The Radicalisation of David Goodhart

I’ve been meaning to get to this. Now, he’s bound to be out telling us to give up this or that to fight the terrorists, so here goes. OK, who’s this?

The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’…I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.

We are ruled by a secret cabal of cosmopolitans, who control the media. I, as a special intermediary who can travel among them, alone bring you the horrifying truth. Here’s some more:

they seem to feel few national attachments. Indeed, they feel no less a commitment to the welfare of someone in Burundi than they do to a fellow citizen in Birmingham. Perhaps they even feel a greater commitment

Not only are they cosmopolitan, they are denational, anti-national.

Here’s some more, again.

Intellectual sophistication is, more generally, associated with transcending the local, the everyday, the parochial, and even the national. Replacing the nation with other allegiances seems an attractive, even morally superior, alternative – chiming with globalisation’s market freedoms.

It’s the intellectuals. Scheming with the merchants. To replace the nation with immigrants. There’s actually a word for that in German (Umvolkung) and the people who invented it are who’d you think.

Here’s some more.

I believe it is necessary to do something to break with the lethargic consensus in which we are trapped, even if it is a sacrifice…While I defend everyone’s national identity as long as they stay at home, I protest against the outrage that aims to replace our nation!

I kid, of course – it’s taken from French extreme-rightist thinker Dominique Venner’s suicide note, issued before he blew his brains out, in front of 1,500 worshippers, on the altar of Notre-Dame, in what was frankly a rather queeny effort to protest gay marriage. The translation is mine.

But the first three quotes are from hyper-respectable establishmentarian thinktanki, David Goodhart. Here’s some more Goodhart.

Who could say confidently that 5 million or 10 million people would not turn up in the space of a couple of years, especially to a country with the global connections that Britain already has?

I can’t find the reference at the moment, and there’s no way I’m spending more than the absolute minimum of my time typing things like “Eurabia GRECE ships founder conquest immigration” into search engines. But Goodhart is either knowingly or unknowingly quoting a founding text of the postwar extreme right in Europe here – a book, published in about 1968 by one of the founders of Venner’s thinktank GRECE, about the inevitable decadence of democracy, that would end when 5 to 10 million (inferior, animal, hypervirile – you know the deal) African immigrants suddenly sailed for our shores in the space of a couple of years, on rusty tankers, and we didn’t have the balls to just sink them on the high seas. I’m hoping one of my readers, probably Chris Williams or Phil Edwards, can remind me of the title.

Or I was. Then I did the obvious thing and referred to Venner’s own blog. It’s Jean Raspail’s Camp des Saints.

In the same piece of Goodhart’s, he specifically says that he wants to end the notion of refugee status for people fleeing, say, famine, natural disaster, or even war so long as the persecution is not directed at you as a named individual.

But many of the largest groups, such as Somalis, applying to enter Britain and other rich countries as refugees are not facing individual persecution but rather are caught up in regional conflicts or civil wars or even natural disasters. They have usually been granted “exceptional leave to remain” or what is now called “humanitarian protection”. There is no reason why the leave to remain should be permanent.

He is actually borrowing from French practice here; until the early 2000s, the French government didn’t recognise being persecuted by, say, the Taliban because you are a woman, rather than being persecuted for some individualised reason like (say) this or that celebrity dissident, and tended to dodge the issue by suggesting you might want to sneak on the Eurostar and get rid of your papers before the UK border control, nudge nudge. I suspect that the sources of this view in French administrative law are not ones you’d want to look at too closely.

Anyway, here’s some light relief. More Goodhart.

In the mid-20th century, political elites in the liberal democratic west began to embrace what the sociologist Geoff Dench has called the “universalist shift” – the belief in the moral equality of all people.

Geoff Dench?

 

Surely it is a notable fact that the director of Demos has self-radicalised, and is arguing for a program whose sources and whose content can be summed up as travail, famille, patrie?

Of course, the man who this reminds me of is Martin Amis, and I wonder if the same person turned both of them on. Perhaps it’s that one, you know, that one person who goes to North London dinner parties and indulges in casual anti-Semitism in front of rightwing newspaper columnists?

Faster, please.

Gavin Kelly argues that it doesn’t much matter, from a practical point of view, what the Eds decide about the coming spending review. It covers 2015 and 2016, and administratively speaking changing it wouldn’t have much impact before the end of the financial year in April, 2016. After all, the Tories and the Lib Dems only managed to implement a few billion in in-year cuts.

