I note that on Friday both IDS and Fox appeared to produce unverified statistics stating that the USA food industry resulted in less death through food poisoning. They claimed that the concerns raised by Labour were just leftist propaganda against the import of food stuffs from the USA.
It was no surprise that the figures quoted by IDS were incorrect and that the protections received by using the standards set by the EU in one category resulted in no deaths compared to 124 in the USA. I guess they were just preparing the public for what could be included in a possible trade deal.
They also announced at 10 pm Friday that one of our defence companies could be sold to the USA. Why announce it at this time other than to try to avoid scrutiny, what are they worried about and are they going to continue with the Johnson election strategy of dodge, duck and lie.

The defence deal was first suggested in the early part of the year, it was called in for scrutiny and passed that. Nobody knows what the trade deal with the USA does or doesn't include. Chlorination is safe, wether it allows poorer farming standards is down to IF those regulations are changed.

Again some very interesting points.

Business hates any kind of restriction which is why they favour the EU. Whilst they all say the play by the rules on taxation perhaps if they played morally by the rules then their place in the general public's view would be improved. The government could then defend a different strategy - it simply cannot defend business in the same way it could.

I have never heard the Tories championing the slashing of workers rights or consumer rights - it would be electoral suicide.

Business can be a very flexible beast when it needs to be - I doubt that situation will change anytime soon. If companies want to sell into the EU the standards they require will have to be met. It might actually mean the government can use its money to directly assist some ailing industries and encourage inward investment via grants something it is prohibited from doing as a member of the EU?

It’s weird that in my bubble that is taken for granted and that in yours it is unheard of.

If you were to Google ‘Tories workers rights’ and pick one of the many hits from the media catering to my bubble, you’d see that version of the reality. Equally, if I click on the link from the Times, i can read a few lines about Michael Gove vowing to stand up for workers rights (either trying to be genuinely reassuring and failing or taking the pee and succeeding) that are visible above the paywall.

One curiosity is that I think that Dominic Cummings does understand those who have been left behind. What is less clear is whether he understands them like somebody understands a hammer, as tool that can help him get poop done (like a British Steve Bannon or Vladislav Surkov), or whether he might have some empathy. His quote about the Tory politicians not caring about ordinary people and the NHS offers hope (and about David Davis being thick as mince )but why he thinks Johnson and Gove are any different or even better, remains a complete mystery to me.

Surely that's just sensible because in a globalised economy they face competition from all over the world. Any additional costs or restrictions that businesses face that their rivals don't face, is a problem. It's just like they would come out and oppose being asked to pay additional business taxes.

Also for years the right wing press have been telling us that 'EU red tape' was strangling our businesses so it's been revealing to see the business community mostly supporting Remain, or at least single market membership.



I agree and think there is a definite spectrum even within the Tory party on this. Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Greg Clark came from the position that capitalism has to deliver for ordinary people otherwise it just undermines support for the market system. They moved towards the position Ed Miliband had taken as leader of the Opposition, ie seeing 'good capitalism' and 'bad capitalism' and trying to tame bad capitalism with measures on the gig economy and price caps for energy. Also they had started to recognise issues like late payment for suppliers, where 'bad capitalism' sees small businesses screwed over by big businesses.

On the other hand you have the ideologues who basically see everything in the private sector as good, everything in the public sector as bad. Chris Grayling was a classic example - getting trapped in a rabbit hole by championing the rail franchises that were obviously failing (like GoviaThameslink) and instead of admitting defeat and exercising sanctions against them or removing the franchise, was changing the rules at which sanctions kick in to basically make sure the failing private provider got cushioned by the state. The 'Britannia Unchained' brigade - Raab, Patel and so on are also rapid believers that the market can do no wrong (except when it comes to free movement of people of course!).

Which way will the current government go....? I think Boris will be torn with pressures in both directions. Some of the rich donors and right wing 'think tanks' (ie lobby groups) will be pushing hard for the Britannia Unchained approach, but that will disproportionately hit less well off voters who are now in Boris' target 'base'.



I've heard Conservatives taking this position a lot recently and it really sums up how they are struggling for arguments to still justify that Brexit is going to benefit the UK. They've been forced to take basically the position of the Bennite left from the 1980s when the argument from the hard left in the Labour party was to withdraw from the EEC so we would be free to pursue a policy of state-subsidies to support strategic industries and protect manufacturing in this country. Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives took the complete opposite view, that ailing industries needed to be competed out of business! Jeremy Corbyn's position in all his years before his late conversion to Remain (which seemed to coincide with taking the leadership) was exactly that - withdraw from the EU, pursue a nationalistic industrial policy. Now some Tories including Dominic Cummings are talking about the same thing.

