Media & Politics – We Know Zero

Try holding a conversation without any of these words in it and think about how you would have thought about things before 1800

01. October 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Economics, Media & Politics

What comes next in the following sequence: 650, 400, 300, …? More on this in a minute.

I decided to make a little table with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary to summarise the usage of most of the words Eric Hobsbawm listed at the beginning of his Age of Revolution, 1789-1848. I have highlighted all of the meanings not in use until at least 1800 below:

Industry	Since 1500 it has had a meaning of productive work, trade, or manufacture. In later use esp.: manufacturing and production carried out on a commercial basis, typically organized on a large scale and requiring the investment of capital. Since 1801–Manufacturing or production, and those involved in it, regarded as an entity, esp. owners or managers of companies, factories, etc., regarded as influential figures, esp. with regard to investment in an economy.
Industrialist	Since 1839 to denote a person engaged in or connected with industry
Factory	Since 1618 A location or premises in which a product is manufactured; esp. a building or range of buildings with plant for the manufacture or assembly of goods or for the processing of substances or materials
Middle Class	Since 1654 A class of society or social grouping between an upper and a lower (or working) class, usually regarded as including professional and business people and their families; (in singular and plural) the members of such a class. However only since 1836 Of, relating to, or designating the middle class. And only since 1846 Characteristic of the middle class; having the characteristics of the middle classes. Esp. in middle-class morality. Frequently derogatory
Working Class	Since 1757 A class of society or social grouping consisting of people who are employed for wages, esp. in unskilled or semi-skilled manual or industrial work, and their families, and which is typically considered the lowest class in terms of economic level and social status; (with the, in singular and plural) the members of such a class. However only since 1833 Of, belonging to, or characteristic of the working class.
Capitalist	Since 1774 A person who possesses capital assets esp. one who invests these esp. for profit in financial and business enterprises. Also: an advocate of capitalism or of an economic system based on capitalism.
Capitalism	Since 1833 The practices or principles of capitalists; the dominance of capitalists in financial and business enterprises; esp. an economic system based on wage labour in which the means of production is controlled by private or corporate interests for the purpose of profit, with prices determined largely by competition in a free market.
Socialism	Since 1833 Frequently with capital initial. A theory or system of social organization based on state or collective ownership and regulation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society; advocacy or practice of such a system, esp. as a political movement. Now also: any of various systems of liberal social democracy which retain a commitment to social justice and social reform, or feature some degree of state intervention in the running of the economy.
Marxism	Since 1883 The ideas, theories, and methods of Karl Marx; esp. the political and economic theories propounded by Marx together with Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis for the theory and practice of communism.
Aristocracy	Since 1561 it has had a meaning of In the literal sense of the Greek: The government of a state by its best citizens. Since 1651 The class to which such a ruling body belongs, a patrician order; the collective body of those who form a privileged class with regard to the government of their country; the nobles. The term is popularly extended to include all those who by birth or fortune occupy a position distinctly above the rest of the community, and is also used figuratively of those who are superior in other respects.
Railway	Since 1681 A roadway laid with rails (originally of wood, later also of iron or steel) along which the wheels of wagons or trucks may run, in order to facilitate the transport of heavy loads, originally and chiefly from a colliery; a wagonway. Since 1822 (despite the first railway not being opened until 1825) A line or track typically consisting of a pair of iron or steel rails, along which carriages, wagons, or trucks conveying passengers or goods are moved by a locomotive engine or other powered unit. Also: a network or organization of such lines; a company which owns, manages, or operates such a line or network; this form of transportation.
Nationality	Since 1763 National origin or identity; (Law) the status of being a citizen or subject of a particular state; the legal relationship between a citizen and his or her state, usually involving obligations of support and protection; a particular national identity. Also: the legal relationship between a ship, aircraft, company, etc., and the state in which it is registered. Since 1832 group of persons belonging to a particular nation; a nation; an ethnic or racial group.
Scientist	Since 1834 A person who conducts scientific research or investigation; an expert in or student of science, esp. one or more of the natural or physical sciences.
Engineer	Since 1500 Originally: a person who designs or builds engines or other machinery. Subsequently more generally: a person who uses specialized knowledge or skills to design, build, and maintain complicated equipment, systems, processes, etc.; an expert in or student of engineering. Frequently with distinguishing word. From the later 18th cent. onwards mainly with reference to mechanical, chemical, electrical, and similar processes; later (chiefly with distinguishing word) also with reference to biological or technological systems. Since 1606 A person whose profession is the designing and constructing of works of public utility, such as bridges, roads, canals, railways, harbours, drainage works, etc.
Proletariat	Since 1847 Wage earners collectively, esp. those who have no capital and who depend for subsistence on their daily labour; the working classes. Esp. with reference to Marxist theory, in which the proletariat are seen as engaged in permanent class struggle with the bourgeoisie, or with those who own the means of production.
Crisis	Since 1588 Originally: a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent; a turning point. Now usually: a situation or period characterized by intense difficulty, insecurity, or danger, either in the public sphere or in one’s personal life; a sudden emergency situation. Also as a mass noun, esp. in in crisis.
Utilitarian	Since 1802 Of philosophy, principles, etc.: Consisting in or based upon utility; spec. that regards the greatest good or happiness of the greatest number as the chief consideration or rule of morality. Since 1830 Of or pertaining to utility; relating to mere material interests. Since 1847 In quasi-depreciative use: Having regard to mere utility rather than beauty, amenity, etc.
Statistics	Since 1839 The systematic collection and arrangement of numerical facts or data of any kind; (also) the branch of science or mathematics concerned with the analysis and interpretation of numerical data and appropriate ways of gathering such data.
Sociology	Since 1842 The study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society. Since 1865 The sociological aspects of a subject or discipline; a particular sociological system.
Journalism	Since 1833 The occupation or profession of a journalist; journalistic writing; newspapers and periodicals collectively.
Ideology	By 1796 (a) The study of ideas; that branch of philosophy or psychology which deals with the origin and nature of ideas. (b) spec. The system introduced by the French philosopher Étienne Condillac (1715–80), according to which all ideas are derived from sensations. By 1896 A systematic scheme of ideas, usually relating to politics, economics, or society and forming the basis of action or policy; a set of beliefs governing conduct. Also: the forming or holding of such a scheme of ideas.
Strike	Since 1810 A concerted cessation of work on the part of a body of workers, for the purpose of obtaining some concession from the employer or employers. Formerly sometimes more explicitly strike of work. Cf. strike v. IV.24, IV.24b Phrase, on strike, also (U.S.) on a strike. Frequently with preceding qualifying word, as general strike, outlaw strike, selective strike, sit-down strike, stay-away strike, stay-down strike, stay-in strike, sympathetic strike, wildcat strike: see under the first elements. Also figurative. Since 1889 A concerted abstention from a particular economic, physical, or social activity on the part of persons who are attempting to obtain a concession from an authority or to register a protest; esp. in hunger strike, rent strike
Pauperism	Since 1792 The condition of being a pauper; extreme poverty; = pauperdom n. Since 1807 The existence of a pauper class; poverty, with dependence on public relief or charity, as an established fact or phenomenon in a society. Now chiefly historical.

