I'd recommend Ian Dunt's How Westminster Works and Why it Doesn't. In the last chapter on the Lords, much to his chagrin he concludes that maybe the Lords is the part that works best because it does contain people with deep expertise and is less overtly political. Just need to cull the hereditaries and all those party donors and friends...
And yes it jars with me too - Ive been lucky enough to see the place from the inside and came to a similar conclusion. The Lords along with Select Committees are the parts that work best but get the least exposure in terms of the debates and work done
«Ian Dunt's How Westminster Works and Why it Doesn't. In the last chapter on the Lords, much to his chagrin he concludes that maybe the Lords is the part that works best because it does contain people with deep expertise and is less overtly political.»
That "less overtly political" is telling as the implied premise is that Peter Mandelson was right:
“in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all Thatcherites now”
Therefore legislative activity is not about mere politics as in the conflict of opposing interests as "we are all Thatcherites" but it is instead about an earnest debate among (Thatcherite) philosopher-kings “with deep expertise”.
Eventually we could save a lot of money by simply dispensing with elections and Parliament and let the country be administered solely by Whitehall technocrats "in the national interest" of course :-).
John Major on Newsnight, 1st May 2026, made exactly this point but he claimed that the dumbing down was a construct. He said that if the public were told - bluntly - that a long term problem needed a long-term solution that they would engage with that analysis. There was scepticism but the infantilisation of politics and the public needs to be challenged. How is brave enough to try?
Excellent analysis, which perfectly articulates my inchoate thoughts.
For the good of the country and the party, Starmer should surely go, even though I still think he’s better than the previous five PMs, which says little and indeed suggests it’s a systemic problem that is beyond anyone’s control.
And just at a visceral level, Starmer, like Corbyn, Reeves, Streeting just doesn’t have the chops for the job. It would require someone of extraordinary leadership and charisma to shake things up. I suppose the nearest to that is Burnham. Colonel Al Carns maybe has it, but is too junior and untested.
I’m not convinced that there is a general dumbing down, exactly.
It’s definitely true that print and TV have dumbed down. It’s also true that the level of engagement people have with both has cratered. And at the same time, there is an enormous amount of free or cheap information available on the internet, some of which is of extremely high quality.
As a teenager in early 2000s Aberdeen, I do genuinely think things were worse there and then. TV and print was still dire: the Daily Mail believed my generation was succumbing to witchcraft, BBC Horizon did a piece on the imminent apocalypse predicted by the Bible Code.
But at the same time, actually getting information from anywhere else was significantly harder than now; I was entirely dependent on the library. There were several questions I had about the world I could only dream of finding answers to; often now I can find the answer to them in ten minutes.
Instead, my view about the current state of things is that it feels very Kuhnian to me— there is a way of understanding the world which is being threatened by new ways of understanding it, and those currently in power must intensely resist the new ways.
I don’t mean this in a particularly radical way; Kuhn is about the way what you see arranges into a framework more than anything else. A lot of powerful people in politics are old; in technology especially the last two decades have seen radical change. I suspect a lot of the “craft” of politics simply doesn’t work anymore: you can’t control perception as well in a fragmented media landscape; a single media line falls apart if intense public scrutiny gets applied to it.
But for as long as the routes into politics are overseen by those who “know how the real world really works,” these ways of doing things will continue. Kuhn thought this kind of crisis only really goes away when an old guard retires; until then the old way of seeing things endures. But an old framework becomes increasingly confusing and desperate if evidence against it starts to mount. To me this is a Kuhnian tragedy— Kuhn was writing about scientific knowledge, but I think if anything these dynamics are worse when politics depends on technical craft, which itself undergoes revolution.
I see a lot of this as an information space problem. No doubt that Starmer lacks virtues as an individual but more importantly, the system lacks a filter. Too much noise everywhere. So the noise is met with simplifying (strongly emotional) heuristics. These heuristics have always been there at some level but the difficulty today is that they manifest at *every* level. Because no-one has bandwidth to pull all the noise together & find the signal. This is clear across the news & social media landscape. So much noise, so little attention available that smart people end up racing through an interview to find a gotcha on stuff that Does Not Matter.
I see this problem in policy making too. There is so much information to synthesise that we are satisficing big stuff, not just the small, urgent stuff. We need people to get richly skilled in the systems they govern - to build up layers & layers of tacit knowledge. But tacit knowledge is so diffused across systems & data that it’s very difficult for people to acquire this knowledge. Too little time for people to read broadly & widely. To discuss ideas. Always a decision needed quickly with imperfect information & output - not outcome - accountability. I suspect there is some important point to be made about performance related pay here. Very good for piecework. Atomised work. Can create false incentives where people need to dig in, learn by doing, make mistakes.
I would also challenge, a tad, the idea that public intellectuals have retreated. I mean, damn - you can’t move on these platforms without another post from these academics. I think many of them are living their best lives! Getting wealthy, & attracting female attention by trotting out ideas they formed in the 1990s. The problem with (Economics) academics is that none of them has read Babylonian history / Darwin / Hegel etc; Their ideas were all formed in a consumption age after the end of dollar convertibility. That shapes the decision space & explains why no-one has solutions for the post fossil fuel & probably, post dollar age.
