There are some policy issues on which almost everybody is sufficiently dissatisfied that the situation is universally agreed to constitute a ‘crisis’. And frustratingly - or conveniently - often people have different, contradictory, perceptions of what the problem is. The ‘housing crisis’ is not just one thing, but many complaints rolled together, ditto childcare or social care. Over recent months and years, English higher education has reached a similar point, with widespread recognition that something has gone wrong, but surprisingly little appreciation that people are upset about different things. It’s worth pulling that bundle apart.

The proximate problem is institutional finances. Around 45% of the sector is in deficit and 50 institutions face some risk of closure, leading to thousands of job losses. The continued freezing of tuition fees, even as costs have gone up, has squeezed university balance sheets.

But a second complaint runs in the opposite direction - there is also a broad sense that students are having to pay too much. And it forks again: some object to the level of repayments, the effective 9% marginal tax; others to the interest rate and the difficulty of clearing the debt.

A third worry is quieter but deeper: that going to university isn’t worth it. A fourth set of concerns is more cultural: grade inflation, ‘wokery’, regulatory overreach, a general sense standards have slipped.

The trouble is that these diagnoses point in different ways when it comes to remedies. Raising fees or cutting student numbers might steady the finances but inflames students’ sense of grievance and creates social justice worries about access. Loosening repayment terms eases the burden on graduates but adds to the government’s bill. Until you say which crisis you mean, "fixing higher education" is an empty phrase.

The easy answer is to say that the government should increase its grant funding of universities, but it’s only easy until you look at the tightness of the public finances. And even if the government had cash to spare, it’s far from obvious that universities should be a priority compared even to other bits of the education system, being far better resourced than schools and colleges and having largely been protected from austerity in the Coalition era. FE colleges have been as likely to be in deficit, and financially squeezed for longer, without anything like the attention given to universities.

Source: IFS

I don’t think there is any one thing that underpins all of these complaints, but if I had to try and boil it down, the single biggest issue might be consumerism and marketisation. The current settlement reflects a bet that student choice and competition between institutions will allocate learners to places efficiently, and exert a disciplining force on universities, pushing them to be higher quality and more responsive. Conveniently that also allows the government to step back and minimises its responsibilities. Trouble is, that current settlement is creaking on all sides.

Start with funding. We pay for universities mainly through student fees, which are capped by the government and mostly paid for via income-contingent loans. Endless energy goes into arguing over whether this is better or worse than a ‘graduate tax’, but as I’ve said before it basically already is a graduate tax. Worse, it’s a graduate tax with some weird design features that make it less progressive (if you’re rich you can pay it off early), and hypothecated: because the student loans system is parallel to the tax system, the revenue raised is only used to fund universities.

To give it its due, this system has been remarkably successful in two ways. As a stealth tax: call it a ‘tuition fee loan’, and it turns out a 9% marginal tax rate can go largely unnoticed for years (it helps when the burden falls on young people who don’t vote). And as a ring-fence, guaranteeing HE an income stream insulated from an annual scramble against the NHS and pensions. But the ruse has been rumbled: people have cottoned on to their high marginal taxes. And the ring-fence has failed on its own terms: politics always intrudes, with politicians still setting the cap and the repayment terms, and per student funding now back where it was 20 to 35 years ago. It would be better to call time on the games, call a spade a spade and do a proper graduate tax.

Then there’s choice, which has always functioned rather awkwardly in the education ‘market’. We are quite far from the economics textbook of how a market functions: you only buy your degree once, you can’t judge it until it’s over, and the buyer is barely an adult. Far from incentivising providers to teach better, the incentive is to dumb down, inflate grades and offer gimmicks. Students might get what they want but not what they need. This is in part why the sector regulator is so unloved - because it operates as a consumer protection agency, seeking to ferret out mis-selling rather than defending quality. What has long bothered me is how little effort government makes to understand what students actually learn. The contrast with the machinery that surrounds schools — inspection, fair exam-based benchmarks — is staggering.

As for competition, the mechanism intended to make this all work, it has proved - in the sector’s language - ‘nugatory’. Higher-tier institutions lower their entry tariffs to poach students, courses are duplicated wastefully, ‘cold spots’ remain where the losers retreat. Aggressive recruitment produces feast and famine: bulging class sizes and creaking facilities in some places, others shrinking towards closure.

But it’s not just me. A couple of recent think tank reports suggest that the wonk class is converging on a shared diagnosis, even if the wider discourse hasn’t quite caught up. Tarnished Towers by Policy Exchange from last month, and John Blake’s April paper Blood, debt, toil and arrears for the Post-18 Project, have a lot in common, as Jonathan Simons observes:

Both reports say the fees and loan system has run out of road. Student choice doesn’t work. The sector is both too heavily and too lightly regulated. Bad actors can flourish. The question of international students needs to be taken seriously…Different starting philosophies. Some difference in policy solutions (though not always). Almost identical problem diagnoses.

The striking thing about Tarnished Towers (which I’ll focus on in this post) is where it comes from. A right-wing think tank, nominally committed to free markets, has looked at the marketised university and concluded that greater planning, regulation and state oversight is needed. True believers like Jonathan defending the status quo are looking more and more beleaguered.

I don’t agree with everything the Policy Exchange paper suggests, but there’s a lot I would endorse. In particular, they give due attention to ascertaining and improving educational quality, recognising the harm market incentives have done to it, and moving away from a system that uses institutional autonomy as a shield against scrutiny.

Capping the share of top grades to check inflation, as PX suggests, makes some sense.1 The increase in the share of Firsts is literally incredible: at 29% in 2024 compared to 16% in 2011, though it has been coming down since the pandemic. But a flat cap across the system sits awkwardly with our academically selective system - you’d expect more first-class work at institutions that have chosen the most able students - so it would be better for any limit to be institution or course-specific.

My favourite recommendation is for a standardised national exit exam testing verbal, mathematical and reasoning skills. This would measure whether students actually improve over their degrees, and could anchor the grade quotas in something real rather than blunt across-the-board caps.

Universities hate being treated as big schools (to an irrational extent in my experience), but Policy Exchange are in no mood to tiptoe around such sentiments. They call for periodic quality reviews with inspectors on the ground - and lest anybody miss the analogy, they suggest the review process be overseen by someone with experience of Ofsted, the English schools inspectorate. The idea is less alien than it seems: between 1992 and 2001 university subject teams did undergo hands-on ‘Teaching Quality Assessments’. It would certainly be helpful to have independent expert judgement to supplement students’ own perceptions.

To manage competition, they echo the common call for institution-level student number caps, as before 2015, plus consolidation via area reviews that coordinate what's offered where — the same planned logic already being applied to FE colleges. It certainly represents an intellectual shift towards a planned system, and away from the open market.

PX’s response to the funding crisis is also more state. Today, in England, the state contributes less than a quarter, mostly through written off student loans (by comparison, the government takes on 39% of the cost in the US, or 84% in Germany). The Policy Exchange report proposes shifting that balance, continuing to let inflation erode the value of tuition fees, but replacing it with direct government grants. This is framed as making the public subsidy more transparent, but they rather give the game away by immediately suggesting using grants to nudge institutions towards government favoured degree courses (more money for STEM, zero for creative arts). I’m not opposed to such market steering in principle - and elected politicians should certainly exert democratic control over state HE funding - but the political beauty contest between subjects could be quite unedifying.

The boldest proposal of all — a 30% cut in domestic student numbers, phased over five years — deserves a post of its own, because it turns on a genuine dilemma: fewer students better resourced, or wider access spread thinner? My instinct is that the direction is right but the number too high: cuts of that magnitude could genuinely be catastrophic for institutional survival.

That’s emblematic of my overall assessment of the Policy Exchange report. I’m sympathetic to the diagnosis they make, and think they’ve done a valuable job in stating it so plainly. But the medicine is too strong and might be worse than the disease. Can we reduce the dosage?

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Book: Last week I read Inside the Box by David Epstein, which tries to explain how constraints help people be effective, creative and collaborative across business, arts, sport and society more generally. It’s a fine example of pop science writing, weaving together scientific evidence with a litany of fun illustrative stories. The central case at the heart of the book is Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodic table - which, according to myth came to him in a dream, a supposed illustration of the power of random inspiration, when in reality it was accelerated by his need to finish some diagrams to meet a book deadline. The patron saint of the book is Herbert Simon, godfather of behavioural economics, and proponent of ‘bounded rationality’ and ‘satisficing’ - doing what is good enough rather than seeking perfection. Simon also loomed over my PhD, which - like Epstein’s book - was interested in the drawbacks of choice. So I’m very sympathetic to the core argument that constraints can be productive - I mean, I write these posts on a weekly basis to force me to record and refine my thoughts rather than passively consuming stuff. At the same time, I worry that Epstein is arguing against a bit of a straw man (though it’s a view he himself seems to have held at an earlier point): the extreme view that total freedom is the idea. In practice, the question we usually face is how much constraint is necessary without crushing joy or initiative. Abolishing management is unhelpful, but micro-management is bad too. I’m not sure Epstein is that much use in striking the balance. Epstein also hints at the political implications of his ideas without pursuing them. There’s something a bit post-liberal about the idea that we in modern society have too many options without the tethers and guidelines that orient people and keep them grounded. But what does that practically mean? Should we use law and politics to reinforce cultural homogeneity and social norms, from support for religious organisations, traditional families etc - or is that too far, and why? Epstein implicitly raises these sorts of questions (he even cites Durkheim!), but given the genre I suppose it’s fair enough he doesn’t resolve them.

Article (1): The Doomers Are All Right by Ozy Brennan (Asterisk). I move in circles where it is not uncommon for people to believe there is a huge risk of human extinction or a similarly catastrophic event in the next few years. It’s a bit of a head trip, to put it mildly. So I appreciated this piece trying to understand how people feel about such possibilities, and how they continue to live their lives. The responses are surprisingly mature, sympathetic and even wise. Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, we are all living with our mortality and it is hardly uncommon for people to have terminal diagnoses that mean they have to face death every day. And as far as I can tell the best way forward is to keep going, perhaps with a greater appreciation of the things that make life precious. Cliches are cliches for a reason.

Article (2): Should People Avoid Whole-Body Screening Info? by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten). I’ve been annoying people for a while (particularly since I read The Age of Diagnosis at the start of the year) arguing that excessive medical testing of otherwise healthy young people is often likely to do more harm than good. This is counterintuitive - more information usually seems better. Yet in many cases, screening is more likely to pick up something benign that causes unnecessary anxiety and treatment than actually. That’s the argument the UK’s National Screening Committee recently made to resist campaigns for mass prostate cancer screening in men. So I found Scott Alexander’s back of the envelope analysis as to whether full body screening is worth it valuable in sharpening my thinking. I was struck by how finely poised the balance of reasons is, with substantial uncertainty and reliant on judgement calls. That suggests the value of screening will really vary depending what specifically we are testing for.

Podcast: Stefan Dercon on Implementing Elite Bargains (Africa Urban Lab Podcast). Four years ago, Stefan Dercon published a book arguing that ‘elite bargains’ - whereby the powerful members of a society agree to invest in the productive economy rather than squabbling over rents - are necessary to support growth in poor countries. In this interesting discussion, describes the process of taking that idea outside of the academy and attempting to actually facilitate some of those bargains via governments. It’s a tricky task, having to be pragmatic in terms of the governments you work with and the policies you pursue, while recognising the risk of being used by governments that don’t want to change. Dercon’s own unwilling celebrity in Pakistan as he tries to relax import controls highlights the perils of navigating those choppy waters.

