Well I've never heard of the cunt and he writes for TheTimes, so I am going to automatically assume he's a complete crank.
Secondly, his strategy of "just do all the things, duh" is exactly the kind of thing that it's easy for a newspaper columnist (or indeed a wanker on an imageboard) to just say, but hardly gets to the systemic root of why we are seemingly unable to just do the things. It's all well and good trying to drum up a bit of patriotism is the real problem is the fact our government and every single industry is infested top to bottom with self serving parasites.
But thirdly, I find it amusing. I really do. How you can catch a right winger off guard like this, and they basically independently come to the conclusion that individualism, free market capitalism which pits all of our interests against each other and not in alignment with each other, is the problem; and that all our problems would be solved with a return to something resembling the post-war consensus. Socialism but it's okay because it's got a union jack wrapped around it.
I'm in agreement with the general ideological tilt of this viewpoint- It's what I have always said this country wants, and wishes it could vote for, if only it had the option. But it will never have the chance to vote for it, and people like him will never own up to the fact that they are part of the establishment rigging the game to prevent it.
I've heard of Matthew Syed; he's either a very high-ranking journalist or he just gets mentioned in Private Eye a lot.
I agree with probably 90% of what he says. He's absolutely right, then he throws in some mad shit about immigration to placate the retards, and thinks that the word "entitlement" is some trenchant one-word summary of society's ills, when it patently isn't. Ultimately, I find it extremely encouraging that if Matthew Syed can see what the problem is, then maybe everyone can, and we can all start working together to tackle it.
I read once that Rachel Reeves was taking an approach to the public sector where rather than looking at what we can cut, she simply abolished it entirely and set it up again from scratch, with only the useful jobs left. This clearly isn't actually being done and you can't get rid of all the useless public-sector jobs, because many of those employees are too useless to work anywhere else and will just wind up unemployed and still being a drain on the system anyway, but I do think the idea is excellent. We built an NHS from scratch in the 1940s and it worked then; we can do it again.
I also don't really see the connection between the policies in this article, and patriotism. Nobody's going to accept a shittier life for muh flag, because every government tries that and it never works. The trust is gone and can't be got back. The article is really just trying to use it as a sales pitch to get everyone to support the radical maverick government that so many people are already crying out for. You don't need Union Jacks to get people to want to nationalise the water companies.
It's an appeal to a populist strongman of the very worst kind, the core of it is an "oh if only we had a strong leader to sweep away all the parasites, trade unions and international hyenas. And coincidentally let's rewrite the UK's laws on human rights because they get in the way".
Yes there is always institutional decay, rent-seeking and biased interest groups but that should signal the need for a national debate and clear-minded reform. The kind of 'pick-up-the-bloody-phone-ism' that you lot should love.
>Take a step back for a moment because something strange (and miraculous) occurred in the postwar period, across much of the western world. Technological change was modest compared with today, but economies grew at an unprecedented compound rate of over 3 per cent. Why? How? You’ll never find an answer from economists because this tribe — with its mathematical abstractions and models — struggles to grasp the true causes of prosperity.
>I have a small business that diagnoses company culture and you know what’s the surest sign of an impending death spiral? Let’s call it “creative evasion”. Everyone knows the company is in a hole but they blame everyone else (or every other department) except themselves. This is the UK today.
What he meant to say was "I have a preconceived idea of what's wrong and I went to Oxford so I can spin a yarn out of any old bollocks".
>Technological change was modest compared with today
Also bollocks. They were building the first nuclear power stations less than a decade after Big War #2, cars and motorways were becoming de rigour, and, oh, we invted the NH-fucking-S. Which might not technically be a "technological change", but it's a damn sight more impactful than being able to read the papers, listen to the radio and book a taxi from a small computer you keep in your pocket.
>Offshoring, aggressive tax avoidance, cronyism, welfare fraud and crime were historically low for a simple reason. There was a recognition that we were all in it together; that by harming the collective, the hive, what one historian called the “mighty abstraction of the nation state”, we were also harming ourselves.
"Rhetoric, always more rhetoric." - NSF unabummer 2 (Deus Ex, 2000)
Look, I don't know who's going to save us, but I wouldn't count on a glorified motivational speaker with a PPE degree and a background in table tennis to be the guy. Especially not after what I just read.
>>102485 All very good points. The vapidity of his argument is obvious once you realise he offers no actual vision of the day after. Once his liberal Napoleon has crushed all the special interests, what then?
Also how? Auftragstaktik is fine when you want to attack a fortified hill, but reforming the entire nation state requires a bit more direction than "go on, do it". You want to tell the resident (formally junior) doctors to do one? Well, what if they do? What if you're booted out of government half-way through your Augustan remodelling of Britain? What about when any external force of any sort mucks about with your splendidly simple plan?
I know some great people who studied there, but there are certain departments of Oxford and Cambridge that this country would do well to vaporize with a big cartoon lazer.