And final point on Starmer vs Blair era. I have some sympathy for the idea that Brown / Blair were simply bigger, better thinkers / leaders. But we have now sampled 6 PMs in 10 years. None lacked intellectual credentials. A couple were colourful & charismatic. At least 2 had been forged in the corporate world. They had (often annoying) seriously clever, ideological back room staff. And none gripped the problems in the country. That suggests to me that they experience significantly more constraints than Blair / Brown did. The financial world & bond markets have become colossal since the 90s. The banking industry has completely reorganised into a collateral operation for global capital. We have fewer assets that can be privatised (hence the desperation of selling off prime digital markets to US tech) or deregulated, & our collective knowhow & industrial recombination space has been weakened. Yes, it would be nice to have a leader with vision. But to do what exactly? The old adage of the Irishman informing the lost traveller “well, I wouldn’t start here if I were you”, is apt.
I totally agree with the change being in how globalised, unregulated and unaccountable finance now dominates the political scene. Decisions that benefit the populace but in any way threaten the financial elite, or their system, are not allowed. As a result, those who want to pursue them are hounded out, or more politely, selected against.
As an insider, I would think Chris ought to have some interesting insights on this, but he seems curiously shy about acknowledging its darkly controlling preeminance.
I mean I think there’s a tendency to avoid broad brush criticism of finance because it gets deployed too casually as a kind of anti-capitalist sentiment. And also I think the restructuring is really complex. People talk about shadow banking & private credit markets & QE etc but putting it all together with the current account & manufacturing decline starts to get complex. Chris Dillow knows all this stuff because he’s written about our consumption problem. But where do you even start trying to explain this? The people I really object to are the ones on the BBC or podcasts trotting out the same old rubbish as if it’s still 1997 & it’s all one big trade-off between tax & spend.
I’m currently reading Ann Pettifor’s book “The Global Casino” and it seems clear that as long as there is a vast unregulated transnational mobile pool (ocean?) of capital seeking the highest ‘returns’, and able to turn anything into betting opportunity, national governments are powerless to make significant changes towards making the economy serve society. Either we tackle the out-of-control behemoth, or we continue towards techno-feudalism. That much seems blindingly obvious.
The bigger question is how, but surely that is exactly what someone with the insider knowledge Mr Dillow has ought to be addressing, instead of his commentary on the niceties of mangerialism, and random thoughts on how markets maybe aren’t quite the magic solution some imagine. It is deeply frustrating that there is an existential issue that he must have some useful insights on addressing, but instead we get these thought pieces that are intelligent, but ultimately meaningless.
I haven’t read it yet but I’m a big fan of hers & you may recall that I have my own solution!! We need to firewall capital markets, regulate credit creation, turn off the reserve tap & scrap the deposit guarantee. Oh - & bring pensions back into the domestic economy. But what Gov - especially in Britain - wants to try & unilaterally regulate financial capital? You need a leader who’s prepared to self immolate. And the entire tech industry in the US would collapse if someone called time on their valuations. Guess we’ve got to wait for WW3 & Bretton Woods2?
Which is my point, no national government can tackle the shadow banking / global financial machine alone. But, since almost all governments are essentially either owned by the beast, or understandably fearful of the consequences of taking them on, nobody is going to do it. Unless…there is a crisis that dwarfs the GFC. Big finance expects to be bailed out if/when their gambling streak fails, as they have established themselves as too big to be allowed to fail. But, if the crisis is deep enough, governments may be unable to without massive unrest. That seems, sadly, the only likelihood of serious reforms happening. The Great Depression lead to the end of the gilded age, so its probable that a new even Greater Depression will be needed to end the seemingly inexorable rise of the new gilded technorats. Perhaps MAGA should be MADA - Make America Depressed Again (and the rest of us).
«Too much noise everywhere. So the noise is met with simplifying (strongly emotional) heuristics. These heuristics have always been there at some level but the difficulty today is that they manifest at *every* level. Because no-one has bandwidth to pull all the noise together & find the signal. [...] And none gripped the problems in the country. [...] it would be nice to have a leader with vision. But to do what exactly?»
I like your post because it seems earnest rather than "centrist" propaganda, but it still is framed by "centrist" propaganda so I will spare you my usual "real world"/"parallel reality" sarcasm.
I think that there are two claims that the job of politics is to have the “bandwidth to pull all the noise together & find the signal” and that it not being done because it is so hard and they seem to me unrealistic:
* If that were the case then I would expect government action to be mostly ineffectual and random, with winners and losers being different groups at different times in an uncontrolled and noisy manner.
* But if I look at the politics since Thatcher and Blair it is strongly apparent to me that the same vested interests groups have made a lot of money and others have been shafted hard (and some have not been touched much) over decades regardless of which thatcherite parties were in office and largely thanks to government actions and omissions.
* This tells me that to “find the signal” is possible and has been achieved by politicians over decades and also that in actually-existing politics the role of politicians is to make money, one way or another, for their "sponsors" and they do it well and consistently.