Live Comedy: I saw Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf (Grand Opera House, York). I laughed a lot, the main thing. He’s still technically excellent. He’s still meta. He seems to do fewer interminable sections where he repeats the same joke. By this stage, he seems bored by conventional stand-up and it feels like he’s setting himself challenges to stay interested (the sort of creative constraint David Epstein would love?) . What was striking about the set was the number of different comedic styles he took on - not just three different personae of different political perspectives, but a few turns at visual and slapstick humour. It didn’t all work for me, but I’m not sure I would expect it to. Still a good time.

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The risk of lead poisoning runs across the UK, but it is not evenly spread. The highest prevalence, according to our estimates, is in Wales. In the worst affected constituencies, Cardiff West and Llanelli, near 3 per cent of children could have worryingly high blood lead levels. In most Northern Irish and Scottish constituencies, almost 2 per cent of children are at risk of lead poisoning. Higher concentrations are also found in a band across the north west of England, and pockets of the north east, West Midlands and east London. Things look a bit better in the south east – but even in the least exposed constituencies hundreds of children appear to have high levels of lead poisoning.

There’s an interactive map so you can see for yourself where your constituency ranks and how many children could be at risk in your area. And if you’re doing that, please do contact your MP to alert them to the issue and encourage them to do something about it.

Read the full article here.

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Book: Last week I read The Power and The Glory by Jonathan Wilson, which I think is already the definitive history of the competition (with apologies to Brian Glanville and Michael Coleman). Wilson is many things - tactics writer, reporter - but above all he is a historian, and he has the historian’s nose for quirky detail, odd connections and the macro trends that sit behind events. It is something of a shame, then, that my conclusion from the book is that the World Cup is overrated. A through line of the book is that the World Cup has always been the way it is today: chaotically managed (it was a struggle to get teams to enter in the early years), politicised (they didn’t play national anthems for most of the 1966 World Cup so the UK could avoid recognising North Korea), and exploited by unsavoury regimes (Mexico 1970 and Argentina 1978 both took place in the shadow of human rights abuses). The cliche is that we can overlook the off-field ugliness because of the beauty on the pitch, but we shouldn’t exaggerate the quality of play either. Wilson is clear eyed about how dull many tournaments have been, how the quality has lagged behind the club game, and how often caution and defensiveness have trumped skill and flair. The World Cup has rarely been the tactical vanguard of the sport - the most interesting teams of the past 60 years - the Netherlands in 1974 and Spain in 2010 - were later and less effective versions of club teams (the total football of PSV and Ajax, the tiki taka of Barcelona). I’m also sceptical that the World Cup brings people together and fosters benign nationalism. As often, it has inflamed tensions and encouraged bigotry, from the soccer war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 to troubled matches between England and Argentina after the Falklands War. The reality is that it is in club football that players from all around the world rub shoulders, that fans are all but forced to cheer for players from a diverse set of nations, and cultures and poured together into a melting pot (or, as Michael Cox would put it, the mixer). I’ll still watch it1, but the notion that the World Cup represents the best of football, in any sense, seems clearly wrong to me.

Paper: Political Identity Beyond Politics: The Messi-Ronaldo Preference Across 26 Countries by Ahmed et al (SSRN). When I wrote about Mohamed Salah a few months back, the thing most people commented on was my reference to a survey that showed that people on the political left preferred Lionel Messi to Cristiano Ronaldo, and those on the right felt the opposite. Fun news: a new paper surveying people across 26 countries replicated the finding, with political ideology the strongest individual-level predictor of preference for one footballer over the other. Those who get their news from short-form video, and who have a stronger sense of self-esteem are also more likely favour Ronaldo, while more cognitively reflective people prefer Messi. Also South Koreans yield to nobody in their distaste for Ronaldo. There’s a lot here, and a lot of fun room to speculate: clearly Messi’s quiet, humble, less individualistic approach resonates more with those on the liberal left. But as some people pointed out to me, it isn’t obvious the sorting would work this way: we could imagine a world in which Messi’s collectivist, family values values, his divinely ordained gifts would appeal more to the right. Yet those values feel almost quaint in the current political context, harking back to an earlier conservatism. Intriguingly, the effect of political Messi-Ronaldo divide was stronger among younger people, perhaps signposting the direction of political arguments for years to come.

Podcast: The Levellers (In Our Time). In Our Time, the delightfully anachronistic BBC radio show where academic experts are interviewed on a different topic each week, has held up remarkably well in my view after losing its iconic host Melvyn Bragg. This episode begins with (I think) the very reasonable claim that the intellectual influence of the English civil war is underestimated, and discusses one of the more interesting movements that emerged in that period. The Levellers were quashed pretty quickly in the 17th Century, but I left persuaded that they were more strongly committed to the idea of basic human equality than almost any political group before them - which makes them an important part of the story of moral and political progress.

Live Music: I went to see Belle & Sebastian at Piece Hall in Halifax, performing the entirety of the album If You’re Feeling Sinister to mark its 30th anniversary. As a birthday activity I can recommend going to an event where people a bit older than you are feeling nostalgic for something you don’t remember from first time around to make you feel young. I would have preferred a 20th anniversary performance of The Life Pursuit, an album I recall vividly from my final months at school, but the one song they performed from that album - Another Sunny Day, a song set in midsummer, played on a midsummer night - was perfect. It was also my first time in Halifax, which is beautiful! Grand sandstone buildings set against the spectacular natural setting of the Pennine Hills. And part of the draw of this show was the venue, an 18th Century cloth market, with a large open courtyard that reminded me as much as anything of Somerset House.

Food: I’ve already sung the praises of Skosh (York), but I’ll do it again since I hired out the private room with some friends for my birthday. On theme, they’re celebrating their birthday too (10 years), and have been putting on a ‘greatest hits’ menu of the best dishes they’ve done so far. As a result, everything was consistently top notch, but probably my favourite thing was the crisp, fluffy potato and hispi cabbage okonomiyaki (Japanese pancake). Outstanding.

Book: Last week I read It’s Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong as a themed reading to coincide with my trip to Kenya - and it fit the brief perfectly. The book tells the story of the Anglo-Leasing corruption scandal of the mid-2000s, and more generally the dashed hopes for a cleaner politics following the election of President Mwai Kibaki in 2002, and the wider social and historical context that led to that outcome. It’s depressingly resonant today: almost everybody I spoke to was disenchanted with the government and disgusted with politicians. And yet a paradox remains: however rotten the political system is, it seems to be delivering results. Health, economic, infrastructural indicators have generally improved - often substantially in the past 25 years - and as a visitor the country feels remarkably functional for a country with an apparently rotten political system. I think Wrong would say I’m falling into the same trap as generations of aid donors, overlooking crookedness and venality because I’m dazzled by the metrics. And I was genuinely shocked by the account in the book of of development institutions from the World Bank to DfID failing to exert the power they had to support anti-corruption efforts. But equally I think Wrong goes too far in downplaying the good that aid can and has done (another striking feature of my Kenya visit - the number of USAID stickers in medical settings) - and thus the costs of withholding funding. There’s much more to the book, including interesting discussions of tribal, economic and linguistic divisions - in particular, the dominance and resentment of the Kikuyu. Given the timing of the events, the contested 2007 election cast a shadow over most of the book, but when they came I found the descriptions of the violence horrifying and heartbreaking. I hadn’t appreciated just how traumatising those events still are - with an election coming next year, people are already anxious over the risk of old tensions being inflamed. I truly hope it’s not as bad as they fear.

Article: I read and disagreed with Labour needs a contest, not a coronation by George Eaton (Arguably). George argues that “Burnham deserves more scrutiny as a putative prime minister, rather than merely a by-election candidate, and Labour needs to decide what it is truly for”. I agree that it would be good to have a test of Burnham’s abilities as a PM, of running a government. But a leadership election would only test his abilities as a campaigner, which aren’t really in question. My worry is that any leadership election would just encourage gimmicky policy commitments that would make the job of governing harder (did the 2022 leadership contest strengthen the Tory PM candidates or encourage a dumb bidding war?). I also just don’t think there is a big important philosophical divide to put to the members. I really don’t think an argument about fiscal policy is helpful or enlightening (it’s not 2010), I’m not convinced nationalisation is actually that big a deal (it’s not the 1980s). How much and how quickly to spend on defence would be a worthwhile debate but I don’t believe that’s what we would get. In any case, all of the political philosophy arguments would (rightly given the threat!) be subordinated to the question of who can beat Farage. And I don’t think we need a membership vote to resolve that question.

Film: I watched Aapish (Office), a Bengali film about the parallel lives of a middle class woman and her domestic servant, charting their shared feminist struggles to achieve power and independence within their relationships and society. It wasn’t great: I found the plotting heavy-handed and the acting stagey. But I’m just fascinated by the strange relationship between rich families and their servants (White Tiger is one of my favourite novels), and this film takes an interesting line in highlighting the mutual dependence - demonstrating it’s not just the poorer women who relies upon her employer for her livelihood and career. It’s all a bit Hegelian. The movie is also intriguing because in its crude feminism it is unclear what the moral of the story should be: is domestic service a good, mutually beneficial, even necessary thing? The pat answer would be to say men need to do their part - but in the Indian context, the film struggles to suggest either that the husbands could be reformed or that the women might be better off without them.

Live Sport: I went to see Australia v Bangladesh and India v Netherlands at the Women’s T20 Cricket World Cup, the most exciting World Cup right now (even for Scotland - I wish I had gone to last night’s near-upset as well). Both games were relatively sedate early round fixtures, in which the favourites came through comfortably. A few reflections:

• It’s a privilege to get to see Ellyse Perry play (and get player of the match again, like the other time I saw her). Absurdly impressive that one of the best cricketers in the world has also scored a goal at the football World Cup.

• Smriti Mandhana is so elegant.

• DJing sporting events is hard, but I find the music at these sorts of events a bit intrusive.

• Kids really like counting, huh? There were a bunch of school groups and they were most excited for the countdowns (before each innings, every DRS check).

Food: Between coming back from Kenya, and taking the week off for my birthday, I have eaten an obscene amount of food across a number of cities. beit é selam, a stylish pan-African restaurant in Nairobi was probably the best meal I had in Kenya (blackened cauliflower). I finally tried Padella in London, which is top tier as advertised - though I’d say Notto and Bancone offer more pleasant atmospheres and comparable quality pasta. Dosa at Tharavadu. But probably the highlight was taking advantage of an extended break in the cricket to eat at Lupe’s Cantina (Leeds), an unpromising place that looks like a converted garage by the side of the road but which serves the best tortillas I’ve had up north. I ate enfrijoladas, which involved the best kind of corn and bean mush, while my brother might have bested me with fish tacos in a delightfully delicate batter.

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Book: Last week I read The Formula for Better Health by Tom Frieden. Tom was head of the Centers for Disease Control under Barack Obama (most famously overseeing the response to Ebola), and health commissioner in New York City under Michael Bloomberg. This book - part memoir, part manifesto - distils his accumulated wisdom from over thirty years of working in public health. Tom loves a catchy framework (ideally with an accompanying acronym: he extols the virtues of ‘technical packages’ like DOTS for tuberculosis, or HEARTS for blood pressure control), and this book is centred around the formula ‘See/Believe/Create’. The interesting implication is that figuring out what to do and implementing (the ‘Create’ part) it is not necessarily the main part of the problem when it comes to making progress on public health problems. As significant, and more easily overlooked, is ‘Seeing’ (identifying the problem and acknowledging it), and ‘Believing’ (generating the will and motivation to address the issue). I think a few years ago I would have been more sceptical of this claim. But bitter experience has demonstrated how resistant people are to acknowledging the invisible forces that drive outcomes until they are obvious. I’ve had too many conversations where people treat a ‘counterfactual’ as some sort of nefarious witchcraft, a tendency exacerbated by the populist inclination to insist that social problems must be simple and easily legible. There is a reason I love to quote Bastiat’s parable of the glazier, which urges us to attend to “that which is not seen”. But I was as compelled by the part about ‘believing’. Tom is very American - in the best way, in this context - exhibiting a can do attitude that inspires ambition and dissolves cynicism that problems that have festered for generations are inescapable. Part of what was most moving in this book were the stories, of Tom’s personal achievements on TB control, but of the various mentors and exemplars who refused to accept death and suffering and kept going with the ‘resolve to save lives’ (as Tom’s organisation is called). We would do well to honour their example.

