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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 3h

I agree there's an element of that. But the centre-right hasn't just lost power, but has almost completely vanished: Heseltine's intervention was striking for being so rare. Here's one I wrote earlier this year: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-centre...

The centre-right: killed by economics

Economic forces lie behind the collapse of the centre-right.

chrisdillow.substack.com

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 4h

This. The Tories, Reform UK Ltd & even Labour hate the actually-existing British economy, whose comparative advantage lies in higher education & the creative industries.

Otto English @ottoenglish.bsky.social · 7h

Badenoch and Co see education only as a means to a massive income in some soul destroying career.

Devoid of imagination and the power of knowledge they view life entirely through the prism of the CV.

My advice always is to study what interests you and the rest will follow

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 4h

Yes, the flaws of capitalism were clear in 2015-19, & McDonnell was good on them. Maybe pols have learned from his defeat not to think about such things.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 4h

Good point this. The macroeconomic point of raising taxes is not to raise money but to cut consumption, thereby diverting resources to the public sector & investment. That requires taxes on the middlingly rich. Taxing the mega-rich is necessary (if not sufficient!) to legitimate such rises.

Resolution Foundation @resfoundation.bsky.social · 7h

🚨 New research published today

'Before the fall' looks at what has happened to the distribution of household wealth in Britain and the impact on families.

Read it here 👉 buff.ly/Ya8kInK

Senior Economist Molly Broome:
"Wealth gaps in Britain are now so large that a typical full-time employee saving all their earnings across their entire working life would still not be able to reach the top of the wealth ladder. These gaps are doubly concerning as wealth mobility in Britain is low – people that start life wealthy tend to stay wealthy, and vice versa.
Rising house prices and changes in the value of pension promises account for most of the growth in wealth gaps since the early 2010s, rather than any active behaviour on the part of individuals, such as buying homes or acquiring new assets.
Soaring wealth and an acute need for more revenue has prompted fresh talk of wealth taxes ahead of the Budget next month. But with property and pensions now representing 80 per cent of the growing bulk of household wealth, we need to be honest that higher wealth taxes are likely to fall on pensioners, Southern homeowners or their families, rather than just being paid by the super-rich."

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 7h

You can't have a successful economy by kowtowing to bigots who want to close the country to the rest of the world. It'd be nice if a politician had the brains or guts to point this out.

Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · 9h

Wilful ignorance of how trade and migration actually work in a globalised economy.

The idea that the (short and long-term) movement of people -especially between India and the UK - has nothing to do with trade and investment is (obviously) wrong.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 7h

Yes! There's an ideological blindspot: an inability to see that making capitalism succeed for more than a tiny minority of people requires big policy changes.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 7h

"Fiscal conservatism, monetary activism" failed to boost growth in 2010-15, so why should next time be different? (Poss answer: companies more able/willing to borrow - but is that good enough?) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Badenoch to set out new rule to cut borrowing and taxes

In a conference speech, the Tory leader will say the Conservatives are the only party

www.bbc.co.uk

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 1d

Yes there is. And ironically, he was at the time widely regarded as a duffer.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 2d

Also, "unhelpful ideological priors & vested interests" aren't mere accidents: they're an inherent feature of the human condition. It's clear that the man's a gibbering imbecile: what's not so clear is exactly why our political system is so defective as to give people like this any attention.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 2d

In P.G. Wodehouse's world, people with the IQ of a backward clam (Barmy” Fotheringay-Phipps) merely hang around in the Drones club. In our world, we vote for them.

Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 2d

Reform likely to raise Kent council tax after cost-cutting drive falters on.ft.com/4pTvJ62

Reform likely to raise Kent council tax after cost-cutting drive falters

Nigel Farage’s party promised to revive local authority finances by slashing wasteful spending

on.ft.com

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 3d

Samuelson wasn't alone. The US govt didn't kill millions of people during the cold war because they thought communism would fail; they did so because they feared it would succeed.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 3d

The Tories' problems are deeper than merely a bad leader. The centre-right has been weakened by the degradation of erstwhile professional jobs and by capitalist stagnation. Here's one I wrote earlier: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-centre...

The centre-right: killed by economics

Economic forces lie behind the collapse of the centre-right.

chrisdillow.substack.com

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 4d

Yes. I was making an empirical claim, more than an attempt at reasoning with these people.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 4d

Yes. But there's something else - that political violence often just doesn't work. How has Kirk's murder weakened Trumpism, or the Manchester murders advanced the cause of the Palestinians? Trotsky was good on this: www.marxists.org/archive/trot...

Leon Trotsky: Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism (1911)

Leon Trotsky: Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism (1909)

www.marxists.org

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 5d

The man was Bill Woodward, who owned a chain of hairdressers' shops in Leicester.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 5d

You're right, no proper journo would fall for that. I would, however, expect them to work very hard to answer the most important question of the day - if she is any relation to Alan Mullally, the former Leicestershire seam bowler.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 6d

That's not a vice that's confined to Marxists.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 6d

You're preaching to the choir! There's no question that class has a scarring effect even upon those of us who escape our class origins.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 6d

Yes, but quite a few of those proletarians with bourgeois habits discovered the reality of class when they lost their jobs. Also, these days even people in fancy well-paid jobs don't own even their own house, so they're proletarian in a sense their 70s/80s counterparts were not.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 6d

Seeing talk on here about class makes me wish people could at least acknowledge the Marxian point that class is not just another form of identity politics, but is about one's relationship to the means of production - eg I'm now bourgeois whatever my upbringing, prejudices etc.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 6d

The cost of cyber attacks isn't just (or even mainly) the lost production caused by successful attacks. It's the diversion of clever people into preventing such attacks when they could instead be doing creative work.

Tony Tassell @tonytassell.bsky.social · 6d

Japan is just a few days away from running out of Asahi Super Dry as the producer of the nation’s most popular beer wrestles with a devastating cyber attack that has shut down its domestic breweries www.ft.com/content/bb86...

Japan days away from running out of Asahi Super Dry after cyber attack

Vast majority of factories of nation’s most popular beer have stopped work this week

www.ft.com

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 6d

This looks like a version of the dictator paradox. Trying to suppress some attitudes doesn't necessarily eliminate them, but makes them harder to detect by those in power, & harder to measure their prevalence. tps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgq06d44jyo

Secret BBC filming exposes hidden culture of racism and misogyny inside Met Police

Panorama undercover investigation captures evidence that

www.bbc.co.uk

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 6d

Quite. The thing is that demographic change favours social liberalism, but not necessarily obvious forms of pro-capitalism. That's awkward for Toryism.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 6d

But can the Tories be revived? What is their potential class base? How can they distinguish themselves from Reform given that Lib Dems are more credibly socially liberal? Is it just an accident that their personnel are so unimpressive? (etc)

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 7d

Why should we regard "racist" as a simple binary either/or category? Why not instead regard it as a spectrum, ranging from definitely racist through degrees of racist encouragers, enablers etc?

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