I am not surprised by that because (there ism literature about that and) the "sponsors" are smart, ruthless, determined, and have a vast array of consultants, think-tanks, institutes to analyze and plan for them and feed the plans to the political system and actions like handing out free money for one or two trillions between the 2001 crash, the 2008 crash, the COVID-19 crash do not require complicated machinery. In the USA a right-wing author wrote over a decade ago:
“It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.”
Note: in the USA "middle-class wages" means the wages of middle-*income* families, that is working-class ones.
This all seems about right. I do find think EVEN so that the mandelson appointment is puzzling. My guess is that Starmer, who didn’t enter parliament till long after Mandelson’s heyday, didn’t remember just how dangerously toxic he was and, perhaps, wasn’t even paying attention at the time.
Rory Stewart’s book on his time in government is excellent. His observation — that it’s hard to get anything done when ministers stay in particular offices for which the have no preexisting expertise — has been true a long time. In 2019 I worked out that the average tenure of a Sec of State for Education since WWII was about two years; and I think only Gillian Shepherd and Estelle Morris entered the post with any actual expertise (not surprisingly, both quite good, compared with others).
«it’s hard to get anything done when ministers stay in particular offices for which the have no preexisting expertise»
I guess that "permanent secretaries" of government departments exist only in my imaginary parallel world and in the real world political ministers actually engage directly in administration.
A legacy of feudalism, we afford our politicians far too much leeward and not enough accountability. This has to change. Accountability at the ballot box every four years is simply not effective to prevent charlatans from running the whole show. Here is a constructive suggestion for reform: https://www.jandehn.com/post/let-them-eat-cake
This piece understands something very real. The examples - ignoring opportunity cost, shaky fiscal rules, the belief in neat “policy levers” - are basic failures of thinking. It shouldn’t be controversial to expect better.
But while calling it “stupidity” feels satisfying, it only goes so far. A lot of what you’re describing looks less like random incompetence and more like decisions being shaped in inner circles, with limited challenge and a very narrow range of acceptable ideas. If that’s the environment, shallow policymaking is almost inevitable.
I've delved into this in my piece, 'Power Without Office: McSweeney, Mandelson, and Labour’s Inner Circle' - give it a read if it sounds interesting. If policy is increasingly filtered through unelected advisors and informal networks before it ever reaches formal decision-making, then the lack of rigour you point out must be structural, no?
Nevertheless, the core point is still made well. Stripping away the assumption that Westminster is operating with any real intellectual seriousness is necessary, and it opens the door to asking deeper questions about how decisions are actually made. Well written.
«Sir Keir Starmer seems not to understand the basics of what the job of Prime Minister should be. It should be to set out a basic strategy (”vision” if you like) for government and to resolve conflicts between departments. [...] fail to understand that policy-making isn’t a simple engineering issue but is more like gardening, an exercise in guided emergence.»
Suppose that the task of the prime minister and the political class were to prioritize policies that redistribute a lot of money to the vested interest groups that "sponsor" them by doing something like “gardening, an exercise in guided emergence”: then in my parallel world most PMs since Thatcher and Blair and the political class have been competent and determined in doing that while confusing voters with babble about values and identities.
It is lucky for you and all the people in the real world that the political class there is merely ineffectual rather than as skilled at redistributing upwards to their "sponsors" as in my parallel reality.
I don't disagree with the fundamental point that politics is increasingly stupid in the sense that it is all about trying to court popularity while deliberately misleading a largely misinformed populace, so as to get elected, with little thought to actually running the country. I do have two issues with what you have written here.
First, you need to explain what you mean by Tragedy of the Commons. As a generic descriptor for how publci (common) assets get abused, or in reference to the now utterly debunked nonsense by the eugenicist, Garret Hardin?
Secondly, re. Thatcher referencing Friedman and Hayek. As for the first, of course she did, since he was one of the architects of neoliberalism and everything he said or wrote was with the intention of providing academic weight to the entirely self-serving and forensically cherry-picked 'economics' he and she espoused. As for Hayek, she only ever referenced the things he said or wrote that supported her cause, and utterly ignored the crucial bits that warned against them. The same happens to Adam Smith. So much of what he wrote that is unflattering to the whole 'free market' fakery is blanked by those professing to be his followers.
«As for Hayek, she only ever referenced the things he said or wrote that supported her cause, and utterly ignored the crucial bits that warned against them.»
From a private letter between the Thatcher and Hayek it turns out that he was a great admirer of Pinochet and it was indeed Thatcher who described his methods (not his policies) as "unacceptable":
“I was aware of the remarkable success of the Chilean economy in reducing the share of Government expenditure substantially over the decade of the 70s. The progression from Allende's Socialism to the free enterprise capitalist economy of the 1980s is a striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons. [...] Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time.”
Mission Accomplished! The UK economy (in my parallel reality) has been largely pinochetized by herself and all her successors so far.
«I don't disagree with the fundamental point that politics is increasingly stupid in the sense that it is all about trying to court popularity while deliberately misleading a largely misinformed populace, so as to get elected, with little thought to actually running the country.»
In my purely imaginary alternate reality instead politics is clever because it is about running the country to redistribute large amounts to the vested interest groups that "sponsor" politicians which are currently mainly the finance, property and tech industries, and this has been highly successful, and those lobbies have benefited massively since Thatcher and Blair from government policies.
In my imaginary reality *electioneering" looks more like "to court popularity while deliberately misleading a largely misinformed populace" and I am surprised that in the real reality that is all there is to politics and vested interest groups have not been the beneficiaries of decades of massive redistribution to them thanks to the competent running of the country by their "sponsored" politicians. Those who live in the real reality are lucky for that.
«vested interest groups have not been the beneficiaries of decades of massive redistribution to them thanks to the competent running of the country by their "sponsored" politicians. Those who live in the real reality are lucky for that.»
For example in the real reality this fortunate statement applies:
«is not the only basic economic idea of which the government seems unaware: there’s also regulatory capture»
In my imaginary reality to political class are well aware of regulatory capture by practising it, for example the Competition Authority head and dozens of its employees were fired by the PM for being "overperforming" and the new head used to be an Amazon executive, and the new Chairman of the BBC used to be a Google executive (and never mind that in my imaginary world Owen Smith, Wes Streeting, Keir Mather, and 30% of New Labour MPs used to be corporate lobbysts). In my imaginary parallel world the UK political class have been well-learned practitioners of regulatory capture for a quite a while as this quote is from 1997:
“Avoid the British experience. As the professional market legislation also proposes, U.K. regulators concentrated on the politically correct goal of protecting small punters, leaving professionals to their own devices. Knowing the relevant history, a U.S. politician worth his or her salt should wonder if the Conservative government’s approach to market oversight has something to do with the number of Tory resumes on the street, and if a vote to duplicate U.K. market regulation communicates this disease, brought on by a rapid succession of Barings, Morgan Grenfell and Sumitomo problems, to name a few. British regulation, now recovering and making adjustments, failed not only to protect the public from the industry, but the industry from itself.”
«If your final shortlist for a job comprises Mandelson, George Osborne (and maybe Bear Grylls) but not anyone with direct relevant experience such as career diplomats then you’ve probably not even bothered to do a detailed job description;»
That very much depends on whether the "job" is indeed just a job or something quite more political as in being about advocacy and connections more than running an embassy and meeting other foreign ministry bureaucrats. I can imagine that the ambassador to Thailand may be more of an administrator than a politician but the ambassador to the Swamp Of Washington seems to me a more political role.
From the point of view of "centrists" of course no role is political: because of the "end of politics" (misnamed "end of history" by Fukuyama) all "centrists" know that the "Washington Consensus" is the only possible politics so every role from PM to ambassador to the USA is just about technocratic administration the "Consensus".
I wonder why our blogger seems to adopt here a "centrist" point of view.
All true enough. We always get the claim 'if only we had better politicians'. But they come and go and never get any better. Which begs the question 'are the candidates all rubbish, or is the system unchangeably rubbish'?
Looking across the political spectrum shows a very very disappointing bunch of spivs, chancers and frauds. What a choice. You just know none of them is any good.
A look at the French or the German or American situation shows a similar situation. The French and Germans seem to run fairly similar economies to us, the Americans run a richer economy within a social bear garden. Us Brits seem dragged back and forth between the American model and the European model. Never settling on either. Ending up with the worst of both.
As a sideline the Mandelson business begs the question 'who knew about the underpants and when'? Seems to me the vetters were pretty unaware and the CIA or whoever had a good laugh. Something very mucky hidden there was quickly concealed. Deep incompetence or worse, nothing to see here, move on. The secret squirrels cost us a lot of money - and did not deliver.
Sometimes we hear 'Parliamentary Business'. But politics is not like business at all, it is more a way of backscratching, schmoozing and sailing as close to corruption as one dare. Frauds, Mountebanks and Projectors have always come to the King's Court peddling this or that scheme. Occasionally a scheme is workable, more often just a scam.
Politics attracts (or keeps) a certain kind of people. The really able are never attracted or move on quickly but the schmoozers, bunko artists and manipulators attract and need lobbyists, pressure groups and anyone who can scream and wave banners and get on the telly. They are essentially in the advertising and media business with litle need to achieve a product. Elections? We swap one useless bunch for the next, the players shuffle round a bit and keep taking the money.
In the past wars and invasion kept them on their toes. Invading and stealing from overseas made good business. That primitive approach has gone. We now have an overmanned system that has found internal squabbling is the only job available.
«They are essentially in the advertising and media business with litle need to achieve a product. Elections? We swap one useless bunch for the next»
It is lucky for those like you living in the real world that real politicians are ineffective and merely “scream and wave banners and get on the telly” because in my parallel reality politicians instead have delivered competently and consistently to the same vested interest groups for decades the very valuable "product" of massive redistribution in their favour by government actions and inactions while camouflaging this under a lot of noise about identities and values.
I'd recommend Ian Dunt's How Westminster Works and Why it Doesn't. In the last chapter on the Lords, much to his chagrin he concludes that maybe the Lords is the part that works best because it does contain people with deep expertise and is less overtly political. Just need to cull the hereditaries and all those party donors and friends...