Article: American football is bad for the brain. Football - soccer - is the beneficiary by Joey D’Urso. With the World Cup starting today, it’s a good time to sign up for Joey’s Substack, which explores the economic and social world around football. This was a typically thought provoking post, making a plausible argument that the success of football is in part down to its relative safety, involving less traumatic impact than other sports (heading aside), and thus carrying less risk of death or even severe injury.

Film: Marty Supreme. I thought this movie was fine, kind of diverting, but also fairly annoying. I found the style - big ‘80s sports movie soundtrack over a ‘50s period piece - a little distracting and pretentious. The predictable discourse over whether we’re supposed to sympathise with the main character is already tedious. It reminded me of Anora, another zany stress comedy I didn’t care for - though this is funnier and less icky. Mostly I wish the film cared more about table tennis - I think the story of a delusional chancer trying to sell the world on ping pong would have been enough without the sex and crime and absurdly heightened drama.

Podcast: OnlyFantasy (up to episode 4). The sudden and rapid growth of OnlyFans, supercharged by the pandemic, is a great premise for a podcast series. This one gets clients and performers to open up on the nature of the work and the relationships they forged. Maybe I was too cynical, but I’ve been surprised by how often performers seem to feel genuine care and affection for their clients - wanting to be a set of social training wheels rather than an emotional crutch. That said, I am conscious that the stories of people with deep and complex emotional needs are more interesting than those on the platform for sexual gratification, so there may be bias in the emphasis. Episode 4, on scams, was the best so far. There was a frank interview with a former ‘chatter’, hired to form part of a legion of stand ins pretending to be a popular performer. There was also a loathsome agency executive, arguing unconvincingly that clients fobbed off on ‘chatters’ probably know they are being deceived, that they are being saved from even less scrupulous actors, and that in any case the agency are heroes for doing something about the loneliness epidemic. It’s not a judgemental series (maybe a bit too liberal to my taste), but it does give people the rope to hang themselves.

Food and Drink: I’ve been in Kenya for work the last few days, and sampled a few local delicacies, including arrowroot (very dense and starchy) and ugali (cornmeal porridge, which I enjoyed more than other people seemed to - but then I really like polenta and upma). If you’re a regular reader (or viewer of my bad photography) you will know I generally care about taste over appearance, and am not too swayed by aesthetics and ambience. However, the most remarkable experience of the week so far has been a drink at dusk at Dunga Hill Kamp, Kisumu - simply for the spectacular sunset view over Lake Victoria.

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Last week the Conservative policy researcher Iain Mansfield made a provocative argument:

“The state needs to just get completely out of the international development business….there's simply no cause for Government to be involved in this - when debt is at 95% of GDP, and anger at the cost of living is fuelling populists to the right and left. It's not even popular (which would at least be an excuse, if not a good one). Those who generously wish to give their own money to this cause - Oxfam and the Against Malaria Foundation are right there. Go right ahead; knock yourself out. But let's put an end to the wealthy and privileged spending other people's money to salve their own consciences”.

My first response is that this seems rather gratuitous - the British government has already slashed foreign aid dramatically, imposing deeper cuts than the Trump administration, and is reportedly considering cutting it further. Why is Iain continuing to hack at the bloody stumps that remain? I suppose he would argue that the £9 billion a year we’ll still be spending on aid is still £9 billion too much, even if it is a rounding error compared to the £1,400 billion the government spends in total each year.

But to Iain’s point, why is this a matter for government, rather than charity? For many of the same reasons that helping poor people in the UK is not just a matter of private charity. Governments operate at a different scale and can coordinate activity in a way all but the largest international charities cannot. Against Malaria Foundation is an excellent organisation, but in practice it works alongside the Global Fund, which draws together dozens of donor governments to sustain malaria (and HIV and TB) financing at a scale no private donor could replicate. There aren’t many charities that could finance and help design improvements to health systems, second bureaucrats to provide technical assistance to other governments, or coordinate funds that help poor countries navigate fiscal and economic crises. And the charities that could do these sorts of things would struggle to fundraise since it wouldn’t occur to most ordinary people to fund this sort of activity.

There are benefits to pooling our resources and delegating them to people whose job it is to understand how and where they are needed.

However, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that efficiency is the only reason to do redistribution through taxation rather than charity. Left to their own devices, a lot of people wouldn’t help the poor, and so many of us support using the coercive power of the state to require contributions from them through taxation. Libertarians think this is unjust expropriation. My view, which I think is more widely shared, is that tolerating poverty is worse than forcing the rich to share a little of their resources. The question is whether this solidarity extends beyond borders.

Most people seem to have made peace with redistributive taxation and some form of welfare state. It’s less clear they’re happy to be taxed to help poor people in other countries. For years, overseas aid has been the least popular type of government spending, with 60% of British people ranking it in their top three priority areas for the government to cut. And when the government has cut the aid budget, those moves have invariably had majority support.

So I feel some of the force of Iain’s argument that foreign aid can look like an elite driven project, running roughshod over popular preference. And it stings harder because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the tendency of politicians to overstate their mandate and to act as ‘elected dictators’, imposing their idiosyncratic policy tendencies over the public’s. In particular, the argument that there is a ‘representation gap’ between voters and the people who elect them, a principal-agent problem, where voters cannot trust the people they elect to do what they want them to.

A standard move here is to point to voters’ ignorance. Surveys regularly show that citizens wildly overestimate how much the country spends on aid. For example, a 2013 Ipsos survey found that 26% of British people thought that aid was among the top three spending items for the government. Only 18% think development aid is effective, despite its role in saving millions of lives each year.

This ignorance may be rational. It is understandable that most people have busy lives and don’t engage that closely with politics or policy, particularly on foreign aid, which is so distant from their everyday experience.1 It’s the other side of the division of labour I described earlier, with voters handing off the task of understanding aid to the representatives and officials, so they don’t need to worry about it. But the more you outsource your thinking on a topic, the weaker your grounds to object to policies you don’t fully comprehend.

I would still be worried if I thought that people’s informed preference was to eliminate foreign aid. But given there is almost no prospect of discovering those informed preferences, we’ll never know. One study found that informing people how small foreign aid is as a proportion of total government spending does slightly reduce opposition to aid, but 50% still say we are spending too much (down from 62%). A deliberative poll conducted in the US in 2003 found that facilitating discussions on foreign policy topics and allowing participants to question experts also modestly raises support for aid.

In any case, even taking public opinion at face value, there doesn’t seem to be much desire to fully eliminate foreign aid, as Iain demands. In a survey by the British Foreign Policy Group last year, barely one in six people said that the UK government shouldn’t spend any money at all on development, basically unchanged since 2021. Even in a relatively hostile atmosphere, outright abolition is a minority position. I think the best synthesis is that most people don’t oppose aid in principle, but just have a vague sense that there is ‘too much’ of it, spent wastefully. A separate survey last year by the Development Engagement Lab found that only 18% think development aid is effective, while 58% believe that it mostly doesn’t get to its intended recipients. I suspect this is motivated reasoning as much as ignorance: people want to rationalise their opposition to aid by reassuring themselves that it doesn’t do any good anyway.

Now, that doesn’t mean that if forced to confront the trade-off, most people would pick the same alternative as me. On the margin, £30,000 spent in the NHS could give a British pensioner an extra year of life, or save several children’s lives in Africa through vaccinations. I’d hope people value the latter, but when pushed to choose, I wouldn’t be confident.

I am confident of is that most people would hate to be asked, to be confronted so starkly with the life and death stakes of the decision. Even 50% of Reform voters don’t want to stop vaccinating kids against malaria and ebola.

There’s an important question here, I think, for the future of democracy. Citizens can demand genuine participation, as long as we are ready to roll up our sleeves and inform ourselves, engage with complexity and trade-offs and give inputs that can actually shape decisions. Or we can delegate, decide we have better things to do than dig into the details of foreign aid - and dozens of policy areas like it - and trust our representatives to get on with it. But we can’t expect the best of both worlds: heckling ignorantly from the sidelines while refusing to get your hands dirty cannot be a stable settlement.

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Book (1): Last week, I read Love Machines by James Muldoon, a book about how AI is changing relationships, with chapters on companionship, sex, mental health and grief. For a while, I’ve thought this is one of the most significant and underestimated questions in AI prognostication. A lot of the discourse suggests that AI will never be able to replace the ‘human touch’, whether that’s a doctor’s bedside manner, the personalised attention of a teacher or the help of a carer - the machine will always benefit from a face at the front. In a service economy, that’s quite reassuring. However, I don’t think we can be confident it’s true: with thousands of people already getting emotionally vulnerable with, falling in love with, wanting to adopt children with(!) AIs, I don’t think we can assume anything - especially since existing systems might only be primitive versions of what’s coming down the line. Muldoon is careful, balanced, open minded - in less compassionate hands this could have been presented as a freak show. He does a decent job of explaining the appeal of AI relationships - of course people are attracted to convenience, control, undivided focus on them, and having their own perspective affirmed and repeated back to them. But Muldoon also identifies the dangers: while the technology could help people some people practice and improve for real human relationships, it risks deepening others’ isolation by making the virtual world too comfortable. Still, he never quite seems to shake the presumption that AIs are second best to the ‘real thing’ that humans provide - which seems far from inevitable to me. For example, he cites a study that compared transcripts of human vs AI therapists, and concluded they were basically indistinguishable - yet he insists AI lacks “the depth of genuine human connection essential to therapy”, and that therapists will be better because they can pick up on subtle, non-verbal cues. Maybe…but I worry this overstates our knowledge about how or why human therapy works. Are we sure therapy needs human connection after all? How reliably do human therapists actually pick up on these subtle clues? The possibility that AI could surpass us - that it can be warmer, more reassuring, less self-absorbed, more patient than us flesh-and-blood humans - doesn’t seem that far-fetched to me. And if so, I’m very uncertain how far AIs will enhance or replace human relationships (probably both, but in what proportion?)

Book (2): I also read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. It’s a series of short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, accompanied by Saunders’ commentary, based on Saunders’ creative writing course. I love stuff like this, and wish there was more of it - deconstructing and explaining the craft and intention behind works of art in an accessible way.1 I would have got half as much from reading these stories on my own without Saunders’ scaffolding. I wouldn’t exactly say I was convinced on all of them, but I came away with a clearer idea of what they were trying to do, and why Saunders loved them. And it helps that Saunders is such a warm, enthusiastic and plainspoken guide - he is disarmingly frank about the things that make these stories boring, dry, confusing or off-putting, and what we can learn from them anyway. Of the four writers, Tolstoy resonated most with me - the most didactic, moralistic and schmaltzy of the stories, but - as Saunders emphasises - not as simple as they seem.

Article: Why do Mainstream Parties Lose Either Way on Accommodating the Far Right? by Hanno Hilbig (Popular by Design). Interesting - if somewhat equivocal - analysis of one of the most important political questions of the moment - how to defeat the far right, and defuse the toxicity over the issue of immigration. The punchline: more often that not, ‘accommodation’ to the concerns of voters via a hard line approach on immigration is counterproductive because it is hard to avoid raising the salience of migration, to avoid damaging losses to more consistently pro-migration parties and to persuade migration sceptic voters you have really changed. Denmark may be the exception that proves the rule, but it seems exceptional. I found the piece interesting for its approach as much as its conclusion - as I’ve said before, we don’t have enough rigorous analysis that connects policy to electoral outcomes. This stuff is hard to study, but Hilbig describes some methods we should see more of, in my view: exploiting variation in candidate positions, conjoint designs and survey experiments that give people information about different party positions and monitor voter preference. And perhaps the most interesting, natural experiments like Keir Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ speech, which raised the salience of migration right in the middle of the fieldwork of a poll, offering a clean before and after.