Have you watched the youtube vid of Cummings speech to the IPPR in 2014, called 'the Hollow Men'. It's over an hour long but only about 40 mins is his speech, the rest is questions and answers. He comes across better than I expected from what I'd heard about him. He's definitely not a ranting ideologue, although there is something dangerous about a man who is completely convinced in his own genius.

He's definitely not a loyalist Tory, he's not even a Conservative member. He was scathing about the lack of ability of the Conservative Ministers under Cameron and as well as giving a list of things 'the left' doesn't understand, he gave a similar one of things 'the right' doesn't understand, starting with bloated salaries at the top of the private sector and the way the rich get round paying taxes. Most of his ideas around changing the skills base for those in government - more towards understanding statistics, data, how to do models effectively, and taking a scientific approach to policy problems, rather than the approach of rewarding PPE or arts grads who are good at networking, blagging it and 'playing the system', seemed sensible to me. This was before the Brexit referendum so he didn't talk about the EU much, he wasn't going on about deregulation or culture wars, his main goal seemed to be that the UK should become the 'nursery of science' for the world.

I’ll see if I can find it, thank you.

One thing that has been interesting about the Brexit debate has been re-alignments, contortions even, that a lot people and groups of people have undertaken to support their position. Quite rapidly in some cases - remember a few months ago when the ERG thought the DUP’s opinion was important for more than just reasons of parliamentary support? Labour banging on about impacts on business and free-trade, Tories making the case for potential State-ist intervention in key industries. In that respect it might have done us some good, and i’m not sure we will return to the old normal. And Cummings has been one catalyst for that, as a ‘disruptor’. He’s shown he can break the system... can he contribute to making a new one?

I suspect he despises Johnson, an arts graduate who is good at networking and blagging it, as you put. Cummings is quoted as saying ‘Look around parliament. Who are the people that get ahead? People who are glib, who enjoy public speaking, who make jokes’. Both a complaint, and a description what he needed, I suppose. It’s a very volatile and probably unstable combination, but there’s a symbiosis to it too. Johnson relied on Stuart Reid to run the Spectator when he was nominally editor, and knew he needed policy and management help when he became Mayor of London (fair play), so this is just the pattern repeating.

It is a interesting whistlestop manifesto. Especially given where he is 5 years on, and some of it is starting to be implemented. People appointed to the Lords and given ministerial roles, for example.

It warmed by heart to hear someone extolling the virtues of science but I think he has an idealised view of it. As i’m sure he’d be the first to say, things work best when incentives are well aligned, and as in all walks of life that isn’t always the case in science. As an outsider, I might easily point to some Whitehall’s magnificent achievements - living with a system is going to influence your view of it, obviously. The good scientist as bad manager cliche isn’t baseless, and while we could definitely do with a better mix of professional backgrounds in Parliament and Cabinet, I wouldn’t want to go overboard on that.

Also the commercial sector selects for success, and retrospectively pointing out what a top job Steve Jobs did, also, surely requires us to look at examples of the market and allocation of capital going wrong - Theranos, WeWork and the like. Tech entrepreneurs may be incentivised to think longer term than politicians, but that doesn’t mean the failure rate isn’t huge. It’d be great to think that our Health System might ‘do an Amazon’, or that Defence might ‘go Instagram’, but if Education is MySpace... not so hot. I know things have moved on a lot since the dotcom bust, but it’s close to certain that some current tech favourites will have crashed and burned by 2030.

I agree. The civil service by nature needs to have some checks on risk and can't be run like a start-up. Having worked inside Whitehall, and with Whitehall departments, and on the outside, I recognise some of the stuff Cummings talks about.

The first thing people should recognise is that amongst professionals, you get the same type of people inside the civil service as you do outside. Lawyers, scientists, economists (my profession). There is a caricature that you go in the private sector and find creative, driven hard workers and you go in the civil service and everybody is sitting round eating biscuits and browsing the internet all day, which isn't true. The single main difference I observed was more women in senior positions in the civil service, especially a lot of women who had transferred in from the private sector.

I did see some of the inefficiencies that frustrated Cummings. I found there was a body of middle to senior management that seemed to exist to generate work for others to justify its own existence. They were the people who described their job as 'its about asking the right questions', or 'its about commissioning and synthesising work from others' and 'its about keeping others on track'. Worst of all is when people make a virtue out of 'delivering through others'. All too often this meant basically seeking approval from those above them, by creating 'projects' and delegating work down to those below them, then going round senior meetings talking about all the 'outputs' their team was delivering.

