Assuming the Scottish Symphony, National Orchestra of Wales and Ulster Orchestra are sacrosanct (part-funded by the devolved governments), the existing voluntary redundancy programme for the three English orchestras (BBC Symphony - national/London, BBC Philharmonic - Salford/the North and the BBC Concert Orchestra - future base uncertain, more popular/jazz etc) might be stretched. Or there might be more reorganisation between them. Or one might no longer be a separate entity.
Looks like Sunak has seen off any chance of a serious threat from Boris the Fibbing Bludger:
Yesterday’s man.
Sunak isn’t doing an amazing job polls-wise - they’re stable at a c.15-20% Labour lead - but it’s clearly become obvious to the majority of his party that Boris is not the electoral catnip he once was.
Whether this change in Boris’s ability to win votes is due to changes in a) Boris, b) the voters or c) the ability of e.g the Times to notice and mention his obvious flaws is a question for future political historians, I guess.
Johnson won a large majority in 2019 because —
— He had a simple slogan (“Get Brexit done!”) which appealed to an electorate heartily sick of Brexit, which has since turned out to be bogus.
— He had Jeremy Corbyn as his opponent, which will never happen again.
— Nobody had any experience of what a truly awful Prime Minister he would be, a state of affairs which can never recur.
So the factors that made him electorally successful were transient, and cannot be replicated. Even his admirers can see this.
This is all true, but also:
A simple slogan which was never interrogated in any way.
While he hadn’t been PM before, he had been Mayor of London and Foreign Secretary and left a pretty comprehensive record of exactly how he approached important jobs, his grasp of detail and his ability to form let alone execute any kind of coherent plan. I mean, I knew he’d be a shit PM in exactly the ways he turned out to be a shit PM, and I’m an idiot.
There are people who earn both a lot of money and enormous cultural cachet through their claim to be the great understanders of politics who fearlessly speak truth to power and at best they turned out when confronted with Johnson to be a bunch of utter rubes.
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups .”
- George Carlin.
Plus… there are other 3 word slogans, and a right wing press.
I think the press should have to print, on their front pages in large lettering every day, exactly who owns them and how much tax they (the people concerned) pay in the UK. Might open a few readers’ eyes and question everything they read and the motivations of said owners, even just a little bit. I said ‘might’, not ‘would’. Depressingly it probably wouldn’t make much difference to most of them.
What are these “newspapers” of which you speak?
Strangely enough, I was recently reading the 2019 General Election thread on this very board. Some very bad calls there. So I’ll take the wisdom of the collected sages here with a pinch of salt.
They’re the original source of many of the stories people share on social media.
They’re a major driver of elite opinions.
They largely set the news agenda for broadcast media.
They are regarded by people whose job is to win elections as vitally important to have on-side.
They are part of Britain’s free and fair press which fearlessly holds power to account.
One of those may not be entirely true.
Awkward dilemma for Sunak. Which looks tougher, sacking his deputy for bad behaviour or facing down what many in his party consider the snowflakey “blob”?
Sunk seems to have announced a major policy (childcare) recently which… directly benefited his wives companies in… childcare. Without putting it on the interest register.
I really will never understand people like Sunak and his wife. He’s incredibly rich. She’s incredible rich. Yet they’ll nickle and dime corruption so blatantly and obviously with a shrug, and for what? A drop in the ocean of bribery. Is it the game rather than the money?
Raab has resigned, or rather “resigned”:
In summary: this is all a load of bullshit but you got me on a technicality.
And the answer is…
The whole thing is quite spectacularly petulant. The Telegraph has also given him a column to get his justification in early before the report has been published, and put it outside the paywall to boot.
Basically, he did nothing wrong except perhaps defend democracy a little to over zealously.
“Why holding government ministers accountable is a bad thing” by < insert Tory cabinet member name here >
That’s it in a nutshell.
He gets to give “direct” critical feedback to civil servants; no one can tell him to change his behaviour.
