November 25, 2008

Quote for the Day

Chris Dillow - always worth your time - casts a weary eye over a number of government policies and concludes:

What this shows, I think, is that New Labour’s claim to believe in technocratic, evidence-based policy is a sham. They are not technocrats at all, but either priggish moralists or cowardly panderers to mob prejudice.

Quite so. And as he says, we may need a revolution. Lord knows, however, where that might come from.

25 Nov 2008 14:52:00 | Britain, O Tempora, O Mores

1 Comment

dearieme

"Lord knows, however, where that might come from." The usual source - the old Adam. And it won't be pretty.

Posted by: dearieme | November 25, 2008 at 07:25 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Never mind me mate, what about the other mob? Commenting on this post Ian Leslie - aka Marbury - argues that we're on the brink of a new era and that just as Callaghan was right to appreciate that one era had ended in 1976, so Darling and El Gordo may be correct to suppose that another has been shipwrecked now. Maybe. Look, I'm not sure this will work, and if it does work it might be partly by accident and yes I know that Brown hasn't really earned his authority over the last ten years. This is a gamble. But taking a gamble at this stage is better than doing nothing and hoping things will return to normal, as the Tories propose. They won't. Well, are the Tories really proposing "doing nothing"? Granted, their proposals haven't been especially persuasive either. But to say - for the sake of argument - that Labour's proposals are better than what the Tories have to offer is a long way from supposing that Labour's plans should be supported. A rotten plan is not necessarily better than no plan. At times like these it doesn't really matter what the opposition hae to say: after all they're in no position to do anything. It's...
PREVIOUS POST
Best, Brightest, Fabbest Cabinet, like, Evah I'd been meaning to write something about how all the cheering at the supposed brilliance of Obama's cabinet picks was reminiscent of the huzzahs that greeted George W Bush's peronnel choices. But Ezra Klein has beaten me to it: "Isn’t it amazing," asks Krugman, "just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing. For a bunch of people who were written off as a permanent minority four years ago, the Democrats look remarkably like the natural governing party these days, with a deep bench of talent." That certainly feels true. But the Bush administration started out with a fairly deep bench. Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Paul O'Neill --a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and a past chairman of the RAND Corporation -- as Secretary of the Treasury. Columbia's Glenn Hubbard as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice providing foreign policy expertise. Indeed, the Bush team was lauded for being such a natural entity of governance: These were figures from the Nixon and Ford and Bush administrations, and they were backed...

alex massie

Search

My Online Status

Recent Comments