David J. Bradshaw

This is not the best place to find me.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@CitySamuel So just disconnect them, until they fix it. Why is this anyone else’s problem?

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@TeslaMining @alexanderrX_ Even though I could afford it, I still can’t justify it to myself. Three year old cars are a much better deal and if you’re not in a rush you can find the exact spec you want.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@ReliablyGenX @GoodwinMJ What happens when they increasingly decide to leave?

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@annaskaya I made far more progress than my doctors ever did.

Anyway it must be a decade since I last saw you. Hope life is good.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@googleearth How about making this an X-Plane add-on, so we can combine the best data set with the best flight model.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

Coastguard helicopter just landed at the Clifton Observatory. Someone must have fallen off the bridge again.

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Excellent thread, this. Something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about…

The British state is run by people who have never been fired, never missed a number, never had a client scream at them, never stayed up until 3am working on a deal, or repricing a book because Tokyo opened badly.

They have never experienced CONSEQUENCE. Ever.

THAT is the single most important fact in British public life.

The pipeline is so uniform and mediocre it scarcely needs describing:

- School
- PPE or adjacent
- Civil Service fast stream or a Think Tank research role
- Spell as local councillor to appear “grounded,”
- Then a safe seat and a red box before 40

At no point has the market ever called them a moron.

At no point has a P&L told them their idea was shit.

The feedback loop that every private sector professional takes for granted simply does not exist in their world.

This matters because policy is NOT an essay. It IS a trade. Every regulation has a cost, every tax has a behavioural response, every intervention has second and third order consequences.

In markets, if you misread convexity you get carried out. In government, you get reshuffled to a different department.

The incentive structure could not be more perfectly designed to retain the incompetent and repel the capable.

Anyone with genuine commercial talent is earning multiples of a ministerial salary by their early thirties. So the applicant pool self selects for people for whom the title is the reward because they could never command that status where performance is measured.

The think tank ecosystem makes it worse.
IPPR, the Resolution Foundation, JRF and the rest function as ideological finishing schools and revolving doors. They produce people fluent in the language of policy who have never implemented anything. They can model a distributional impact assessment in their sleep but could not run a corner shop at profit.

This is NOT intelligence. It is pattern matching within a closed system that never tests its own assumptions because everyone in it shares the same priors.

The civil service compounds it further. The fast stream rewards generalism, rotating you through departments every 18 to 24 months to develop “breadth,” which in practice means you never develop depth.

A Treasury official who helped design a tax policy in 2019 is working on transport by the time it starts distorting behaviour in 2022. Nobody owns the outcome.

The private sector has one thing the state fundamentally lacks: a kill switch.

Bad companies go bust.

Bad traders get sacked.

The state just absorbs failure, reclassifies it as “lessons learned,” and promotes the people responsible.

The compound effect of thirty years of this is a permanent class institutionally incapable of delivering growth or even understanding why the private sector they depend on for revenue keeps shrinking under their stewardship. This is what we have, right now.

You cannot fix this with better people inside the same system. The system selects against competence, insulates against feedback, and rewards survival over performance.

Every parliament is just a fresh rotation of the same profile through the same machine expressing the same surprise when nothing improves.

We need parallel institutions to be built by the guy or gal staying up til 3am repricing the book. The risk taker. The entrepreneur.

Then we gradually phase the existing sclerotic failed structures out.

That’s how we win.

Make Britain Great Again 🇬🇧 💪

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

We have a centre right party that can’t even do economic nationalism. So why would the British consumer think in such terms?

A plate made in Britain is never going to be as cheap as one made in China.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@tjbate2000 @AaronBastani There is no deep water in Gaza.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@incxlchud @stealthyTom @NewmanJ_R @NickSzabo4 Saddam pretended to have weapons he didn’t have as deterrent. Iran got 90% of the way there as a clear signal deterrent, the plan was to walk the line, but never cross it. However, Trump is too old to have a good sense of balance.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@AnnieLiao_2000 So 75% of the staff gone in the next two years

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@AndrewOrlowski It might not be that simple.

[Donna Rachel - The Dissident Councillor 🕊️ @Donna_Rachel_]

Over the last month I've undertaken an extensive survey of the British left's and right's ecosystems in terms of party political structures, campaigning and activism groups, think tanks, media, local government and the civil service, political bodies, charities, and funding.

I have applied Elite Theory to this landscape - the theory being that democracy is a mirage, and that power is always held by the most organised minority.

The picture is bleak. The left has a strong and highly interconnected ecosystem, with each organisation acting as a node in a network that's highly responsive to threat and able to mobilise with ease.

The right has a series of fractured and ever-fracturing silos, almost none of which are connected to one another, and which break apart further every time they encounter ideological difference.

The result is there for all to see. We are on the precipice of a coalition government made up of Islamic interests, the far left, and their progressive useful idiots. They will win the next election and they will take this country off a cliff.

I used my analysis to create a series of projections, using the headline polling figures as a baseline, and incrementally factoring in three different issues that work against the right wing vote:

1. The lack of a right wing ground game in elections
2. The Muslim Vote
3. The right wing split.

You can see the outcome of each of these (plus baseline) in the graphic attached. In short, they make victory impossible. Hold on to your hats, folks, this ship is going down.

(If you're interested in the full analysis, I will be releasing the paper on Monday).

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

After almost 20 years with @santanderuk, after this weekends customer service experience it's time to look for a new bank. Who should I go with?

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@PolitlcsUK Move out for 20 years and your likely not moving back. Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@JoolsJuevans @jhansonradio Have a look at what MP pay is in Singapore and the reasons for it

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@it_unprofession I’d add to subtlety subvert the dress code so people notice and remember you. An orange shirt can get you a long way.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@stephan_eckner @AaronBastani @peterrhague Because they didn’t spend those 45 years starting more wars and running a non-stop terror campaign

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@PatriciaNPino 1/ Tell that to Argentina.

2/ You have misunderstood how M4 money supply works.

3/ the expansion of the money supply through debt creation causes inflation, not the interest on it.

4/ Not doing so has lead us into this mess. In the 1800s the country was run like a company.

[David J. Bradshaw @davidjbradshaw]

@wadeyart @ElectionMapsUK @FindoutnowUK Surely that should depend on which way your seat is going?