Over the summer there’s been a change in East London mores: people no longer press the button on the pelican crossings, and leave their baskets for staff to collect on the self-checkouts.
The government planned to gut the NHS and flog the entrails of to private equity. The “black hole” is a smokescreen.
The Chancellor, of all people, “secures” an £8b AWS datacentre that will “support around 14,000 jobs per year” - the most sustainable of which being the delivery riders bringing the lattes to the journalists at the photo-ops and the spads holding the politico’s umbrella.
A ‘tough’ government would be taking power and money from the rich, not mugging pensioners for their winter fuel money or taxing poor families for having kids.
If Britain is broken, why does government fiddle with the dials? If the machine is kaput you fix the machine. You don’t play with the settings.
In the polities of neoliberal meritocracy, elected politicians consider ordinary folk non-player characters. If you try to engage with politicians you soon realise the reverse is true. The politicians speak in robotic slogans scripted by shadowy players working for the oligarchy to rig the game.
My question for the Labour Treasury team is, if the bond markets are running the country, why are we paying you to do it, particularly when you claim money is tight?
The government either takes us for fools or are so completely clueless about economics that they should be nowhere near the levers of power.
The Parliament of Crows
I live in east London and I often walk down Bow Creek from Bow Locks to the A13 via Cody Dock. In all these years, I’ve only seen the parliament of crows once.
It was a warm afternoon, and the tide was low, exposing a beach at Bow riverside as the river doubles back towards the A13. There’s a colony of crows here: they dance in the updrafts from the airconditioning of the Amazon and DPD depots.
This time, though, there were more crows than I’d ever seen - all massing at the riverside. More crows came. More and more crows from the City in the west, Stratford in the north, and Essex in the east, looping towards the river, dark streams in the sky. Some crows barrelled under the bridge that carries electric cables across the river, and playfully zig-zagged across the Lea, screen-gliding like waterfowl, wingtips grazing the water before pulling up to land on the beach.
The crows all settled on the beach on the Tower Hamlets side. The arranged themselves in concentric circles, hundreds of birds, maybe a thousand, with more joining outer circles. The caw-ing was deafening. The warm afternoon stood still. The pigeons roosted on the industrial estate. The coots and moorhens hid in the reeds. The parliament reached a crescendo - and then at a certain moment, their decision was made. The crows at the centre lifted off, spiralling west, east and north. (They never fly south beyond the A13). The sky darkened as the parliament dissolved and hundreds of crows took off together, returning to their territories, leaving only the birds who dance over the warehouses picking for morsels in the river mud.
How do you know you’re going deaf in one ear? Your AirPods consistently run down in one ear faster than the other.
As AI fever grips public services, there’s a lot of talk about AI replacing professionals. Professionals accept liability. Something there is absolutely no chance of an AI company doing.
When politicians say they will be “tough on immigration” it’s a tell. They are letting you know they have no intention of creating a fairer economy that works for the rest of us. They won’t do anything about the housing crisis, waiting lists or collapsing public services. They’ll continue to act in the interests of the rich and will set “native” against “immigrant” as a distraction from their incompetence and cowardice.
It is an irony of our times that the professional and managerial caste who manage “teh economeh” on behalf of the oligarchy know nothing of economics. Indeed many undertake elite education precisely to entrench their ignorance.
Not sure if the pigeons are fans of minimalism or just like numbers. Anyhow, I play them “Einstein on the Beach” most evenings.
A successful Labour government needs a commitment to social justice. A technocratic government of slight ambition needs a good understanding of macroeconomics. If you have neither, here is what is left.
Rachel Reeves planning to raise taxes and cut spending in October budget
I’ve never understood why governments are so interested in the opinions of corporations and the oligarchy. These will be the first people to fly out and set up shop elsewhere once they’ve shat the bed. Why not talk to the folks who’ll be staying to clean up the mess?
Cold snap bonus: Rachel Reeves will only have to kill 250k pensioners over a cold winter to save as much again as her winter fuel payment cut.
Bought a black Echo Pop during some sort of Prime discount thing. It came with a white power supply. It shows up on my Amazon account as a white Echo Pop. For the handful of other Echo devices I have, they show up with the right colour.