Richard T Kelly

Novelist @FaberBooks, teacher @FaberAcademy, Associate Professor leading the MA Publishing @NorthumbriaUni. Latest novel THE BLACK EDEN in paperback now.

[Richard T Kelly @RichTKelly]

My novel The Black Eden returns in paperback from @FaberBooks next Thursday! Nothing else on that day, right? 😉But please bear it in mind for your summer reading. And thanks again to kind reviewers first time out: @chrisdeerin, @jennycolgan, @judecook_ , @KiberdRory inter alia.

[Richard T Kelly @RichTKelly]

Jennifer Williams, now inactive on X, but still delivering the goods at the FT: "Aside from its boosterism, what Manchester did differently was provide a clear, single, consistent, credible story, which it stuck to. That one really is a lesson for any prime minister in waiting."

[FT UK Politics @ftukpolitics]

Separating Manchester’s truth from the legend https://t.co/UnQyDtgJWj

[Richard T Kelly @RichTKelly]

@AlexBibliophile Aside from the standard full-set arguments, Lydia Davis did just Vol.1, thus an outlier, but could be fun to resume with her?

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

How very very sad.

Marjane was a true artist and advocate for Iranian women and freedom.

She disrupted literature with her wildly successful autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis.

AFP reports she died of sadness a year after losing her husband, the love of her life.

RIP

[Dr Lawrence Newport @lawrencenewport]

Labour Growth Group had some truly excellent people who were ready, early on, to be quite radical.

In the early days of LFG, they were the first political group to come on side and endorse the LFG Bill.

Chris Curtis and Mark McVitie in particular stuck their necks out for what they believed in. They took a chance on LFG - a new group starting from nowhere, when the easier path would be to do nothing. That takes guts and I hope they have big plans for the future - because very clearly, there is a lot to do.

[Steven Erlanger @StevenErlanger]

it's so important to remember the sheer ugliness of the wall and the ideology behind it.

[Shashank Joshi @shashj]

“If Washington’s vice is sometimes premature action, the European vice is often endless diplomacy without the prospect of non-economic coercive power. If one system is criticized to fire before aiming; the other aims forever and never fires.”

[Ferenc Hörcher @HorcherF]

A great debate between two great intellectual historians, about Shakespeare. Do you need anything more?
"This would have been a much better book if a discussion of perennial problems had been balanced by a discussion of issues that no longer concern us, but that did concern Sh."

[Aris Roussinos @arisroussinos]

Me on the Redmondite Home Ruler Andy Burnham, his attempt to use the Nairn-Anderson thesis for Unionist ends, the short shrift peripheral nationalists will give him, and the political danger in carving a rebellious England into quasi-Greater Manchesters: https://t.co/ySQZC9qQEj

[Shashank Joshi @shashj]

I wrote our cover story this week, a valedictory essay on the changes in war & warfare over my eight years as defence editor. It’s a reflection on the growth & limits of battlefield transparency, the lessons from different wars & the utility of force today https://t.co/5mBbcRGC3A

[Institute for Fiscal Studies @TheIFS]

'We get about 70-75% of our energy in the UK from oil and gas'

On our latest podcast @Dieter_Helm joins us to discuss Britain’s energy mix, net zero targets, and how policy should respond to energy price shocks.

🎧️ Listen to the podcast: https://t.co/vHpPpIhCW7

[John Stepek @John_Stepek]

This taxation by barnacle accumulation (good metaphor) has to stop. This is the genuine "comms" problem of our era. Politicians taxing by stealth and over-complexity because they live in fear of certain headlines and are incapable of explaining what they're doing

[Tom Westgarth @Tom_Westgarth15]

Laura Gilbert built 10 Data Science and the Incubator for AI, which have both pioneered the deployment of technology across the British state. Few people have contributed more to improving the UK’s state capacity in AI than Laura and the teams she was a part of.

10DS modelling reportedly informed the choice to prioritise by age rather than occupation. This is widely credited with saving lives versus the occupation-based alternative being lobbied for at the time.

10DS and the brilliant folks there did a lot of other great stuff, including building live COVID data that policy teams and the public relied on, as well as releasing a lightweight data sharing tool on GitHub where anyone can access it free of charge. Today, it has amassed over 200,000 public downloads, used by teams across government and industry to make data sharing easy.

Onto AI, where Zack has suggested that Laura doesn’t have lots to offer to public discussion. Whenever I speak with frontier labs, they tell me the U.K. now has the most ambitious and sophisticated approach to deploying AI in public services.

With Extract (which Laura’s Incubator for AI team developed), planning documents are now converted into digital records in 40 seconds, versus the 1–2 hours of planner time it typically takes manually, with higher accuracy. That’s roughly a 100–180x speedup, and is contributing to a 45% reduction in processing time to build the housing and infrastructure the UK is sorely in need of.

The public sector team who built Extract scaffolded Gemini so that it could orchestrate Segment Anything and pose estimation models to map geospatial information from text and diagrams in a way that even the GOOGLE DEEPMIND TEAM hadn’t worked out how to do at the time.

So rather than outsourcing to big tech, which I’m sure Zack and many others are more than sceptical of, Laura helped build true public sector state capacity that reduced our reliance on the private sector, while also delivering a world class public service.

Powerful AI systems are going to usher in a centuries worth of social and economic transformation within only a couple of decades. This requires a deep analysis of where capabilities will develop, an understanding of which externalities we want to mitigate, a vision of what a good life looks like, and amassing the people, tools, infrastructure, and institutions to build that vision. 

Of course Laura is precisely the sort of person that has much to offer in answering these questions. We should be cherishing the tireless civil servants and incredible technical talent that have built capabilities that many folks think the public sector would never be able to do.

[Richard T Kelly @RichTKelly]

@JohnRentoul Wouldn't say #5 is just buzz: the ordering of the priorities is significant.

[Tom Forth @thomasforth]

My favourite bit of the Tony Blair essay his views on how to help "the north of the country". A big improvement from his old "education, education, education" conviction. Education now comes second. Infrastructure is first. That is an important lesson learned. Good.

[Richard T Kelly @RichTKelly]

@DamCou Who are you thinking of as the high-performance exemplars in this study...?

[Richard T Kelly @RichTKelly]

@BenZaranko Terrifically interesting Ben, and many thanks for the steer.

[Richard T Kelly @RichTKelly]

@BenZaranko Thanks for this great piece. Could you possibly direct me to the data mentioned about productivity growth in publishing?

[Richard T Kelly @RichTKelly]

'If the government was pursuing a plan to achieve productivity growth by making labour more costly this is how it would show up.' Accepting unemployment as the price for stronger productivity is a coherent choice [but] “what happens to people who lose their jobs?”@GregoryThwaites

[Ben Zaranko @BenZaranko]

Full version in my column for this weekend’s Observer, which has some (other) cracking stories in there:

https://t.co/rDbDDR2lWF

[Rory Sutherland @rorysutherland]

Did the customer ever ask for this? https://t.co/26g4MsJTZJ

[John Wills @johndotwills]

https://t.co/pD0QH1zZEA