Excellent from @KemiBadenoch pushing back against confected outrage and casual misuse of the word racism from SNP MP
David Goodhart
12.5K posts
David Goodhart
@David_Goodhart
Founder Prospect magazine. Author ‘Road to Somewhere’ (Anywheres/Somewheres) and ‘Head, Hand, Heart’. Ex-director Demos. Now PX. New book ‘The Care Dilemma’
London
Joined November 2009
- BBC news coverage is too high on emotion, too low on useful information. Seems to be aimed at a 12 year old. We need human interest too, but we know that every stat is a real person. Gov info suffers from same failing. Please treat us as adults. More science/indie experts/abroad
- Rising wages at the bottom of jobs market suggests economists underestimated downward pressure on wages from free movement, says Prof Brian Bell head of Migration Advisory Committee. Adds that immigration in recent decades hasn’t made us richer, or made much economic difference
- Lazy BBC coverage of care home crisis. Same for last 3 weeks. Repeat of “we’ve been abandoned” mantra. Yes was big error to let infected patients back to homes. But do homes have no responsibility? No mention 70% of homes C19 free or % of deaths in UK homes lower than much Europe
- Are we finally waking up to the fact that what were meant to be the 2 great drivers of economic growth—mass higher education and mass immigration—are in fact drags on it?
- Why do so many clever and informed ppl assume that Brexit has had a big negative impact on the UK economy when it isn't the case, whether you look at growth, trade or greenfield FDI? @campbellclaret and @RoryStewartUK interviewing @RachelReevesMP on "Leading" took it as a given.
- RIP Jeremy Clarke, @spectator Low Life columnist who died this morning, lovely man, beautiful writer, he’s forever blowing bubbles
- Ridiculous confected outrage over Sewell’s slavery comments, why is @thetimes putting it on front page (though editorial OK)? Some of coverage truly awful, ITV News at 10 a joke. No attempt to inform, just outrage. Maybe no surprise kids are burning the flag at Pimlico Academy
- I knew @Sathnam when he was a rising young star on the FT, Sikh family, Wolverhampton Grammar and Cambridge, more interested in writing beautiful, witty English sentences than race. He moved to Times and at some point caught the race bug, now has zealotry of the late convertLook at this now deleted tweet from @Sathnam at The Times -“innocent white women” in quotes aka children who were raped -the suggestion grooming is rooted in white racism -and shameless book plug It’s disgusting attitudes like his that led to the rape gangs being ignored
- Has Britain become too diverse to sustain a common national culture that benefits us all? This was the question I asked 20 years ago in a Prospect essay Too Diverse? (reprinted in the Guardian) causing a mini-storm. I revisit the question in today's Times
- I see that quite a lot of people don’t like Dominic Cummings very much! It seems such a waste that the outrage generated cannot somehow be plugged into the national grid
- 55% of people in the North East live within 15 minutes of their mother compared with just 15% in London. Fascinating research on the Somewhere/Anywhere regions of the UK (from Understanding Society). Wales and NIreland closest to NEast, South East and South West closest to London
- V surprising that the ruling was unanimous and surely hyperbolic of Hale to claim that the effect on the fundamentals of democracy was “extreme”, didn’t prevent Parliament forcing PM to ask for a Brexit extension! We are sleep walking into a more judicial US-style democracy.
- The knowledge economy turns out not to need many knowledge workers, so we must try to steer ppl away from idea that membership of the graduate cognitive meritocracy is only worthwhile goal. A Sunday Times taster for my new book Head, Hand, Heart out next week (preorder now!)