I think this is, in a word, nuts. First of all, the comprehensive spending review timetable is not controlled by the precession of the galaxy. It was invented by Gordon Brown. It’s an administrative construct, not a law of nature. If it was absolutely necessary, it could be changed. That said, administrative constructs have a life of their own. After all, there’s a reason why the end of the financial year is in April.

Much more importantly, though, we should think back to the summer of 2010. It is of course true that a lot of the cuts weren’t implemented until much later, and indeed some still haven’t been implemented. But there is surely a reason why the recovery stopped dead in Q3 2010, just then. The Government took considerable care, over the summer and autumn of 2010, to communicate that it intended to swing to austerity, to prepare the public with rhetoric, and also to make early announcements that would be hard to roll back, as costly signals of credibility.

Hence the decisions to kill the Building Schools for the Future program and to chop the Nimrod MRA4 planes up for razor blades. They knew it would take some time to implement the plan, and they took action ahead of it in order to commit themselves irrevocably.

If you think expectations, predictions of the future, plans for investment, and forward guidance on policy matter in economics, you should take this very seriously. It is utterly conventional to say that governments should hand monetary policy to the central bank, or import credibility from a fixed exchange rate, in order to commit themselves in advance. If you’re a Keynesian, you presumably think animal spirits – largely intuitive enterpreneurial judgments of future prospects – play a key role in the determination of investment.

For some reason, “expectations” have always been used as a punch at Keynes, as an argument that stimulus always and only achieves inflation. This only works with full-blown Ratex, but still, it is surely strange that nobody seems to think that the government credibly signalling an intention to achieve deflation might cause rational economic actors to expect just that but everyone thinks the same would work for inflation. They had the power, they had the intent, and it was what half the country feared they’d do.

If you want a slightly more formal statement of this, consider either an adaptive-expectations model where people adjust their expectations to what just happened, or else a slightly more sophisticated one where people follow the trend with gradually increasing confidence, but try to identify break-points where things change. (I’m indebted to Daniel Davies for this idea.)

Another issue is the composition of the cuts. So far, they have disproportionately fallen on capital investment and specifically on construction. The front-loaded element was even more so. There are good reasons to think that investment, and even more so construction, are the leading variables in the economy. (Kondratieff, Keynes, and Kalecki thought so, and that’s just the Ks.)

Now, consider François Hollande. The PS has pursued the idea of staying the course until some future development makes it possible to do otherwise – either a shift in European politics, or eventually winning back the confidence fairy via enough “sérieux budgétaire”. Surely, the expectation this creates is that it’s not getting any better, and is likely to get worse with the chance of some sort of horrible accident, and therefore it’s best to dig a hole. Of course, being in the eurozone creates constraints the UK doesn’t have.

I’m on the record as saying that the worst possible thing that could happen at the election would be Labour getting Zapped into Hollandaise sauce. So I think that whatever is planned for the spending review, the very first days of the Eds should include an immediate demand shock, if nothing else to show willing. The example of 2010 suggests that it might not need to be very big. Similarly, the example of 2008 suggests that a relatively small discretionary stimulus might be more effective than we think. And both suggest that targeting capital investment and construction would help.

The title is, of course, taken from “Crazy Mike” Ledeen. If he could influence politics with his blog…

A short homage to the ThinkPad keyboard

So I was thinking about user-experience design, specifically watching my partner squinting at the web-based paper-marking interface built into the British universities’ joint monster Turnitin plagiarist killer. And I’d said to Oliver Rivers that few things fascinate me more than human-computer interaction, but then again most things seem to fascinate me in the end.

OK, real quick, what does great UX feel like and why should anyone care? Well, I would say it should feel toolish, ha ha ha. Like good tools. Anyway, here’s a now-classic talk that speaks to the point:

Check out the daringly minimal use of his slides! So, why are we going on about this, and isn’t this just more Harrowell machismo and planespotting? Well, I saw this quote and it instantly reminded me of the Children of the Magenta Line:

maybe we could get the interface down to an iPhone app that would superimpose a bright white line over the camera’s view of the surrounding street just telling us where to walk and what to do and buy all day long. Wouldn’t that be a bit of a relief?