TV: I finished the outstanding final episode of Hacks (Sky), the comedy-drama about an unlikely friendship between an ageing stand up comedienne and her younger writing partner. As sometimes happens, I suspect the idea for the finale had been brewing for a while - it was a big step up relative to the rest of the (still decent) final series. Without giving too much away, it finds humour in the darkest of topics - because comics can’t help it - and continues to pay tribute to the joy and sweat and necessity of working with someone who gets the most out of you to produce work you’re really proud of.

Food: Mafaldine with asparagus, poached eggs and hazelnuts. I’m still on asparagus, so made this simple, but rich and tasty dish. Piedmontese in inspiration (apparently the region is known for asparagus and hazelnuts), though it turns out the pasta is Southern (sorry, it’s what I had in the house).

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Book: Last week I read Live Forever? by John S Tregoning, a guide to the most common sources of death in Western societies, non-communicable diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia. Despite the morbid subject matter, its a breezy and informative read, lots of dad jokes, kind of Bill Bryson-esque. There’s lots of stuff I half-remembered from school biology or words I sort of understood but not really (probably not a great admission from someone who has worked as much on public health topics as me, but reassuringly Tregoning seemed to be learning a lot too, despite his day job as an immunologist). Despite being sold as ‘nutty professor tries a bunch of fad diets and regimens’, the experimentation in the book is a little lame, as are the answers Tregoning discovers to the question of how to live longer. Don’t smoke, don’t drink much, eat a healthy diet, exercise and sleep. Oh, and if you’re a man, ejaculate 20 times a month (associated with lower prostate cancer risk…though I’m not sure how robust the evidence is that this is a causal relationship).

Film: I watched Is this thing on?, starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern in a Bradley Cooper-directed John Bishop biopic - which is just a deeply weird set of words to put together in a sentence. Unfortunately the movie didn’t live up to it - kind of slow, not that funny (unclear how far the stand up routines were deliberately bad), people just weeping every ten minutes in lieu of character development. Bit of a Marriage Story vibe, but more boring.

Article: Stop looking for Burnhamism - in six years, I’ve never found it by Joshi Herrman (The Mill). Well, last week I asked for deeper accounts of Andy Burnham’s time as Manchester mayor and what it says about his aptitude to be Prime Minister, and lo! Here is exactly what I was after. There’s certainly stuff that’s concerning here: Burnham’s lack of ideological clarity, a reluctance to make tough choices or upset people, a preference for symbolic gestures over nitty-gritty detail. While his positivity and optimism is a strength, he seems to have a tendency to believe his own hype, which prevents him from spotting problems. Herrman thinks his skills are well suited to being mayor of Manchester - he is a good face and figurehead - but less appropriate for a Prime Minister, and the daily grind of gnarly trade-offs. That seems very plausible. But I think there are a couple of encouraging things in the profile too. Burnham’s recognition of rough sleeping and buses as two issues he could own and make progress on reflects a level of strategy and prioritisation that would be an improvement from the current administration in my view. More fundamentally, there are hints of humility (alongside considerable ego, like most politicians) and pragmatism. According to Diane Coyle, Burnham is a “good listener”, who is “very self-aware about not being a policy wonk himself”. There are many different ways to be a good PM - the job asks for more things than any one person can give. Like any leadership role, I think the critical thing is self-knowledge: understanding your limitations and delegating to others who can cover them. If Burnham can do that, he could just be effective in Number 10.

Podcast: Breaking the Old Firm: Fergie’s Aberdeen Revolution (It Was What It Was). One of the great things about being a football fan is the sliver of recognition you get when you meet someone from a place with a team you’ve heard of. Like, I don’t know, Karlsruhe: I should probably associate them with the German Constitutional Court; in fact, I remember they were in the Bundesliga in the 1990s. My hometown, Aberdeen, ought to be a place like that: not only is it where Alex Ferguson made his name, it is (alas) the last team to win the Scottish league other than Rangers or Celtic, and (alas) the last team to beat Real Madrid in a European final. More people, in my opinion, should know about this. So I enjoyed Jonathan Wilson and Rob Draper’s interview with Michael Grant about Ferguson’s gilded period in the North East of Scotland. And I learned a bit from it too: not least that Ferguson dismissively referred to a troublesome clique of his players as the “Westhill willy-biters” (this is extra funny if you have a sense of Westhill, an innocuous suburb of the city).

Food: The podcast was apt becayuse I was back in Aberdeen last weekend, seeing my father, enjoying better cooking. And that means Bengali home comforts: masoor dal (red lentils), jhinge posto (ridge gourd - a slightly bitter tastier relative of the cucumber cooked in a nutty, spicy poppy seed paste, an absolute favourite of mine), potoler dalna (another type of gourd, this one “pointed”) and lal shak (amaranthus, literally red spinach - more of a novelty).

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Book: Last week I read Escape by Marie Le Conte. I think I have encountered Marie once IRL, before I had ever spoken to her. It was Tory party conference, I saw her and thought “there’s that Marie Le Conte off the internet”. If that happened today, I would go and say hello - she interviewed me for a radio documentary a while back (possibly while she was writing this book!), and we’ve been mutuals on social media since. I have a lot of these sorts of augmented meatspace semi-parasocial relationships (albeit a many fewer than Marie, judging from this book). Heck, when I started my current job and met the CEO for the first time, he recognised me off twitter. All of this is baffling to my father. It is - I gather - a bit different to how gen Z (more passive content consumers) engage online. But it is natural to many of us millennials. The book is a sort of memoir, sort of lament, for the internet we grew up with up. It is conscious of all the bad things it did, and all the ways in which it went wrong, but defiant about the joy and belonging it brought too. At first glance, the book looks a bit like Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online, just a half generation earlier than the influencers and creators she profiles. But it’s quite different: more personal, much less detached. It’s a nostalgia trip - and what more sign do we need that we’re getting old?

Report: The Good Life? by Kevin Latham & Esme Lillywhite (Sutton Trust). Really interesting research that pushes back against the common narrative (for example, Lynsey Hanley's book, Respectable) that emphasises the loss and emotional dislocation that comes with social mobility. On average, Latham & Lillywhite find, people who move up classes tend to have higher subjective wellbeing and those who move down tend to have lower. There’s an interesting parallel with physical mobility i.e. international migration, which raises similar concerns about the emotional costs of moving country. In practice, migrants tend to end up somewhere between their origin and destination country in terms of life satisfaction, just as this Sutton Trust study finds people end up somewhere between the class they started and the class they reached.

TV: Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat (Prime). The original Jury Duty basically invented a new genre - call it the hidden camera sitcom - so it’s exciting to see another instalment. This series involves an office temp hired to help run a company retreat where things spiral out of control - because everybody else at the company is an actor, following a script. Essentially Trigger Happy TV meets The Office (which the show’s creators wrote for). Season 2 didn’t quite hit the absurd heights of the first one, and the economist in me bridled a bit at the pro-family firm anti-big business propaganda1, but it was still a good time. And, like a magic trick, frankly astonishing the lengths the crew went to in order to make it work.

Podcast: Shakira - Hips Don’t Lie (60 songs that Explain the 90s: the 2000s). I haven’t featured 60 songs on here aside from my inaugural end of 2025 review post. That partly reflects the show’s hiatus, and partly a not-quite vintage run of episodes (I blame the apparently inescapable, risible, pivot to video infecting podcasts everywhere). The last couple have presented a bit of a return to form, though. An episode on Feist, with a detour on songs that involve counting, and a lookback at the Canadian indie scene of the 2000s was always going to appeal to me. But last week’s was fun too, trying to figure out what Wyclef Jean’s value add was (don’t think we quite got to the bottom of that), before getting to the story of Shakira. Some choice nuggets: Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote a pervy profile of Shakira before she made it big in the US. Also Gloria Estefan translated ‘Whenever, Wherever’ into English (and as such is responsible for the line “lucky that my breasts are small and humble/so you don’t confuse them with mountains”).

Food: Khai Khai (Newcastle). Similar shtick to Dishoom, but better in my opinion. The signature tandoori broccoli is a revelation (the revelation being that broccoli can taste this good).

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I don’t actually subscribe to the view of democracy that implies that elections are essentially job interviews (the trustee model of representation). But I do think, sometimes, it’s interesting to follow that logic and see where it takes us. All else equal, we would obviously prefer to have a Prime Minister who had some aptitude for the role, and we’ve seen how badly things function when they don’t. Yet as I wrote in my last piece, “most voters a) have a pretty weak understanding of what the job of Prime Minister entails and what would make someone good at it, and b) how different candidates would compare in their ability to do the job”. That’s not their fault: media coverage of politics does a pretty spotty job of highlighting politicians’ strengths, weaknesses and record of achievement. And this stuff is hard to know from the outside: imagine hiring someone purely on the basis of their CV and application.

So given we seem on the cusp of a change, I thought I would try to do my civic duty and interrogate some of the prospects for next leader of the United Kingdom. I’m not able to interview them myself, but I can do the next best thing and gather some references. After all, I know a lot of people who work in and around Westminster. Some have worked directly with our potential Prime Ministers, some have worked with people who have worked with them, others can just report what they’ve heard on the grapevine. I messaged a number of my friends - think tankers, parliamentary researchers, civil servants, journalists - and asked them who, of the plausible candidates, they thought would be best at the job of Prime Minister.

Overarching impressions

Even though I explicitly asked them to focus on the candidates’ qualities, achievements and experience, many struggled to divorce competence from electability. I recognise the two things are closely related - being a good communicator is key to both winning power and exercising it effectively. But I think people probably over-indexed on popularity relative to governing skill.

Interestingly, one person rejected the premise of the question entirely, arguing that the Prime Minister doesn’t need any particular skill for leadership, and all that matters is their ideology - since they only have to set the vision for the government. Now, the current PM has certainly failed on that score, but I think he has also shown that good governance can fail even if you have the decent values.

In terms of the positive qualities that people marked candidates against, these could be put in the following buckets:

• Intelligence/Policymaking skill: Not just raw IQ, or even policy experience, but also imagination and creativity.

• Decisiveness: Quite possibly a reaction to the current administration. Equally, I know from direct experience as a civil servant how much the government just craves clear direction (and how frustrating dithering and ambiguity can be). Relatedly, a few people highlighted the need for political bravery - making tough choices and taking risks (not just saying that’s what you’re doing)

• Experience: Again, perhaps in recognition of Keir Starmer’s limitations, people put significant value on familiarity with the system and how it works. Government is complicated, and it is easier to drive the machine if you’ve been doing it a while.

• Effective Delegation: The Prime Minister is, famously, surprisingly weak, with limited support and capacity. That makes it essential that they can assemble a good team and trust them to do the right thing.

• Leadership, collegiality and coalition building: Politics is a team sport. Being able to build good working relationships is key. Inspiring confidence, loyalty and sacrifice is even better. Forming effective alliances helps, within and outside government. More broadly, working well with stakeholders, winning them over or delivering bad news, is an important skill.

Running down the list, what’s striking is how banal it is. These are standard criteria you’d use to judge most senior leaders of organisations. And yet it isn’t immediately obvious how the people in the country’s most lofty position do against them. So, to the candidates.

