I Heart Nick Davies.

I’ve been a big fan of Nick Davies ever since his book “Dark Heart“, which I recommend to people on a tediously regular basis. 

I make that recommendation in part because Nick Davies’s book mentions the street I grew up on twice in it’s opening pages*, and reading those references was the first time I had any clue that someone mightbe interested in what happened on streets like mine. To this day I keep a copy of the book by my desk.

Nick is known now as an investigator of the media, and his story today will light a bonfire under the methods of Journalists well beyond news International.

It will probably also lead to the resignation of Andy Coulson, though the Tories are currently trying to protect their man. Personally, I reckon being editor of a newspaper that allegedly bugs thousands of people should disqualify you from being a comms adviser to a party leader.

If you didn’t know about it, you’re incompetent. If you did, you’re dangerous.

But mainly I just wanted to say “Isn’t Nick Davies a good journalist?”

Now, if newspapers could just get rid of a few bloviators, they’d be able to hire more like him.

* pages 14 and 32, should you care to check.

The Fog of War

In the aftermath of Robert McNamara’s death, a fair few blogs have mentioned that Errol Morris’s “Fog of War” is a very good film indeed.

They’re right. I happen to have a copy that I’m willing to lend to any reader of the blog.  First person with a valid e-mail address in comments wins.

If you can’t wait for me to send it to you, you can see the whole thing online here.

The Thames Tunnel sounds amazing.

If you walk along the Victoria embankment at all, you’ll notice little planning permission notices for the Thames and Lee Tunnels. They sound ridiculously cool. The Thames Tunnel alone will run 20 miles along the path of the Thames, 75 metres below the river and be three double decker busses wide.

What’s more, they’re good for us. The tunnels will help prevent 32 million tonnes of sewage being deposited directly into the Thames. You can see where sewage currently spills into the Thames here.

The more metaphorically minded  will note from the chart that the sewage overflows from the environs of the Palace of Westminster will not be intercepted even in these new plans. 

So sewage will flow from Westminster into the Thames for many years to come. You can make your own puns about that.

On a serious point, I find these kind of projects incredibly interesting. I know it’s sewage, but a twenty mile tunnel wide enough to take a bus through running 75 metres under a great big river? That is impressive.

I really, really hope they’ve got someone writing a popular history of all this, a sort of David Simon or Robert Caro of tunnels.

No Bonfires for David.

The nice people at Reform invited me to yesterday’s “Quango” speech by David Cameron. I couldn’t go – real life intruding once again, but I followed the speech and the subsequent coverage pretty closely.

This is how the invitation looked:

Bonfire of the Quangos
                                                                                                                                                                   
Rt Hon David Cameron MP, Leader of the Conservative Party
Chair: Andrew Haldenby, Director of Reform

Now, can I suggest to CCHQ that if you don’t want people to think you want to cut the number of Quangos, and indeed are specifically going to call for there to be no overall aim of reducing Quangos, then calling your speech “Bonfire of the Quangos” is probably a bad idea. People will start to think you want to reduce the number of Quangos.

To be generous, perhaps readers were meant to infer that Quango’s are like marshmallows: slightly reduced in size and charred by exposure to naked flames, but still a delicious and tasty accompaniment to any bonfire.

In any case, Cameron’s actual speech seemed riddled with contradictions, as Will Straw points out. We need more demcratic accountability from ministers? So why create an NHS Independent Board to run the NHS?  We need to trim Quango’s policymaking functions? Then why support the creation of an office of budget responsibility, which would be all about policy direction?

Anyway, I did idly wonder, reading the speech, who would be granting licences for new schools under the Tory free schools plan. In Sweden, it is the National Agency for Education, a Quango, which decides whether a school is eleigble for state funding.  Will that be number 18 on the list of new Tory Quangos?

Things I learnt last night

1. My friend Alan Beattie’s book is recommended by very smart people. I shall attempt to review it, but be warned, he’s a friend, so I am part of the corrupt London based media hegemon on this one.

