David (90 IQ communist) Higham
@oldtrotter
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Exiled Boltonian. Ex academic. Member of Hezza’s Barmy Army (©The Sun). 20 years failing to rebalance the economy. Used to win the odd bike race. Music fan.
Joined August 2011
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If you’re interested in my views on regional policy, here’s a blog I did for
@ukcivilservant
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Some personal news. My long delayed heart surgery is scheduled for tomorrow so I will be off this site for a little while.
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A reminder that however bad your day, it’s unlikely to be as bad as Colonel Ponsonby’s.
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Your regular reminder that the fuel crisis in 2000 led Blair and Brown to construct an extensive resilience network which the Coalition - and specifically Eric Pickles - dismantled on ideological grounds.
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@davidallengreen
Not sure who was responsible for this cartoon but it’s depressingly accurate
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A perfect example of the economy of expression that characterises the topic the civil service. I only wish that I could write like this.
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Let’s not forget what the Levelling Up Agenda has delivered so far.
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Seems an appropriate time to repost this letter to the New Statesman from a year ago. The centre of British politics moves ever rightward.
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Quite the paragraph from
@rafaelbehr
Think it might answer that question you asked
@drjennings
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That is quite some opening paragraph.
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"Furious activity is no substitute for understanding". Ten lessons from 20 years working on regional development as a civil servant based initially in Whitehall and latterly in the NW of England. Long thread.
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Call me old fashioned but I expect senior ministers to be capable of carrying out policies without getting “carried away”.
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What is the Western canon of music and drama?
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Hasn’t he got a seat yet?. I can’t take much more of this
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That’s quite the interview with Peter Hennessy in the FT. Britain is suffering from the economic malaise of the late 1970s and the political malaise of the mid 1990s, with a political class limited in outlook. He’s also a *bit* angry
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@MikeHolden42
@bbclaurak
And didnt one of his aides tell a reporter to "**** off" on live TV? Surely that's as much of a story as one of Hancock's aides not been assaulted 🤔
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From four years ago. Nothing has changed. Levelling Up 🤔
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@Mr_John_Oxley
@Frances_Coppola
And national service was only abolished in 1960 and theatre censorship ended in 1968 but why let facts get in the way?
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This is from the PM's official account. Extraordinary.
This is what we’re up against.
The Labour Party, a subset of lawyers, criminal gangs - they're all on the same side, propping up a system of exploitation that profits from getting people to the UK illegally.
I have a plan to stop it.
Here’s how 🧵
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@Otto_English
I think the Right need to decide whether being sent to Rwanda is a punishment or a reward.
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The conclusion from today’s piece by Martin Wolf.
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Are the Tories really going to go down this route?
So here is Mp Richard Bacon saying
@BBCLookEast
have failed to investigate 1.5 million
@NHSuk
staff to find out if they let there hair down during Covid Lockdowns.
@theRCN
@unisontheunion
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@alexhallhall
Keep ranting. About time people held Johnson and Frost accountable for their actions.
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You get a superior class of trolling in the FT.
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@mikegalsworthy
@BBCr4today
Yet another illustration of Asimov’s warning about the dangers of anti-intellectualism “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge” The BBC should not be encouraging this trend.
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@Sime0nStylites
@katie_martin_fx
Wouldn’t it exclude Liz Truss who has been extremely critical of government policy🤔
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@Bob__Hudson
They don’t like lots of people being educated? The idea that you only educate people to the level needed to do a job has been a theme in RW thinking since at least Victorian times.
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All those Tory Party members and MPs who dislike wind and solar farms because they're unsightly are going to have a shock when they discover what's involved in fracking.
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Tell me you've never ridden a bike without telling me you've never ridden a bike. Cyclists can "easily" exceed 20 mph. Let's put Shapps on a bike on a level road and see how he gets on.
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Quite the opening paragraph in this piece. Extraordinary (at least to me) that anyone thought that EU membership was a threat to British identity. Those debates had been had in the 1950s and 1960s
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In Cheshire they use actual potholes. Saves money all round.
Some areas in Canada have used 3D images of Potholes to slow down traffic in some areas.