Ed Miliband

It would be too strong to call it unanimity, but the person most people I asked considered to be best suited to being PM was Ed Miliband - though almost everybody also said they didn’t think he could win an election. Maybe I oversampled my policy wonk brethren, who are obviously inclined towards someone so thoughtful and knowledgeable about policy he did a podcast about it in his spare time. But even the journalists I spoke to were impressed by his clarity of focus and strategic approach to being in government. More than anything, I think people responded to his experience, but also there was recognition of his ability to bounce back from defeat as Leader of the opposition and show humility and learn lessons from that, which seems to reflect good character.

Miliband would be expected to set clearer direction for the government - multiple people praised him for his strong principles, consistent priorities and vision. He was described to me as having an ideological clarity that would let his staff “throw the complexity away”. However, some feared this has a tendency to slip into rigidity or stubbornness.

Some surfaced doubts about his self-confidence from his time as leader of the opposition. Certainly, as with reflective, policy minded people, there is a danger of being sucked into the detail and failing to let go. Yet others suggested this has been an area of improvement. While people who had worked closely with him suggested he does occasionally have a tendency to “get panicked”, they saw him as generally fairly decisive, albeit “less decisive than Kwasi Kwarteng” (this was a compliment for Ed).

Finally, Miliband was described as kind an caring, a pleasant person to work for - an aspect of leadership that shouldn’t be underrated.

Angela Rayner

Nobody’s idea of an intellectual, Angela Rayner is in some ways the opposite of Miliband. Yet the number of backers she had demonstrates how there are quite different ways to do the job of leading the government. People were more or less blunt about her intelligence, though a number of people also recognised her reputation is also shaped by the sexist and classist assumptions people make about her. Indeed, one person who has worked with her branded her as “smart” and a “quick learner”.

At the same time, there was widespread belief that she had been highly effective as part of the cabinet. She is seen as a strategic, a firm negotiator, and a quick certain decision maker. The Employment Rights Act is seen as her baby, and people close to the arguments she had with the Treasury insist she more than held her own. The one dissenting voice pointed out the lack of demonstrable success on housebuilding, but I’m inclined to cut her slack given how the lag from policy to construction, and since it is unclear how much of a priority it really was for her.

Her superpower seems to be diplomacy - the small p politics of managing stakeholders, identifying where she has leverage, where there are bargains to be struck and how to position herself in the social dynamics. Surprisingly, I was told that she can be cold and awkward with people - but also that she can inspire great loyalty.

A general point someone made to me, something I’ve considered when I’ve been hiring myself, is that there is a strong signal in the distance Rayner has travelled. Having come from her background, as a single mother with limited educational qualifications suggests she must have some things over more mediocre and privileged peers. If nothing else, it speaks to a determination and force of will that could be a significant strength.

Andy Burnham

Onto the favourite. In contrast to Rayner and Miliband, both fairly or unfairly regarded as electorally toxic, the dominant attribute of Burnham is his popularity. Nobody doubted his skill as a communicator, but people were very uncertain how much substance there is underneath it.

On the face of it, this is odd. We’re talking about a man who has been in frontline politics for over 20 years, who has been running Manchester for the better part of a decade. Surely we should have a clearer idea of his strengths and weaknesses? Again, the first thing people reached for were the vibes - Manchester feels prouder and more optimistic under him. There was belief in his ability to build a coalition - identify supporters and point them in the same direction.

In terms of record of delivery, people pointed to his identification of transport, housing and homelessness and priority issues that he could own and demonstrate progress on. There are concrete successes he can point to in terms of Manchester’s performance on economic growth or life expectancy, though it’s unclear how much personal credit he deserves for this

Fundamentally, though, people worried about his changeability. Does he have the mettle to stand behind the hard calls? As per Jennifer Williams’ excellent FT piece from last week, exactly the sort of thing I think there should be more of raking over his experience and record: “He’s very conflict-averse. Andy wants to be loved and avoids making difficult decisions”. One person highlighted his failure to implemented a clean air zone in Manchester, in contrast to Sadiq Khan in London.

Wes Streeting

Another person who won’t get the job because not enough people like them. But Streeting too came up a lot in terms of the Prime Ministerial skillset. Once they set aside their ideological sympathy or aversion, a number of people mentioned Streeting’s communication skills, his ability to “speak human”. On the other hand, one person suggested this sometimes lapses into “immaturity” - not just plain spoken, but impolitic, picking unnecessary fights with medical groups.

People were unsure what lies beneath the rhetoric. Several people described him as ‘talking a good game’ on the health service, but suggested his concrete achievements didn’t match it. On the other hand, that could actually suggest a set of attributes suited to leadership rather than delivery. He seems more comfortable setting vision, direction, resolving disagreements and backing his side over their opponents than getting stuck into policy detail. Compared to Ed Miliband, he seems less likely to get lost in the weeds.

Those five were the main ones people mentioned spontaneously. Other big names - Yvette Cooper, David Lammy - were missing, reflecting their relatively low profile in the leadership contest. I didn’t get anything on outsiders linked to a tilt at the top like John Healey or Al Carns. Someone mentioned Yuan Yang, but it was at least half joking. Perhaps if we have a contest and there are other candidates, I’ll dig harder.

What does this all tell us? First, that there are meaningful differences between who people think are electorally potent, or even who shares their policy preferences, and governing competence. Ed Miliband ticks a lot of boxes: experience, analytical skill, personally pleasant, decisive and strong views. Andy Burnham has shifted so much people don’t know what to make of him - we could really do with closer scrutiny of his time in Manchester. Angela Rayner could be expected to offer direction and handle stakeholders better than the current administration, even if she isn’t a policy brain. Streeting would be more of a risk, given his lack of testing.

Maybe all of this is obvious from the outside. I knew some of it. I suspect people would be taken aback by how many and varied the admirers of Rayner and Miliband are, and the specific qualities attributed to them. Our most likely next Prime Minister remains more of a blank canvas, but if we don’t fill it in we risk a re-run of the problems of the last two years.

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Book: Last week I read Determined by Robert Sapolsky, in which he argues that there is no free will, and that this implies “There can be no such thing as blame, and that punishment as retribution is indefensible - sure, keep dangerous people from damaging others, but do so as straightforwardly and non-judgmentally as keeping a car with faulty brakes off the road. That it can be okay to praise someone or express gratitude toward them as an instrumental intervention, to make it likely that they will repeat that behavior in the future, or as an inspiration to others, but never because they deserve it…no one has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else”. I don’t disagree with any of that. In fact, Sapolsky seems to struggle more with these conclusions - “even I think that taking that seriously sounds absolutely nutty” - more than I do: it feels natural and obvious to me to view the world and live that way. I share Sapolsky’s view that it is more compassionate and reasonable and better for me and the world to try and understand why people behave the way they do than to spend too much time trying to evaluate them morally. Even if you resist such a stark conclusion, it’s an entertaining and informative book. The first half covers a lot of ground in biology and social psychology, running through the various factors which determine our characters and life outcomes. But the book really gets going in the second part when it considers the moral and societal implications. Even if you don’t buy that all our actions are fully determined, you should acknowledge that much more is driven by forces outside our control than society routinely recognises. Some of the most moving and inspiring passages describe the moral progress we have made as coming to see epilepsy and schizophrenia as illness rather than curses or moral failings (though these revolutions remain incomplete). And the line keeps shifting in that direction: less moralised and more scientised. There’s little prospect of us jumping all the way to the world Sapolsky describes any time soon - he also discusses the evolutionary pleasure that humans and other creatures get from enforcing moral sanctions - but we are probably inching, frustratingly slowly, in a more humane direction.

Article: Inside Number 10: the politics behind the smoking ban by Bill Morgan (King’s Fund Blog). Informative account from Rishi Sunak’s health adviser of the reasoning behind the scenes that led the then Prime Minister to push forward with the generational smoking ban, drawing out broader political lessons for public health regulation. Bill makes his interesting case for free votes as a way to draw the sting (which raises a question of why governments don’t use free votes more often in general). But I remain a bit unsure as to why he sees the smoking ban (and public health measures more broadly) as so politically risky. It’s a pretty popular policy (two-thirds of people support it), as is often the case with public health interventions, so public opinion doesn’t seem to be the constraint. Is it controversy on the backbenches? But that was only the case for the Tories, Labour MPs have been united. The measure would have received industry pushback, but that is the case for basically any regulation. So why is Bill so adamant that “public health restrictions are deeply politically risky”? As with much of the political advice ministers receive, I think it is much too vibesy, and insufficiently grounded in actual evidence.

Music: Lately I’ve been enjoying Romanticize the Drive by Metric, the new Metric album that sounds like an old Metric album (Fantasies, to be precise), and that’s a good thing. Maybe the Millennial nostalgia is hitting me, but there’s something nice about an old band unapologetically continuing to do what they do best.

Film: Rental Family. Good premise - American actor in Japan starts working for a company that offers stand-ins for friends, family, co-workers to fill out social events (apparently a real thing!)- that doesn’t quite deliver on that promise. I was never fully drawn in emotionally. The film hints at offering a cultural analysis of Japan, but doesn’t quite get into it. And it suffers in comparison to other works that rely on similar set ups. It’s not as weird as Tom McCarthy’s book Remainder. It doesn’t have the mad scientist genius, and reflection on the human desire for control of Nathan Fielder’s TV series The Rehearsal. Meh.

Food: Asparagus, pea and lemon orzo. Asparagus is probably the most seasonal vegetable I eat, so this was the perfect time of year to try this pasta dish, which is a zingy, verdant spring day in a bowl.

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Book: Last week I re-read An Extraordinary Time by Marc Levinson, maybe my favourite work of economic history, and a book that seems particularly salient just now as we grapple with the fallout from an oil price hike occasioned by geopolitical instability in the Middle East. The book describes how 1973 was a pivotal year for the global economy, marking the shift from the postwar boom to a protracted period of crisis. Reading it from our present vantage point, the parallels are alarming and uncanny: hubristic technocrats who believed they had tamed boom and bust spiralling into panic as they find none of the old levers work; an American government undermining the global economic architecture, indifferent to the impact on the rest of the world, placing political pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates; countries running bigger and bigger deficits because they can’t raise taxes enough to cover their spending commitments; and the worst of the volatility being felt by the poorest countries. Underpinning it all, a productivity puzzle that leaves us all poorer. It’s not a reassuring book: Levinson is (rightly in my view) sceptical that there was much policymakers could do to alter the fundamentals of their economies - the dip just needed to be ridden out. But in the meantime, politicians were at the mercy of their citizens - there are alarming echoes to the “ungovernability” and political violence of the present day too, with governments struggling to form majorities, kidnaps and assassinations on the rise and independence movements in Canada and the UK. Sound familiar?

Article: My year as a degenerate gambler by McKay Coppins (Atlantic). Compelling and concerning chronicle of a journalist going above and beyond - stretching the limits of his Mormon commitments - in order to understand the reality of America’s newly liberalised sports gambling system. Describes not just the obsession, isolation, grim Vegas rooms and charlatans promising free money, but also the buzz, tantalising glimpses of success, and the seductive sense of having an edge. FPL will do fine for me, thanks.

Article (2): Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything? by Dan Schwartz (Asterisk). On the subject of gambling…a reasonably even handed discussion of the promise and perils of prediction markets from the former CTO of Metaculus. Sets out the theoretical case for why prediction markets ought to be good (risk monitoring, interpreting news, anticipating policy outcomes, accountability and novel information), and grades them against those objectives. If anything, I’d say Schwartz is a bit of a harsh marker - the sense of disappointment is palpable, but at the same time he doesn’t go deep into the harms of gambling on the other side.