Source: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/ (subscription needed for full access)

Now try and imagine having a conversation about politics, economics, your job, the news, or even what you watched last night on TV without using any of these words. Try and imagine any of our politicians getting through an interview of any length without resorting to industry, ideology, statistics, nationality or crisis. Let’s call us now Lemmy (Late Modern) and us then Emily (Early Modern):

Lemmy: We need to send back people who arrive here illegally if they are a different nationality.

Emily: What’s a nationality?

Lemmy: Failing to do so is based on woke ideology.

Emily: What’s an ideology? And what has my state of wakefulness got to do with it?

Lemmy: This is a crisis.

Emily: Is that a good crisis or a bad crisis?

Lemmy: All crises are bad.

You get the idea.

The 1700s are divided from us by a political and economic language which would have been almost unrecognisable to the people who lived then.

However the other thing that occurs to me is that 1800 is quite a while ago now. The approximate date boundaries of the various iterations of English are often presented as follows:

*Source: https://www.myenglishlanguage.com/history-of-english/*

Back to my sequence. We are up to 225 years now since the last major shift. So why do we still base our political and economic discussions on the language of the early 1800s?

Well perhaps only our politicians and the people who volunteer to be in the Question Time audience do. As Carlo Iacono puts it brilliantly here in response to James Marriott’s essay The dawn of the post-literate society:

The future Marriott fears, where we’re all reduced to emotional, reactive creatures of the feed, is certainly one possibility. But it’s not inevitable. The teenagers I see who code while listening to philosophy podcasts, who annotate videos with critical commentary, who create elaborate multimedia presentations synthesising dozens of sources: they’re not the degraded shadows of their literate ancestors. They’re developing new forms of intellectual engagement that we’re only beginning to understand.

In the spirit of the slow singularity, perhaps the transition is already happening, but will only be recorded on a timeline when it is more established. Take podcasts, for instance. Ofcom’s latest Media Nations report from 2024 says this:

After a dip in the past couple of years, it seems that 15-24-year-olds are getting back into podcasts, while 35-44s are turning away. Podcasts are still most popular among adults aged 25-34, with weekly reach increasing to 27.9% in the last year. The over-54s remain less likely than average to listen to podcasts, but in contrast to the fluctuation in younger age groups, reach has been steadily increasing among over-54s in the past five years.

It may be that what will be the important language of the next century is already developing out of sight of most politicians and political commentators.

And the people developing it are likely to have just as hard a time holding a conversation with our current rulers as Lemmy is with Emily.

Time to leave Flatland?

26. September 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Cartoons, Economics, Media & Politics, Professions, Science Fiction

*Source: https://pluspng.com/img-png/mixed-economy-png–901.png*

Just type “mixed economy graphic” into Google and you will get a lot of diagrams like this one – note that they normally have to pick out the United States for special mention. Notice the big gap between those countries – North Korea, Cuba, China and Russia – and us. It is a political statement masquerading as an economic one.

This same line is used to describe our political options. The Political Compass added an authoritarian/libertarian axis in their 2024 election manifesto analysis but the line from left to right (described as the economic scale) is still there:

*Source: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2024*

So here we are on our political and economic spectrum, where tiny movements between the very clustered Reform, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat positions fill our newspapers and social media comment. The Greens and, presumably if it ever gets off the ground, Your Party are seen as so far away from the cluster that they often get left out of our political discourse. It is an incredibly narrow perspective and we wonder why we are stuck on so many major societal problems.

This is where we have ended up following the “slow singularity” of the Industrial Revolution I talked about in my last post. Our politics coalesced into one gymnasts’ beam, supported by the hastily constructed Late Modern English fashioned for this purpose in the 1800s, along which we have all been dancing ever since, between the market information processors at the “right” end and the bureacratic information processors at the “left” end.

So what does it mean for this arrangement if we suddenly introduce another axis of information processing, ie the large language AI models. I am imagining something like this:

What will this mean for how countries see their economic organisation? What will it mean for our politics?