They are extremely effective.
Have a lowered average speed than Speed-bumps.
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Private Eye continues to do more to hold the Government to account than most of the media.
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I’ve worked for many ministers. Can’t recall many that liked long briefings and can think of one or two who would have thought even one side of A4 was far too long. Conveying complex arguments concisely is a key skill of the civil service which it has become fashionable to deride
Boris Johnson’s aides have been ordered to send him shorter memos, limiting papers to just two sides of A4. Civil servants have also been told to cut the number of documents put into the prime minister’s red box to “make sure that he reads them”
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I think it’s fair to say that Martin Wolf isn’t impressed by the Tories’ record in office.
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So let me get this right, Brexit has reduced the attractiveness of the U.K. for international investment so we’ve launched a new fund to attract it and we’re going to claim that’s a benefit of Brexit 🤔
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Raab “scientists make assumptions, we rely on hard facts”
#R4
Ministers have clearly learnt nothing during the pandemic.
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Yet more
#winning
#BrexitReality
We have made it as hard to sell to the EU as to the rest of the world and sold it as a move towards free trade. Extraordinary.
We are sorry to say that we have been forced to immediately abandon all direct deliveries from our website to Canada. This was meant to be an emerging market to replace the loss of the EU but is equally impossible for us to access due to high cost of delivery & customs duty🇨🇦👋😥
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The weakness of Starmer’s current election strategy summarised (Martin Wolf in the FT)
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From a few years ago but still makes me simile.
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How about just attempting to run the country, like an actual government?
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The conclusion of the latest blog from
@davidallengreen
illustrates the extent to which this Government’s priorities continue to be distorted by Brexit and the need to show that it was necessary.
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@patricksturg
@drjennings
@thesundaytimes
Shouldn’t the headline read “most privileged” rather than “brightest”?
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@ThomasBridge3
@tompeck
Both World Wars were followed by major social change. This pandemic will be no different. There will be a renewed focus on inequality the like of which we haven't seen for over 70 years.
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Given 🚌 are back in the news following the excellent piece by
@JenWilliams_FT
, and this striking graph, a 🧵 on how we got here.
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There’s a much stronger case for tax reform to boost growth than there is for tax cuts. If Truss doesn’t mind being unpopular then reforming the taxation of property would be the place to start.
Agree with
@TorstenBell
- there are lots of useful tax reforms Ministers have shied away from as unpopular. If you are willing to be unpopular, do some seriously useful tax reform. sorting property tax would be a great start.
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Anthony Seldon on how Johnson is approaching his last few weeks in office. It’s not odd at all. Sometimes the simplest explanations are the best. He only ever cared about the trappings of being PM rather than the hard work of governing.
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Being impartial means not letting your personal views influence your professional judgement (as Simon McDonald explains and which Kuenssberg knows). Looks like we’re in for another round of the “enemy within” coinciding with Sue Gray taking up her post with Starmer.
Civil servants are meant to be totally impartial … but here’s what the former foreign office chief did in the aftermath of the EU vote
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Sam Brittan giving remarkably prescient evidence on the limitations of a simple inflation target to the Lords Committee on Economic Affairs back in 2004
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One thing that I didn’t have on my Bingo Card was Nick Timothy morphing into Tony Benn
@StuartWilksHeeg
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Excellent piece pointing out that Truss needs to relearn what Macmillan learned all those years ago: that Britain’s strength lies in being part of Europe. She needs to stop treating the EU as the enemy.
"Truss may refuse to claim France Emmanuel Macron as a valuable ally. Biden has no such hesitation." The prime minister is heading for talks in NY with the US president. My take in latest Inside-Out
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@sarahoconnor_
At least we know now why "Government sources" thought Southgate's letter was suspiciously well written.
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Alok Sharma on tackling climate change. “It’s not the Government’s job to tell people how to behave” Err, it is. That’s why they make laws, impose regulations and levy taxes.
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If you're in the Home Office and being relocated to Stoke this is a sample of the grimness that awaits you.