Podcast: Toxic Legacy: Bonus Episode with Samantha Power (FT). Sorry, more lead content. But it was fascinating to hear the former USAID head explain how the problem of lead exposure came onto her radar, and gratifying to hear about the role my colleagues played in it. There is a lot of nonsense and misconception around effective altruism, but here, surely, is the best case for it - alerting people in positions of power to an overlooked cause of sickness and poverty.

Film: I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2, for my sins. It was bad and also boring, so I don’t have much to say about it save that Rachel Bloom was good, and I wish I could see her in more stuff again. I guess Aline Brosh McKenna should only write for her. Also, I can’t believe I watched Stanley Tucci go to Italy and not eat a single plate of pasta.

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Book: Last week I read Why is this Lying Bastard Lying to Me? by Rob Burley, a memoir of two and half decades working as a researcher, producer and editor of political TV and radio shows, as well as history of the broadcast political interview in the UK. Burley has no doubt that set piece interviews “play a vital role in our democracy”, but it’s not quite spelled out in the book just what this role is, and I’m instinctively sceptical. The case is most compelling for rooting out political corruption or malfeasance - pinning down the liars, as the quote in the title (often attributed to Jeremy Paxman) would suggest. But the trouble is that often the newsworthy stuff politicians are trying to conceal is not particularly in the public interest - for example, Burley admits there was something unedifying about confronting Gordon Brown with rumours about which medication he was taking. It seems true that interviews can reveal something of politician’s character - for example Boris Johnson’s shallowness, evasiveness and mendacity. But often all it uncovers is how comfortable or uncomfortable they are being grilled on TV (contrast the real and apparent sincerity and integrity of Tony Blair and Theresa May). Burley seems to give up quite quickly on interviews being forums for the exchange of ideas (for example, criticising Evan Davis for being too intellectual to be an effective front line interviewer. He’s almost certainly right that politicians would take advantage of being given more space to filibuster, and that audiences would be bored by in depth wonkery. That said, it’s not unimaginable that broadcast interviews could be a stand in for a job interview (to pick up a theme from earlier this week. But that is a world in which we have a clearer sense of the skills and attributes that matter for effectiveness in the job, and interviews explicitly designed to test them. Too often the media defaults to ‘good communicator’ because it what they care about, and is easiest to test. But the trouble with political interviews is that they very rarely do build a clear sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the interviewee. Which feels like a failing of the format.

Book (2): Last week I also read (long flight) A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers, a Hugo award-winning ‘solarpunk’ novella about an unlikely friendship between a monk and a robot. I thought it was entertaining and mostly sweet, verging on cloying. In general, I think relatively optimistic, non-dystopian sci fi is underrated, though I thought this the philosophical message (touch grass, relationships matter) was kind of banal.

Article: The Burdens of Office by Chris Dillow (Substack). I can’t disagree with Chris’ central argument here. Being a politician does mean working under awful conditions - in fact, the threat of violence is worse than he suggests, with two MPs assassinated in the last decade. That creates a negative selection effect, attracting status seekers, because of one of the main rewards for putting up with it is to be made to feel important. I think his solution - sortition, selecting random citizens to be legislators - would address the issue: if it’s such a burden, we’d do better to share it evenly, and no individual would have sustained power and influence. It’s not a knock down argument for sortition, because politicians have - or can develop - specialist skills or knowledge that the average person on the street lacks. The question is whether those specialist skills are worth the problems Chris raises. I’m not sure they are.

Sport: Liverpool 3-1 Crystal Palace (English Premier League football). I got a ticket to see my beloved Liverpool play last weekend and felt every bit the lottery winner that in a literal sense I was. Having spent about 20 years waiting for the opportunity to go, this was my seventh visit to Anfield, and I still don’t take it for granted. I hope they will let me back in after I drop an extremely controversial take: football should be a summer sport. The vibes were remarkably good last weekend, despite a misfiring team trudging towards the end of a disappointing season, and an ongoing protest against a proposed ticket price increase. In fact, I’d say people seemed to be having a better time than in the first game I saw, when Liverpool were top of the league and on course for their first league title in almost 30 years. I think the difference is mostly down to the weather: my most recent Anfield game was in glorious late Spring sunshine, whereas the first time time I went it was snowing. Moany football fans need all the help they can get to lighten their mood. On the football calendar, as in so much else, British leagues should follow the Nordic countries.

Food: Burma Love (San Francisco). With a high density of vegetarians, the catering for our work events often seems like an extended game of ‘99 ways with tofu’, and our team dinner did not buck that trend. I learned this week that Burmese food is apparently a big thing in San Francisco, and this chain is something of a local institution. I found it reasonably good without being spectacular: there was some spicy tofu, and a platha/paratha so buttery it would ace the Dr Nick paper test. Most interesting was the fermented tea leaf salad, and I enjoyed the novelty of the sour laphet with a pleasing assortment of crunchy nuts and seeds.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. In opposition, Keir Starmer exuded competence. If people described him as ‘managerial’ by way of criticism, that also implied that he would be good at running things. Having been head of a major organisation like the Crown Prosecution Service, it seemed a fair assumption.

Yet the depiction of the Prime Minister in Politico last week by aides and officials who have worked with him at close quarters was brutal:

“Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth,” said one Labour insider. “Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth.”

Starmer, they say, has no ability to manage a team; an aversion to conflict; no guiding mission for power; no energy to drive change; little interest in people; and no interest in political strategy. While not all agree, some suggest Starmer just isn’t willing to do the tough work a prime minister must — perhaps because he likes his time away from the office more than he should.

We should take these accounts with a healthy dose of scepticism - it’s not hard to find people to kick a politician when they are down, especially one that has sacked and sidelined so many people. But though others might be more delicate and measured in their criticisms, the flaws enumerated in the piece are consistent with other storeis about the PM, and many of these points would be conceded even by his allies.

Which raises many questions. Why do these issues only seem to be emerging now? Shouldn’t they have preventedStarmer from rising to the top job? How come nobody raised them earlier? And given the succession of short-lived predecessors before him, why can’t the UK seem to find a decent leader?

I don’t think these issues have emerged from nowhere. There were indicators of Starmer’s character flaws before the election. The fictitious ten pledges he made to Labour members to get elected leader spoke to a certain duplicitousness. The churn in his team hinted at a certain disloyalty and tendency to scapegoat. But everyone has limitations, and there was no reason to think these were disqualifying in Starmer’s case.

Perhaps Starmer should have had the self-knowledge to understand he wasn’t equipped for the job, and avoided running for leadership in the first case. But that’s expecting a lot of anybody, let alone ambitious politicians. In most walks of life it’s usual good advice not to rule yourself out of contention too easily, to put yourself forward for a role and to let others judge whether you’re a good fit. And given the stark record of recent Prime Ministers, it’s hard to credit that immodesty is the only issue here. Rather, something seems to be systematically wrong in how we select our candidates.

This is deeply problematic for a certain view of representative democracy, which sees elections as essentially a sort of job interview. On this view, elected politicians are supposed to be the best of us, empowered to use their stronger judgement and discretion to identify and do what is best for the country.

But elections have always been a rather weird sort of hiring process. To start with, there is no agreed job description. Is it most important for the PM to be a person who is can set strategy and vision, a wonk who gets into the details of policy, a coalition builder who can manage egos and motivate their team, a communicator who can explain what they are doing to the outside world? Expecting somebody to be good at all of these things is to set them up for failure - which might partly explain the disenchantment of recent years. Preferably, whoever is in charge of selecting a leader needs to decide which of these criteria (and others) matter most, and assess the candidates against them.

Bad news: the people responsible are us. And yet most voters a) have a pretty weak understanding of what the job of Prime Minister entails and what would make someone good at it, and b) how different candidates would compare in their ability to do the job. In any ordinary job interview, you would try to get a sense of how a candidate performed in previous roles. Yet how much did we find out about how Starmer ran the CPS, or how much did people know or care about Boris Johnson’s approach to being Mayor of London?

I never met Jeremy Corbyn, but the impression I got of him was of a person who could meet two people, hear opposite arguments, and leave both thinking he agreed with them. This indecisiveness would have been far more of an impediment to good government than his level of nuclear bloodlust, and yet I don’t think it was widely understood. Insofar as voters are encouraged to learn about and care about the personalities of their prospective leaders, it is around their likeability. It’s not unreasonable to consider whether you’d want to go to the pub with someone when you hire them, but it would be odd for it to be your main criterion - and even weirder when it’s the PM and you don’t even work with them day-to-day.

The media clearly deserve some of the blame for this. A lot of media coverage is oriented around whether somebody looks the part or sounds Prime Ministerial, without sufficient interrogation of what that means. On a generous reading, the personality politics of the media is looking for proxies as to whether politicians are good delegates (i.e. the opposite of trustees). We can get some sense of whether they are ‘like us’, and on that basis have more confidence that they share our values. But that approach doesn’t select at all for competence.

What we almost never get is a sustained attempt to connect specific traits to the actual work of governing. How does this person show leadership? How do they respond to setbacks: do they take responsibility, or throw people under the bus? How do they handle dissent? Are they good at motivating people?

This is made all the more difficult because - like many hiring processes, especially at senior levels - we are trying to hit a moving target. The characteristics that set a person up for success depend on the context. Winston Churchill was repeatedly a disaster until - in the most critical moment - he was the right person in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you need a project manager with patience, stamina and a long term vision, sometimes you need a bulldozer to break through opposition, sometimes you need a charismatic leader to inspire and rally the troops. How often do we ask ourselves what the situation demands when we elect our leaders?

I’m increasingly coming to the view that one of the fundamental problems of our democracy is that we put too much weight on a single vote in a general election. When British voters step into the ballot box, they are being asked which party they want to govern, which vision and policy agenda they want the next government to promote, what they think of the achievements and failures of the current government, who they would like to represent their area in parliament. Technically, they are not asked who should lead the country, though in practice their vote is taken as such.

That is an impossible job (not unlike being PM). If you buy in to the trustee model at all, you should be thinking long and hard about how we can improve these processes to make it easier for voters to understand who to place their trust in. I’m probably more inclined to say it shows we should throw out the trustee model, and not expect voters to use this odd, misshapen popularity contest as a way to find effective people. More minimalist theories of democracy imply elections are basically a referendum on the current government, a way to kick the rascals out if you’re unhappy with your circumstances. I disagree - I think we voters should hold ourselves to higher standards than the Prime Minister, and avoid lashing out at scapegoats when we’re dissatisfied with how things going. Instead, I would argue voters should focus on identifying the party that shares their values, not trying to judge competence.

That puts more pressure on parliamentary selectorates. I fear that rank and file MPs are not that much more attuned to what makes a good leader and Prime Minister, but I think we should expect more from them. They’re close enough to government to learn how it works, to judge the situation and to get to know the character of their colleagues. The trouble is that in practice, leadership contests are dominated by ideological alignment, perceived electability and the hope of patronage. The same logic works in reverse: Prime Ministers assemble cabinets to manage their party, not to run the country, which is why so many ministers are ineffectual.

The same structural problem occurs in other countries, but the British system seems particularly exposed. In the US, the direct election of presidents and governors, following a primary system (and often an ‘invisible primary’ of vetting by party insiders before that), puts focus on individuals’ track record and character as well as ideology.

By contrast, in the UK, we have a system where it’s nobody’s job to ensure the Prime Minister is suited to their role. Is it any surprise so often they’re not?

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Book: Last week I read Goodbye to Russia by Sarah Rainsford, her story of 20 odd years of covering the country as a BBC journalist, only to be unceremoniously ejected. It describes the growing cruelty and arbitrariness of the Putin’s regime and how it twisted Rainsford’s adopted society before her eyes. Rainsford’s accounts of the Kursk disaster and the Beslan siege, events half-remembered from my childhood, demonstrate Putin’s longstanding incompetence and indifference to life. Her descriptions of the byzantine tribulations of being a foreign journalist in an increasingly hostile state were also interesting. But the book didn’t quite manage to be more than the sum of its parts, neither history nor diary nor quite giving away enough to be a memoir, and losing flow and momentum by jumping around in time rather than letting the narrative unfold linearly.