And yes it jars with me too - Ive been lucky enough to see the place from the inside and came to a similar conclusion. The Lords along with Select Committees are the parts that work best but get the least exposure in terms of the debates and work done
«Ian Dunt's How Westminster Works and Why it Doesn't. In the last chapter on the Lords, much to his chagrin he concludes that maybe the Lords is the part that works best because it does contain people with deep expertise and is less overtly political.»
That "less overtly political" is telling as the implied premise is that Peter Mandelson was right:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/jun/10/labour.uk
“in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all Thatcherites now”
Therefore legislative activity is not about mere politics as in the conflict of opposing interests as "we are all Thatcherites" but it is instead about an earnest debate among (Thatcherite) philosopher-kings “with deep expertise”.
Eventually we could save a lot of money by simply dispensing with elections and Parliament and let the country be administered solely by Whitehall technocrats "in the national interest" of course :-).
John Major on Newsnight, 1st May 2026, made exactly this point but he claimed that the dumbing down was a construct. He said that if the public were told - bluntly - that a long term problem needed a long-term solution that they would engage with that analysis. There was scepticism but the infantilisation of politics and the public needs to be challenged. How is brave enough to try?
Excellent analysis, which perfectly articulates my inchoate thoughts.
For the good of the country and the party, Starmer should surely go, even though I still think he’s better than the previous five PMs, which says little and indeed suggests it’s a systemic problem that is beyond anyone’s control.
And just at a visceral level, Starmer, like Corbyn, Reeves, Streeting just doesn’t have the chops for the job. It would require someone of extraordinary leadership and charisma to shake things up. I suppose the nearest to that is Burnham. Colonel Al Carns maybe has it, but is too junior and untested.
I’m not convinced that there is a general dumbing down, exactly.
It’s definitely true that print and TV have dumbed down. It’s also true that the level of engagement people have with both has cratered. And at the same time, there is an enormous amount of free or cheap information available on the internet, some of which is of extremely high quality.
As a teenager in early 2000s Aberdeen, I do genuinely think things were worse there and then. TV and print was still dire: the Daily Mail believed my generation was succumbing to witchcraft, BBC Horizon did a piece on the imminent apocalypse predicted by the Bible Code.
But at the same time, actually getting information from anywhere else was significantly harder than now; I was entirely dependent on the library. There were several questions I had about the world I could only dream of finding answers to; often now I can find the answer to them in ten minutes.
Instead, my view about the current state of things is that it feels very Kuhnian to me— there is a way of understanding the world which is being threatened by new ways of understanding it, and those currently in power must intensely resist the new ways.
I don’t mean this in a particularly radical way; Kuhn is about the way what you see arranges into a framework more than anything else. A lot of powerful people in politics are old; in technology especially the last two decades have seen radical change. I suspect a lot of the “craft” of politics simply doesn’t work anymore: you can’t control perception as well in a fragmented media landscape; a single media line falls apart if intense public scrutiny gets applied to it.
But for as long as the routes into politics are overseen by those who “know how the real world really works,” these ways of doing things will continue. Kuhn thought this kind of crisis only really goes away when an old guard retires; until then the old way of seeing things endures. But an old framework becomes increasingly confusing and desperate if evidence against it starts to mount. To me this is a Kuhnian tragedy— Kuhn was writing about scientific knowledge, but I think if anything these dynamics are worse when politics depends on technical craft, which itself undergoes revolution.
Civilisation was patrician tosh. The Ascent of Man, Connections, The World At War, Ways of Seeing, those were the standout series of the 70s.
I see a lot of this as an information space problem. No doubt that Starmer lacks virtues as an individual but more importantly, the system lacks a filter. Too much noise everywhere. So the noise is met with simplifying (strongly emotional) heuristics. These heuristics have always been there at some level but the difficulty today is that they manifest at *every* level. Because no-one has bandwidth to pull all the noise together & find the signal. This is clear across the news & social media landscape. So much noise, so little attention available that smart people end up racing through an interview to find a gotcha on stuff that Does Not Matter.
I see this problem in policy making too. There is so much information to synthesise that we are satisficing big stuff, not just the small, urgent stuff. We need people to get richly skilled in the systems they govern - to build up layers & layers of tacit knowledge. But tacit knowledge is so diffused across systems & data that it’s very difficult for people to acquire this knowledge. Too little time for people to read broadly & widely. To discuss ideas. Always a decision needed quickly with imperfect information & output - not outcome - accountability. I suspect there is some important point to be made about performance related pay here. Very good for piecework. Atomised work. Can create false incentives where people need to dig in, learn by doing, make mistakes.
I would also challenge, a tad, the idea that public intellectuals have retreated. I mean, damn - you can’t move on these platforms without another post from these academics. I think many of them are living their best lives! Getting wealthy, & attracting female attention by trotting out ideas they formed in the 1990s. The problem with (Economics) academics is that none of them has read Babylonian history / Darwin / Hegel etc; Their ideas were all formed in a consumption age after the end of dollar convertibility. That shapes the decision space & explains why no-one has solutions for the post fossil fuel & probably, post dollar age.