And, of course, it also made me wonder what I’d do #ifihadglass. Perhaps I’d make as big a monkey of myself as Scobleizer, boasting about how addicted to Google services I was and how I never wanted to take ‘em off.

Anyway, the first major insight from Children of Magenta is that automatic can be more work. Depending on what you’re trying to do, solving your problem by punching more instructions into the autopilot can involve more work, more effort, and more stress than just grabbing the yoke and the throttles and pointing the aeroplane in the direction you want it to go.

More generally, a supposedly easier and friendlier UX can be more painful, less efficient, and more stupid to work with, especially for use cases that are more than trivial or when efficiency and speed are important.

The second major insight is that automation required a change of cognitive style that wasn’t helpful. They had to burn the limited resources of Kahneman’s System Two to get around the FMS in order to do things you could do with the intuitive, tireless skills of System One. As a result, they also tended to lose their strategic overview of the situation, the sort of thing System Two is good at.

So, people tended to do what seemed to make the automation happy, although it didn’t have any intelligence that made that meaningful and still doesn’t and probably won’t for a hell of a long time. This was the outcome of relying on it for command functions, when the original design concept was meant to let the machine steer and the pilot command, and of trying to steer through the management interface.

We have three antipatterns here; wondering what it’s doing now, not wondering at all, and responding to problems by making a PowerPoint presentation, roughly. I think this is relevant. I see people doing this with computers all the damn time. Technology is not liberating them to reason, it’s forcing them to guess badly at how it works, and it seems to encourage them to adopt pathological solutions.

What’s the alternative? The alternative is the aesthetic of tools. Think of those things you pick up and feel tempted to work with. A good kitchen knife, the long-handled pliers I used to carry around Australia in my belt being a really terrible apprentice, the Nokia 6230i, the Nokia E71, the iPhones, the ThinkPad keyboard. I could write a small book about that; IBM’s buckling-spring technology, the indisputable physical click, especially the speed with which you can tab through a web form or knock in commands in a terminal. The beauty of it is that doing so feels like not much more work than this post.

OK, enough aestheticising. Henri Cartier-Bresson said the best camera is the one you’ve got with you. This has been taken as a rebuke to materialism. If you lack the Artistic Soul, young man, no equipment will help…you know the sort of thing. But the camera you’ll have with you is a potential design objective. Dimensions: easy to carry. Material and structure: as tough as physically possible. Features: general purpose capability above all. Today we’d probably say that as much of it as possible should be in software, as nothing is easier to carry around than software.

What are the tool-like qualities? What you can do with it – the affordances – should be obvious or at least learnable. The tactile experience should be satisfying. It should be easier to use it right than wrong. On the other hand, it should reward discovery and experiential learning. These two points are contradictory, like most things that are important, and the challenge is to cope with them. In many ways, things that are good to work with lead us from system 2 to system 1. They are also notoriously beautiful.

The economic miracle of 1992 to 2005

A lot of economists were arguing after Thatcher’s death something like this – the recessions caused terrible and lasting social misery, most of the North Sea oil money went up in smoke, the Lawson property boom didn’t do anyone any good, but you know, GDP per capita caught up with the Germans. Here’s Jonathan Portes of NIESR:

Jonathan Hopkin points out that this gets much oversold, just because the people who argue this tend to use cash exchange rates, and the Thatcher government spent a lot of time targeting a high exchange rate with the D-Mark. If you plot the purchasing-power parity rate it’s less impressive.

Then, I saw this quote from Tony Benn:

The second thing is, despite the fact we have been told we are an entrepreneurial society, this is a country today that has an utter contempt for skill. You talk to people who dig coal, run trains, doctors, nurses, dentists, tool-makers – nobody in Britain is interested in them! The whole of the so-called entrepreneurial society has focused on the City news we get in every bulletin, telling us what has happened to the Pound Sterling, to three points of decimals, against a basket of European currencies. Skill is what built this country’s strength, and it is treated with contempt!

(From here.)

This is, as often with Benn, a bit hard to take at face value. Having been a government minister in the 60s and again in the late 70s, he knew from watching the sterling exchange rate. British governments in the postwar era were obsessed by sterling exchange rates. The Tories pulled out of Suez in the name of the sterling parity; Wilson gave up economic planning in its name. Callaghan sent Healey to the IMF in its name. There was probably no issue that drew quite so much water.

And with good reason. Here’s a chart I made earlier.

