July 27-August 2, 2024
SATURDAY 27 Labour won its landslide victory on a promise of change. It was generally presumed that this would begin with some “quick wins”, low-cost changes that have immediate impact. This hasn’t really happened, yet. But there is the suggestion in a New Statesman article by Andrew Marr that it actually has started to happen. By emphasising not the WHAT of change but of the HOW, Starmer, et al, are slowly carving out a new way. Marr predicts, for example, big wage increases for teachers and nurses. Pulling this off peacefully will show how Labour can do things differently. Keeping education and health workers onside, along with their unions, is a win and a clue to how Labour intends to rebuild Britain’s economy. The same idea will surface at the Home Office in its handling of migration. Marr predicts the soft introduction of an identity-card system as a precondition to getting a job, or benefits, or healthcare, etc. These are all WHATS that carry easy general acceptance, and the HOWS will demonstrate competence in making them happen. That’s a long-term win dressed up as a short-term victory.
SUNDAY 28 Today will be shorter than usual because last night we went to our friend Sandra’s birthday party in Piano Smithfield and carried on dancing until 3am.
đź“Ś We finished The Jetty, a thoroughly depressing police drama about a community in which the sexual exploitation of young women was endemic, and started ShĹŤgun, a drama based in 17th Century Japan in which western mercantile culture is pitched against brutally feudal Japanese hierarchies.
MONDAY 29 As he gets to work trying to drag the UK economy out of its coffin, Keir Starmer might profit from a message shared by two recent articles – one by Lawrence Freedman at Comment Is Freed, the other by Paul Mason in the New European. The last boils down to Britain being catastrophically unprepared to deal with emergent crises such as the 2008 global financial crash and more recently Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine. Mason, natch, argues, for the state to get a grip…
The free-market era did not just hollow out the state. It mandated its operation in a systemically risky way. And the price of each crisis gets higher: the financial crisis lifted UK debt from 60% to 80% of GDP; Covid lifted it close to 100%; and the Ukraine war lifted the cost of servicing that debt fourfold.
đź“Ś Watching Chancellor Rachel Reeves making her statement to Parliament on the state of the nation’s purse I heard her steal one of my ideas. Some time last year, when TV’s Line of Duty was still in the public mind, I suggested in this scrapbook that the government could benefit from its own anti-corruption unit similar to AC12, with a leader not unlike Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar, now in Kiss Me Kate). Reeves added to the workload of such an embyonic unit with a separate team of detectives not unlike Steve and Kate that will ferret out all the taxpayers’ money the last government bunged to its rich friends, and get it back in the state’s coffers to spend on stuff like health and education. As I remember, the genius of this idea, I suggested at the time, was that as each dirty deed of squandering public money is revealed by the investigative team, the government can remind the public of what a deeply corrupt outfit the previous government was, and never to be trusted with their money ever again.
đź“Ś The Knowledge reports of a letter published in the Times quoting a notice in the window of a Dublin book store…
Shoplifters will be made to read Ulysses. If we catch you twice it’s Finnegans Wake.
TUESDAY 30 Katie, our financial adviser, came round and basically urged us to get on with buying a very expensive apartment. My wife is nervous about that, whereas I’m all in, bring it on, tell me when, get it done, etc.
đź“Ś A report on BBC Radio 4 suggested that the design of the Parisian Olympic swimming pool might have cost Team GB swimmer Adam Peaty a gold medal. The report stated that the pool in which Peaty was pushed into second place by 2/100th of a second is shallower than other Olympic standard pools, which results in a greater degree of churn as swimmers sprint to the finish. This sounds plausible. But the Italian swimmer who won gold was in the next lane to Peaty, and presumably just as disadvantaged by this alleged churn as Peaty was.
WEDNESDAY 31 Incest, witchcraft and espionage were among the accusations levelled by fake news merchants at foreign queens in 15th Century England, says an article in the Conversation. Joan of Navarre was a spy, apparently, Jaquetta of Luxembourg a witch. Spreading rumours about kings was punishable in law, but not for queens.
đź“Ś Nice to hear the Seine has been declared clean and Olympic events can go ahead as planned.
đź“Ś A powerfully honest and direct essay in the New Statesman pricks the inflated messaging on a potential victory for Kamala Harris in November’s US presidential elections. If she does win, it predicts, it will be by a very slim margin. Ditto Trump. This roughly 50-50 outcome is becoming as predictable in the US as it was for the 2016 UK Brexit vote. The slim winners in these elections rarely try to find a way to govern on behalf of the people who didn’t vote for them. And so it is bogus for the United States of America to think for one minute that it is in any way united at all. The same applies to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
đź“Ś It’s amazing what you get excited about when the BBC coverage of the Olympic Games is restricted because the Discovery Plus streaming channel has bought up all the transmission rights. Today we were mesmerised by the two-wheel acrobatics in the BMX finals.
THURSDAY 1 Frank Skinner was on the radio talking about class and wealth. He joked that there should be a special rate of Inheritance Tax for people who worked their way up from nothing, “and not lump them in with the Rees-Mogg children.”
đź“Ś Keir Starmer doesn’t stand a chance of repairing broken relations with Europe unless he first keeps the promises the UK has already made in the various deals it has with the EU, says an article in the FT. This strikes me as a golden opportunity, especially in relation to Northern Ireland, where a micro economic revolution is waiting to happen in trade relations.
đź“Ś For this week’s Headway writing group, I submitted two stories, one titled Paris and the other Fishy Tea.
đź“Ś We were unable to visit this evening’s Open Studio because I had double booked with an Imagine Fund awards panel meeting. My wife was not happy about that.
FRIDAY 2 We went with Brian to Tate Modern for the Yoko Ono exhibition. One of the exhibits was a sound recording of a flushing toilet, another was a film of Yoko having her clothes cut off her seated body by a succession of different people. The whole exhibition was an adventure playground of conceptual art. My favourite exhibit was of a fly settled and grooming itself atop a nipple, to the soundtrack of a suckling baby.
Inevitably, there were several rooms in which visitor contributions were encouraged, so I thought why not.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 