I got brought in during a Spending Review, to build a value for money model about a particular spending line that was going to get submitted to the Treasury. In the private sector, this would have been just a classic research project, you have a client, a deadline, you gather evidence, build a model, get some peer review, deliver. Unfortunately inside Whitehall it was infinitely complicated by having to deal with those kind of people I described above. Before we could get started on the project, there was a whole rigmarole about writing a terms of reference, sending it round, getting comments, rewriting, getting sign off. Then we had to set up 'governance procedures', so we had to set up an internal governance board and we had to meet them every 3 weeks and for each board we had to write some papers for them to discuss. Then someone would say 'are we engaging with other government departments on this?' and so we had to set up another governance board which included other departments, with a different set of papers to be written for them. Then we had the internal 'central team' who had been set up to 'keep everyone else on track' and who had their own project meetings every few weeks, who kept asking for slidepacks to be generated showing 'findings so far'.

Now in the private sector, you'd usually keep in touch with the client with updates/questions and asking for their input as and when it was required, and would have a halfway point where you'd give them an interim findings presentation and slidepack, but this was a 6 month project that I think we could have done in 3 in the private sector, but it became really difficult to deliver in 6 months because of all the work we had to do on the side to feed these multiple internal project management processes.

What also annoyed me was that in none of these various governance reporting meetings did we actually have constructive conversations about the detail of the value for money evidence or interested in taking any of it on board to help shape policy decisions. They liked to talk about 'outputs and timescales'. Well, the whole project had a single output and a 6 month timescale, but they were desperate to get 'interim outputs' because they wanted stuff to fill on project trackers to show their own seniors that work was being delivered. We were producing papers for the purpose of having papers, just to tick a box, and when I moaned about it I always got told 'you have to play the game....thats how Whitehall works'. The moment I started trying to engage these people on the detail of the evidence or get them to discuss implications for policy they weren't interested in talking, they just saw this as something that needed to be delivered for the Treasury and didn't much care what it said. They weren't going to change any policy decisions on the back of it.

So although I said its a caricature that civil servants sit around doing nothing, I think there's a cadre of staff there on around £60-70k who have worked out how to play the system, and are on to a cushy number, just generating project management processes that they delegate down to others to service. On the other hand, I found some superb brains, often young staff including a lot of PhD analysts, underpaid, renting in crappy conditions in London, who could produce some real quality work but whose efficiency was being diminished by being diverted away to service this project management crap.

Final gripe on this - when I met project managers in the private sector, they usually had some kind of professional qualification, PRINCE2 or whatever. In the civil service there were all these bloody project managers, they had no formal qualifications for it, they didn't actually provide any leadership in to the projects, they just said to others 'draw up a gantt chart to show me your planned timescales', 'send me a slidepack showing me where you're up to', printed them all out and attended senior meetings with evidence that they had kept stuff on track. They wouldn't engage in any problem solving or talk about what members of a project team needed to do or how they should do it, they just kicked all of the grappling with the detail to those lower down the chain and saw their job as 'holding them accountable'. Nice way to earn £60k.

Now in the interests of balance, I saw a lot of crap in the private sector that I didn't see in Whitehall. In the private sector I seemed to spend a lot of my time 'selling my services', filling out bids for work, networking with clients to try and get work from them. In Whitehall work just gets thrown at you. Also there are a lot of toxic cultures in the private sector that you don't get in Whitehall....the pressure to drink and take clients out, the abuse of the company credit card for expenses, the little cheap cost-cutting tricks to fleece clients to show your bosses that you were hitting your project 'profit mark up' targets. I found a lot more toxic gossip and internal politics and people stabbing others in the back to get ahead in the private sector, in the civil service that didn't seem to happen.

Also, in private sector economic consultancy you get a cadre of seniors who spend all day tweeting, writing blogs, going to events as a 'panel speaker', acting as talking heads for Sky News as an 'expert' and literally do no work, other than sticking themselves down for 1 day work on every project bid at a £2500 a day rate and being very expensive proof readers. In the civil service the Chief Economists and whatever do a lot more meaningful and constructive work than that and get paid less. There were some very impressive people high up in the senior civil service.

So I am not arguing for the superiority of private v public sector....but I understand Cummings frustrations with the inefficiencies of the Whitehall machine and I can see what he means when he says you could cut a huge chunk of staff out and make it more efficient. What I fear from Cummings is that he will leave Whitehall in charge of making its own redundancies and 'the system' will protect itself and force out good people at the bottom. And also he might get involved in a war on 'flexi-time' to appease the tabloids that he was being tough on lazy Remainers. Of all the problems I found in Whitehall, things like job shares or staff being able to work from home was not a problem for me.

A couple of things I think Cummings has maybe or probably got wrong.

1. He acknowledges leveraging immigration in the Leave campaign with a view to detoxifying the debate and it becoming a second or third order issue after Brexit. That feels like a typical liberal bubble error, of thinking he’s pacifying those with the most visceral concerns rather than having empowered them.

2. Johnson forcibly reassured Cummings that he’d stand by his commitments to the NHS. That feels like a classical logician’s error of checking for internal consistency without considering dishonesty.