2. People who serve canapes at the FT have postgraduate degrees in economics and marketing. They also suggest that British businesses are biassed against Eastern Europeans in hiring for anything above service roles. I suspect they are right on this. 

3.  People are remarkably forgiving of a historical tendency to avoid social functions and be generally anti-social when invited to things. It’s not so much I don’t want to go to events, as that I always feel awkward networking, which awkwardness has benefits, such as I get to learn things like 2 above.

4. Some people actually read this blog. I know this is obvious to you, as you are reading this post, and therefore it is a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, but to me it is always slightly astonishing whenever a real phyisical person talks to me about things I’ve written.  It’s nice, yet rather confusing, like Super Mario coming up to you at a party and telling you that your strategy for dealing with Koopas is all wrong.

Blond on Blond

How seriously to take Phillip Blond? It’s a question that’ s been niggling at me.

A sophisticated, urbane (and Tory) correspondent emailed in over the weekend to point out the the Phillip Blond article I quoted on Saturday was worse than I thought.

Not only does Blond conoujour figured and returns from the vasty deep (One trillion investment, 5% return, 50 billion cash to exchequer) but worse, he seems to believe that this sum will arrive every year. Either that or he believes that a Capital injections is used wisely in creating and temporarily meeting an annual cost to the exchequer*

(By the way, handing people asset vouchers has a history of ending badly for the poor and very well for a small number of wealthy people. Ask Mr R. Abramovitch)

Anyway, this leads me to to my question. How seriously should anyone take Philip Blond? Obviously my good freinds at the Fabians, the Guardian, New Statesman and Independent would like to take him very seriously indeed, as he represents a sort of lefties platonic ideal of a Tory.

It’s striking too that his most hagiographic profiles have all been in the mildly leftish press (and Radio 4).  Given this, and the implications of what he actually proposes, which would be a massive redistribution from someone who claims to oppose redistributivion I can’t help thinking that no bright Tories would fall for the material he presents for a minute.

All of which leads me to think that Blond is influential not for what he thinks, but for what he represents, and I can safely discard his actually writing and focus on his achievements as a socio-politico-cultural phenomenom.

This suits me, because Blond’s writing is bad. I mean it’s terrible, obscure, vague, confusing, imprecise and muddled. You don’t so much read it as wrestle with it. Faced with the prspect of trying to work out what a “radical communitarian civic conservatism” actually means**, you retire defeated, and fail to note that a paragraph which talks about the significance of extending property owning democracy rests on a crisis defined by a decline in “wealth, excluding property”.  Faced with this sort of thing, I’m inclined to call the whole thing nonsense and leave it resting in the corner, unread.

 But perhaps I’m wrong – perhaps Tory Policy thinkers do take Blond seriously, and he’s not merely a helpful caricature of a moderate Tory, blown up into unwarranted significance by lefities who desperately want to have a figure on the centre right to debate with.

So, Tories, help me out. Is Phillip Blond in any way useful to read as a guide to the thinking of the real players in the Conservative party – or is he a political condom – a useful cover when attempting to achieve your goal, but destined to be rapidly dispensed with once the chase is complete?

*There is another possibility. That he uses the word “return” extremely vaguely as a one off profit from sale, rather than an actual return from the investment.

** It’s a sort of contradiction palindrome, no?- communitarian civics and radical conservatism.

A Tory Tractor Girl?

It comes as no surprise that the Tories are stressing their candidate’s local roots in the Norwich North By-Election.  By -elections are like that, and I’ve got no problem with candidates who make a point of their undying, never-ending commitment to the constituency. Written similar leaflets myself, as it happens.

Yet I wonder if the Chloe Smith who claims to be “Norfolk through and through” is the same Chloe Smith who Conservativehome tell us reached the final four for the Conservative candidacy in…. Ipswich. 