And final point on Starmer vs Blair era. I have some sympathy for the idea that Brown / Blair were simply bigger, better thinkers / leaders. But we have now sampled 6 PMs in 10 years. None lacked intellectual credentials. A couple were colourful & charismatic. At least 2 had been forged in the corporate world. They had (often annoying) seriously clever, ideological back room staff. And none gripped the problems in the country. That suggests to me that they experience significantly more constraints than Blair / Brown did. The financial world & bond markets have become colossal since the 90s. The banking industry has completely reorganised into a collateral operation for global capital. We have fewer assets that can be privatised (hence the desperation of selling off prime digital markets to US tech) or deregulated, & our collective knowhow & industrial recombination space has been weakened. Yes, it would be nice to have a leader with vision. But to do what exactly? The old adage of the Irishman informing the lost traveller “well, I wouldn’t start here if I were you”, is apt.
I totally agree with the change being in how globalised, unregulated and unaccountable finance now dominates the political scene. Decisions that benefit the populace but in any way threaten the financial elite, or their system, are not allowed. As a result, those who want to pursue them are hounded out, or more politely, selected against.
As an insider, I would think Chris ought to have some interesting insights on this, but he seems curiously shy about acknowledging its darkly controlling preeminance.
I mean I think there’s a tendency to avoid broad brush criticism of finance because it gets deployed too casually as a kind of anti-capitalist sentiment. And also I think the restructuring is really complex. People talk about shadow banking & private credit markets & QE etc but putting it all together with the current account & manufacturing decline starts to get complex. Chris Dillow knows all this stuff because he’s written about our consumption problem. But where do you even start trying to explain this? The people I really object to are the ones on the BBC or podcasts trotting out the same old rubbish as if it’s still 1997 & it’s all one big trade-off between tax & spend.
I’m currently reading Ann Pettifor’s book “The Global Casino” and it seems clear that as long as there is a vast unregulated transnational mobile pool (ocean?) of capital seeking the highest ‘returns’, and able to turn anything into betting opportunity, national governments are powerless to make significant changes towards making the economy serve society. Either we tackle the out-of-control behemoth, or we continue towards techno-feudalism. That much seems blindingly obvious.
The bigger question is how, but surely that is exactly what someone with the insider knowledge Mr Dillow has ought to be addressing, instead of his commentary on the niceties of mangerialism, and random thoughts on how markets maybe aren’t quite the magic solution some imagine. It is deeply frustrating that there is an existential issue that he must have some useful insights on addressing, but instead we get these thought pieces that are intelligent, but ultimately meaningless.
I haven’t read it yet but I’m a big fan of hers & you may recall that I have my own solution!! We need to firewall capital markets, regulate credit creation, turn off the reserve tap & scrap the deposit guarantee. Oh - & bring pensions back into the domestic economy. But what Gov - especially in Britain - wants to try & unilaterally regulate financial capital? You need a leader who’s prepared to self immolate. And the entire tech industry in the US would collapse if someone called time on their valuations. Guess we’ve got to wait for WW3 & Bretton Woods2?
Which is my point, no national government can tackle the shadow banking / global financial machine alone. But, since almost all governments are essentially either owned by the beast, or understandably fearful of the consequences of taking them on, nobody is going to do it. Unless…there is a crisis that dwarfs the GFC. Big finance expects to be bailed out if/when their gambling streak fails, as they have established themselves as too big to be allowed to fail. But, if the crisis is deep enough, governments may be unable to without massive unrest. That seems, sadly, the only likelihood of serious reforms happening. The Great Depression lead to the end of the gilded age, so its probable that a new even Greater Depression will be needed to end the seemingly inexorable rise of the new gilded technorats. Perhaps MAGA should be MADA - Make America Depressed Again (and the rest of us).
«Too much noise everywhere. So the noise is met with simplifying (strongly emotional) heuristics. These heuristics have always been there at some level but the difficulty today is that they manifest at *every* level. Because no-one has bandwidth to pull all the noise together & find the signal. [...] And none gripped the problems in the country. [...] it would be nice to have a leader with vision. But to do what exactly?»
I like your post because it seems earnest rather than "centrist" propaganda, but it still is framed by "centrist" propaganda so I will spare you my usual "real world"/"parallel reality" sarcasm.
I think that there are two claims that the job of politics is to have the “bandwidth to pull all the noise together & find the signal” and that it not being done because it is so hard and they seem to me unrealistic:
* If that were the case then I would expect government action to be mostly ineffectual and random, with winners and losers being different groups at different times in an uncontrolled and noisy manner.
* But if I look at the politics since Thatcher and Blair it is strongly apparent to me that the same vested interests groups have made a lot of money and others have been shafted hard (and some have not been touched much) over decades regardless of which thatcherite parties were in office and largely thanks to government actions and omissions.
* This tells me that to “find the signal” is possible and has been achieved by politicians over decades and also that in actually-existing politics the role of politicians is to make money, one way or another, for their "sponsors" and they do it well and consistently.
