- Blog
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And your enemies closer
’Close-marking’ is an electoral strategy, the invention of the now legendary Labour Party spokesman Alastair Campbell and strategist Peter Mandelson. — The idea is that an opposition party assembles focus groups and runs polls to identify the government policies that are popular in the target electorate and then copies those policies. Remember Gordon Brown’s pledge…
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End of the line
The Conservative Party is, famously, the most successful political party in history. — The party is a shape-shifting cockroach that’s survived the whole industrial era, the expansion of the franchise, the growth of the cities and the urban middle class, revolution all across Europe, secularisation and the erosion of the power of the gentry. It…
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Metre disorder
I love poetry. I write poetry, I love rhyme and rhythm and structural play of all kinds. I write in rhyme. But I can’t see metre. — I know what metre is, I can hear it when it’s pointed out. I know it’s there. I just can’t see it or use it in any non-clumsy…
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Civilianise the police
Trying to turn a 19th Century property-protection force, organised like the army, into a 21st Century organisation, modelled on a corporation, is a mug’s game. — The Met is in trouble again. An excoriating new report calls for reform and accountability. For management to credibly identify and remove bad apples and institute new, up-to-date norms…
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Hi-viz
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How do you like your tradition?
Essentially perfect small town joy or ridiculous and contrived ceremonial fiction? — I was watching this ace video about the shrovetide madness that takes over in several small English towns in February each year and just gurgling with joy at the completeness, the perfect, hermetic correctness of the whole thing. It’s a kind of unarguable…
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1998, the last time New York City had the correct amount of visual chaos
It was the end of history but it was before 9/11, before the dot.com crash, a whole decade before the Great Recession — Zuckerberg was still at school. I was in New York. I had a beeper and an answering service, there was a tiny office with a desk and a chair and no one…
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Night shift
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More Klingon than Starfleet
A Musk spaceship will be a Musk workplace — FURTHER UPDATE 13 January 2025. It’s difficult to know where this will end. Musk – a foreigner, remember – now has the kind of direct access to the machinery of government in the USA that a robber baron could only have dreamt of. And there’s not…
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Bureacracy in deep space
If you want to understand the state of the art in space-age capitalism you must visit the HR department — Everyone knows that it’s in Human Resources that you’ll find the perfect expression of the polished lie of the benign 21st Century workplace. The grim neoliberal orthodoxy of human potential in service of capital lives…