You can generalise that. People everywhere support state spending and transfers more if the resources are going to people like themselves. Why support for welfare states correlates with ethnic homogeneity. Opposite is hostility to market dominant minorities.

I think the account is mostly accurate but it has a true Pooterish quality

And ideological ones as well. It has the feeling of a ‘diamond necklace’ moment.

Barringer’s Neustria Trilogy

In other words it has succumbed to the incentives for enshittification.

He’s correct. Not only did you have midwives in both Christian and Muslim societies, it was seen as a quintessential female role. Like most fundamentalism this kind of thinking is anything but medieval, it’s actually modern chronologically and a response to modernity.

Indeed. The danger is that that kind of record distracts from the real need for structural reform of government. You can see already that ministers in this government are as frustrated as their predecessors in the Conservative one.

I think he was right about there being structural problems and about the introspection of SW1 but didn’t really work out his solution beyond “we need a lot of crazy but smart people like me in charge”. So no detail about eg the malign role of the Treasury or over centralisation

Perfectly possible that the previous government made lots of bad decisions (or bad non-decisions) and then blamed the outcome on the civil service AND that the government machinery is simply not capable of doing anything for various reasons. They aren’t incompatible.

I doubt you can get money out of politics without a revival of mass participation in it. As long as it’s conducted through and in electronic media of all kinds it will be very expensive and it will only be a question of where it comes from with getting money an end in itself.

I remember visiting my grandparents in Nelson, Lancs as a child and it was like that. No inside toilet. Mind you, I thought going outdoors to the toilet was really exciting and asked my mother when we were going to get one. Couldn’t understand why she laughed so much.

And the main reason why life expectancy at birth is no longer 33 (it was that low because a quarter of children died in the first year of life, mostly due to infant diarrhoea).

People from all political persuasions have made that point. For example it’s the one Hayek made when he said liberals needed to describe a liberal utopia if they were to compete with socialism or Eden when he spoke about a ‘property owning democracy’. All effective politicians have known this.

That’s a great coinage of a needed term. Goes with “enshittification” which just made it into the OED I believe.

It’s like being back in the seventeenth century when petitions with no actual effect were the standard way of mobilising people

Not to mention Byron’s doctor writing a novel that started off modern vampire fiction.