Does the Treasury deserve its reputation for holding back the British economy? My new article in The Political Quarterly uses the histories of Concorde and civil nuclear power to challenge common arguments about the Treasury, industrial strategy, and state capacity. 🧵

Could be similarly significant in reverse. bsky.app/profile/publ...

Public Sector Lawyer@publicsectorlawyer.bsky.social · 2y ago

Potentially more significant than the defections by fringe politicians. Founder of ConHome, quite a significant voice in Conservative circles. www.spectator.co.uk/article/cons...

So it looks like the payout will be more than standard after all. (See thread below on confused reports at the time.) bsky.app/profile/publ...

Public Sector Lawyer@publicsectorlawyer.bsky.social · 6mo ago

"Starmer actually no worse than Johnson, claims IFG." 😀 I'm still confused over what's happened here. Gus O'Donnell on R4Today said such a direction correct because no one senior to CW could authorise, so had to be a ministerial decision. bsky.app/profile/alex...

Thoughtful piece on this by @stephenkb.bsky.social. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... The difficult truth about Jason Arday

The difficult truth about Jason Arday

From the beginning, investigations were accompanied by a cloud of excessive references to his race

giftarticle.ft.com

Every time I read this, over several decades, it seems to get better. bsky.app/profile/zami...

Zamira Rahim@zamirarahim.bsky.social · 5d ago

"We should be careful/Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time." (Larkin, The Mower.)

Chris Mason doesn't accept the cock-up explanation for the resignation reported in the Times recently. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5...

Not a comment about the piece as a whole, but is the best example of "woke" really opposition to a paramilitary kidnap & death squad?

Good explainer on this. Including on the dangers of a "loosely worded social media post" by the PM, which contributes to this doom-loop of media-driven criminal justice policy, making rational debate on the issue so difficult, as I've written about. One query... bsky.app/profile/josh...

Joshua Rozenberg@joshuarozenberg.bsky.social · 6d ago

While PC Andrew Harper’s killers wait to hear what proportion of their prison sentences they’ll spend in custody, his mother asked Andy Burnham yesterday not to “let us down again”. So it’s worth taking a closer look at options the prime minister has announced rozenberg.substack.com/p/preventing...

Note the warning a couple of weeks ago from the person behind the release scheme. bsky.app/profile/davi...

@davidgauke@davidgauke.bsky.social · 3w ago

Why solving the prison capacity crisis is hard but unavoidable. My piece for Arguably on why there’s no alternative to an early release scheme. www.arguably.uk/p/britain-is...

The framing of this - “find a way”, the PM getting the Lord Chancellor to make an exception - suggests the law can be bent under media pressure. The continuing politicisation of criminal justice can store up greater problems for politicians in the long term. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

PM asks justice secretary to keep PC Harper's killers in jail

Andy Burnham is confident a solution can be found to exclude two of PC Harper's killers from an early release scheme, the BBC understands.

bbc.co.uk

Recommend a read of the blog.

SpinningHugo@spinninghugo.bsky.social · last wk.

Examples of Jolyonism. 1. Being criticised shows I was right all along 2. The allegations of plagiarism are without foundation. I am not an academic and so cannot tell whether there is plagiarism. 3. Neurodivergence is relevant in a way I cannot specify www.whatthelawdoes.com/p/good-law-p... /1

Kemi Badenoch writing in the Sunday Times. The beliefs he’s rejected were not neo-Nazism but ‘cultural Marxism’. bsky.app/profile/publ... www.thetimes.com/article/40c7...

Kemi Badenoch: We must believe offenders can be rehabilitated

Controversy about our council candidate raises the same question as Andy Burnham’s prisoner release scheme: what do punishment and rehabilitation actually mean?

thetimes.com

Public Sector Lawyer@publicsectorlawyer.bsky.social · 2w ago

Joshua Bonehill-Paine’s explanation of his antisemitism & how it ended. It contains no mention of his Nazism, or any right wing affiliation. It suggests instead he was motivated by Marxism. (Cured, he says, by his faith, linking Judaism to Christianity.) www.thecrewkerneman.com/inside-the-m...

Joshua Bonehill-Paine’s explanation of his antisemitism & how it ended. It contains no mention of his Nazism, or any right wing affiliation. It suggests instead he was motivated by Marxism. (Cured, he says, by his faith, linking Judaism to Christianity.) www.thecrewkerneman.com/inside-the-m...

