My mental model of the whole Murdoch/political complex, as I’ve said before, is that there have been two projects, The Project 1.0 and The Project 2.0. The first was the original use of “The Project” as Peter Mandelson introduced the phrase – the Blairite settlement, under which there was a transactional, bargaining relationship between the…
Read More The Project 2.0: confirmedHere’s something interesting. Who knew A4e had a secondary charity it gave money to, that also does public sector work and that also employs Emma Harrison and all her mates? It’s like that point in the con where you start setting up another scheme with the money out of the first one. Meanwhile, this has…
Read More the difference is that you put your money back into this one!I still can’t get over this morning’s Cameron press conference. The incredible thing, as I said, was the transition in what was respectable to discuss. The Guardian went the whole hog and brought up the whole ball of police corruption, and Michael Crick of the BBC pressed very hard on the question of the money.…
Read More transmission beltI have mostly been blogging the cuts at Stable & Principled this week. Somebody had to. How the Government produced a comprehensive spending review without mentioning the monster housing bubble or using the word recession more than once. Smoke and mirrors, and housing benefit cuts. Has Dave from PR got his jets mixed up? Why…
Read More all around the world I’ve been supporting team blogging proposalsThis Crooked Timber points to a column in the Economist about interns on the Bush campaign carefully hand-writing a range of fake homemade signs, confiscating the ones their positively vetted audience had brought along, and issuing them to the crowd for the media to wow over their rural authenticity. Well, not surprising. And the Economist…
Read More David Cameron…and the MAFIA, but not in the way you thinkIf it’s possible to get Americans to start a string of minor riots in order not to have at least $80bn worth of national healthcare, surely it must be possible to start a good row about whatever it is the Conservatives have in store for us? We stand to lose at least that and more.…
Read More first mover advantageOK, so I got no takers for this prediction. My money’s on the Latvian or the Hungarian to out himself as a buffoon or neo-nazi. Not surprising, really. But what I didn’t expect was that even though the Latvian turned out to be the neo-nazi, the buffoon would turn out to be Timothy Kirkhope MEP,…
Read More too many right-wing meetingsWhat is the legacy of the so-called “loony left”? The conventional wisdom is clear; it was all their fault, for panicking the swing voters and preventing a sensible, Newish Labour solution emerging earlier. Well, how did that work out? And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for…
Read More Loonies 2.0Philip Hammond is whining. One year ago, Philip Hammond thought the economy was OK, that the crisis was made up, and that everything would be even more wonderful if he got a tax break on his own property interests. In fact, Hammond was arguing frantically for the government to encourage people to buy property into…
Read More Sauce!This really is getting strange. The Tories look worryingly convinced of the wisdom of a plan to build a gigantic airport in the North Sea, split between two separate islands, because you never need to change the runway a plane is going to depart from…right? At the same time, the Government is considering a gigantic…
Read More the latent content of this airport, however…