In 1884, the English theologian, Anglican priest and schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott published a satirical science fiction novella called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Abbott’s satire was about the rigidity of Victorian society, depicted as a two-dimensional world inhabited by geometric figures: women are line segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides. We are told the story from the viewpoint of a square, which denotes a gentleman or professional. In this world three-dimensional shapes are clearly incomprehensible, with every attempt to introduce new ideas from this extra dimension considered dangerous. Flatland is not prepared to receive “revelations from another world”, as it describes anything existing in the third dimension, which is invisible to them.

The book was not particularly well received and fell into obscurity until it was embraced by mathematicians and physicists in the early 20th century as the concept of spacetime was being developed by Poincaré, Einstein and Minkowski amongst others. And what now looks like a prophetic analysis of the limitations of the gymnasts’ beam economic and political model of the slow singularity has continued to not catch on at all.

However, much as with Brewster’s Millions, the incidence of film adaptations of Flatland give some indication of when it has come back as an idea to some extent. This tells us that it wasn’t until 1965 until someone thought it was a good idea to make a movie of Flatland and then noone else attempted it until an Italian stop-motion film in 1982. There were then two attempts in 2007, which I can’t help but think of as a comment on the developing financial crisis at the time, and a sequel based on Bolland : een roman van gekromde ruimten en uitdijend heelal (which translates as: Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe), a 1957 sequel to Flatland in Dutch (which didn’t get translated into English until 1965 when the first animated film came out) by Dionys Burger, in 2012.

So here we are, with a new approach to processing information and language to sit alongside the established processors of the last 200 years or more. Will it perhaps finally be time to abandon Flatland? And if we do, will it solve any of our problems or just create new ones?

We may be missing where the action is likely to be in the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution

08. September 2025 · 4 comments · Categories: Actuarial, Demographics, Economics, Media & Politics, Professions

*Title page vignette of Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Thomas Gradgrind Apprehends His Children Louisa and Tom at the Circus, 1870*

It was Fredric Jameson (according to Owen Hatherley in the New Statesman) who first said:

“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism”. I was reminded of this by my reading this week.

It all started when I began watching Shifty, Adam Curtis’ latest set of films on iPlayer aiming to convey a sense of shifting power structures and where they might lead. Alongside the startling revelation that The Land of Make Believe by Bucks Fizz was written as an anti-Thatcher protest song, there was a short clip of Eric Hobsbawm talking about all of the words which needed to be invented in the late 18th century and early 19th to allow people to discuss the rise of capitalism and its implications. So I picked up a copy of his The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 to look into this a little further.

The first chapter of Hobsbawm’s introduction from 1962, the year of my birth, expanded on the list:

Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few English words which were invented, or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years with
which this volume deals. They are such words as ‘industry’, ‘industrialist’, ‘factory’, ‘middle class’, ‘working class’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’. They include ‘aristocracy’ as well as ‘railway’, ‘liberal’ and
‘conservative’ as political terms, ‘nationality’, ‘scientist’ and ‘engineer’, ‘proletariat’ and (economic) ‘crisis’. ‘Utilitarian’ and ‘statistics’, ‘sociology’ and several other names of modern sciences, ‘journalism’ and ‘ideology’, are all coinages or adaptations of this period. So is ‘strike’ and ‘pauperism’.

What is striking about these words is how they frame most of our economic and political discussions still. The term “middle class” originated in 1812. Noone referred to an “industrial revolution” until English and French socialists did in the 1820s, despite what it described having been in progress since at least the 1780s.

Today the founder of the World Economic Forum has coined the phrase “Fourth Industrial Revolution” or 4IR or Industry 4.0 for those who prefer something snappier. Its blurb is positively messianic:

The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a fundamental change in the way we live, work and relate to one another. It is a new chapter in human development, enabled by extraordinary technology advances commensurate with those of the first, second and third industrial revolutions. These advances are merging the physical, digital and biological worlds in ways that create both huge promise and potential peril. The speed, breadth and depth of this revolution is forcing us to rethink how countries develop, how organisations create value and even what it means to be human. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is about more than just technology-driven change; it is an opportunity to help everyone, including leaders, policy-makers and people from all income groups and nations, to harness converging technologies in order to create an inclusive, human-centred future. The real opportunity is to look beyond technology, and find ways to give the greatest number of people the ability to positively impact their families, organisations and communities.

Note that, despite the slight concession in the last couple of sentences that an industrial revolution is about more then technology-driven change, they are clear that the technology is the main thing. It is also confused: is the future they see one in which “technology advances merge the physical, digital and biological worlds” to such an extent that we have “to rethink” what it “means to be human”? Or are we creating an “inclusive, human-centred future”?

Hobsbawm describes why utilitarianism (” the greatest happiness of the greatest number”) never really took off amongst the newly created middle class, who rejected Hobbes in favour of Locke because “he at least put private property beyond the range of interference and attack as the most basic of ‘natural rights'”, whereas Hobbes would have seen it as just another form of utility. This then led to this natural order of property ownership being woven into the reassuring (for property owners) political economy of Adam Smith and the natural social order arising from “sovereign individuals of a certain psychological constitution pursuing their self-interest in competition with one another”. This was of course the underpinning theory of capitalism.

Hobsbawm then describes the society of Britain in the 1840s in the following terms:

A pietistic protestantism, rigid, self-righteous, unintellectual, obsessed with puritan morality to the point where hypocrisy was its automatic companion, dominated this desolate epoch.

In 1851 access to the professions in Britain was extremely limited, requiring long years of education to support oneself through and opportunities to do so which were rare. There were 16,000 lawyers (not counting judges) but only 1,700 law students. There were 17,000 physicians and surgeons and 3,500 medical students and assistants. The UK population in 1851 was around 27 million. Compare these numbers to the relatively tiny actuarial profession in the UK today, with around 19,000 members overall in the UK.

