Richard N Griffiths @[email protected]

Boomer thoughts on reaching my three score and ten years (today), a brief thread:

🚨WORLD’S RICHEST MAN BUYING OUR DEMOCRACY🚨Elon Musk is set to pump £78m into Nigel Farage’s party—a sum that would allow Reform to flood our politics with targeted ads. Add your name to the petition! 38d.gs/n3se

What would happen to the £60bn debt if English water companies were taken into public ownership? Ultimately it’s a matter of public support & political will. As the economist Maynard Keynes said: “Anything we can do, we can afford.” A thread 🧵 💧👇 1/8

This post is problematic for a number of reasons. A thread…🧵 1. For those attempting to make sense of Trump’s victory and the rise of the far-right across Europe - look no further than the PMs statement below. Whether you like it or not, the far-right has a set of common narratives. We can probably all recite them…

This: theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Trump has killed the neoliberal order taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/11/0… It looks as if Trump has won in the USA. Its people appear to have rejected neoliberalism, thinking that what it has to offer is worse than the risk Trump creates. If so , this is the end of the neoliberal order. What we now need is a non-fascist alternative to it. Our futures depend on it.

Last month I came fourth in the Private Members’ Bill ballot. This gives me the opportunity to propose my own legislation, with guaranteed debate time. So today, I am introducing the Water Bill to Parliament. My bill will: 🔵Set new targets and objectives relating to water, including in relation to the ownership of water companies and to climate mitigation and adaptation 🔵Place requirements on the Secretary of State to publish and implement a strategy for achieving those targets and objectives 🔵Establish a Commission on Water to advise the Secretary of State on that strategy 🔵Require the Commission to set up a Citizens’ Assembly on water ownership Why water? This bill’s primary purpose is economic democracy. It’s about creating an open conversation in Parliament, which involves the public through a Citizens’ Assembly, about how our water is managed. Water is a critical national resource. It is something on which all life and ecological health depends. It belongs to all of us. Water access and our water system are set to come under tremendous strain as the result of climate change. This bill establishes a blueprint for democratic practice: for creating an open conversation about the state of our water and its future management – particularly in respect of the deep climate adaptation required - drawing on all expertise and ideas available to us, and which leaves no rock unturned in examining the root causes of the current failure so mistakes are not repeated. This bill does not presume a particular end point, and aims to push the public debate beyond simplistic and unhelpful narratives of privatisation vs nationalisation. This bill puts the conversation about the future management of water where it should be – in the hands of parliament and the public. This is a conversation that must take place in broad daylight, not behind the closed doors of boardrooms, or through opaque industry lobbying. Water belongs to all of us, so how it is managed is a question of economic democracy. This should not be difficult for any government to grasp. Half a century ago, Margaret Thatcher’s revolution ripped up and rewrote the rulebook for economic management. It was an ideology that assumed that profit-maximisation would deliver public good, even when it came to our common resources and public services. Whether or not you agree with her ideology, Thatcher proved that the world could be made differently, and that rules were there for the changing. We need to apply that same mindset now. As John Maynard Keynes “anything we can actually do we can afford”. That is what democratic and responsive adaptation to the climate crisis demands. Politicians need to be honest, that we are struggling to find a way out of this mess. The dominant political and economic orthodoxy of what is possible has come to its limits. We have blocked ourselves on every avenue – whether that is through arbitrary fiscal rules, or failing to confront the plain reality that the profit-maximisation motive is undermining good public resource management. This is a cage we have built for ourselves. It is also one we can let ourselves out of, if we so desire. There’s clear public outrage about how our water is being mismanaged. There’s also a clear public consensus that the current system does not work. If government fails to act, this will further undermine people’s faith in democracy. With the rise of the far right, the failure of democracy is not something we can afford. We have to stop water mismanagement, and that can only be done through systemic change. The answers do not lie in failed regulators or tinkering. We must have the courage to change the rules and create a new political reality. This is, to some degree, already happening in other areas, whether that is rail or energy. Let this bill be the starting point for a national and democratic conversation about water, and how this integral part of our commons is managed in the 21stcentury, with all the democratic, climate and ecological challenges that lie ahead.

A privilege of retirement, lingering by the morning radio when something catches your attention. Case in point: BBC Radio 4 'Start the Week' this morning; brilliant and terrifying discussion on the social effects of AI between Yuval Noah Harari, Edith Hall and Madhumita Murgia.

Sir Keir Starmer must now issue his own version of the Ministerial Code. This is an opportunity to restore integrity to the heart of government. Sign the petition @UnlockDemocracy secure.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/page/157975/do…

@clark_aviation @ProfBrianCox @MrJamesMay The delta shaped plastic aeroplane you launched with an elastic band catapult - of course!

Off topic, but who is old enough to remember the anticipation of buying one of these at the sweet shop? My favourite 'surprise content' inside...was the plastic parachute trooper! 🪂 Yours? @ProfBrianCox @MrJamesMay

@clark_aviation Ten or so years ago I saw what I believe was the prototype at Gatwick Aviation Museum.

