I struggled through this morning's media news reports from the UK, USA and elsewhere. I usually end up with more ideas as a consequence of doing so than I have a chance to write about. I am aware that there is a practical limit to the number of articles that people want to read by me each day. Today I had no such problem.
I had to read deeply between the lines to come to support my belief that an election might be on the way, about which I published this morning.
Thereafter, looking at what appears to be happening in the world of politics, there was nothing much else to talk about.
Why is that? The answer is that nothing does appear to be happening.
Labour seems to be in power, but is doing nothing.
Kemi Badenoch is sitting back and letting Reform self-combust in a way that must help her electoral position, meaning silence on her part, at least with regard to policy, might be her best strategy.
The SNP conference is in progress, with big demands for an improved approach to independence, but while that matters to me, it is not the focus for many on this blog.
In summary, we are in a world where so much needs to be done, but there appears to be no action.
The book I am currently writing picks up themes I first explored in my 2011 book, The Courageous State. It contrasts the Cowardly State, which, in the face of almost any problem, backs away and presumes the market will find a solution, with the Courageous State, which believes it is the government's job to address the failures that market resource allocation creates. I have an ever-increasing sense of the relevance of this argument, given the current very clear indications that we live in a Cowardly State, where our politicians vie to be in government, but have not the slightest idea why they wish to be there.
I wish it were otherwise. I wish we lived in a Courageous State. I want to see active government that delivers change for people.
This, and this alone, is the required answer to fascism.
It is also, for the party that embraces the idea, the route to power. People have had enough of ineptitude. They want to see competence, and that will be based upon ideas.
Yesterday, I finished the first draft of all 12 chapters of this book. Today, once video recording is complete, I begin my edit and then work out the infographics that need to go into the text.
I have a busy couple of weeks ahead of me, which is more than can be said of many of our politicians, who appear to be spending their time twiddling their thumbs.
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Corporate donors, neoliberal ideology, USA far right +tech bros, Israel………..The Captured State
“The attitudes and attributes which get people to the tops of organisations are, all too rarely, those which result in the organisation being well run.” (From Janette B. Gillies)
Might it be that an effective way to gain wealth is to obtain a position of political power and then please the extremely wealthy?
Might another contrast to the “Courageous State” be the “Complicit State”?
“I want to see active government that delivers change for people.”
Hmmm… That’s what some people believe Reform would deliver.
Some people should be very careful what they wish for.
Not your most useful comment ever, Andy, and welcome back.
I presume you are not saying I am a fascist.
So why not work out that I am suggesting that this should happen and Reform’s policies make it clear that it is not?
To be fair to Andy Richard, like us all I imagine, he has sat through other people telling him we need change and then telling him that they think a racist ex only rather successful commodity trader can provide it for the country with his rich mates and their ‘home made’ money.
In societies riven with division like ours, language becomes a battleground too unfortunately. In fact, everything becomes a battle ground. ‘First they came for……………’.
Noted
There is no use in leaving this wording to the extreme right.
Using it like Richard, which means actually really being capable to deliver change because of understanding the tools for it, makes it even better by turning a lie into truth.
Thank you
Well, that is right Markus but what we have us a multi-polar situation with ‘tribes’ saying the same thing but actually no solidarity behind any one definition beyond the words.
So what we can say is the ‘divide and conquer’ rule we have suffered under has succeeded comprehensively. It’s a form of political ‘market segmentation’.
I don’t say this to concede defeat. I set it as a challenge. And a certain event in Ely recently provided much of the answer – we have to go beyond words and imagine and describe that imagining (‘imagi-neering’) – build that alternative future, make it stack up.
And we also have to play the same game as the Right – make the emotional appeals too. It has be both. Progressives are ahead by the way – because our ideas are based on the reality of MMT (lets not beat around the bush here – 2008 was the big ‘denouement’ for Central Banks).
Carl Schmitt – liberalism’s most shrewdest critic – said that democracy was impossible because democracy could not be all things to all people (I thank Chantel Mouffe for these insights). The question is which people are we talking about? Them at the top or the rest of us?
I think that there are answers to Schmitt who undoes himself the more I contemplate his challenge . But as far as I am concerned I have come to realise that rather than jettisoning democracy, it just needs to be made more robust. Question: do we have the capacity and the will to make it so?
I like imagineering.
Just one of many examples of the failure of the state to act at the scale and urgency required to adapt to a changing world:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/oct/15/cost-of-balancing-great-britain-power-grid-50m-daily
Agreed
I find it difficult to equate that grid problem is one that market resource allocation creates.