Ipswich, for those who don’t know, is Norwich’s foe in most things.  So somehow I doubt that being a “Norfolk girl through and through” was a key feature of the leaflets in Ipswich.

Ambition can cause strange memory loss like that.  Still, I wonder if any leaflets remain from that selection battle…

We share Dating suggestions ITT*

So, summer is here and it’s time to suggest good ways to spend romantic evenings.

I’ll kick things off. I suggest a good London date this summer would be the short walk from the Royal Hospital in Chelsea down to the river and through Battersea Park in the early evening, pausing by the Peace Pagoda (romantic and London-y), followed by drinks at Doodle Bar where you can drink and draw little pictures on the walls followed by dinner at next door Butcher and Grill. (quality meat = romance, though not for vegetarians.) If you want to be even cooler, you should go to Tom Ilic at Battersea.

You’d need to warn your date not to wear heels though.

Now, you produce a better date.

*If you don’t know what ITT means, you don’t spend enough time on internet forums.

Which Tory thinks we’ll make £50 billion from the bank bailout?

Phillip Blond’s “Red Toryism” is the current embodiment of the old zinger about a speech being both original and good.

However, I did learn one interesting thing from his Guardian article this week.

Someone has told him that there will be a £50 billion profit from Britain’s ownership of shares in Banks, and that the “progressive right” wants to spend this money on repaying debt and on tax cuts for the poor.

Blond:

“The overall level of the UK bank bailout depends on definition, but authorities agree that it represents some £1 trillion. At some point these assets will be broken up and sold back to the private sector. Even at a rough figure of 5% return, this will produce an enormous capital injection of £50 billion. The argument on the progressive right is that since the poor suffer the greatest marginal rates of taxation (the bottom fifth of households also pay a greater share of their income in overall taxation than any other group), this money should be used to repay debt and lower their tax burden.”

So there is a belief current amongst parts of the right that Government will make profit of £50 billion or more from the bank bailout, which is a big difference from the £50 billion LOSS projected in the 2009 budget.

Phillip Blond is saying Tory policymakers think there will be £100 billion in wriggle room on Tax. Indeed, he tells us there is even a debate on the right about how best to use that money. This seems rather more newsworthy that the rest of the article.

What I want to know is who on the “progressive  right” is telling Phillip Blond we’ll make money from the Bank Bailout and that it’s important to decide how to use this money?

After all, if there were names attched to such a debate, it would amount to a confession that the Bank Bailout was a good idea and that the Government will make a handy profit. It would also mean that the current debate on Tax and Spend figures is utterly irrelevant – because we’ve got a £50-100 billion cushion and the public finances will be far better than the Treasury projects.

Hopi Sen Smackdown watch: Freeman and Dillow edition

Tom Freeman and Chris Dillow explain why I’m wrong about binning Treasury projections and forecasts.

Dillow:

“So, if we assume that the £173bn forecast for PSNB in 2010-11 is the central point of the projection, a range forecast would take the form of saying something like: “There’s a roughly two-thirds chance PSNB will be within the range £143-£203bn, and a one-in-six chance it will be below this, and a one-in-six chance it’ll be above it.”
It would, however, be impossible for a government to do this. Every know-nothing numbskull and opportunist would claim that this is not what it is – a sensible recognition of the fact that the economic future is inherently unpredictable – but rather a confession of ignorance.”

Freeman:

“what role do these forecasts serve?

I think their main purpose is as media fodder. A specific number is much easier to communicate than a probability distribution, and for the media reporting a prediction, it does show that they know things in detail…

…Which means that the reason politicians keep doing this is that they hope their own set of guesstimates will get picked up and used in questions to needle the other lot.

Oh, how edifying. Another way in which the news media and the political parties are symbiotic upon each other, and jointly parasitic upon the rest of us.”

Being accused of idealistic naivete is both novel and refreshing.

Usually I’m the one patiently saying “yeah, but things don’t work like that”.

(God, I’m stealing a lot from Brad Delong)