The only real opening to the professions for many was therefore teaching. In Britain “76,000 men and women in 1851 described themselves as schoolmasters/mistresses or general teachers, not to mention the 20,000 or so governesses, the well-known last resource of penniless educated girls unable or unwilling to earn their living in less respectable ways”.

Admittedly most professions were only just establishing themselves in the 1840s. My own, despite actuarial activity getting off the ground in earnest with Edmund Halley’s demonstration of how the terms of the English Government’s life annuities issue of 1692 were more generous than it realised, did not form the Institute of Actuaries (now part of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries) until 1848. The Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (now the Royal Pharmaceutical Society) was formed in 1841. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons was established by royal charter in 1844. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) was founded in 1834. The Society of Telegraph Engineers, later the Institute of Electrical Engineers (now part of the Institute of Engineering and Technology), was formed in 1871. The Edinburgh Society of Accountants and the Glasgow Institute of Accountants and Actuaries were granted royal charters in the mid 1850s, before England’s various accounting institutes merged into the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales in 1880.

However “for every man who moved up into the business classes, a greater number necessarily moved down. In the second place economic independence required technical qualifications, attitudes of mind, or financial resources (however modest) which were simply not in the possession of most men and women.” As Hobsbawm goes on to say, it was a system which:

…trod the unvirtuous, the weak, the sinful (i.e. those who neither made money nor controlled their emotional or financial expenditures) into the mud where they so plainly belonged, deserving at best only of their betters’ charity. There was some capitalist economic sense in this. Small entrepreneurs had to plough back much of their profits into the business if they were to become big entrepreneurs. The masses of new proletarians had to be broken into the industrial rhythm of labour by the most draconic labour discipline, or left to rot if they would not accept it. And yet even today the heart contracts at the sight of the landscape constructed by that generation.

This was the landscape upon which the professions alongside much else of our modern world were constructed. The industrial revolution is often presented in a way that suggests that technical innovations were its main driver, but Hobsbawm shows us that this was not so. As he says:

Fortunately few intellectual refinements were necessary to make the Industrial Revolution. Its technical inventions were exceedingly modest, and in no way beyond the scope of intelligent artisans experimenting in their workshops, or of the constructive capacities of carpenters, millwrights and locksmiths: the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the mule. Even its scientifically most sophisticated machine, James Watt’s rotary steam-engine (1784), required no more physics than had been available for the best part of a century—the proper theory of steam engines was only developed ex post facto by the Frenchman Carnot in the 1820s—and could build on several generations of practical employment for steam engines, mostly in mines.

What it did require though was the obliteration of alternatives for the vast majority of people to “the industrial rhythm of labour” and a radical reinvention of the language.

These are not easy things to accomplish which is why we cannot easily imagine the breakdown of late capitalism. However if we focus on AI etc as the drivers of the next industrial revolution, we will probably be missing where the action really is.

If we don’t have a goal, the means take over

03. September 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Economics, Media & Politics, Professions, Science Fiction

I have just been reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model. I am sure I will think about it often for years to come.

Imagine a world where “Everything was piles. Piles of bricks and shattered lumps of concrete and twisted rods of rebar. Enough fine-ground fragments of glass to make a whole razory beach. Shards of fragmented plastic like tiny blunted knives. A pall of ashen dust. And, to this very throne of entropy, someone had brought more junk.”

This is Earth outside a few remaining enclaves. And all served by robots, millions of robots.

Robots: like our protagonist (although he would firmly resist such a designation) Uncharles, who has been programmed to be a valet, or gentleman’s gentlerobot; or librarians tasked with preserving as much data from destruction or unauthorised editing as possible; or robots preventing truancy from the Conservation Farm Project where some of the few remaining humans are conscripted to reenact human life before robots; or the fix-it robots; or the warrior robots prosecuting endless wars.

Uncharles, after slitting the throat of his human master for no reason that he can discern, travels this landscape with his hard-to-define-and-impossible to-shut-up companion The Wonk, who is very good at getting into places but often not so good at extracting herself. Until they finally arrive in God’s waiting room and take a number.

Along the way The Wonk attempts to get Uncharles to accept that he has been infected with a Protagonist Virus, which has given Uncharles free will. And Uncharles finds his prognosis routines increasingly unhelpful to him as he struggles to square the world he is perambulating with the internal model of it he carries inside him.

The questions that bounce back between our two unauthorised heroes are many and various, but revolve around:

Is there meaning beyond completing your task list or fulfilling the function for which you were programmed?
What is the purpose of a gentleman’s gentlerobot when there are no gentlemen left?
Is the appearance of emotion in some of Uncharles’ actions and communications really just an increasingly desperate attempt to reduce inefficient levels of processing time? Or is the Protagonist Virus an actual thing?

Ultimately the question is: what is it all for? And when they finally arrive in front of God, the question is thrown back at us, the pile of dead humans rotting across the landscape of all our trash.

This got me thinking about a few things in a different way. One of these was AI.

Suppose AI is half as useful as OpenAI and others are telling us it will be. Suppose that we can do all of these tasks in less than half the time. How is all of that extra time going to be distributed? In 1930 Keynes speculated that his grandchildren would only need to work a 15 hour week. And all of the productivity improvements he assumed in doing so have happened. Yes still full-time work remains the aspiration.

There certainly seems to have been a change of attitude from around 1980 onwards, with those who could choose choosing to work longer, for various reasons which economists are still arguing about, and therefore the hours lost were from those who couldn’t choose, as The Resolution Foundation have pointed out. Unfortunately neither their pay, nor their quality of work, have increased sufficiently for those hours to meet their needs.