The whole report is here, FYI. The last couple of pages are the relevant conclusions:
2023.04.20_Investigation_Report_to_the_Prime_Minister.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)
But happily tweeted in image format too:
Also (as the tweet says) a great lesson here in the importance of taking notes and very slight implication the investigator thinks the ex-DPM’s pants may have been just a tiny little bit on fire.
In their world, money is used to obtain power and power is used to obtain money. Everybody has completely normalized the idea that governmental discretion is always going to be exercised to the benefit of somebody, so why not me? With a certain fig leaf that “The new policy is good on own sake, and my business is no less efficient or less deserving than anyone else’s. So it’s not actually special favors for me/us and certainly not harmful to the public cause.”
Raab’s defense, in his resignation letter, his Telegraph article and as echoed by various of the usual suspects is that he simply has high standards to which he holds himself as much as anyone else and that this is simply a matter of expecting high performance. The full report does acknowledge this, referencing his expectations of for both the content and form of submissions from civil servants.
If you’re wondering what high standards about the form in which information is presented to him looks like in practice, this excerpt from the inquiry into the shitshow that was the attempted evacuation of Afghan allies from Kabul is instructive:
To address some of the numerous requests for the reconsideration of particular cases we received, the Crisis Centre adopted a system of submitting exceptional cases to the Foreign Secretary for approval. We therefore wrote notes or submissions on a series of individual cases which arose for the Foreign Secretary’s approval.
It took several hours for the Foreign Secretary to engage on any of these notes. In the circumstances, I am not sure why. The Foreign Secretary then replied through his Private Office to say that he could not decide on individual cases and he would need all the cases set out in a well-presented table to make decisions. I understand that he or his Private Office had commented that as a lawyer he could not take information without the full facts in a table. We therefore reformatted the table and sent it back to the Foreign Secretary.
In my opinion, for the Foreign Secretary to make this request suggests he did not fully understand the situation. Firstly there was very little time left for anyone to enter the airport, therefore the Foreign Secretary’s choice to cause a delay suggests he did not understand the desperate situation at Kabul Airport. Secondly, the Foreign Secretary’s reluctance to authorise any exception to our prioritisation process indicates he did not understand the, at best highly approximate, nature of our process.
If the Foreign Secretary felt he did not have sufficient information to make a decision, it would have been extremely reasonable for him to defer to the judgement of the Crisis Centre on this question
by merely accepting the Crisis Centre’s recommendation that these people should be evacuated. However in the circumstances it is hard to explain why he reserved the decision for himself but failed to make it immediately. In my opinion, it is likely that the decisions the Foreign Secretary initially declined to make were less ambiguous than decisions made by relatively junior FCDO employees.On Wednesday 25 August, Lord Ahmad and the Minister for Armed Forces, James Heappey MP instructed us to evacuate a senior Afghan soldier, his adult children, and his small grandchildren. The Afghan soldier had been prioritised for evacuation but his adult children had not, although they had separately applied for evacuation. The soldier judged that if his children were left behind they would certainly be murdered. The MOD and Mr Heappey agreed that his children would be murdered. The Afghan officer said that as an honourable soldier and father he would not leave his adult children and infant grandchildren behind; he would rather remain and die with his family.
The Crisis Centre initially judged that Lord Ahmad’s and Mr Heappey’s instruction should not be implemented because the sons had not been prioritised by our overall evacuation process. I said that this process was very arbitrary; it is plausible that the applications submitted by the senior soldier’s adult children had simply not been read. We agreed to submit this case to the Foreign Secretary. As noted, the Foreign Secretary did not respond for several hours. I believe this family did not succeed in entering the airport. The bureaucratic delay may have been a factor,
A group of seven people, said to be women’s rights activists, had been promised evacuation by the Home Secretary. Their case was supported by senior executives at Sky News and were therefore referred to as the ‘Sky Seven’. It was not clear on what basis the Home Secretary had agreed to this and we did not know the exact identify of these people. We included them in our submission to the Foreign Secretary, I believe including noting their connection with Sky News.
On the evening of Wednesday 25 August, they were waiting by the Baron Hotel gate, which was about to close for the night. The Foreign Secretary declined to make a decision on whether to admit these people without a properly formatted submission with a table setting out multiple cases.