Articles: Essays on Abundance by Sam Freedman, David Lawrence & Kane Emerson, Matt Davies, Giles Wilkes, Kate Alexander-Shaw (IPPR Progressive Review). Belatedly came across this collection, reflecting on the abundance movement and its implications for British politics, with a number of overlapping themes. The essays recognise the value of an optimistic and utopian liberal vision, and the importance of restarting growth in this country given the UK’s dismal economic performance in recent years. Indeed, Sam and Giles worry that the ideas slip into wishful thinking and are too far removed from the hard choices of government. Yet at the same time the essays tend to be quite pessimistic about the political potential of the idea of growth - even David & Kane, the closest things to cheerleaders for abundance, worry that it is an abstraction that needs to be made tangible. There’s a contradiction there - abundance is too utopian but also insufficiently inspiring? Strange to say, given the hype around it, but I think they’re underselling abundance, and that people can understand growth, or at least the better vision of life that growth can get us - slogans like ‘energy too cheap to meter’ seem a plausible candidate for a modern version of a ‘chicken in every pot’. A general concern across the essays is that abundance doesn’t take trade-offs seriously enough. I think that’s a reasonable criticism of the Klein & Thompson book, which a few essays observe, points vaguely in a deregulatory direction without detailing which regulations should be retained or dropped. But that would have made the book boring and unwieldy: I think it’s OK for them to say the line needs to be pushed back without saying exactly how far. Giles suggests that its trivial to be in favour of growth, but that doesn’t tell us much about navigating the hard choices to we need to make to achieve it. I used to agree and roll my eyes at people who acted as if there was a secret growth lever in Horse Guards Road the Chancellor just refused to pull. But the thing about trade-offs is that they force you to prioritise between all the different things that you favour. While the government has clearly prioritised some growth enhancing policies, for example on planning and capital investment, its immigration policy doesn’t seem to be driven by growth at all costs. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: a politician or administration that cared only about growth, regardless of the social, environmental, intergenerational cost would be frankly psychotic. But a growth-oriented administration should have a high bar and few exceptions. That’s why books like Klein & Thompson, and the work done by think tanks like David & Kane’s, is important: to try and persuade the left (and the public at large) that growth should be an overriding concern. Abundance isn’t a complete ideology, but it can provide motivation and push us to reorder our priorities.

Film: The Drama. Best film I’ve seen this year so far, and its not even close. A genuinely funny dark comedy, stuffed with so many dramatic ironies I probably only noticed about half of them. Best spoiler free synopsis: a man discovers his fiancee has a terrible secret the week before they are due to get married, and struggles with his shifting feelings for her leading up to the big day. I’ve been wrestling with how far this movie is about ethics. Initially, I was inclined to write it off as about ‘the ick’, before I realised it says something about my moral psychology that I see disgust/purity as non-moral considerations. The more I think about it, though, the more counter-cultural the movie seems: it is fundamentally a situationist film in an age more inclined to virtue ethics. Or, in plain English: a lot of contemporary culture seems to be predicated on figuring out whether people are good or bad (‘based’ or ‘cancelled’), and on the face of it the movie encourages that tendency. But actually what it is saying - in ways I think fit with moral psychology and criminology evidence - is that there is a huge amount of contingency in whether we do good or evil, and that is largely driven by social context and environment. I fear that message might go over people’s heads though as they argue over whether they are team Charlie or team Emma.

Podcast: If the student loan system is the problem, is a ‘graduate tax’ the solution? (Inside Your Ed) I haven’t yet recommended Inside Your Ed, maybe my favourite podcast on a specific policy area. Tom Richmond is an excellent curator, invariably able to get guests who know what they are talking about.1 The most recent episode exemplified what’s great about it, bringing together Jonathan Simons, one of the architects of the current student finance system in England when he was a civil servant, and John Blake, until recently a Director at the Office for Students. I thought Blake had the better of the argument, highlighting the ways in which the current finance system already largely resembles a graduate tax, and making the provocative but I believe reasonable argument that a grad tax ought to be applied to all graduates that haven’t already paid for their education. Simons’ strongest argument was that tuition fees protect university finances through a form of hypothecation, but I would say they illustrate the problems of earmarked revenue streams. In recent years, the system has provided volatile and arbitrary levels of funding to universities: they were protected over other deserving forms of public spending (for example, FE colleges) through the period of austerity, and then were at the mercy of inflationary pressures as the government froze the nominal level of fees. But whichever side you come down on, the podcast should clarify your thinking.

Food: I baked a walnut cobb, with ground walnuts and a mix of white and wholemeal flour, came out pretty well. Had it with griddled asparagus (first of the season!) and a salad with a walnut oil vinaigrette, to stay on theme.

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The usual disclaimer applies: this post reflects my personal views and not those of my employer, Coefficient Giving. This is especially true here, as I am not part of the farmed animal welfare team.

Policy is hard. I think we wonks should be more open about that fact, especially in an environment where populists are doing their utmost to convince people that solving our problems is simple. Anybody who has studied public policy, or just been paying attention, recognises that policymakers are acting on complex, unpredictable systems, prone to unintended consequences. As a result, there are dozens of cases where despite the best of intentions, ideas that made sense on paper went wrong. Think of the troubled families program, which struggled to scale. Consider university tuition fees, which were meant to secure university finances, but encouraged a capital spending binge and left institutions more vulnerable. Individual Learning Accounts were meant to give workers control over their own training, but were a magnet for fraud, and poisoned the well on adult education for a generation.

All of which is a long way to get to the policy that has been on my mind lately. According to the Guardian, the government intends to revise the National Planning Policy Framework for England to relax restrictions on chicken farms. My immediate response was dismay. With over one billion chickens already slaughtered annually in the UK - 95% of which are reared under factory farm conditions- at first blush, this looks like the government giving the green light to scale up an inhumane business.

Yet things are not so straightforward. According to the industry, expansion is necessary in order to improve conditions. If chickens are not to be packed in so tightly, they need to be housed in bigger farms. Chicken producers would say that, of course, but people I trust who care deeply about farmed animal welfare are inclined to believe producers when they say that planning permission is a major obstacle to reducing the density of birds and moving away from fast-growing ‘frankenchickens’. They also say that blocking production in England simply encourages companies to source their chickens from countries with even lower welfare standards.

Can it be true, paradoxically, that allowing factory farms to expand is good for animal welfare? Or is that too galaxy brained? Many animal welfare organisations seem to have had the same instinctive reaction as me. For example, World Animal Protection UK described the proposals as “deeply concerning”, since they would mean “more animals will end up in systems that cause severe suffering”.

Relaxing planning constraints on British chicken farms would be expected to have three effects:

1. An increase in the number of chickens reared under relatively higher welfare conditions (e.g., the 30kg/m² standard of the Better Chicken Commitment, compared to the industry Red Tractor standard of 38kg/m²).

2. An increase in the number of chickens reared under relatively lower welfare conditions through the expansion of existing intensive production.

3. The displacement of imports from countries with lower welfare standards.

What’s the net effect of these three different channels?

In the most optimistic scenario, 1 (the increase in higher welfare chickens) is a big number, and 2 (the increase in lower welfare chickens) is small or even negative, because the relaxed constraints encourage an industry-wide shift to higher standards. For example, maybe being allowed to expand makes it possible for more players to sign up and comply with the Better Chicken Commitment.

Frankly, I think that’s too credulous. The industry say that they can’t deliver higher welfare without new sheds, and estimate that they would need 20% more space if they were to transition all chickens to 30kg/m². But they certainly aren’t saying that all new sheds will contribute to higher welfare. At the same time, they are speaking out of the other side of their mouth about the supposed imperative of ensuring food security and keeping prices low. In other words, just because 20% additional capacity is needed to raise standards across the sector doesn’t mean that 20% additional capacity would actually be used to raise standards. It seems to me a reasonable bet that at least some of it would be used to expand production of lower welfare chicken.

The specific proportions matter, but we can only speculate. While many retailers have committed to reducing stocking density to 30kg/m², recent months have shown them to be flexible on their word. They may be tempted to delay implementation, prioritizing more profitable lower-welfare production in the interim. Given that roughly 95% of current production is intensive, we might expect a significant portion of new production to remain so. A cautious assumption might be to split the difference: 50% of additional capacity for higher welfare, and 50% for lower welfare.

What about import substitution? Again, we have to do some guesswork. Chicken is not like haircuts: they are a tradable good, and the UK is plugged into an international market. At the same time, chicken is not like oil, which (ordinarily) flows between countries incredibly easily, such that the UK’s modest production makes little difference to global prices and levels of consumption. Chicken is somewhere in between, but where to place it on the scale?

Fresh chicken, which is where British producers specialise, is not that easily tradable because of its short shelf-life. Unsurprisingly, that is where British producers are most competitive, and even if it is traded, it is unlikely to have travelled far, coming mostly from European countries with comparable welfare standards to the UK. Frozen chicken (dominated by Brazil) and processed chicken (more likely to come from places like Thailand) are more problematic. Overall, imports account for around a quarter of chicken consumption.

The major crux is how far increasing the supply of British chicken grows the market, rather than displacing production from other countries. I’ve found it very hard to get a handle on this. Trends in the beef market - where cattle numbers have fallen, causing prices to rise and consumption to fall - suggest that imports won’t necessarily rise to fill gaps in the meat market. But beef is not the same as chicken, which seems to have more robust international supply chains. The best way I’ve been able to find to estimate the scale of import substitution is to combine estimates of the overall price elasticity (-0.7) of consumers with respect to chicken with the price elasticity of demand for imported chicken (-0.94) specifically. Note that neither estimate is UK specific, so this is indicative at best. We can use the gap between the two to estimate the extent to which people substitute domestic for imported chicken. Using these numbers it turns out that 34% of incremental domestic production is at the expense of lower welfare imports.

Combining these speculative guesses: if capacity for 100 chickens were added in the UK, 50 might be reared to higher standards and 50 to current low standards, but around 35 would be “saved” from even lower welfare standards abroad. Is this a win? Those who believe no increase in low-welfare production is acceptable would reject planning relaxation. Others might argue that improving the lives of enough chickens justifies the expansion, even if the total number of factory-farmed birds increases. The answer depends on whether you believes standards like the Better Chicken Commitment provide a life worth living.

I remain sceptical enough on these points to doubt that relaxing planning regulations would be good for animal welfare. I am not a strict abolitionist, and definitely believe ‘less, but better’ would be an improvement when it comes to chicken consumption. My fear, though, is that planning deregulation gets us ‘more, only somewhat better’ - and that could be a step backwards.

But I could well be wrong, and that position could mean inadvertently thwarting initiatives like the Better Chicken Commitment, which I think are important. The ideal outcome, in my view, would be to make planning permission conditional on achieving a certain welfare standard. For example, there could be guidance on minimum stocking density in the National Planning Policy Framework, or a statutory requirement, as there is for energy efficiency of new build homes. But I’m not holding my breath that animal welfare is enough of a government priority to permit that.

More broadly, I think this case illustrates the uncertainty under which governments have to make policy decisions - trying to anticipate their response to regulation, discern whether they are bluffing or to be taken at their word, and how big of a risk they are willing to take. Will this tax push rich investors abroad? Will this requirement cause firms to exit the market? Often we just don’t know. Moreover, I think that the question of how we should respond to this sort of uncertainty is too often missing from our democratic debate. As a society, how comfortable are we with different levels of policy risk, and which outcomes are important enough for the government to try and roll the dice on? Not an easy trade-off to articulate to ordinary citizens, but important to helping people understand what is actually at stake.