Complicated economic chart

The blue line is an index of the sterling exchange rate; I wanted either sterling/mark or the trade-weighted index, but they’re not in FRED yet. The green line is the ratio of real, per-capita GDP in the UK and Germany, multiplied by 100 to fit the chart. The orange line is the same, but using PPP GDP.

The point that comes to mind is that if this ratio means anything, it improved a bit in the Lawson boom because there was a housing bubble, duh, and then lost it all and more in the second Thatcher recession. Also, the PPP/cash distinction matters much less than I thought.

Another point is that things were so much better without Thatcher. So much more catching-up happened later, and of course reunification and the pre-Euro sparpakets helped this metric from the other side. Nobody talks about a Major miracle, and the Brown boom is hugely unfashionable, but perhaps they should. One of the reasons why is that they didn’t have as many disasters.

And yet a third is that the pound sterling mattered, a hell of a lot. Things got better, a lot, after the 1992 devaluation, the abandonment of Thatcherite hard-money thinking, and they kept going until…just after a big run-up in the pound. This should be a simple point, as there were basically two policy regimes under Thatcher – monetarism, until they gave up on it, and then a strong-pound policy which was formalised by ERM entry. 1992 was a structural break with both.

If you care about skill, certainly, watch the sterling exchange rate!

Another point, not much discussed, is that the mid-2000s were better than the late 2000s but they weren’t that fantastic. The orange line shows this clearly.

Really.

OK, the worst Rugby League structure proposal yet.

The idea, as far as I understand it, is that the two bottom teams will be relegated from Super League at the end of 2014, regardless of which teams they will be. There could even be three teams relegated if the clubs decide they want Toulouse in the competition in 2015 with a TV deal possibly on the table from BeIn Sport.

There will then be two divisions of 12 each, which will play each other once (eleven games) in the first half of the season.

In the second half of the season, those clubs will split into three divisions of eight teams, depending on finishing places in the first half of the season. The bottom four Super League clubs will be in with the top four Championship clubs (which may include the two SL clubs relegated the previous season). Those teams will play each other at home and away (14 games) in the second half of the season.

The top four clubs in the second tier, at the end of that season, will then return to Super League for 2016.

ALL CLEAR SO FAR? The good thing about Richard “the tennis guy” Lewis as RFL Chairman was that at least he shut up all this terrible bollocks.

A glimpse of the libertarian utopia

Here is a blog post on the fate of horrible Internet troll “Old Holborn”, who seems to have decided to insult the whole of Liverpool, and succeeded in inspiring at least one Liverpudlian to dox him and report him to the police in his home town. I haven’t laughed so much in years, as this character was literally the only person in the British political blogosphere to recommend drawing up lists of enemies, and actually linked to one of my posts in so doing. Also, apparently the angry Scouser threatened to tell his employer all about the computer diary, which is salutary, given as his comments thread did that about twice a week to some poor public servant or other.

Beyond mere snark, a couple of points. For a start, this points up a huge problem with libertarians and their ism. If you really mean it about absolute free speech, doesn’t this place you under a duty to use it responsibly? Remember the crack about putting a big knife in the boss of cars’ steering wheels as a road-safety measure. If, rather than in the steering wheel, the knife was attached to a hub cap like the scythes on Boudicca’s chariot, surely it would be incumbent on you to take extra care? Obviously, a libertarian or anarchist society would be much more dependent on individual tolerance, forbearance, and civility just to keep the show on the road and daily life non-kinetic. Especially if everyone’s allowed to have guns.

Also, one of the classic arguments for freedom as a good in itself is that it promotes human flourishing. Not just because it is the absence of tyranny, or because the economy might supposedly work better, or because it provides space for creativity, eccentricity, and innovation, or even that it is abstractly inspiring as an ideal, but because living as a free moral actor requires you to be a better person. You might at this point think of some of the horrible gargoyles authoritarian societies seem to produce, and nod sagely. But it’s up to you. As the existence of this post suggests, we’ve got some real pieces of work too.

Anarchists agree, and take this much more seriously, to the extent of considering anarchy as in part an inner project of self-improvement and self-discipline. You are expected to live as if you were already part of an anarchic society. After all, even if abolishing the state is a somewhat remote objective and even creating a commune is a big project, you can at least expand the zone of sanity by not being such a twat. You might even be an example to others.