I am not surprised by that because (there ism literature about that and) the "sponsors" are smart, ruthless, determined, and have a vast array of consultants, think-tanks, institutes to analyze and plan for them and feed the plans to the political system and actions like handing out free money for one or two trillions between the 2001 crash, the 2008 crash, the COVID-19 crash do not require complicated machinery. In the USA a right-wing author wrote over a decade ago:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/index4.html
“It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.”
Note: in the USA "middle-class wages" means the wages of middle-*income* families, that is working-class ones.
This all seems about right. I do find think EVEN so that the mandelson appointment is puzzling. My guess is that Starmer, who didn’t enter parliament till long after Mandelson’s heyday, didn’t remember just how dangerously toxic he was and, perhaps, wasn’t even paying attention at the time.
Rory Stewart’s book on his time in government is excellent. His observation — that it’s hard to get anything done when ministers stay in particular offices for which the have no preexisting expertise — has been true a long time. In 2019 I worked out that the average tenure of a Sec of State for Education since WWII was about two years; and I think only Gillian Shepherd and Estelle Morris entered the post with any actual expertise (not surprisingly, both quite good, compared with others).
«it’s hard to get anything done when ministers stay in particular offices for which the have no preexisting expertise»
I guess that "permanent secretaries" of government departments exist only in my imaginary parallel world and in the real world political ministers actually engage directly in administration.
A legacy of feudalism, we afford our politicians far too much leeward and not enough accountability. This has to change. Accountability at the ballot box every four years is simply not effective to prevent charlatans from running the whole show. Here is a constructive suggestion for reform: https://www.jandehn.com/post/let-them-eat-cake
This piece understands something very real. The examples - ignoring opportunity cost, shaky fiscal rules, the belief in neat “policy levers” - are basic failures of thinking. It shouldn’t be controversial to expect better.
But while calling it “stupidity” feels satisfying, it only goes so far. A lot of what you’re describing looks less like random incompetence and more like decisions being shaped in inner circles, with limited challenge and a very narrow range of acceptable ideas. If that’s the environment, shallow policymaking is almost inevitable.
I've delved into this in my piece, 'Power Without Office: McSweeney, Mandelson, and Labour’s Inner Circle' - give it a read if it sounds interesting. If policy is increasingly filtered through unelected advisors and informal networks before it ever reaches formal decision-making, then the lack of rigour you point out must be structural, no?
Nevertheless, the core point is still made well. Stripping away the assumption that Westminster is operating with any real intellectual seriousness is necessary, and it opens the door to asking deeper questions about how decisions are actually made. Well written.
«Sir Keir Starmer seems not to understand the basics of what the job of Prime Minister should be. It should be to set out a basic strategy (”vision” if you like) for government and to resolve conflicts between departments. [...] fail to understand that policy-making isn’t a simple engineering issue but is more like gardening, an exercise in guided emergence.»
Suppose that the task of the prime minister and the political class were to prioritize policies that redistribute a lot of money to the vested interest groups that "sponsor" them by doing something like “gardening, an exercise in guided emergence”: then in my parallel world most PMs since Thatcher and Blair and the political class have been competent and determined in doing that while confusing voters with babble about values and identities.
It is lucky for you and all the people in the real world that the political class there is merely ineffectual rather than as skilled at redistributing upwards to their "sponsors" as in my parallel reality.
I don't disagree with the fundamental point that politics is increasingly stupid in the sense that it is all about trying to court popularity while deliberately misleading a largely misinformed populace, so as to get elected, with little thought to actually running the country. I do have two issues with what you have written here.
First, you need to explain what you mean by Tragedy of the Commons. As a generic descriptor for how publci (common) assets get abused, or in reference to the now utterly debunked nonsense by the eugenicist, Garret Hardin?
Secondly, re. Thatcher referencing Friedman and Hayek. As for the first, of course she did, since he was one of the architects of neoliberalism and everything he said or wrote was with the intention of providing academic weight to the entirely self-serving and forensically cherry-picked 'economics' he and she espoused. As for Hayek, she only ever referenced the things he said or wrote that supported her cause, and utterly ignored the crucial bits that warned against them. The same happens to Adam Smith. So much of what he wrote that is unflattering to the whole 'free market' fakery is blanked by those professing to be his followers.
«As for Hayek, she only ever referenced the things he said or wrote that supported her cause, and utterly ignored the crucial bits that warned against them.»
From a private letter between the Thatcher and Hayek it turns out that he was a great admirer of Pinochet and it was indeed Thatcher who described his methods (not his policies) as "unacceptable":
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/117179
“I was aware of the remarkable success of the Chilean economy in reducing the share of Government expenditure substantially over the decade of the 70s. The progression from Allende's Socialism to the free enterprise capitalist economy of the 1980s is a striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons. [...] Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time.”
Mission Accomplished! The UK economy (in my parallel reality) has been largely pinochetized by herself and all her successors so far.
«I don't disagree with the fundamental point that politics is increasingly stupid in the sense that it is all about trying to court popularity while deliberately misleading a largely misinformed populace, so as to get elected, with little thought to actually running the country.»
In my purely imaginary alternate reality instead politics is clever because it is about running the country to redistribute large amounts to the vested interest groups that "sponsor" politicians which are currently mainly the finance, property and tech industries, and this has been highly successful, and those lobbies have benefited massively since Thatcher and Blair from government policies.