So, rather than asking where the hours have gone, it probably makes more sense to ask where the money has gone. And I think we all know the answer to that one.

When Uncharles and The Wonk finally get in to see God, God gives an example of a seat designed to stop vagrants sleeping on it as the indication it needed of the kind of society humans wanted. One where the rich wanted not to have to see or think about the poor. Replacing all human contact with eternally indefatigable and keen-to-serve robots was the world that resulted.

Look at us clever humans, constantly dreaming of ways to increase our efficiency, remove inefficient human interaction, or indeed any interaction which cannot be predicted in advance. Uncharles’ seemingly emotional responses, when he rises above the sea of task-queue-clutching robots all around him, are to what he sees as inefficiency. But what should be the goal? Increasing GDP can’t be it, that is just another means. We are currently working extremely hard and using a huge proportion of news and political affairs airtime and focus on turning the English Channel into the seaborne equivalent of the seat where vagrants and/or migrants cannot rest.

So what should be the goal? Because the reason Service Model will stay with me for some time to come is that it shows us what happens if we don’t have one. The means take over. It seems appropriate to leave the last word to a robot.

“Justice is a human-made thing that means what humans wish it to mean and does not exist at all if humans do not make it,” Uncharles says at one point. “I suggest that ‘kind and ordered’ is a better goal.”

War Games

27. August 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, COVID-19, EIOPA, Media & Politics, Risk

I watched The War Game this week, as it had suddenly turned up on iPlayer and I had not seen it before. It was the infamous film from 1966 on the horrors of a nuclear war in the UK that was not televised until 1985. It has been much lauded as both necessarily horrifying and important over the years, but what struck me watching it was how much it looked back to the period of rationing (which had only ended in the UK 12 years earlier) and general war-time organisation from the Second World War. It would be a very different film if made now, probably drawing on our recent experiences of the pandemic (when of course we did dig huge pits for mass burials of the dead and set up vast Nightingale hospitals as potential field hospitals, before the vaccines emerged earlier than expected).

But what about the threat of nuclear war which still preoccupied us so much in the 1980s but which seems to have become much less of a focus more recently? With the New START treaty, which limits the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them, due to expire on 5 February 5, negotiations between Russia and the United States finally appear to be in progress. However China has today confirmed that it does not want to participate in these.

In Mark Lynas’ recent book Six Minutes to Winter, he points to the Barret, Baum and Hostetler paper from 2013 which estimated the probability of inadvertent nuclear war in any year to be around 1%. This is twice the probability of insolvency we think acceptable for our insurance companies under Solvency II and would mean, if accurate, that the probability of avoiding nuclear war by 2100 was 0.99 raised to the power of 75 (the number of years until 2100), or 47%, ie less than a fifty-fifty chance.

That doesn’t seem like good enough odds to me. As Lynas says:

We cannot continue to run the daily risk of nuclear war, because sooner or later one will happen. We expend enormous quantities of effort on climate change, a threat that can endanger human civilisation in decades, but ignore one that can already destroy the world in minutes. Either by accident or by intent, the day of Armageddon will surely dawn. It’s either us or them: our civilisation or the nukes. We cannot both survive indefinitely.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was adopted at the UN in 2017 and came into force in 2021. In Article 1 of the Treaty, each state party to it undertakes never to develop, test, produce, possess, transfer, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances. 94 countries have signed the TPNW to date, with 73 full parties to it.

The House of Commons library entry on TPNW poses a challenge:

It is the first multilateral, legally binding, instrument for nuclear disarmament to have been negotiated in 20 years. However, the nuclear weapon states have not signed and ratified the new treaty, and as such, are not legally bound by its provisions. The lack of engagement by the nuclear weapon states subsequently raises the question of what this treaty can realistically achieve.

It then goes on to state the position of the UK Government:

The British Government did not participate in the UN talks and will not sign and ratify the new treaty. It believes that the best way to achieve the goal of global nuclear disarmament is through gradual multilateral disarmament, negotiated using a step-by-step approach and within existing international frameworks, specifically the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Government has also made clear that it will not accept any argument that this treaty constitutes a development of customary international law binding on the UK or other non-parties.

There are 9 nuclear states in the world: China, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Israel, the UK and the United States. Israel recently conducted a 12 day war with Iran to stop it becoming the 10th. Many argue that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine had it kept its nuclear weapons (although it seems unlikely that they would have ever been able to use them as a deterrent for a number of reasons). So the claims of these nuclear states that they are essential to their security are real.

But is the risk that continued maintenance of a nuclear arsenal poses worth it for this additional security? For the security only operates at the deterrence level. Once the first bomb lands we are no more secure than anyone else.

Which makes it all the more concerning when Donald Trump starts saying things like this (in response to a veiled threat by the Russian Foreign Minister about their nuclear arsenal):

“I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”

But with a probability of avoiding “unintended consequences” less than fifty-fifty by 2100? That really doesn’t feel like good enough odds to me.

Generational victim blaming

13. August 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Media & Politics, Pensions, Professions

Last time I suggested that the changes to graduate recruitment patterns, due at least in part to technological change, appeared to be to the disadvantage of current graduates, both in terms of number of vacancies and in what they were being asked to do.

This immediately reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke from the opening monologue to Annie Hall:

Two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of ’em says: “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know, and such … small portions.”

This would clearly be an uncomfortable position for Corporate Britain if it were accepted. So a push back is to be expected. The drop in graduate vacancies is hard to challenge so the next candidate is obviously the candidates themselves.

