Rebel just for kicks.
1,373 posts
1,825 followers
811 following
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Struggling to tell the difference between Goodhart's liberal-modifying ideology and moderate Islam tbh.
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So yeah they strip our autonomy and funding then complain we can't deliver.
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Yes I'm sure part of the reason we don't take local taxation seriously is because - being charitable - the SW1 classes think councils simply don't have the capacity to do anything very useful.
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There is actual evidence which we could engage with, and it strongly suggests that fiscal decentralisation can be very beneficial when the system is well-designed (particularly when there is a good match between responsibilities and local revenue sources).
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I don't think our governing classes regard excessive centralisation as a problem. Look at @officialedballs.bsky.social recent work which just says none of the experts they spoke to supported more local taxation, as if that was a policy conclusion in itself.
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TBH that local government spend probably isn't really local any more. Council tax is essentially a nationalised revenue source now. It would be more accurate to say we are 100% central government.
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Well if Morgan's lurking on the TL... you know where I am. But they do already have @nick80.bsky.social - who as you say is getting really good stuff done.
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I wonder what the right skillset is here? If it isn't the standard political flak or civil service toolkit, what is it that a PM should be looking for?
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Like this a lot. The expressed preference of many politicians is towards day-to-day tactics. It's easier and provides a greater sense of agency than the slow boring of hard boards required to actually change anything. You need people who can do the latter.
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To be clear I'm well up for planning reform but don't expect it will solve all our problems. I have no particular brief for the TCPA, but at least some of the grief the act gets is ideological. The chart above shows it was perfectly possible to get things built after 1945.
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The UK reached record numbers of housing completions under the TCPA.
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Oh for sure. I fundamentally buy the HLS idea that the purpose of public service system should be to find out what works, and that this requires flexibility and variation.
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I brought a human learning systems guru into DfE a couple of years ago. Obviously I sympathised, but it went down very badly because the departmental view was that yes it was complex, but we still had to do something and there was evidence that at least some things worked.
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It's best to see the PSED as a thought process we are required to go through before making a decision. It doesn't mean we can never have a negative impact on a protected characteristic - this would make budget cuts nigh on impossible.
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If socio-economic background becomes a protected characteristic, it mean we'll assess and mitigate for them too. It doesn't give us any powers to discriminate against someone else - and neither would we want to.
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What the public sector equality duty requires us to do is take into account the impact our decisions will have on people with protected characteristics. In practice this means we assess and publish any differential impact our decisions will have on these groups.
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Inside the civil service GDS does remain an important reference point. Its most significant legacy is probably the concept of being 'user centred', which has become a form of common sense, even if like a lot of common sense it is often ignored.
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'The free market can fix this' does rely entirely on the 1930s as a datapoint. I don't doubt that liberalising planning could help, but as you say the market failures that drove the TCPA haven't gone away.
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It's possible I'm not the ideal user. I trained as a journalist so I write well and quickly. I'm picky about slides and think they should predominantly use images and charts (meta-communication beats bullet points). The idea of asking AI to replace that bit of my work... meh.
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Sticking with the Boyzone theme... 'Love me for a reason' includes the lines 'My initial reaction is / Honey give me love / Not a facsimile of'.
(Yes I know it's the Osmonds really)
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Yeah but there's a *lot* of doom-wanking atm and I do worry where it leads. And of course bits of the Cummings analysis are true.
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And of course he has to find a way to explain his own failure. He did as much as anyone to deliver Brexit, and the world did not change. He put himself at the heart of power in the UK, and the world did not change. What is the common factor?
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The tragedy of Cummings is to be so much of the elite he hates. It explains the writhing, ranting quality of his prose. Houdini chained beneath the east river, suddenly realising he never knew how to escape.
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The protests in the US are interesting in this regard. Folk want to be rid of illegal migrants, but when it turns they actually know some illegal migrants...
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FWIW I think all the 'Farage for PM' stuff is just terrible reporting. The real story is that everyone is on about 20-25%. That plays about as a minority or coalition - and no one is going to be junior partner to Reform.
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I cling to Orwell's view that the British fundamentally don't like being told what to do (even if they love telling others what to do).
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Yeah that seems right. Consensus democracies inevitably blunt radicalism, for better (in this case) or worse. Presidential systems - and to some degree FPTP - allow political dominance often without real majorities.
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That's the whole libertarian schtick isn't it? They know they can't win democratically so they build coalitions of the weird.
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I actually buy the argument that we need an economic restructuring, but the question is whether this is state-led or market-led. The latter of course is what Truss was attempting and there is no way to do it without utter chaos.
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The relatively open, flexible and low(ish) tax economy we had was only possible because we were integrated with the single market. The great irony is that leaving Europe requires us to become more European, in terms of our state at least.
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As Hannan and co rapidly discovered it was the wrong tool. They thought the thing holding back Singapore-on-Thames was a leftist European project. But all Brexit did was expose the deep weaknesses in our economic settlement - which are only going to be fixed by a developmental state approach.
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I assumed they were archive images he will be showing us while darkly intoning that neoliberalism is leading us to civil war.
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It's total shite of course, as any number of academic studies have demonstrated.
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Your regular reminder that public choice theory proceeds from the idea that people are purely self-interested, so anyone claiming to be altruistic or idealistic is probably trying to sell you something. This makes meaningful collaboration outside of the market impossible.