Willy Hutton asks the question:
So, is Andy Burnham’s credo of business-friendly socialism a contradiction in terms –
No. What it is is fascism.
Note this is different from spiffy uniforms and invading Poland. The fascist economy was one in which capitalists, business, were nominally independent as long as they did what government told it. Which is what Willy and Andy are proposing here.
So, it’s fascism.
True!!
It’s why, when communism collapsed in Russia and China, fascism took over.
It’s what we’ve had since the late 90s, at least.
The Blairites abandoned state ownership of the means of production and replace it with state control via regulation of, well, everything.
It always amazes me that Blair does not get more credit from the Left for this astonishing achievement (among many others).
“but is as passionate as Haldane about the same levelling-up cause, which he actively advocates as chair of the Northern Powerhouse.”
The problem with Northern Powerhouse is that the North doesn’t actually need better trains, because cities in the North aren’t like London.
London is a highly concentrated city. Loads of commerce in the centre, surrounded by lots of housing. It’s not only mental to drive into the centre, but also, if someone calls you about doing a meeting it’s most likely going to be in the centre, and not say, Chiswick or Barnet.
Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds etc are more mixed. You might have to go to an office in Manchester, but you also might go to a factory near Stockport, or a call centre near Wythenshawe. At which point, you’re farting around with taxis around trains, and the car is more convenient.
Western Bloke’s Rule of Travel: People will use a car unless it’s really inconvenient. Sure, there’s train nerds and the disabled and the odd person who just hates driving, but in general…
You’re right. And all the councils fight like racks in a sack for funding. They’re on local news every night whining for more state money. They’re not interested in helping the private sector grow. More trains won’t fix that.
Very much so. Getting around Cambridge central by car is a pain in the backside, the taxi drivers moan about the state of the roads and even the buses go at a fraction of the speed of a cyclist. So you cycle or walk.
I’d guess over a human lifetime a migration effect emerges where a rough 10 year average age gap emerges between cities with lots of cyclists and those with few. If you get injured, old, or just want to get about by car, you move to a car friendlier place like one of the New Towns or the hollowed out North where congestion isn’t much a problem.
And then politicians moan about regional inequality and think it’s fixable by HS2 to Manchester and trams in Leeds.
Most regional inequality is just going to get fixed because regional inequality was about where service jobs were. They were clustered on the rail hubs: Manchester, London, Reading, Leeds.
If you wanted people to commute to an office, it was best to be in those places. It’s fuck all to do with King of Manchester bollocks, because Reading saw the same sort of growth as Manchester.
And what’s changing is that you don’t need everyone in the office every day. Which is why house prices have been rising faster in places like the North East, Wales, South West than London and Manchester.
Yes, yes, not all jobs can be done remote, but some can. And actually, a lot of the work that can’t be done remote is in the cheap places. There’s not much manufacturing or brewing in the centre of Manchester or Reading, It’s in Suffolk, Lancashire and Trowbridge.
There is lots of inequality within the North. Barnsley and Huddersfield vs Manchester. But you can do a hybrid software or marketing job in Barnsley, so why not? Why spend on Manchester rents?
Sorry WB but that sounds like more “inside the box” thinking. Anything that is distributed data processing is ripe for AI. So those “can be done remote” jobs are going to go.
I think we’ve covered this before, so unless you want to explain some of that in detail, don’t bother. I have been automating business processes for over 30 years, I know quite a lot about Bayesian inferencing, LLMs, Google Gemini, Amazon Comprehend.
Your information, my guess is coming from either your imagination, or what media people are telling you.
The whole thing is a VC dump and pump. Talk it up, get journalists to hype it, take it public and walk off with the cash. OpenAI and Anthropic are losing money. And people are going to spend $1tn+ each buying them.
No, because what I’m suggesting is entirely predictable. Break any data processing activity down – and that’s what you’re talking about – its very simple & rules based. Most things at root are y/n options.
In a previous comment I mentioned designing logic circuit boards. It’s very simple. You write a flow chart for what you want the circuit to do & then build it.. For simple circuits you can get the flow chart on a couple of sheets of A4. It’s when it occupies 500 sheets it’s starts getting difficult. That’s when you start talking progamming.
It’s the same for the decision making process. Break it down to its fundamentals and it’s ‘does whatever meet the criteria, Y/N?’ All decisions are like that at a fine enough resolution. And if you can describe the criteria mathematically a machine can process it.
This isn’t anything new. People have been talking about this for decades.
Maybe it’s easier to understand if you’re looking at it from a distance. Or is it, you’ll never get anyone to understand something if their job depends on them not understanding?.
