Tom Doherty

Breaking Rachel Reeves says that the student loan system is 'broken' - but adds that it is not at the 'front of the queue' in terms of her political priorities She said that the bigger priority is the fact that one in six young people are not in education, employment or training 'So, yes, we want to fix it. Yes, we want to make improvements. But is it front of the queue? No, it’s not' She also said that lifting hospital waiting lists and axing the two-child benefit cap is more of a priority 'Politics is about priorities. I’m not denying there is a problem. I’m not blind to that, but what I do say is there has to be some patience. We can’t fix everything straight away. 'If you say to me, ‘you shouldn’t have done child poverty and you should have reformed the student loan system’, I just strongly disagree with that'

John Bew’s piece in the New Statesman is really exceptional. I highly recommend reading it. “Can we fix all our problems in one parliamentary term or with the unfurling of a pristine new national plan? Most certainly not. Can we do better than we are doing now, with a coherent and cross-cutting programme of radical change – of the type that is never found in a party manifesto and will never emerge, without prompting, from the stakeholder state?…… The argument is that we are in the midst of the Fourth Great Disruption of the modern British state – and that our politics, across every part of the political spectrum, is lagging perilously behind the realities we face.” 🎯🎯🎯 Compare and contrast the quality of his analysis with that of Ben Judah’s…. Bew is not only an extremely able scholar, but also able to work inside the system and deal with practical reality. An extremely rare combination. And it’s also a tragedy that successive Prime Ministers he worked under (Johnson all the way through to Starmer) have essentially entirely failed to step up to the historical moment he foresaw and worked to get the UK ready.… Little attention is given to the fact that much of the actions now being discussed now as essential were the core number ten plan in 2020, with people like Bew, Keith Dear, the misfits science-tech team, and a wide range of others thinking about to fix procurement, the civil service, natsec, sci/tech strategic advantage, lessons from COVID etc in an integrated way (read the 2021 integrated review for parts of this). Almost all of it was binned in favour of doubling down on the usual levers (see Boriswave, R&D spend uplift commitments cut, minimal action on drones/binning military procurement fiascos like Ajax).

Britain isn't a serious country, sadly. Or at least, our leaders are unable to confront trade-offs and act in the national interest. This will not prevent UK content creators from having their work used to train AI models, other countries have more flexible rules. It will, however, block British AI businesses from using that data here.

10 years ago today, Tiffany Pollard mistook the death of David Bowie for her ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ housemate, David Gest.