We’re subsidising carbon dioxide capture schemes, putting food into petrol and burning imported wood chips because our government believes in part that sticking a carbon tax on emissions and leaving the rest to markets won’t allocate resources in a way which will reduce emissions.
Sorry for the long sentence, but had to get it off my chest.
I love a word that my main man Mike Parr used recently that sums up why what is in your post exists so – ‘deracinated‘ – the pulling up of something, uprooting it and losing the connection.
Abstract Neo-liberal economics has done that and helped economics to lose its connection with reality; allowing politician pay to bloom whilst presiding over austerity has helped MPs to be less connected to the reality of their voters more than ever before; I can tell you that working from home has not produced better services in local government at all and destroyed pedagogy at work; AI is also part of the problem because it is only human beings that can help other human beings – AI just creates failure demand from what I have seen (people ringing me up in desperation as they cannot get an answer about something).
Yep – our governance has simply lost the tools to do the job – deracination rules because that is what the libertarian Public Choice theorists wanted – to break the link between the political and the people arguing that it was corrupted by ‘self interest’.
And what do we have now? Rich donors paying for politics and getting first dibs at policy; using the Treasury as a hole in the wall; the tax system as a reward card.
As ever with Neo-liberalism, rather than change anything, all it’s done is reconfigure the system they call rotten to more exclusively serve the elite who helped it to be born in the first place.
Saying that we’ve all been had is an understatement, isn’t it?
Am blushing.
Deracinated …some very many things are. There is some benefits to being a +/- fossil – one remembers how things were. Stuff functioning – not perfectly but govs owned & controlled services, that for the most part functioned more or less OK. Just think if the main thing we complained about now wrt trains was…. curly tasteless sandwiches. Or, the local electricity board was a bit slow to pick up the phone to answer a question (yes they really used to do that – for the cost of a local call), or… etc. Regarding burnt-ham, he is a facade, more human than Starmer but one senses that the direction of LINO has not changed, there is nobody within LINO able to say (courage to say?) “oh stuff it lets solve water/sewage by liquidating the companies” etc. That is why nowt is happening, because there is nobody in LINO functionally capable of making it happen. They are ALL managers, “don’t-rock-the-boaters”, steady as she (doesn’t) go.
there was nothing much else to talk about.
Pilgrim Slight Return, I’ve just been learning about failure demand. Must be very frustrating for you, as well as for the people you are trying to serve.
I thought this was of interest in the Guardian today – an interview with a young economist, Isabella Weber. She apparently is in demand. She seems to be talking sense, interestingly Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate economist said her arguments were ‘truly stupid’ he later apologised to her.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/oct/16/isabella-weber-anti-fascist-economics
She will be on the blog soon. She has asked to be a podcast guest.
I understand Reform/Restore. I get why they do what they do and I understand why their message works. But it’s corrupt fascism. I reject it.
I understand the Tories mission to protect the wealthy. I disagree with its dishonest aspirational appeal, but I understand it.
I get the Greens, I understand their urgent vital sustainability message. I like their recent apparent economic conversion, I hope they can URGENTLY organise themselves into a credible alternative political force ready to govern.
I recognise LibDem schizophrenia, as a protest vote, being what you want them to be, depending where you live (the NOT Tory, the NOT Labour, the NOT fascist vote). Other than that I haven’t a clue what they stand for, and I don’t trust them (2010-2015).
What I CAN’T understand is Labour. So full of promises and principles, and proud history, waking up on 5th July 2024 with over 400 MPs, having promised “change”, and TOTALLY wasting the opportunity to make the world a better place, in fact doing the genocidal austerity Trump-appeasing opposite, then having dumped Starmer, looking very like doing the same thing all over again under Burnham. Promises of jam tomorrow (when they could be distributing SOME jam NOW with their majority) simply aren’t good enough for me.
“Just be patient for a little longer and Uncle Andy will make everything better (but not yet)” is not enough to get my vote, not even to stop Fa***e.
But my vote IS available for a courageous Labour Party, committed to being a courageous state, but I need a courageous, caring immediate downpayment NOW – plenty to choose from in the FTF archive. But that downpayment (several billions spent on the most in need and a greener future) has to be NOW – 28/10/2026 will do very nicely thank-you.
Much to agree with
I saw this in the Guardian. I wondered if it was an indication that change might be in the air. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/oct/16/isabella-weber-anti-fascist-economics
She has asked to appear on my podcast, and I have, of course, agreed.