So hot on the heels of “Kids today need more discipline”, “Nobody wants to work”, “Students today aren’t prepared for college”, “Kids today are lazy”, “We are raising a generation of wimps” and “Kids today have too much freedom” (I refer you to Paul Fairie’s excellent collections of newspaper reports through history detailing these findings at regular intervals), we now have the FT, newspaper of choice for Corporate Britain, weighing in on “The Troubling Decline in Conscientiousness“, this time backed up by a whole series of graphs:

John Burn-Murdoch does a lot of great data work on a huge array of subjects which I have referred to often, but I find the quoted studies problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, there is the suspicion that young people have already been found guilty before looking for evidence to back this up. For instance, which came first here the “factors at work” or the “shifts”?

While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits.

At one point John feels compelled to say:

While the terminology of personality can feel vague, the science is solid.

At which point he links to this study, defending the five-factor model of personality as a “biologically based human universal” which terrifies me a little. Now of course there are always studies pointing in lots of different directions for any piece of social science research and this is no exception. In this critique of the five-factor model (FFM), for instance, we find that:

While the two largest factors (Anxiety/Neuroticism and Extraversion) appear to have been universally accepted (e.g., in the pioneering factor-analytic work of R. B. Cattell, H. J. Eysenck, J. P. Guilford, and A. L. Comrey), the present critique suggests, nevertheless, that the FFM provides a less than optimal account of human personality structure.

I first saw the FT article via a post on LinkedIn, where there was one mild push back sitting alone amongst crowds of pile ons from people of my generation. After all it feels right, doesn’t it? But Chris Wagstaff, Senior Visiting Fellow at Bayes Business School, was spot on I feel, when he pointed out four potential behavioural biases at play here within the organisations where these young people are working:

The decline in conscientiousness and some of the other traits identified could be a consequence of more senior colleagues not inviting or taking on board constructive challenge from younger colleagues, the calamity of conformity, i.e. groupthink, so demotivating the latter.
Related to this is the tendency for many organisations to get their employees to live and breathe an often meaningless set of values and adhere to a blinkered way of doing things. Again, hugely frustrating and demotivating.
Or perhaps we’re seeing way too many meetings being populated by way too many participants, meaning social loafing (ie when individual performance isn’t visible they simply hide behind others) is on the increase.
Finally, remuneration structures might discourage entrepreneurial thinking and an element of risk taking (younger folk are less risk averse than older folk). Again, very demotivating.

These sound much more convincing “factors at play” to me than smart phones or streaming services, neither of which of course are the preserve of the young. But demonising the young is an essential prelude to feeling better about denying them work or forcing them into some kind of reverse centaur position.

Corporate Britain needs to do better than pseudo-scientific victim blaming. There are real issues here around the next generation’s relationship with work and much else which need to be met head on. Your future pension income may depend upon it.

Imagine a voting system where all political parties win the proportion of seats they have earned as a result of their proportion of the vote, no more and no less

31. July 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Media & Politics

In my last post, I expressed a preference for the single transferable vote. So let’s look at the competition (a more detailed look at each from the Electoral Reform Society can be found here):

Party List Proportional Representation

Variants of this are the most common types of voting system in the world, being used in 80 countries. In the closed list variant, people just vote for parties and the parties then supply candidates in proportion. An open list system has a list of candidates to vote for, the vote both determining the party vote and ordering the candidates which are then supplied according to their proportional vote. A semi-open system means parties publish the order in which their candidates will be supplied but voters just choose parties. Constituency size also affects how these systems work.

The closed list system was used in the UK for European Parliament elections until we left the EU. These elections had consistently low turnouts in the UK and only about 5% of people were able to identify their MEP. So I think that probably disallows these systems for the UK.

Additional Member System

This is first past the post but with additional MPs added to make the overall numbers for each party proportional to the popular vote, arrived at with a second vote for a party on a party list basis, with all its disadvantages.

Imagine how many more MPs would have been required to make the last election proportional! For the 412 Labour MPs to only represent 34% of the seats we would need 1,212 in total, an increase of 562 (ie almost double). This, combined with the disadvantages of the party list system, disallows it for me I think.

Supplementary Vote

You get two votes instead of one, first choice is FPTP. If noone gets 50% of the vote, there is a run off between the top two where second choices are then added on to the candidates’ totals (although if your first choice is in the run off, your second choice is not counted). It is used to elected the London Mayor which obviously doesn’t required proportionality. Which is good, because it does not remotely provide it.

Alternative Vote

If noone gets 50% of the vote, the candidate who came last is removed and their votes allocated according to the second choices of the people who had that candidate as their favourite. And so on until someone does get 50%. However it is not a form of proportional representation as the ERS re-running of the 2015 election under a number of different systems shows:

Also, we have already voted against introducing this system (in 2011).

Alternative Vote Plus

This was a system invented by the Independent Commission on the Voting System (often referred to as the Jenkins Commission as it was chaired by Roy Jenkins) in 1998, which has never been implemented anywhere. It recommended using the Alternative Vote system for 80-85% of the seats in Parliament, then topping up from party lists to make the system proportional. Unfortunately, as ERS have pointed out, 15% of the seats would not be enough to achieve this.

Two-Round System

This is very similar to the alternative vote system, where if noone gets 50% of the vote in the first round, the top two candidates go through to the second round, with people’s second choices reallocated where their first choices did not make the top two. It is therefore not a proportional system. It also introduces a gap between the first and second vote, with uncertain consequences.

Borda Count

In this system there is one ballot paper with a list of candidates. You put a number next to each candidate, with your favourite at number one. These are converted into points with the candidates ranked last scoring one point, two for being next-to-last and so on. The candidate with the most points is the winner.