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Book: Last week I read How We Think by Marius Ostrowski, an odd experience because I’ve known Marius since we were graduate students together, a period when, he says, this book was gestating. Back then, he would not have been high on my list of people I expected to write a pop psychology book - he was invariably knee deep in theory, his academic writing dense and jargony. That this book is as clearly and straightforwardly written is a testament to public communication being a skill that can be learned and developed, and Marius has clearly worked hard at it (while retaining a heavy dose of academic theory in the background).1 The book itself is ambitious, setting out a taxonomy of ‘thinker types’ - ‘worrywart’, ‘gloomster’, ‘happy camper’ - intended to compete with Myers-Briggs or Enneagram. There are ten in all, which feels like a lot of archetypes to handle, but that’s not out of line with other personality tests, and the names are certainly catchier and more intuitive. For all its accessibility, the biggest pity is that Marius doesn’t much get to apply his political expertise and insight in the book. He says the project started out as a way to understand our social divides and ideological disagreements, but doesn’t really map these modes of reasoning and emoting about the world onto political behaviour. Maybe classifying politicians (or political philosophers) to his ideal-types is a project for the next book.

Book (2): I also read What is Immigration Policy For? by Madeleine Sumption. It addresses the question of the title admirably and accessibly, without pretending there are any simple answers. On the contrary, Sumption’s main message is that immigration policy is very hard, and requires us to confront irreconcilable trade-offs: between economic imperatives, the short-term demands of public services, humanitarian commitments and social integration. She shows some sympathy for the politicians that have to navigate the inconsistent demands of public opinion, though she also suggests they bring it on themselves by making unrealistic promises that overstate their ability to influence cross border movement. Sumption is absolutely correct to reject the idea that migration policy should be left to experts (as chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, she’d be on the hook, and clearly wouldn’t like that). But I think she’s too quick to assume decisions must therefore be left to politicians’ discretion (as opposed to finding ways to get citizens to rationalise their expectations). She has a certain queasiness around ‘moralising’ immigration discourse, fearing it will entrench people in self-righteous camps unwilling to compromise with one another. Yet how much we care about helping vulnerable people, what indignities we’re willing to impose for the sake of control, even the economic costs we’ll pay for greater homogeneity — these are all moral questions. And in practice we do have to compromise on them. Politicians, moreover, don’t seem any more capable or willing to forge those compromises than citizens do. The challenge, as always, is how to wrap these trade‑offs into democratic deliberation and decision‑making. Sumption’s book frames the right questions, but doesn’t get into the process by which we might arrive at some answers.

TV: Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair (Disney+). It’s a really strange phenomenon, watching fan fiction penetrate popular culture, becoming integral where once it was on the periphery. The Malcolm in the Middle reboot, rather like the (hugely underrated) Frasier one, feels like fan fiction with a full cast and budget. Maybe that’s fitting for such a dose of millennial nostalgia. It’s not necessarily a bad thing: the new series takes the prompt “what would the family be doing in 2026?” and runs with it, showcasing how strong the characterisation was and how richly drawn the family dynamics remain. As a kid, all that went over my head, but on re-watch it resonates. Still, the new series leans more socio‑psychological than comic, and as a result ends up less funny. Fine for a one-off mini series, but probably not enough to build a full-scale reboot upon.

Film: One Battle After Another. Long plane journeys means watching movies my wife won’t mind skipping. Hence If I Had Legs I’d Kick You on the way out to Brazil, and this on the way back. Again: I didn’t really get the hype. It wasn’t boring (not faint praise: it’s 2h40 and I was sleep deprived). But it wasn’t especially funny, the political message was pretty crude, the characters sketches at best, struggling to see anything revolutionary (so to speak). Like a washed-out Tarantino.

Music: First live show of the year! And in York, which is a novelty. Went to see Lande Hekt. It was fun: all indie guitar jangle tone and glottal stops.

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Book: Last week I read The History of Ideas by David Runciman. It’s a collection of essays, each focused on different great work of political philosophy, from Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality to Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices. Like the podcast series it originates from, reading the book feels like taking lessons from an outstandingly clear undergraduate lecturer, which it basically is. However, the essays aren’t just introductory sketches of the thinkers’ ideas. Runciman usually has distinctive takes on each one. For example, I think he grasps something fundamental about Jeremy Bentham and the consequentialist temperament - it is an inherently sceptical creed, suspicious that common sense, assuming that the way we do things is all too often a function of deliberate obfuscation, prejudice and inertia. It is an acid bath, dissolving indefensible ideas and leaving their rational core behind. Critically, in Bentham’s time there were a lot of bad ideas to dissolve - slavery, oligarchy, homophobia, inhumane punishment. The critics of consequentialism, on this view, suppose that those bad ideas are behind us, and that throwing the acid of criticism around risks burning through valuable stuff. Are we really so sure we’re past outdated moral ideas though?

Podcast: Political Conversions: Switching Sides in the 21st Century (Past Present Future). More David Runciman, but this one is more about his guest David Klemperer, who is a fascinating historian of politician ideas in his own right, and an excellent foil for Runciman. The entire series tracing stories of intellectuals switching political sides, from Oswald Moseley to postwar ex-communists to the neoconservative movement, is worth a listen. I learned less from the final episode, which offered more limited historical detail, but it touches upon what I think is one of the most important questions of our age: is this a post-ideological era, or is another fundamental clash of values occurring? I’m inclined to believe we’re still mostly in a world of valence politics, where even populists are competing mostly on their ability to take the (they say simple) measures necessary to turn our social and economic fortunes around. David K thinks we are increasingly facing a choice between people who believe in equality and democracy and those that do not. Despite my scepticism, I think it’s plausible he’s right - enough so, that I hope he’s up for the task of sketching out the dividing lines and how egalitarian democrats might be able to win.

Article: Generative AI exposes longstandong flaws in the use of essay assessments in a mass system by Nigel Francis et al (Wonkhe). Found this piece interesting because it is unusually candid in acknowledging most university teaching in the UK is a “bargain basement” version of the Oxbridge tutorial system without the resources to implement it properly (small class sizes, regular feedback from low stakes essays). It also recognises that the obvious response to the challenge of AI assisted essays is to lean more on oral assessments, though it doesn’t recognise the extent to which the direction of travel seems to be away from expecting students to speak in class (the consumerist tendency in universities disagrees with making students do something they don’t want to, the overzealous inclusivity strand sees oral assessment as dangerous to mental health and wellbeing). But the even bigger issue is that AI doesn’t do anything about the resource constraints that stopped most universities doing orals in the first place. Unless we get class sizes down significantly, I don’t think this proposal is going anywhere.

Film: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Some places bafflingly bill this as a comedy, but I found it unremittingly bleak. Rose Byrne understandably got a lot of plaudits for her portrayal of a haggard, hassled therapist whose life spirals out of control as her child develops an eating disorder. I found it borderline irresponsible in the way that almost rationalises and makes breakdown seem like a natural response to demanding parenthood. At the same time, it does seem to illustrate a tragic reality, that being mentally unwell isn’t something we can control, that a person can know exactly what they ought to do, and yet find themselves completely incapable of doing it. Byrne’s character is a physician who absolutely cannot heal herself, mirroring the worst habits of her worst patients. The arbitrariness and helplessness may be true to life, but god it’s a miserable truth.

Food: Brota (Rio de Janeiro). I’ve spent the last couple of days in Rio de Janeiro which, is not, it turns out, an easy place to eat vegetarian. So it was a relief to find Brota, a classy meat-free place in Botafogo. I ate some delicious brotinhas (essentially arancini) and a very tasty burrata with onion, crisp garlic and fried capers, as good a vegetarian meal as you’ll get anywhere.

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Book: I just finished Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen & Larry Bartels, which might be one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time, and also one of the most disenchanting. It is a brutal experience, having the implicit story of how democracy is meant to work torn up and burned before your eyes, page by page. You think democracy is about governments being responsive to their citizens’ wishes? Impossible: most voters don’t have coherent political views, can’t map those views onto political candidates at election time, and vote for people that evidently have quite different policy priorities. You think democracy is about holding governments accountable? It can’t be when voters are so myopic in their judgements, only considering how they feel right now, and failing to distinguish genuine competence from pure luck. All politics, Achen & Bartels suggest, is identity politics: the fundamental driver of electoral outcomes is voting the way “people like us” (Republicans, Southerners, ethnic minorities, women) ought to. Their account of the value of democracy is pretty minimalist: we should just be grateful to have a peaceful transition of power every few years, even if it is largely random. That is a bleak outlook for more institutional designers: Achen & Bartels see trying to make things more democratic as a mistake, because they believe ordinary citizens fundamentally don’t want to engage any more with politics. I think they go too far here, and that part of the problem is that citizens have such restricted opportunities for participation - it’s not human nature, but a contingent feature of modern institutions. But both sides are speculating. I’m most curious about how politicians should respond to the Democracy for Realists argument. Should they feel liberated from the apparently impossible task of trying to interpret and influence popular opinion? Or should recognition of the limitations of elections in providing a clear signal be a prompt to explore other ways to better understand the values and preferences of the people they are there to represent? I think it’s the latter, but this book gives me pause as to what is actually achievable.

Article: Social Media is populist and polarising: AI may be the opposite by John Burn-Murdoch (FT). A follow up to my colleague Dylan Matthews’ piece on how AI might be nudging people towards a shared set of facts rather than fragmenting agreed truth, bringing the data as JBM is wont to do. Putting the theory to the test with thousands of conversations with LLMs on controversial sociopolitical topics, he finds that the bots seem to drive conversations to the political centre ground and push back on conspiratorial beliefs. I’m increasingly persuaded that in its psychological consequences at least, AI will be far better than social media. Whether it will be net positive remains an open question.

Podcast: Why you can’t change someone’s mind (LRB On Politics). Sarah Stein Lubrano’s Don’t Talk About Politics was one of the best books I read last year, and this discussion with James Butler is an excellent exposition and exploration of its ideas. It, too, paints a rather sceptical picture of democratic process, observing that political arguments rarely shift people’s views. So there’s something ironic about that argumenr being expressed in a conversation so rich with ideas, from Hegel to Adorno to Habermas. Indeed it’s ironic that I’ve updated my views in Stein Lubrano’s direction since learning about them (she also nudged me further towards the view that cognitive dissonance is one of the most powerful and underrated forces in modern society). The key insight, however, and the grounds for some hope, is that politics is about more than having intellectual debates, and that it is action and social ties that actual alter people’s beliefs and values. It won’t come easily - Stein Lubrano is admirably frank about the amount of work involved in fostering meaningful connection entails - but the idea that effective citizenship is hard workalso seems right to me.

Film: Frances Ha. Very belatedly got around to this movie from the Greta Gerwig/Noah Baumbach back catalogue. The most alarming thing is that a film from 2012 now looks like a period piece (complaining about your friend ignoring you for her email-enabled phone - quaint!). I enjoyed it, it was pleasant enough. But as a film about young women in their 20s in New York struggling to adult, I couldn’t help but compare it unfavourably with Girls. The comedy is gentler, but considerably less funny as a result. Girls is extraordinarily self-aware for a show written by someone so young. Frances Ha is a far more sentimental and romanticised account of being young, despite (because?) it was written by Baumbach in his 40s, drifting almost towards manic pixie dream girl territory (which, to be fair, is a trope that takes me right back to my early 20s).

Food: Baked camembert. Toasted walnuts, walnut oil, confit garlic on the side, with pickles, fresh baguette (store bought). Nothing revolutionary, but enjoyable way to say goodbye to the last vestiges of winter.

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