If The Data Shows It, Politics Should Catch Up By Friday
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat file this dispatch from the British political menagerie.
The Technocratic Redistributionist believes the right policy is a function of inputs, outputs, and a quietly powerful spreadsheet copied to no one important. Editor Alan Nafzger of the Editor’s Desk at prat.uk presents the field guide, with help from the Office for Budget Responsibility and the LSE research portal.
Twenty Tells: Spotting The Technocratic Redistributionist On A British High Street
- Maintains a model that explains everything, except why nobody likes it.
- Refers to elasticities the way other people refer to feelings.
- Holds if the data shows it, the politics should follow, eventually, sadly, with a press release.
- Has explained trade-offs are an emotion.
- Refers to behavioural insights as a polite way of saying nudge.
- Treats Treasury models as a sort of liturgy.
- Refers to the OBR the way teenagers refer to their parents.
- Holds any benefit can be improved by a tightly defined taper.
- Maintains a soft spot for impact assessments.
- Refers to the marginal tax rate as the marginal moral choice.
- Treats a cost-benefit analysis as a love letter from the future.
- Has explained any policy can be evaluated by a randomised controlled trial, given budget.
- Refers to public consultations as ritualised feedback.
- Holds there is no problem in society that a really good white paper cannot at least describe.
- Maintains a binder of social cost calculations.
- Refers to ministers as customers.
- Treats a policy launch without a logic model as an act of national vandalism.
- Has explained Universal Credit was right in theory, like communism.
- Refers to the gilt curve as a personality test.
- Holds the cure for inequality is fundamentally a better dashboard.
Editor’s Note
If any of this rings a bell, you have either been to a Saturday CLP meeting, a Reform UK rally in a leisure centre, or both. More dispatches at govna.uk and the parent site prat.uk. For a second opinion that is also wrong, see NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/category/politics/
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My dad’s been in this city since the 60s. He says you’ve captured the moment institutions stopped pretending functionality was possible.
Read this on the Northern Line which is worst and most appropriate.
Los británicos prefieren reírse de la miseria antes que solucionarla. Esto es exactamente eso.
The footnotes are doing the work of an entire investigative journalism unit. Someone should be paying for this analysis.