In my imaginary reality *electioneering" looks more like "to court popularity while deliberately misleading a largely misinformed populace" and I am surprised that in the real reality that is all there is to politics and vested interest groups have not been the beneficiaries of decades of massive redistribution to them thanks to the competent running of the country by their "sponsored" politicians. Those who live in the real reality are lucky for that.
«vested interest groups have not been the beneficiaries of decades of massive redistribution to them thanks to the competent running of the country by their "sponsored" politicians. Those who live in the real reality are lucky for that.»
For example in the real reality this fortunate statement applies:
«is not the only basic economic idea of which the government seems unaware: there’s also regulatory capture»
In my imaginary reality to political class are well aware of regulatory capture by practising it, for example the Competition Authority head and dozens of its employees were fired by the PM for being "overperforming" and the new head used to be an Amazon executive, and the new Chairman of the BBC used to be a Google executive (and never mind that in my imaginary world Owen Smith, Wes Streeting, Keir Mather, and 30% of New Labour MPs used to be corporate lobbysts). In my imaginary parallel world the UK political class have been well-learned practitioners of regulatory capture for a quite a while as this quote is from 1997:
http://derivativesstrategy.com/magazine/archive/1997/0597rtbl.asp
“Avoid the British experience. As the professional market legislation also proposes, U.K. regulators concentrated on the politically correct goal of protecting small punters, leaving professionals to their own devices. Knowing the relevant history, a U.S. politician worth his or her salt should wonder if the Conservative government’s approach to market oversight has something to do with the number of Tory resumes on the street, and if a vote to duplicate U.K. market regulation communicates this disease, brought on by a rapid succession of Barings, Morgan Grenfell and Sumitomo problems, to name a few. British regulation, now recovering and making adjustments, failed not only to protect the public from the industry, but the industry from itself.”
«If your final shortlist for a job comprises Mandelson, George Osborne (and maybe Bear Grylls) but not anyone with direct relevant experience such as career diplomats then you’ve probably not even bothered to do a detailed job description;»
That very much depends on whether the "job" is indeed just a job or something quite more political as in being about advocacy and connections more than running an embassy and meeting other foreign ministry bureaucrats. I can imagine that the ambassador to Thailand may be more of an administrator than a politician but the ambassador to the Swamp Of Washington seems to me a more political role.
From the point of view of "centrists" of course no role is political: because of the "end of politics" (misnamed "end of history" by Fukuyama) all "centrists" know that the "Washington Consensus" is the only possible politics so every role from PM to ambassador to the USA is just about technocratic administration the "Consensus".
I wonder why our blogger seems to adopt here a "centrist" point of view.
All true enough. We always get the claim 'if only we had better politicians'. But they come and go and never get any better. Which begs the question 'are the candidates all rubbish, or is the system unchangeably rubbish'?
Looking across the political spectrum shows a very very disappointing bunch of spivs, chancers and frauds. What a choice. You just know none of them is any good.
A look at the French or the German or American situation shows a similar situation. The French and Germans seem to run fairly similar economies to us, the Americans run a richer economy within a social bear garden. Us Brits seem dragged back and forth between the American model and the European model. Never settling on either. Ending up with the worst of both.
As a sideline the Mandelson business begs the question 'who knew about the underpants and when'? Seems to me the vetters were pretty unaware and the CIA or whoever had a good laugh. Something very mucky hidden there was quickly concealed. Deep incompetence or worse, nothing to see here, move on. The secret squirrels cost us a lot of money - and did not deliver.
Sometimes we hear 'Parliamentary Business'. But politics is not like business at all, it is more a way of backscratching, schmoozing and sailing as close to corruption as one dare. Frauds, Mountebanks and Projectors have always come to the King's Court peddling this or that scheme. Occasionally a scheme is workable, more often just a scam.
Politics attracts (or keeps) a certain kind of people. The really able are never attracted or move on quickly but the schmoozers, bunko artists and manipulators attract and need lobbyists, pressure groups and anyone who can scream and wave banners and get on the telly. They are essentially in the advertising and media business with litle need to achieve a product. Elections? We swap one useless bunch for the next, the players shuffle round a bit and keep taking the money.
In the past wars and invasion kept them on their toes. Invading and stealing from overseas made good business. That primitive approach has gone. We now have an overmanned system that has found internal squabbling is the only job available.
«They are essentially in the advertising and media business with litle need to achieve a product. Elections? We swap one useless bunch for the next»
It is lucky for those like you living in the real world that real politicians are ineffective and merely “scream and wave banners and get on the telly” because in my parallel reality politicians instead have delivered competently and consistently to the same vested interest groups for decades the very valuable "product" of massive redistribution in their favour by government actions and inactions while camouflaging this under a lot of noise about identities and values.
«All true enough. We always get the claim 'if only we had better politicians'.»
In my imaginary world a blogger with a confusingly similar name wrote :-) not long ago:
https://chrisdillow.substack.com/p/against-schoolteacher-politics
“There's a common mistake in looking at politics which is shared by the left and right - to regard bad policy as mere intellectual error.”