Which 1980s thinker has the most influence on today’s politicians? It’s not Hayek or Friedman or Rawls or Negri or Laclau. Nope. It’s Cher. “If I could turn back time” is the motto of much of our political-media class.

This is most obviously true of proposals for remigration and mass deportations, which are not a serious response to any socio-economic problem but merely a desire to turn back time to when the UK was more ethnically homogenous.

It’s also true of Burnham’s urge to turn back 60 years of deindustrialisation and to reindustrialise the country, despite the fact that the management and labour skills we need to do so have vanished, insofar as they ever existed in the first place.

The widespread indifference to the collapse of universities is another example. As are proposed cuts in targets for sales of EV cars, plans for more drilling in the North Sea and (in the case of Reform) a refusal to accept the realities of climate change.

We could add Brexit to this. It was never a solution to any problem but rather an atavistic urge to return to a time when Britain or the UK (Brexiters have never been clear about what our country actually is) stood alone in the world.

Granted, the government does have an AI strategy, but this might be less a sign of a realistic embracing of the future than it is like a bunch of children impressed by a conjuring trick.

Our political class want to return us to an era when white men would leave their factory shift at companies such as Tube Investments or Hawker Siddeley, get in the Austin Allegro and go home to wives wearing crimplene* who had their Findus crispy pancakes waiting for them.

This desire to return to the past is a sharp contrast to our most successful politicians who have instead looked to the future. Harold Wilson’s official government profile says “his main plan was to modernise”. He presented himself as a modern technocrat against the amateurish old-fashioned Old Etonian Douglas Home** who wanted the “white heat of the technological revolution” to sweep away “out-dated practices”. Thatcher opposed state intervention in industry in part because it protected “yesterday’s industries, yesterday’s processes and yesterday’s products”, and she wanted to break trades unions in order to give managers the opportunity to modernise workplaces and embrace new technologies. And Blair couldn’t open his mouth in the 90s without talking of modernisation. As Alan Finlayson wrote in Making Sense of New Labour:

If there is a single word that might capture the essence of New Labour’s social and political project then it is ‘modernisation’.

Why, then, are today’s politicians so keen to return to the past when their predecessors succeeded by looking to the future?

For all Burnham’s talk that “in the 1980s, Britain took some wrong turns”, I don’t think it’s because they view the 60s and 70s as a template. They don’t want the tax rates, strong trades unions or extent of nationalisation that we had then.

Instead, they’re looking to a selective picture of the past because they cannot face today. Michael Oakeshott got it right. “If the present is remarkably unsettled”, he wrote , there’ll be “a recourse to and an exploration of the past.” Our true problems are difficult ones: economic stagnation; climate change; overpriced housing; inequalities of economic power; and a degraded public sphere that precludes rational politics. Rather than face these, politicians and the media are instead yearning for a (partly mythical) past.

This is because they simply don’t have the tools to deal with them.

Herein lies a difference between the modernising political projects of the past and the one we need now.

For Wilson, Thatcher and Blair “modernity” required that other people change: old boy dilettantes, trades unions, public sector workers or the left. Today, however, modernity requires that politicians themselves change.

It requires them to see that the lobbyists and vested interests they listen to are the “forces of conservatism” that are holding back economic growth. Reviving economic growth (if it is possible) requires, among other things, that we attack monopoly power, shrink the financial system, and simplify the tax system. But this would alienate corporate lobbyists.

It also requires them to recognise that the mass media is not only the enemy of decency and rationality but also a terrible guide to reality and public opinion, because it no longer aims at a mass market but is instead a few billionaires’ gimps writing for a handful of cranks. Kowtowing to the press is turning back time to when it mattered. What we need instead today is a reconstruction of the public sphere.

And it requires them to think less about mythical “policy levers” and instead about growing new ecosystems, be they forms of economic democracy, better functioning markets or consumer advocacy and advice groups that could act as countervailing power against powerful companies.

In short, politicians themselves must slough off the professional deformation which blights even the best of them: their excessive faith in top-down managerialism and regulation; their reluctance to challenge the constraints which regressive sections of capital tries to impose on them; or their neglect of the importance of emergent social phenomena. We need decentralisation not merely to local mayors, but to individuals - be it in the form of better-functioning markets, powerful consumer advocacy groups, or economic democracy.

Right now, the political-media class not only does not want to do this but barely even recognises than it is an issue. Like Cher, it would much rather turn back time - the difference being that at least Cher knew this cannot be done.

* A British invention.