A modern person-carrying under-wing pod? This more recent concept was conceived by London based aircraft consultancy AVPRO U.K. According to Flight magazine, the UKs DERA organisation test fitted a prototype to a Bae Sea Harrier and Army AH-64 at Boscombe Down in the late 1990s.

So here’s a tale… I noticed Charlotte Owen, the junior aide Boris Johnson controversially ennobled, has a new gig with - shock! - Boris Johnson. But that’s only the start. There’s also uranium, Iran, Steve Bannon..& a LOT of qs My piece for @ObserverUK theguardian.com/politics/artic…

Boris Johnson, lying narcissist, faces ‘serious questions’ over new firm "Better Earth" with uranium boss after he FAILED to disclose he met a uranium lobbyist while PM. Firm employs Charlotte Owen - plonked into Lords for no reason Nothing to see here😡 theguardian.com/politics/artic…

America needs to learn the terrifying lesson of the British riots. This was Musk’s trial balloon for the US election. The prospect of political violence is real. And Musk’s behaviour is a warning shot of what’s to come. My piece for @ObserverUK theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

‘The armed forces, by their own admission, are rooted too narrowly in the civil society they are designed to defend...it is a glaringly noticeable opportunity for hostile states and one which they will certainly exploit.’ |✍️ @paulmasonnews britainsworld.org.uk/p/open-briefin…

If you have any responsibility for designing or purchasing digital medical systems, READ THIS. It won't take long (but it might make you squirm).

This digitally-altered image of Kamala Harris posing alongside Jeffrey Epstein is being shared in the wake of Joe Biden's endorsement of her as the new Democratic nominee. The real image, captured in 2015, shows Harris posing with her husband Douglas Emhoff.

@clark_aviation I wonder if I was there? Remember a family day at Filton, BAC on one side of the runway, RR on the other. No one watched the Phantom (RR engines) do it's stuff. All eyes were scanning the distant horizon where Concorde was holding before it's entrance. You could feel the pride.

Feel the noise? 😉 An early pre-production Concorde being 'put through it's paces' at an airshow in the early 1970s. What can't be shown here is the noise, I wonder if the gents in this shot have great hearing today?

Wes Streeting: “We [NHS] need to rethink our role in Government. This is no longer simply a public service...this is an economic growth department" Yes. He said it out loud so his mates in private health know he’s serious. The NHS is For Sale.

@RichardJMurphy ft.com/__origami/serv…

I just listened to Tony Blair being interviewed on Radio 4. I can recall the days when Tony Blair, who had apparently never turned on a PC, believed that IT was the solution for every problem in government . Now it seems that he thinks that AI is the answer to every question. Amongst the problems that he seems to think it might solve will be the junior doctors’ dispute in the NHS, because he spoke about AI when asked what the solution was. The implication of his comments was that he does not see the reason for much of what junior doctors do. It would seem that he thinks that the decisions that they make can be made by AI, and lower qualified staff can deliver the services as a consequence. This then solves the pay dispute, by removing the pay grade. He was not as blunt as this, but that is, I think, where he was going, by inference of what he said, and the context of his other comments. There have been many occasions when Tony Blair has got things terribly wrong. That is because there have always been a very obvious limits to his understanding. This is now the case with regards to junior doctors. Firstly, junior doctors are not junior. Many of them will have been in the job for well over a decade. They are the backbone of the entire hospital system. Secondly, AI works on the basis of algorithms, and they need data. In contrast, the whole point about medicine is that it takes seriously incomplete information, the vast majority of it being communicated nonverbally, and interprets that based on the intuitive experience of the practitioner. The weightings provided are those that at the moment when the decision has to be taken (3am at the bedside of an unconscious elderly person with multiple co-morbidities) seem best to the doctor using a combination of all the heuristics that years of experience has provided to them, many of the inputs for which they will never have time to record. It is, in other words, an exercise in the management of risk in the face of extraordinary uncertainty, including very often not knowing what the patient actually has wrong with them. Good luck in finding any AI system that can process that in a few seconds, including all input time, right now or at any moment in the foreseeable future. It is not going to happen. So, Blair is wrong, again. I am not saying AI has no uses. It is contextually autocorrecting my typing as I write this, often, but by no means always, getting things right. That’s useful. But when a politician possessed of little wit and even less knowledge, let alone understanding, think AI can undertake tasks like those a junior doctor is asked to undertake two things will follow. The first would be massive medical errors. The second would be senior doctors without the experience that comes from years of appraising the human condition. The loss to society would be immeasurable. But, no doubt, somebody funding the Tony Blair Institute would have profited considerably in the meantime, and Tony Blair would define that as a success. Please pardon my cynicism, but incomprehension in the face of reality on this scale is very hard to accept when hinted at as if it is a truth by the likes of Tony Blair.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/… A position I seem to have reluctantly come round to. As usual George Monbiot states it with brutal clarity.