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On Times Radio just now “David Cameron didn’t want his legacy to be defined by Brexit” 😂😂😂😂😂
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And after all that he died suddenly “at an inn near Basingstoke”
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“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”
"It's not fair to say this is an adverse effect of Brexit."
Home Secretary
@SuellaBraverman
says leaving the EU is not to blame for queues at Dover despite warnings from the port's chief executive.
#Ridge
📺 Sky 501, Freeview 233 and YouTube
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"Naive to expect anything but a start tomorrow " The Conservatives have been in power for 12 years.
So much to do to fix the NHS and it would be naive to expect anything but a start tomorrow from the new health secretary Therese Coffey. My understanding is there will be help to speed up transfer of elderly patients into social care, to free up desperately needed hospital...
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So the BBC reporting that Sunak’s favourite author is Jilly Cooper and Seldon saying this will have been dreamt up by his PR team to make him more relatable. Not sure which is worse.
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Just two paragraphs from the latest zinger of a blogpost from
@chrisgreybrexit
We are in truly alarming times given the challenges of Covid, Brexit and climate change.
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So let me get this right. Truss wants to abandon the planned increase in NI, put all the money it would have raised into social care (which is what Johnson originally promised) and fund the resulting shortfall in the NHS from general taxation, which she’s proposing to cut.
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Flying to Cornwall to urge the world to tackle climate change 🤔
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Football supporters added to the “deep state”.
The Liverpool end at Wembley strikes up a chant of "fuck the Tories" and the Chelsea end fights back with a chant of, er, "fuck the Tories". Look away now prime minister
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Policy since 2010 has been to save the cost of the civil service estate by providing fewer desks than people. The Coalition even had a major upgrade to the IT system to allow more remote working.
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So basically what local government used to do before a decade of austerity stripped services back to their statutory core. Well done Eric (now Lord) Pickles.
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That’s a pretty revealing comment about grammar schools.
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The Telegraph setting a really high bar for a successive lockdown.
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“London, Wales and a few university towns”. What a patronising ***.
LOVE this line of defence: "The voters wanted to give the gov't a kicking. They've done that. Now they'll move on." 🤣
Moylan then calls Labour "the party of Mayfair". That's Mayfair, represented by Tories until quite literally 10 hours ago, for *checks notes* 58 years. ~AA
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This is far more significant than the current *debate* on national service. Clearly preparing the ground for a pivot on "iron clad fiscal discipline" Borrowing to invest sounds almost Keynesian. The problem is that a lot of public services require revenue spend ..... 1/3
Rachel Reeves tells Kuenssberg: "There's not going to be a return to austerity under a Labour government." Says "immediate injection of cash" into public services would be a "downpayment" on future investment coming *after* sustained economic growth.
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Still mystified as to what has changed in the way we manage R to justify this. We don’t yet have a system of test, trace, isolate nor do we have a working app or a reliable antibody test. Ease lockdown = more cases. Anyone know?
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There’s journalism and then there’s this. Andrew Neil in today’s Mail.
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Well said by Francis Maude. Another phrase I never expected to have on my bingo card.
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Pathetic. Are they seriously trying to blame the civil service for a catastrophic lack of judgement?
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Satire is truly dead. "Vested interests dressed up as think tanks"
Truss: “I will not allow the anti-growth coalition to hold us back. Labour, Lib Dems, the SNP…vested interests dressed up as think tanks…some of the people we had in the hall earlier.”
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Back home now. Just had the most delicious cheese omelette I've ever tasted, two cups of coffee and now sat in the dying embers of the sun in the garden. Thanks for all your messages of support. They really did help. And the NHS is wonderful.
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Michael Howard “this isn’t as bad a humiliation as Suez”. Now that’s a line that didn’t feature on my bingo card.
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Saving the canal system for leisure use was one of Barbara Castle’s greatest achievements as Transport Secretary. Depressingly predictable that this most destructive of Governments should wish to sweep away that legacy.
Environment Secretary Therese Coffey announces Canal and Rivers Trust is to lose as much as £300m, around half of its funding, and is told to move to new funding models.
Trust warns the move could lead to less maintenance and even canal closures.
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