** The only British PM to have played first class cricket.

The Tories and Reform had it easy when Keir Starmer was self-destructing – but a new PM with ideas exposes how vacant the opposition has become

Andy Burnham’s recollections of Britain in the 1970s must be pretty hazy. He was nine when the decade ended. Kemi Badenoch, born in 1980, can remember nothing. Lacking first-hand experience, the Conservative leader evokes the turmoil of a bygone era with cautionary zeal borrowed from an older generation. In a speech last week, she accused the new prime minister of pining for “endless strikes, rubbish not being collected, bodies not being buried, inflation at 25% and a chancellor going cap-in-hand to the IMF”.

This is more incantation than argument, a ritual fondling of beads on the Tory rosary. It is a symptom of a leader under stress, affirming her faith in Our Lady Margaret Thatcher and warding off socialist devils. Burnham has done nothing to support the claim that his government is a 70s tribute act, unless you count the appointment of a man named Healey as chancellor and the imposition of price controls on buses.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

In the 90s and early 00s, a recurring theme of New Labour was the party’s desire to become more like business. Both Blair and Brown lauded bosses as wealth creators and courageous leaders who had sufficient expertise to advise on welfare (David Freud) and the NHS (Derek Wanless), and Blair was forever demanding that government become “much more business-like”.

Things have changed. One feature of the Starmer government (and indeed its Tory predecessor) has been to act in ways that no sane business would. I’ll give nine examples.

- Good businesses know that it’s easier and better to keep existing customers than to try to win new ones. Labour, however, has done the opposite. Shabana Mahmood has told socially liberal party sympathizers to “fuck right off” whilst chasing Reform voters who never in fact moved to Labour.

- A good business learns from best practice around the world. UK governments have not done this, for example failing to learn from Japan (or pretty much anywhere else) on how to reduce the cost of infrastructure projects.

- No decent business would have appointed someone without experience to a senior position and without doing basic due diligence, as Starmer appointed Mandelson.

- Businesses don’t deliberately deprive themselves of revenue. But the government does, by keeping us out of the single market thereby causing the economy and tax revenues to be smaller than they’d otherwise be.

- Businesses know what their core competence is, and try to cultivate it. Labour has done the opposite, allowing even top universities (one of the few sectors in which the UK has world-class establishments) to decline, whilst trying to support a steel industry in a country with the highest energy costs in Europe.

- Businesses know that balance sheets have two sides. The government has been unaware of this. Rachel Reeves is reported to be considering using a regulated asset base model to finance the building of new towns, whereby a company provides infrastructure in exchange for charging a regulated price for its use such as a toll for roads or an electricity price for nuclear power stations. This makes sense only because it allows her to meet fiscal rules that consider only the liabilities side of the balance sheet and ignore assets such as the future revenues from toll roads. But this is unbusinesslike. Unless they are in financial distress (which the government is plainly not) businesses don’t have self-imposed rules which prevent profitable investments. And if it’s profitable for a private company to borrow to build a new town then it must be profitable for the government to do so too, simply because the government can borrow more cheaply than the private sector.

- A good business knows that you sometimes need to spend money in the short-term to make it in the longer-run. Successive governments have not done this, for example by closing Sure Start centres even though these save the Treasury money in the longer-run, and by not investing enough in net zero even though the benefits of doing so would exceed the near-term costs.

- In business, contracting out is a matter of detailed economics, not ideology or favours to cronies. Good businesses buy in services only if doing so is cheaper and if they have the ability to ensure the precise quality of what they’re getting. Indeed, as Ronald Coase pointed out (pdf) companies only exist at all because the costs of contracting out exceed those of doing the job in-house. Governments, however, have been more careless about this than any decent company would be. For example, the privatization of probation services and children’s homes led to a collapse in quality; Sam Freedman’s Failed State is good on this. And military procurement has for years been as much about corporate welfare as about building good defences. The House of Commons Defence Committee recently said the procurement system was “broken” and that “multiple, successive reviews have not yet fixed it”. And the NAO has found (pdf) that of 52 of the latest major procurement projects only two were delivered on time and within budget. Very few businesses could survive by being so sloppy (or worse) for so long.

- Businesses know that ownership matters. Takeovers, buy-outs, flotations, and sales of some units are quotidian events. The government by contrast keeps issues of ownership off the agenda, despite clear evidence that private ownership of the water industry is a failure.

Of course, I’m not saying that business is a paragon of how organizations should behave. It’s not. It is, as Marx pointed out, a sphere of exploitation, alienation, domination and unfreedom. And it often fails by its own lights. Nick Bloom and John Van Reenen have shown that there’s a “long tail of badly managed firms”, partly because of nepotism and perhaps because managerialism has supplanted actual good management.

But the government has not abandoned the business paradigm for these reasons. Quite the opposite. It’s kept many of the bad aspects of business and abandoned the good, acting in utterly unbusinesslike ways**. It’s given us not actual competence but rather competenciness - a simulacrum of the real thing. The centre-left’s pretence to being the hard-headed grown-ups in the room is merely a narcissistic fantasy. It no more gives us competent government than children playing at doctors and nurses provide qualified medical professionals.