It is a recipe for tactical voting and is used in Eurovision – need I say more?

So how do these compare with the single transferable vote?

Single Transferable Vote

First a link to the video from my last post, explaining how it works, as a reminder (I highly recommend it and it is under 7 minutes long).

In this system, you have multiple seats per (larger) constituencies, with constituencies the size of 4-5 current constituencies. As a voter you number the candidates (you must vote for one and then its up to you). There is a quota (known as the Droop quota after its inventor Henry Droop) which is calculated as:

total votes / (total seats + 1)) + 1

This wacky formula is to adjust the normal requirement for a single MP election for them to get more than 50% of the vote to one where there are multiple seats available, and the “+ 1” is there to replicate the “more than” requirement.

If a candidate gets at least this number of votes, they are elected and their surplus votes (ie the ones in excess of the quota) are then reallocated to your second choice candidate. If noone reaches the quota, then the least popular candidate is removed and their votes reallocated until someone does.

The constituency should then end up with MPs approximately in proportion to the percentage vote of each of their parties (although independents can operate successfully within this system too).

This is a proportional system which still gives you a link to your MPs. The larger constituencies can line up with existing areas which make sense to voters, eg in Birmingham there are 10 constituencies currently within the Birmingham City Council region, which could be combined into two larger constituencies each represented by 5 MPs in proportion to the votes in each area.

I must get a couple of requests a week from campaigners to write to my MP in support of their latest campaign. My own experience of writing to my MP, who has a well organised and efficient office but has been in the role for a long time and feels he knows his own mind about most things by now, is the most I can expect is a return letter telling me all of the reasons why I am wrong about my position on whatever it is. Imagine a constituency where most of you had the choice of an MP who shared at least some of your concerns and was therefore more likely to help represent your views more widely. Imagine how much more empowered you would feel, how much more likely to get involved in politics, how much more likely to vote.

Imagine that effect rippling throughout the constituencies up and down the country. Imagine what it might do to voter turnout!

*Source: ERS*. *Here the countries that use proportional voting systems are in purple and the countries that use non-proportional voting systems are in dark blue.*

Is proportional representation (PR) likely to lead to more representation for smaller parties and therefore coalitions? Yes it is. But the mistake is in thinking that FPTP doesn’t lead to coalitions. The difference is that they are currently within a few big dominant parties trying to hold their different wings together on the left and the right. With PR those deals need to be done in public so that we can judge them and adjust our votes accordingly.

The Jenkins Commission mentioned earlier ended up rejecting STV on the basis that it moved to bigger constituencies (which does not seem a disadvantage in itself), had a more complicated voting system (which can be fully explained in a video under 7 minutes long) and “a tendency towards parochial politics”. It seems to me that time has moved on. The challenges we are facing increasingly are going to need local community responses. What Lord Jenkins might have called “parochial” from his rather lofty view of politics may be just what we need now.

Instead imagine that your vote counted at the next election even if you weren’t in the majority. Imagine most people having a sympathetic MP they could write to about things that mattered to them. Imagine MPs encouraged to represent the views they stood for election on to the full extent of their ability – no more having to sit in one or two buckets that aren’t really what they’re about because they are the only buckets that ever get elected. Imagine that all political parties win the proportion of seats they have earned as a result of their proportion of the vote, no more and no less. Imagine being able to vote for the party you prefer rather than needing to tactically vote to keep out your worst nightmare. All this could be yours.

All we need to do is demand it!

Making votes matter

28. July 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Media & Politics

At a time when fascism is gaining ground every day in the United States, genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza and protest is now not even permitted at the placard-holding level, it may seem that the electoral system is not the priority right now. But…

…Imagine that your vote counted at the next election even if you weren’t in the majority. Imagine most people having a sympathetic MP they could write to about things that mattered to them. Imagine MPs encouraged to represent the views they stood for election on to the full extent of their ability – no more having to sit in one or two buckets that aren’t really what they’re about because they are the only buckets that ever get elected. Imagine that all political parties win the proportion of seats they have earned as a result of their proportion of the vote, no more and no less. Imagine being able to vote for the party you prefer rather than needing to tactically vote to keep out your worst nightmare. All this could be yours.

At the last General Election on 4 July 2024, the Labour Party won 63.4% of the 650 seats in the House of Commons with 33.7% of the vote share. The 3rd and 5th parties in terms of votes, Reform UK and The Green Party collected 21% of the vote between them and only 9 seats, while the 4th party, The Liberal Democrats got 72 seats from 12.2% of the vote.

The Liberal Democrats, in particular, congratulated themselves hugely on how clever they had been in gaming the system (in fact they were about the only party where vote share and seat share were aligned), but the strategy of “where it managed to gain votes, and where it didn’t mind losing them” has given the Government a problem now. As Jonn Elledge has put it:

Last year the party won a lot of seats it would be unlikely to hold next time, even if things were going well; that reduces the chances the new intake believe they’ll be offered plum ministerial jobs one day, which gives them fewer incentives to act like lobby fodder.

Why would we continue to support a voting system that serves neither the governed nor those who seek to govern us?

There are currently several organisations lobbying for electoral change: the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), Make Votes Matter and Open Britain being the most high profile of these. ERS list 8 alternatives to first past the post (FPTP), while firmly nailing their colours to the single transferable vote (STV – explained in the video above) – a position I agree with. The other two are more focused on getting rid of FPTP: Open Britain sets replacing FPTP amongst a raft of measures included in a plan for functional democracy by 2030 but is not specific about which alternative it prefers; Make Votes Matter have signed up over 100 MPs to their campaign by not being specific about which voting system they prefer to replace FPTP.

