It is very hard to see what the tories think they are trying to do. They face an opposition which, while not particularly progressive, is a lot more progressive than they are. This opposition is also much more popular than they are. So what are they doing? They’re proposing policies which are even more extreme than the ones they’ve already enacted. Why?
On the 19th April, 2024, Rishi Sunak gave a speech. For reasons which escape me, what he said might still matter.
Everyone wants to believe in conspiracies. Some people believe that the alarmingly far-right government of the UK is conspiring with shadowy plutocrats to enrich themselves. That government itself apparently believes in the ludicrous ‘15-minute city’ conspiracy theory, and that something variously known ‘the blob’ and ‘lefty lawyers’ is working furiously against them. Trump supporters in the US believe in more conspiracy theories than it’s easy to count. Their opponents believe that Trump is a sock puppet for Putin, or in various conspiracies called ‘disaster capitalism’. People on all sides think the Jews or, perhaps, the Muslims, are behind everything. Or is it the climate scientists?
Here is the British government’s new ‘plan for drivers’. And here is a quote from it:
We will explore options to stop local councils using so-called “15-minute cities”, such as in Oxford, to police people’s lives
We are now ruled by people pushing conspiracy theories: either knowingly because they think that provoking further divisions in society will keep them in power, or because they believe the conspiratorial nonsense they’re peddling to be true. I don’t know which is more terrifying, but in either case these people are grotesquely unfit to be in office.
Wayback machine link because rewriting history is pretty much certain here.
The government of Britain wishes to stop councils — councils elected by local people — implementing schemes where essential amenities are always within a 15-minute walk for their voters.
Being another letter I will not send to my MP.
In late 2018, when I still worked at the Met Office, I sent a document to some people there which explained why I thought AI would come to dominate weather forecasting, and why weather forecasting organisations should be looking at AI, urgently. Today, the 28th of July 2023, there is a leader on the subject in The Economist as well as an extended article in its Science and Technology section.
I’d like to believe there was some purpose in writing to my MP, but I no longer do. He probably means well, but his soul has been sold, if he ever had one.
Or, the calls are coming from inside the house.
I don’t understand how the UK got onto its current death march, or where that death march will end. Here are some ideas which are worth what you paid for them.