So, why are politicians so unbusinesslike?

One reason could be that they have so little experience of business that they just haven’t a clue how it works. As Martin Robbins says:

Our political system is so out-of-touch with any semblance of what effective management looks like in the modern world that in their minds basically any dull man in a suit will do.

Politicians get their image of business not from the real world but from The Apprentice, wherein a bunch of talentless wannabees mistake ambition and gobshitery for any ability to run things.

But there’s something else. In the 1990s, Labour saw business as a paradigm of successful achievement, in contrast to the party itself which had been out of power and sometimes in chaos since 1979. Today, however, two decades of stagnation have left us with very few British businesses that are models of success*. Instead, the paradigm has changed. Politicians now aspire not to be like businessmen but like “influencers” trying to grab eyeballs. Badenoch is the exemplar of this in the digital age: like a cushion that bears the imprint of the last arse to have sat on it, she repeats the last tweet to have impressed itself upon her. Farage is the analogue equivalent, with his dominance of legacy media. Starmer’s tragedy was like Coriolanus’ - unable to either parlay his old skills into his new role, nor adapt to it.

Which poses a question about Burnham. To what extent is his rise the result of him seeming to be a better influencer, with nice eyes and an ability to speak human, and to what extent because of superior ideas and ability to govern? We can but hope.

* One exception to this is Games Workshop, but politicians don’t want to appeal to their client base.

** Don’t tell me that Labour needs to act like this because of public opinion. I might buy that if they were at 35-40% in the polls, but at 15-20% it is just drivel.

Delegates at an ‘anti-woke’ conference disparaged Ed Miliband’s net zero policies. But even they could not ignore the sweat on their foreheads

It was hardly a perfect film, but I keep thinking of Don’t Look Up. In its depiction of a world that stubbornly refuses to heed the warnings of an imminent planetary disaster, it was perhaps too on the nose. But these days, reality itself is too on the nose.

This week served up ample evidence, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, like much of Europe, the all-consuming concern has been intense, intolerable heat, with temperature records shattered and swathes of the country under the highest state of alert. For the first time, red warnings were issued in the UK for three consecutive days. Schools have closed; nights have become sleepless, with the mercury rising to meet the technical definition of “tropical”. There are wildfires in Derbyshire. All this in a temperate country in June.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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A database of almost a million passports from around the world was leaked online.

Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk.

Link: W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty, by Elena Rossini

Elena Rossini (rightly) calls shenanigans on what’s been happening in the European social world. I think what happened should be instructive for any pro-social technology movement.

Here’s what happened:

Earlier this month, the European Commission announced a technology sovereignty plan that included a reliance on open source software as a path to autonomy.

Eurosky, a non-profit fork of Bluesky that is both fully open source and stores all its data in the EU, subsequently launched Mu, a social media application running on AT Protocol that is fully EU-based and is arguably more fully-featured than Bluesky itself.

But the European Commission, including its President and its Central Bank’s President, went another way by migrating to W Social, a proprietary AT Protocol. Whereas Eurosky is a non-profit that has worked extensively in the open with open social web and democratic communities, W Social is a for-profit startup that has been opaque about its intentions and, as Elena now reports, has now pulled its code from being available on an open source basis. These EC profiles now live on a platform that contradicts the EC’s own sovereignty plan.

Worse, the founders have a track record of using causes like climate change for their own profit, notably using Greta Thunberg to raise money for a venture capital firm without her knowledge or consent.

So I strongly agree with Elena’s implication that the Commission made a poor decision here. But it happened because its founders are heavily connected: it launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and its advisors include politicians from across Europe.

Ten years ago I joined a top 100 website after working in open source social for a decade. Based on my naïve experience in open circles, I’d assumed it competed on having a great product. In fact, it hired well-connected partnerships people, already known to influential decision-makers, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes. That team included the relatives of Presidential hopefuls and people who had built wildly successful careers as media executives. Having a good product was table stakes at best; being successful meant negotiating politics, making quid-pro-quo deals, and convincing people to join by any means necessary.

W Social is the insider’s tool: a platform created people who know how to work the system for their own benefit. That ultimately means it’s more likely to betray its users. It seems likely to me that when the discourse moves away from sovereignty to something else, the founders will also shift. But it’s not a surprise to me that European politicians are more likely to work with a platform that partners with and pays people they already know.

The nice thing about open platforms is that there doesn’t need to be one winner. The European Commission has made a bad decision, but Eurosky can still find everyone else. By building better tools for the writers, the artists, the culture-makers, and onboarding people through careful outreach one community at a time, it can serve as the basis for a new social commons that is free from US influence. I hope it succeeds.