So grateful to Keir Starmer and his leaked memo for justifying the entire premise for my book on the week it's released.
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Not that that’s going to change any time soon. But you want to get to an economic and fiscal point where politicians here or wherever else can’t just blame London. Or you do if you have the right objectives imho
Which is why lack of tax levers gets them off the hook and also why most mayors don’t argue for fiscal devolution beyond a tourist tax, which taxes other people’s voters
Nobody at any level wants to lead an argument, they want to follow it, and devolution is definitely no exception
There’s an awful lot of chat about boldness among mayors but often very little political bravery. Sadiq is the immediate one I think of: stick to his guns on ulez
(Not picking on Burnham specifically incidentally, although there’s a lot on the soft left that seems to buy into the idea we don’t need trade offs - just pointing out this is not limited to any one party, having also spent the last year following Reform in local govt)
Neither of which is making an argument about why we need to use green belt for housing, or why those people over there might need to give something up for these people over here
It happened here in Greater Manchester: we don’t need to use green belt for housing and I won’t (Burnham, 2017)
We do need to use green belt for housing but it’s the govt’s fault (Burnham, 2019)
And populism is generally about pretending there aren’t trade offs, a trait not limited to the greens
Which leading economies will pay the biggest price for the Iran war? Not the US, it turns out
Great to end my first week on the @financialtimes.com economics desk working on this story with Sam and Myles
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Not unlike the Derbyshire budget meeting in where a 4.9% increase was unveiled as a tax cut (max is 4.99%)
I’m dealing with it by putting the Harry Styles Netflix thing on in my bedroom and pretending not to hear when I’m called down for tea
I have assumed there is something clever here I don’t understand about Tory strategy, which I’ve so far missed. Reform I understand slightly more, as they’re given to foreign policy (and economic) stances that are on occasion wildly out of line with more than a small % of voters
It baffles me that anyone thinks an electorate exhausted by economic precariousness, more than the sustained memory and political mythology of Iraq, would be up for it.
Presume I’m meant to respond to this with “oh shit”, but I imagine the centre of gravity in this country is roughly “glad we’re on the same page”
Yeah mine was exactly the same and made the point repeatedly to no avail. Meanwhile he was quietly indoctrinating me with long summers of Botham and Gooch and John Humphrys’ brother, who covered rugby on Wales Today
My mother disdained all of his sporting pleasures as “he’ll watch anything involving a ball”, so she was no help on the football front
I think it’s true of sport in general - localised cultures mixed up with class in a messy way. My dad came from a N Wales farming family: played every sport including football but followed cricket and rugby, not football. Which is mainly why I have no strong football inclinations
Certainly not from the matches I went to at LCCC last summer 😂
I’d add cricket tbh. Coded posh but by no means always the case
Yeah I saw someone on this thread from Cornwall describing it in a way that sounded very Welsh
The latter two categories also cross over considerably
well aware of the difference. Im Welsh and live now where I live. He said rugby
Tell that to Wales, or Wigan. Although I suppose both are getting there
Not unlike rugby union in wales
Superlative ending though
Not the main matter in hand but interested to know what that local media strategy is
I would rather not be baited into being more worried about the thing I’m already worried about
I went looking for this article online last night (it wasn’t there yet) because I suspected it wasn’t what it sounded like. But there’s an implicit glee (is that the word?) to plastering that across the top of your front and it makes me very very uneasy
