Posted by Carl Packman

In remembrance of Sir Patrick Moore – the good and the daft

Sir Patrick Moore, who Queen guitarist Brian May once described as the “father of astronomy”, died over the weekend, as many will have no doubt already heard. As I wrote something by way of a tribute to his work on Twitter and Facebook I was speedily reminded that he also had very hairy political views. I want to briefly explain why I think we can distinguish the two things.

People who deal, professionally, with sets of objectively analysed data – economists or scientists, say – play two often inharmonious roles: analysts and people with opinions, good and daft, just like everybody else.

Continue reading →

Payday loans: not a black and white issue (in reply to Chris Dillow)

Nothing excites me more than a myth busting exercise on payday lending – it certainly beats what we read in the papers about it – and this is exactly what Chris Dillow has done today. However I have one or two comments I would like to make about it.

Chris sets up three issues on the matter of payday lending contrasting “statists” on the one hand and “libertarians” on the other. Matter 1 is a non-starter. No one arguing against payday lending today argues between occasional high cost credit and no electricity. Instead, we argue that, in order for bills to be paid, why should the worst off pay the most for their credit? There is a statist v libertarian angle here, but also a third way in the form of statist v libertarian v responsible banking. I’ll explain.
Continue reading →

Why President Obama won (translating Slavoj Zizek)

The radical French philosopher Alain Badiou was asked, after the 2009 US election, what he thought of the then President-elect Barack Obama, to which he responded, only partly amusingly: “Obama? As actor or as politician?”

It wasn’t meant negatively, he went on to explain, but rather that Obama had convincingly pulled off a return to the classical style of presidency, rather than the “modern modes of self-presentation”. Ironically, here, Obama had to act in order to avoid the trappings of the over-stylised American president. Continue reading →

Why I will miss Denis MacShane

So, Denis MacShane has stood down as an MP. It’ll be hard for anyone to find good to say about him today after it was revealed he had been effectively writing himself expense cheques.

Nineteen invoices, covering 2004 to 2008, of over £12,000 were put down as covering “research and translation” for the European Policy Institute – whereas in fact the money was being spent on “travel, subsistence, hospitality and the purchase of books” which the committee looking at MacShane’s case have noted as being “far from what would be acceptable in any walk of life”. Continue reading →

The left are more realistic about the working class vote than some think

Since the publication of Progress’ Class edition, and the polling that has been done through YouGov, there seems to be some confusion about how the left perceive the voting behaviour of working class people in Britain.

Reading Luke Akehurst’s fair piece on LabourList, aside from the harsh reality-check that working class voters in this country are not all egalitarian socialists, one gets a sense that the Labour left ignores this reality and pursues wrongheaded politics regardless.

I would like to challenge this myth, while exposing the dangers of going too far the other way and pursuing only a politics based on the polls of the day. Continue reading →