To write a good computer programme to automate a business process, one needs a sound basic understanding of the process and its purpose. LLMs generally do not *understand* anything.
You can break down a data processing activity into individual steps but if you don’t know what you are doing you can still screw things up – for example the bank’s AI telephone answering service that demands my date of birth (as part of its security check) and then says “do you mean nth of blah 2001?” and will not accept the answer “No, I mean what I said”
“And if you can describe the criteria mathematically a machine can process it.”
I think you’re getting mixed up here between AI and code.
Code has a fine detailed specification of the logic, like that if you want to send an overdue reminder invoice, what exactly the rule is for “overdue”, a layout of the email to send, what fields to use.
Where AI, is more like a text description of the process.
We already do rules-based processing. We write code to do it. You can write it with ChatGPT, but it won’t be great, might not work.
And I do understand this stuff, because I want to use it. Most coding is boring. I’d rather someone else did it. That’s why I know of what I speak because I’ve used Cursor and Google AI Studio.
“There’s not much manufacturing or brewing in the centre of Manchester”
The old Harp Lager factory in Manchester (is it Heinekin now?) is the second biggest brewery in the country. It’s just out the back of the university, a stroll from the town hall.
From what I’ve heard Los Angeles in the US is similar (but it covers a much larger area), which is why they can’t do public transit well there.
Yes, exactly.
Most older European cities, and a few American ones, were designed in the era of trams. and light rail. When that is what you have, the most sensible design of a city is the “wheel and spoke”. A centre everyone can get to on a regular, planned tram with trade and commerce at the centre, and lots of routes going out from it to homes. Once you get cars, the design can shift to a network.
LA really grew in the 1920s, and Americans were having lots of cars then. So, it’s more of a network. A lot of Birmingham’s growth was post-WW2 and because it’s manufacturing (out of the city) people lived near factories, and then, it became more of a network.
You can’t do public transport in the network setting because there’s too many combinations. You can, but you need multiple changes. It probably makes more sense to have some system where an Uber driver can pick up 2 or 3 passengers. And really, that’s not a little different in energy efficiency than buses and trains.
I worked in south Manchester for a few months and went into central Manchester once. I worked in Wythenshawe (colossal shit hole) and stayed around Cheshire, went to the movies at Trafford Centre a few times. There isn’t the same need when you can go in any direction.
Most of the UK is shifting to the network. Offices all over, retail parks all over. These rundown town centres are relics of the wheel and spoke era. Now, this kinda works in London because traffic is too slow, and so trains work. And a few oddities like Oxford.
Most European settlements weren’t designed. You’re falling for the America “somebody instructed where these streets should be” fallacy.
Someone, at some point, instructed where streets should be. Whether it was the landowner or the borough. If you wanted to just build a road, you had to be one of those people. It doesn’t mean there was some Hausmann style plan, but the towns were planned over time.
And when trams and later buses came along, many roads were changed to accomodate them.
When that is what you have, the most sensible design of a city is the “wheel and spoke”. A centre everyone can get to on a regular, planned tram with trade and commerce at the centre, and lots of routes going out from it to homes.
For anyone who’s lived there, pretty well describes the London Underground. To get from almost anywhere to almost anywhere else, if you aren’t already, at some point you’ll be on a train goes through Oxford Circus
Does that mean he’ll get the trains to run on time?
No, because they are being nationalised so the “delay, repay” incentive to get them nearly-on-time will lose its impact.
Yes. The loss after nationalisation of Delay-Repay as an incentive for punctuality really needs to be better publicised. The trouble is that the likes of Burnham never need to make use of Delay-Repay, as they never pay for their own ticket. They are unaware of the huge difference the scheme has made to those of us who use the railway.
I don’t think people understand just how little difference “nationalisation” means.
“Privatisation”: the government micromanages how trains are run and within that, the TOC tries to make some money.
“Nationalisation”. The government micromanages how trains are run, but the TOCs now get paid a fixed price. And you get a new paint job.
Of course, it means the TOCs only have to hit the minimum service levels in the contract. No point in spending any money beyond that, because you get no more money.
I don’t think you can get trains to run on time, because it’s just a sodding expensive, unreliable way to get people around. It isn’t even about government or not. Pneumatic tyres on tarmac are a technological advancement over metal wheels on tracks. Decentralised operation, tolerance of damage to the surface. Vehicles that carry 60 people (buses and coaches) are the sweet spot for most public transport. You don’t save a lot more per passenger making a bigger thing for 200+. You lose the benefits of markets. You lose the flexibility.