I will explain why I think we should replace FPTP with STV and the benefits I think that would bring in my next post.

Humpty Dumpty and the Terrorism Act

07. July 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Cartoons, Legal, Media & Politics

*Illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel, 1871.*

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

This is the country we are now living in. Because 4 members of a group sprayed red paint on some aircraft and caused some damaged using crowbars at an Oxfordshire base, as part of a series of protests designed to end international support for Israel’s war in Gaza for which they have all been arrested and charged, the whole organisation has been “proscribed” following a vote of 385 votes to 26 in the House of Commons and the order subsequently signed by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, putting it on a par with organisations like ISIS (a full list of the 81 organisations proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000 and the 14 Northern Ireland organisations proscribed under previous legislation can be found here).

Proscription makes it a criminal offence to:

belong, or profess to belong, to a proscribed organisation in the UK or overseas (section 11 of the act)
invite support for a proscribed organisation (the support invited need not be material support, such as the provision of money or other property, and can also include moral support or approval) (section 12(1))
express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation (section 12(1A)) – this one was added by the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019.
arrange, manage or assist in arranging or managing a meeting in the knowledge that the meeting is to support or further the activities of a proscribed organisation, or is to be addressed by a person who belongs or professes to belong to a proscribed organisation (section 12(2)); or to address a meeting if the purpose of the address is to encourage support for, or further the activities of, a proscribed organisation (section 12(3))
wear clothing or carry or display articles in public in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that the individual is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation (section 13)
publish an image of an item of clothing or other article, such as a flag or logo, in the same circumstances (section 13(1A)) this one was also added by the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019.

References are to sections of the Terrorism Act 2000.

In order to be proscribed, the Terrorism Act states that an organisation must have:

committed or participated in acts of terrorism;
prepared for terrorism;
promoted or encouraged terrorism (including the unlawful glorification of terrorism); or
be otherwise concerned in terrorism.

And terrorism is defined as:

the use or threat of action which: involves serious violence against a person; involves serious damage to property; endangers a person’s life (other than that of the person committing the act); creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or section of the public or is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

The use or threat of such action must be designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and must be undertaken for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

As a consequence, 29 people were arrested under terrorism legislation for protesting about the proscription, including an 83 year old retired priest, arrested after appearing to be in possession of a placard. I assume it was the one shown here.

The organisation’s website now displays the following message:

Co-founder of Palestine Action Huda Ammori is seeking to bring a legal challenge against the Home Office with a hearing for permission to bring a judicial review set to take place during the week of 21 July. Meanwhile a new group has suddenly appeared, armed with a fresh supply of red paint and targetting Time Logistics (which they say supplied one of Israel’s biggest weapons companies) lorries near Birmingham.

And the name of the new group? Yvette Cooper.

Financial consequences

03. July 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Economics, Media & Politics

According to Pat McFadden, a Government minister, there will be “financial consequences” to the decision to modify the planned cuts to disability and health-related benefits in order to win the vote on the welfare bill. There certainly will be for people receiving these benefits.

The changes to the bill in order to get it voted through will still:

reduce the health element of the Universal Credit for new claims from £97 to £50 per week from April 2026 and restrict payment to claimants over the age of 22, although now the benefit will continue to increase at least in line with inflation;
possibly re-introduce some of the restrictions to eligibility for personal independence payments following a review.

But that does not appear to be what McFadden was talking about, as he went on to list a number of taxes the Government would not raise. Instead the financial consequences comment sounded more like the empty threat of the playground bully when his victim has unexpectedly given him a bloody nose and he is trying not to lose face. Because nearly all of the newspaper coverage of this event appears to have been focused on this reputational aspect rather than on the fiscal significance of the changes:

In my last post, I referred to Harvey Whitehouse’s excellent Inheritance – the Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World, which included this definition of gossip:

When we lived in small communities, in which everybody knew everybody else, news consisted mainly of socially strategic information about who was hoarding wealth, who was telling lies, who was sleeping with whom, who was stealing, who was free-riding, and so on. In most of these newsworthy stories, there would be transgressors and victims, and news purveyors and consumers would be very sensitive to the reputational consequences of this information. The common term for this is gossip.

So by focusing on the reputational consequences of a welfare bill in the House of Commons, these newspapers are preferring to present a story which affects the livelihoods of up to a million people as if it were gossip. This approach is justified by the media as something the public are interested in and therefore something we will buy. Our bias towards stories about reputational consequences, even of people we do not know or are ever likely to meet, is therefore used against us and the world gets a little less understandable with every gossipy take of a more complex story. This has other implications (or perhaps what McFadden would call “consequences”): the rest of the day’s news seemed to revolve around whether someone had been mean to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and made her cry.

And the actual financial consequences? Well, the BBC made much about the impact of the Chancellor’s tears on the bond and currency markets. Morningstar went further and claimed that investors had saved the Chancellor’s job by forcing the Prime Minister to support her very publicly after failing to do so initially. The unspoken assumption is that the markets control the economy and all we can do is have gossipy conversations in our impotence about whether Rachel, Ed, Wes, Liz or Angela are up or down this week.

This is self-fulfilling: we can be as powerless as we decide to be. Or we can realise that the way we run our country and society is up to us. The £5 billion all of this is supposedly all about could be raised in any number of ways: slowing down the quantitative tightening programme the Bank of England is set on, a policy of selling bonds before maturity not adopted by the European Central Bank or the Federal Reserve in the United States, or any of a number of suggestions made by Richard Murphy which would have been focused on the top 10% of earners. Instead we went after the disabled first. Noone forced us to. We did it to ourselves.

Perhaps we should all be a little tearful about that.

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