But as far as I can tell, political libertarianism seems to set out to do the exact opposite, to demonstrate that a libertarian society would be an opportunity to indulge the worst features of one’s character, and indeed to exercise and strengthen them. Also, do any of them imagine there might be anything about themselves that could be improved?

It’s That Bloody Harold Wilson

A bit more UKIP. There are two groups of people who think the Labour Party should take UKIP seriously: the Blairite former-regime loyalists, and some of the radical Left.

Group one is easy: for them the answer always seems to be nice cuts and flogging immigrants, and what was the question? Further, they were always obsessed by unpopular populism and this is just more of it. And any opportunity is good enough to fight the real enemy, pursuing their grudges inside the party.

Group two, though, is harder: if you wanted to sum up UKIP’s message, wouldn’t it be something like We hate you fucking people? Or as my grandad on my dad’s side would say, well into the 1980s, several times a day: It’s that bloody Harold Wilson! Polling of ‘kippers, famously, showed that they don’t care much about the EU and they’re not libertarians, unlike their leaders. What does stick out seems to be conservatism as an identity, mostly defined by hating anything associated with the Left except perhaps the NHS. In many ways, it’s the symbols, tone, and style that are doing the work, not policy content.

So I don’t really understand why any of the radicals think they can convince them, given that their unifying ideology is basically loathing anyone who might be on the Left. I do have a theory that a lot of people on the Left imagine themselves in the great world-historical struggle against fascism all the time, and this of course requires a regular Hitler-hit. (In that, they are at one with the History Channel Bloke ‘kippers.)

Labour should do anything but take UKIP seriously

There is a small industry developing in articles about why Labour should take UKIP seriously. Here is one, and now, here is another! I do not think Labour should take UKIP seriously.

Why should they? UKIP voters are basically very like Tories. Nottingham University’s politics blog makes an important point here and here, which is that there is a great deal of overlap between BNP voters, UKIP voters, and Conservative voters. In all, 80% of BNP voters were essentially deciding between the BNP and either UKIP or the Tories. Also, the BNP and UKIP were more like each other than they were like any other party.

Eric Forth MP remarked that there were millions of white, middle-class, bigoted people in Britain and they deserved representation, which he endeavoured to provide. Less excitingly, there is a pool of bigots in the UK that sloshes around between the Conservatives, the BNP, and UKIP. A couple of years ago it had sloshed into the BNP. Now it has sloshed into UKIP.

As a result, I am not at all convinced that there is a substantial Labour-UKIP swing-group, but even if there were, would it actually be worth pursuing? People who think UKIP should be taken seriously think that hypothetical Labour-UKIP swing voters should be offered political goods of some sort or another. The problem here is that the social group most opposed to bigotry is basically the Labour activist base. Swapping activists for a few low-engagement voters, at the expense of real political concessions, seems…unwise.

Further, the notional Labour-UKIP voter is someone who is presumably worried about core Labour issues, like wages and public services and unemployment, but who is also a bigot. For some reason, the answer to this is apparently either to appeal to bigotry, or else try to reason him out of the bigotry. The first is undesirable and costly, and how likely is the second?

Apparently the problem is that this (still very hypothetical) chap is expressing inchoate protest, and it’s a pity he’s doing it via UKIP. But if some of the bigots are protesting about basically Labour things like wages, there is a simple answer to this: ignore the bigotry and address the Labour stuff, which is what we ought to do anyway, and which might actually appeal to a majority of the public. This also avoids arguing in conflict with the party’s message elsewhere.

My advice would be “filter the noise, and concentrate on line and length”. This here is sense.

Now, if there is a party which needs to take UKIP seriously, it’s the Tories. UKIP voters are, as previously noted, very much like Conservative ones, the local elections were predominately held in Conservative country, and so were UKIP’s successors. UKIP and Labour are enemies, but UKIP and Tories are competitors. It’s always possible that the bigot pool will slosh away from UKIP again, but assuming it lasts, the Tories have to choose between trying to out-compete UKIP and trying to co-opt it.

They could compete in two ways – directly and indirectly. Direct competition would be to crank up the bigotry, attack the flaky element, and generally engage the enemy more closely. This would basically mean a core-vote strategy, probably losing people off the left edge of the party as much as it gained on the right.

Indirect competition would be to write off the bigot pool and replace it with centrists, perhaps trying to keep the coalition permanently in being or absorb the Lib Dems. In a sense, I wonder if this has already happened.