No-one is making much money from coach travel in the UK because yay markets. Flix, Megabus and National Express are fighting each other. They’re far cheaper than trains. We’d have a lot more of them, except that the taxpayers cough up to subsidise ridiculous train services, crowding out buses and coaches.
It’s not business-friendly, unless you are the property spiv he lent £600m of taxpayer’s money to at mate’s rates.
Corporatism – Mussolini said – best describes Fascism, a development of Socialism. Representatives of the State, representatives of private capital, representatives of the workers form a Corporazione (a Body) in each sector of the economy to plan and control it to serve the interests of and meet the aims of the State.
That model was used to create the European Coal & Steel Community (a Corporazione) set up in 1952, which was extended to all sectors of the economy to form the EEC run by the Corporazione called the European Commission, succeeded by its ugly spawn the EU.
The French called their style of post-war Government “Dirigisme” which sounded better than Fascism.
Corporatism has formed the basis of all Western economies since the war, via an informal relationship between the three elements without actually forming a Body.
And Fascism was about Nation State, but not about race, that was National Socialism.
Fascism: strong, autocratic central control of a private economy. The classic definition.
Totalitarian, but lets people own the means of production – the key difference from communism.
Is the West fascist? Absolutely. It is virtually impossible to buy anything that doesn’t have some government mandated content.
As always happens with fascism, corporations learn that resistance is futile, so they partner with government. Corporate/government cooperation is a symptom of fascism. See: Krupp/Göring.
Over here I can buy fresh fruit and vegetables (much of the fruit is imported but some is local and uninspected by any lanyard).
I wouldn’t be saying that in public. They have spies.
This will be interesting, because real fascism hasn’t been tried yet.
The fascists didn’t invade Poland … just Albania (they then *tried* to invade Greece and needed German help).
Actually, the historian in me gets tweaked by that. In the dozens of WWII books I have read, they incessantly talk about the Nazi army doing things. It was the German army. There is also the perpetual tweak of them calling the army “Wehrmacht.” I think English speakers just love the sound of the word, though they don’t know what it really means.
It is not the Republican air force and navy in the Gulf of Oman. It is the US navy and air force. Referring to the German army by the political party in power is annoying, probably based in the demonization of them. Most of the military were just soldiers.* ** Rarely do I see the Soviet army called the “communist army,” or even Red Army.
So that’s right, John77, Germans invaded Poland. The government in charge of the military were Nazis.
*Early formations of the Waffen SS were indeed Nazis. Later formations, not so much. Plus, attrition as the war dragged on, even the early ones lost a lot of their Nazi zealots.
**Kurt Meyer (“panzermeyer”) worked tirelessly after the war to get standard military benefits for former Waffen SS soldiers, to be treated as veterans, not Waffen SS.
By “business friendly”, they just mean full throttle to complete economic destruction via Net Zero and Third World repopulation schemes.
But maybe a couple of cunts from the CBI will get to the House of Toads.
The bugmen are very excited about Andy Burnham, because they incorrectly think they’ve cracked the code to making Clown World popular. Their mandibles are all aquiver at this One Weird Trick to making British people stop voting for Reform, and learn to embrace their daughters being raped and their sons butchered instead.
It’s all gonna end in eyelashes and tears for them. Even if Burnham had the intellectual capacity to understand what needs to be done, and the moral strength to want to do it, there’s hundreds of retards on the green benches who will quickly put a stop to that.
It’s all a bit Nick Clegg. Remember Nick Clegg, briefly, caught the imagination of the insect people?
The problem post-Blair, is that everyone thinks that all that gloss like sticking a football shirt on is what does it. Starmer’s a bit grey, etc.
What everyone forgets about Blair is that not only is a charismatic bloke, but, he was also very capable in interviews AND got the economy at the right time.
Burnham has a quite likeable Centrist Dad thing, but he’s actually quite shit. He was shit when he was a minister, and he doesn’t have a big Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of cash to drain like Blair did. But a lot of Labour people think the sun shines out of his arse.
But a lot of Labour people think the sun shines out of his arse.
True (if unfathomable), but check back in 6 months and it’ll be a different story.
Good analysis, WB.
The cycle has been Leftards stay in power long enough to fook up everything. Conservatives get in and straighten it all out. Clearing a path for the Left to get back in.
The Left’s huge problem now is the Tories did NOT fix it all up. Labour DID NOT inherit prosperity; they inherited a mess. And they have no clue how to deal with it. Burnham won’t either. Labour out NLT 2029. AND their brand will suffer mightily.