@chrisgrey.bsky.social @gilesmacdonogh.bsky.social @igmansfield.bsky.social As it happens, just finished The Affair, in which the politics of the man accused seemed to warp people’s judgement (on both sides). www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Jason Arday: Cambridge professor in plagiarism row quits

Prof Jason Arday said he had "concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away".

bbc.co.uk

I wonder how much worthwhile investment has been lost because of this. It’s not all HMT’s fault I suspect. How often it must have been burnt in the past, when a department has promised savings from eg a massive new IT system, which turns into a fiasco. bsky.app/profile/gile...

Giles Wilkes@gilesyb.bsky.social · 2w ago

"At key moments after 2010, ‘spend-to-save’ initiatives were described to us by a senior official as ‘completely non-negotiable’. The Treasury bias against ‘spend-to-save’ is so pervasive that we heard numerous examples of where departments and agencies self-select against well-evidenced proposals"

It’d be hard to ‘make immigration non-justiciable’ without breaching the ECnHR. But these comments do highlight that the ECnHR isn’t the main obstacle. They’d need to go much further than that. bsky.app/profile/sund...

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 2w ago

"Its a good question", says Yusuf. "Can it be done without leaving the ECHR? Possibly" - cf Italy, Spain, France, Denmark. He would take no chances, repeal all laws, "make immigration non-justiciable" + then 'deploy our resources'. [Removals to where remains unanswered] x.com/GBNEWS/statu...

Rounding the southeast tip of England.

One of the oddities of having a purity test for Net Zero is that she frames it as a difference of approach, rather than one of principle, even here going as far to defend her previous position as a supporter of NZ but ‘sounding a note of caution’. www.aol.com/articles/bad...

While there may be a way of tweaking or selling this policy differently, it looks unlikely any ‘pause’ can fundamentally change what’s needed to deal with the crisis short term, & risks worsening it. www.arguably.uk/p/britain-is...

Britain is in denial on the prisons crisis

Burnham’s decision to pause early releases is good politics but bad policy

arguably.uk

Good ideas here, especially on external shading. One thing we’ve done is put one of those reflective shade cloths usually used for cars over the flat roof kitchen roof lantern. Let’s light in so can be left up all summer.

Chris Foster@chrisfoster.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I just found this website yesterday which has lots of good advice on that. Struggling to keep our upstairs below 28 😐 www.heatwavetoolkit.com

What’s the current approach of government departments regarding X? AIUI, both DCMS & AGO had stopped posting there, shortly before the change of PM. The SoS for the former was reappointed. The AG has changed. Are both depts still off? Any indication others might follow?

Enjoying the Strangers & Brothers novels, which are superb on politics, but one caveat: sometimes CPS is a bit ‘off’ on character. Calvert’s Nazism in The Light & the Dark, Jago’s supposedly superior character over Crawford in The Masters, Eliot’s indulgence of Robinson in Homecomings.

Key read, since this looks likely to be the most significant policy development in the next couple of years, if these plans do go ahead. bsky.app/profile/samf...

Sam Freedman@samfr.bsky.social · 3w ago

New post out "Burnham's defining project" Number 10 North isn't a gimmick, it's the start of first serious attempt to decentralise the state in England. I look at the five biggest challenges to getting it right and how best to manage them. (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/b...

Ridiculous situation. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... “When will Andy Burnham tackle the ‘cost of working’ crisis?”

Shades of Lawrence Fox, except that his longing for hard men was bound up with disappointment that they always led to soft men.

Agree on the early signs here, but perhaps more so than under KS: it looks like short term wins (the ‘cost of living government’) are going to be prioritised at the expense of long term reforms & infrastructure changes (possibly even with a view to an early election). bsky.app/profile/mart...

A sign of how politics has changed that a party would choose to call a general election on the basis of a 30% voting intention figure. bsky.app/profile/jame...

James Austin@jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 4w ago

The big Q here is what numbers are good enough. My suspicion is that you'd want: - Over 30% consistenly in polling - 5% plus ahead of reform - 'Left bloc' showing some signs of consolidating If the polling some something like: Lab: 30% Ref: 21% Con: 20% LD: 11% Green: 10% You surely go for it.

Why do drafters keep using this word? No one seems to know what it means. "It all depends on the context." So everyone needs to troop off to court to find out. Why not just say what you mean up front? I keep complaining about this & no one seems to paying any attention.

IMV a Lord Chancellor doesn't need to be a lawyer, nor an AG to be an especially eminent one. EG of the LCs this century, the lawyers haven't necessarily been better than the non-lawyers. What matters more is commitment to the importance of courts & the rule of law, competence, & influence.