Co-opting UKIP would be something like the arrangement between the German CDU and the CSU. The CSU is distinctly more rightwing, differently so, and more bigoted. It doesn’t operate outside Bavaria, and the CDU doesn’t operate in Bavaria, and the two function as a permanent coalition in federal politics. UKIP doesn’t represent a defined region, but perhaps it could represent a defined period in time. Rather than representing people living in Bavaria, it could represent people who are living in the past. There are those who would say the CSU also provides this service. This would permit the Tories to hive off some of the embarrassing ones to UKIP, while keeping their votes on confidence and supply.

That said, CSU pols get to run Bavaria, no trivial job, and also to pick up some reasonably important (but usually not first rate) federal ministries. There is no Bavaria for ‘kippers, so presumably they would need to be offered more meat in government. Otherwise, they might end up being more like the National Party in Australia, not much more than a historical oddity and a glorified farm lobby. Perhaps what they really want is devolution, something they usually rail against?

Attack of the monetarist vaccine clowns

A pretty good piece comparing the MMR scare with the Reinhart-Rogoff paper. I think there are a couple of interesting points that don’t make the cut, though.

First of all, there’s the power of plot and story, tragedy and comedy.

Anyone, after all, can have an Excel fart, and I doubt you’ll find many people in the biological sciences who haven’t had an embarrassing lab cockup, especially with something as ticklish as PCR analysis 10 years ago.

But Reinhart & Rogoff’s pratfall seems to have carried the idea that there was something wrong with their work, and with austerity economics more generally, far beyond the limits of economics and far beyond what any more considered criticism could achieve. Holtz-Eakin decides he never liked it anyway. US Democratic pols, the ultimate weathervanes, turn Keynesian. It’s a pratfall, a bit of physical comedy, after all. Further, it speaks to the myth of the emperor’s new clothes. The fact it was discovered by an unheralded student and popularised by a relatively obscure blogger only lends punch to this.

Interestingly, the pratfall seems to legitimise more serious criticism, far from distracting anyone from it, like one of those anti-tank shells with two charges, one to trigger the reactive defences, one to penetrate the armour plate. In the same way, the steel scab ripped off the inside of the tank hurtles around inside doing more damage. Why did R&R leave out some of the data points? Why was the weighting scheme so odd? Why didn’t they make any effort to test for reverse causality? Why did they take so long to let anyone else replicate the result? Why was it a mere technical suggestion now, when they repeatedly claimed it was evidence for action this day in the political arena? Why did they avoid ever letting it near a peer-reviewed journal?

Probably the fart will be what is remembered in 10 years’ time, but that’s more than enough.

The MMR scare spread because it engaged a similar dramatic force, which was tragedy. And all that could stop it was farce. It wasn’t Blairite emoting and spin – God knows there was plenty of that to go around – and it sure as hell wasn’t rational reassurance. It’s far better known that Wakefield was enormously conflicted financially, than that he took over his PCR experiment, exquisitely sensitive to contamination, from a student who knew how to do it properly and who never actually detected measles viruses in the samples, and astonishingly enough got the result he was after.

Another point is pretty simple: reverse causality makes fools of better people than you or I, let alone economists. Both Wakefield and R&R were trying to explain phenomena that occur close together in time, and convinced themselves that this implied causality.

And of course, simple patterns fool us all. The idea that triple vaccination was “too much” had that big simple quality of conviction, as well as seeming to resolve the tragedy. Similarly, the idea of individual thrift, that endlessly cited credit card, was good to think with as part of an economic drama in which we all got over the foolish years of hyper-consumerism – perhaps the myth here is the prodigal son?

That said, the Tories have pratfallen enough that the news takes on a faintly sick and pornographic tone. It’s like the oddly huge misshapen kid given to bizarre and violent emotional meltdowns running up to kick the ball…but for some bizarre reason he’s trying to balance a bucket of jelly on his head…while carrying a rusty tentpeg…running Internet Explorer 6…and already sobbing with rage. Nothing good can happen, and it feels unfair to watch, but you fear to look away in case some combination of elbow, peg, ball, IE6, and jelly comes your way, but surely you should check your privilege, and also you don’t want to get stuck with the clean-up…but you can’t ever look away.

The only people who get away with pratfalls are clowns, and they get away with everything.