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.

Emily Darlington is Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central and a member of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee.

LONDON — I’m a mum. I know a social media ban won’t make my kids safe. It will put them at more risk.

For the last two years I’ve held tech companies to account on the Science, Innovation and Technology select committee. I’ve met with representatives from every big social media platform and challenged them on the features that are putting young people in danger and damaging their mental and physical health to extents we don’t yet understand.

I want kids to be safe online. But I do not believe that an Australia-style outright ban is the solution. If this government implements a simplistic last-ditch effort, I believe it will backfire once parents see this policy for what it is: A cop-out from making difficult but necessary changes that will actually work.

Three quarters of Australian teens are already back on social media since the “ban.” They’re either on it without their parents’ knowledge, taking away one of the strongest protections kids have against predators, their parents; or they’re on smaller, more dangerous platforms that aren’t big enough to come within the scope of a ban.

That list includes Tattle.Life, the gossip website that has claimed several lives; Telegram, where communications can’t be traced, or the so-called Incel Forum, where a post mentioning rape is added every 29 minutes, and nine out of 10 posters in those discussions support sexual violence against women. Australia’s model excluded all of these platforms alongside gaming platforms like Roblox, which are social by design and allow strangers to talk directly to kids with no guardrails.

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram need to be regulated to be safe for kids — but I know how to use them, and so can talk to my kids about how to stay safe on them and I can supervise their use if I feel I need to. But if they are banned, I won’t know what kinds of websites and forums their schoolmates join and could encourage them to join as well. And neither will the government, at least not before a terrible headline appears that sheds a light on what our kids are doing in the dark corners of the internet now that we’ve banned them from the spaces we can see.

A ban does nothing to stop new platforms cropping up quicker than government can identify them, let alone legislate against them. A platform-based ban risks creating a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, where we chase yesterday’s technology while today’s alternatives are left to flourish unchecked.

The problem is not social media platforms themselves. It’s the features and business models that make them unsafe for children and young people.

An age ban lets social media platforms off the hook far too easily. They’ve been left unregulated for far too long, making money off exploitative and dangerous features that put all users at risk. What makes a 17-year-old girl less vulnerable to grooming by a stranger than a 15-year-old? Shouldn’t we ban the ability of strangers to contact young people, instead of allowing them to prey on newly turned 16-year-olds who have no experience spotting their tactics?

These are the kinds of specific functionalities we must focus on if we want social media ever to be a safe place for anyone, including young people. Endless algorithmic feeds designed to keep you online for hours, AI chatbots that encourage suicide and self-harm, direct messaging from strangers, and recommendation engines that rapidly push harmful content — these are the real issues.

A platform may disappear, but these features can and will simply reappear elsewhere. Teens will be moved onto the kinds of niche web forums that have historically been the home of the most extreme harmful content. They will use new, untested platforms in secret, exposed to the sorts of exploitation and predatory behaviour that is already banned on mainstream social media platforms. And more worryingly, if using social media is a prohibited activity, a young person who is being cyberbullied, blackmailed, harassed, or stalked online will be even more reluctant than they already are to tell a parent or teacher, for fear of getting into trouble themselves.

If this does happen — and the evidence from Australia shows it will — what will this government say to the parents it promised that a ban would protect their kids? When the headlines prove we were wrong, what leverage will we have over social media accounts whose business models have already changed to exclude young people, to ask them to please make it safe for them to come back online?

The choice is not between doing nothing or banning social media altogether. It’s between regulating brands and regulating harms. One approach will leave legislators perpetually playing catch-up. The other has a chance of making the internet genuinely safer for children. Banning platforms may generate headlines, but making platforms safe would actually solve the problem.

The Ukraine and Iran wars are very different, but a common authoritarian delusion unites the men who started them

A strongman president, self-styled redeemer of national glory, is trapped in a conflict he can’t win but doesn’t know how to end without looking like a loser. A cult of infallibility prevents the leader admitting a strategic blunder even to himself. It could be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin; Iran or Ukraine.

The conflicts and the regimes involved are also dissimilar in important ways. Russia’s campaign to eradicate a neighbouring democracy is nastier in conception and bloodier in execution than the bungled US effort to dislodge a dictatorship in Tehran. It has also gone on much longer. The first world war was shorter than a “special military operation” that was supposed to capture Kyiv within weeks. The Soviet Red Army repelled Nazi invasion and marched on Berlin in less time than it has taken Putin’s forces to occupy a tranche of eastern Ukraine, and they are not making any significant advances. The war has burned trillions of roubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist