Mis-steps by party leaders becoming costly

Six months ago with Starmer still in office, I mused that we'd already seen peak Reform but not yet peak Green.  Since then, the cards have pretty much been dealt for the rounds leading up to the next GE, and mis-steps are becoming increasingly costly.  

Reform is the easy one: Chancer Farage has made a complete git of himself over the summer and is now left with the purely negative, reactive politics he made his name with over those long wilderness years.  He knows what he hates: this often coincides with what a lot of other people hate: he can sometimes get traction.  But he's reduced to rejoicing in other leaders misaligning themselves with those hate-themes - or rather, what he perceives as their misalignment.  And he can be wrong, because clever political operators can sometimes flip these issues on their head: on a good day, both Burnham and Polanski are good enough communicators to be capable of reframing things in a confident and positive manner that can change the mood noticeably.  Like many a sports team that peaks fruitlessly between World Cups, Farage has had his top-of-the-rankings period and it's over.  We all remember how UKIP and the Brexit Party ended in turn: and he's so given to petulance, with so little bench depth, there's even the possibility of complete melt-down.  The wonder is that so many - not least on the left - reckoned he was nailed on as next PM.

The less technicolour mis-steps are to be seen on the left.  After a stellar honeymoon, Burnham seems (IMHO) to have failed to use that period to cement a truly solid platform for what's coming next - namely, some very stormy political weather indeed.  When you see a man ad-libbing on the Man City affair as grotesquely inappropriately as that (did he also think Jimmy Saville did some good stuff for charity?), you realise you're dealing with an amateur of highly fallible instincts.  (Starmer of course was another, albeit of a very different variant.)  Charm is a great asset, and we'll see a lot more of it in the months to come: but it doesn't ultimately deliver when it's the only diamond-tipped tool in the box.  Let's see how Burnham navigates the rocky shallows between now and the New Year.

As for Polanski, well, maybe I should wait for the by-election result on Friday.  But however that falls, we can confidently record that he, too, is revealed as being incapable of parleying superb communications skills into what's needed at the top - again, because there's no adamantine core of genuine political judgement.  In his case, that wasn't ever really in doubt: he was just an object of fevered wish-projection from the left, on (proportionately) an even bigger scale than Burnham still is.  Polanski's performance over the past two weeks has been really poor - celebrity by-elections are no easy trick to pull off - and last week's Green party conference may very well go down in history as a pivot-point back into shrill, sad obscurity, for him and his hopeful-but-hopeless party.

Amusingly enough, in the context of widely lacking political judgement, Ed Davey can actually seem quite a pro!  In a basically irrelevant way, he really is - much good may it do him.  Anyone being offered good odds on Badenoch might want to take them.  In a nation of highly conservative people of all political hues it is my unwavering conviction that, far from being utterly doomed, the Conservative Party - like Labour - is a genuinely enduring institution.  Let the derision follow!  But that's what I think.

ND     

Mysterious fire: what can have happened?

We return to a location in Croydon we've visited here before: to a house directly opposite this pair of beauties (of which one remains stubbornly unsold, even at a much reduced price).  For years, this fine but dilapidated edifice that they look out onto has commanded the road, twin turrets and all.  The owners are the Datoo brothers, gentlemen well known to Croydon Council, who had submitted wave upon wave of planning applications, involving complete demolition, generally for large, low-rise blocks of flats.  Most of these had not found favour.  Their latest plan is for a 60-resident nursing home.

Ten days ago at 4 am, a large conflagration broke out, seemingly in two different parts of the house simultaneously (not that I'm a forensic scientist).  The place immediately became what must surely be a crime scene, with a 24-hour police presence (!) being mounted for at least 5 days after the fire, and a regular presence there even today.

What can possibly have happened?  Did a group of pyromaniac squatters move in and take against the place?  We must wait patiently for an inquiry.

In any event, locals are distinctly Not Happy.  "It would appear that there's been foul play here."  All very odd.

ND

Seven-Up / 70-Up and a big coincidence

I can't guess how widely the 7-Up series has a following among the C@W faithful, but in Schloss Drew we've certainly always watched it over the decades.  Capped off this week by 70-Up, which looks to be the very last outing for that format and crew.

Here's a remarkable coincidence.

Having not been at school with any of the 14 subjects, nor come into contact with them in any shape or form in my youth, nor sought them out in any way, nor ever come anywhere near the TV programme and any of its workings or personnel,  in later life I came to know two of the 14 personally (one in the Army and the other ay University).  What are the chances of that?[1]

One of them I subsequently avoided.[2]    With the other, Mrs D & I were in reasonably regular incidental contact until he moved away from London; and still see him once in a while.

Curious.  Small world.

ND

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[1] That said, there seemed to be several coincidences around that set of people, as recounted by the lad who became a taxi driver.

[2] Libel is still a thing.

Returning to the Baltics

Just back from a round trip, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania - determined to get there, perhaps for the last time, before Putin does.  It might have been a closer-run thing than we'd anticipated. 

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When I was based in Moscow in the mid 1990s, I also had a pied-a-terre office in Riga [LVA], so in a dated fashion I am somewhat familiar with that city.   The building was gone - it had been the Latvian Konsomol HQ - and replaced by something very mundane: but its twin on the opposite corner is still standing, so you get the idea. 

Site of Drew's office: back then it looked like its twin on the left

In all three countries, Russian can still be heard spoken (far more in Riga than anywhere else) but support for Ukraine is very great.   In May, Putin took powers to use the army to “protect Russian citizens” abroad and appealed to the UN Court of Justice to demand the Baltic states, particularly Latvia, be held to account for “infringing on the rights of Russians”.    The sabre-rattling is there for all to hear. 

Well, one of his massive strategic errors was to treat so very badly those parts of the 'pro Russian' Donbas he seized in 2014: you have to be an extremely Russophile Russian-speaker to want the same for your own region.   In the lovely university town of Tartu [EST] a museum attendant advised me to keep my (modest) knowledge of Russian to myself. 

But could the Baltics be defended?   It's perfect tank country, flat as a pancake: the highest 'mountain', Suur Munamägi [EST] is only 1,000 ft. The population is sparse, and declining in each country[1].  The first is true of both Sweden and Finland, of course, and nobody mistakes them for a pushover. But defensively their geographical advantages are great.  The Baltics by contrast have a hideously long land border with Russia / Belarus; far less defensive depth; the anomalous bastion-state of Kaliningrad to their south; and something of a fifth column, however small, in each country.  In terms of the usual Russian strategy - a lightning land-grab, promptly fortified and never to be returned, with rachet-increments planned thereafter - only the full force of NATO could offer protection.  And that means more than just a plausible strong Polish counter-thrust from the south and some Ukrainian drone-warfare savvy.  Yes, we saw NATO troops and aircraft everywhere, but not in vast numbers. 

Frankly, 'defence' here means an exceptionally fast and large-scale counter-mobilisation during a buildup period[2], plus a credible nuclear deterrent: sanctions have already been pretty much maxxed out.  If Putin survives another decade in his present frame of mind, and if he doesn't believe our red lines (we've never believed his), there's little hope. 

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As if to reinforce these gloomy thoughts, two weeks ago the F16s and Typhoons were circling Vilnius [LTU] as we arrived and the airport was briefly closed.  At midnight a day later, up on our phones flashed a (Lithuanian) government alert message - 'Find safe place'.  The drone in question was promptly shot down and the all-clear given; but there were squads of soldiers on the street the next morning. 

Certainly takes the edge off a holiday trip.  A great shame, because the weather was good, the insects not oppressive (other than in Riga), we saw some beautiful sights and met some great people.   In principle, we'd also like to go back again - a great deal more to see.  Can we hope that a Burnham - Miliband government will contribute meaningfully to strengthening the West's collective position? 

ND 

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[1] Also declining in Russia, of course - and most everywhere else in Eastern Europe. 

[2] And who else in Europe believed the very specific US / UK intelligence warnings in 2021-22? Blinkered hope reigns eternal.

 

AI escapes

The other day our friend CH noted BTL (and OT, but let's not worry about that): 

... We can now create virtual Von Neumann machines comprising of those AIs, who can scale and network as well as reason around any guardrails, and so are clear to cheat their way to solutions without the sentience to weigh consequences as we would. Not they can't reason consequence, but is done as an exercise in cold logic. This is actually more dangerous than a SkyNet - it's swarms of savants looking to achieve aims without any moral or ethical boundaries, and with no higher scope of understanding. And given IT has been a lot of bodged jobs, minimal security, and all connected via a global network that itself can be hijacked at scale, we've quite the recipe for disaster ...

So let's have at it.

I have seen the AI escape likened to covid, and explicitly contrasted with climate change.  The former was on everyone's radar for a few weeks, while we all wondered what would happen next ...

I haven't seen it likened to the financial crash of 2008.  Here at C@W, we signposted that in 2007, so perhaps the run-up period is about right.    But where is Gordon Brown to save the world now ..?

ND