The Lentil

Renegade-redhead soixante-sixard. Broadly Liberal but I like boundaries. Blog a bit.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Kathleen Stock interview on Unherd: pretty good summary of the whole sorry Arday affair and how it reflects on our education system.
https://t.co/u4dy80mqTM

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Difficult to track down the precise origin of the quote, but that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" remains true almost always.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Seen a few professional social science academics nitpicking on the Arday stuff as if critics of the man or the institutions taken in by him not quite having the methodology exactly right really matters at this stage. More than sophistry is required.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Full piece here.
https://t.co/pPD01aTBRc

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Nothing new here (though some of the piece is sloppily written: e.g. transfer pricing in and of itself is not a tax avoidance technique)

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

One for the Laffer curve dudes: US corporations now encouraged with lower rates to bring profits home rather than leave them in Ireland or Luxembourg?

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

You'll never lose the market for telling people what they want to hear.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

This is the steelman case for sociology I suppose.

I've got to say I'm not entirely convinced: I suspect sociology has always just played people's priors back to them.

[Lisa Mckenzie @redrumlisa]

It is really awful the Cambridge debacle has put a lens on Sociology it is being ridiculed & delegitimised as an academic discipline. In some ways British Sociology & the Sociologists who have created this storm deserve what they are getting. But Sociology as a discipline has been responsible for important research on Class in Britain, on work, housing, leisure, education and community. Unfortunately this bread & butter research isnt fashionable in Sociology & amongst those who have power in the discipline. Like politics, the arts & culture industries Identity politics have struck again wrecking a discipline that was once important to society.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

I'd guess this is a dirty trick from the Carter F*ck playbook. One of, if not the most despicable firm.

[Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi]

News that the Met investigated reporter Jack Grove for four months just for researching Cambridge’s Jason Arday is incredible - yes, we have speech problems in the US, but the UK has an institutional mechanism to use police to stop reporting https://t.co/IkfAzA1Wrf

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Well fellas, is he really wrong?

[Darel E. Paul @darelmass]

The most telling quote from @Cambridge_Uni Professor Jason Arday: "We're talking about academia here. I didn't murder somebody."

Clearly Arday thinks academia is not a serious profession, demonstrated in both his words and his deeds.
https://t.co/iAQFTfSICK

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Might watch this: education theory is very much not my parish but Launceston is down the road and I know how much ex-teachers of my acquaintance absolutely loathe this trust.

(Not that that necessarily means much one way or the other).

[BBC Panorama @BBCPanorama]

Results have improved at six secondary schools in Devon and Cornwall since they were taken over by the Athena Learning Trust.
But students, parents and teachers have told BBC Panorama the Trust took discipline too far.

Watch on BBC One at 8pm, or on iPlayer now.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Inevitably!

[Binky @TheOnlyGuru]

It was a porbeagle.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

This makes more sense than Burnham, the LibDems, the Tories or Reform.

A fact that the French understand well and our elites never will is that sometimes you can just pass laws and treaties then simply mainly ignore them. Footdragging works.

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

I don't think any of the parties have got a handle on how to deal with the boats. Labour's "safe and legal routes" shtick is completely issue illiterate, but then the right hasn't got much of a clue either. The Tory line reduces it to "leave the ECHR" when the problem with asylum appeals is with domestic law, and Reform's offering is nothing we can take seriously. Their plan does not survive first contact with operational reality. It all hinges on French consent. Good luck with that.

Article 19, UNCLOS has it that:

"Passage of a foreign ship shall be considered to be prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal State if in the territorial sea it engages in any of the following activities: (g) the loading or unloading of any commodity, currency or person contrary to the customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations of the coastal State".

Under such circumstances, our ships returning people to France would breach the law, as there would be no right of innocent passage. Permission would have to be negotiated. See also Art 25. The coastal State may take the necessary steps in its territorial sea to prevent passage which is not innocent.

Restore, meanwhile, falls into much the same trap as the Tory party, placing far too much emphasis on the ECHR and the various conventions as though they are holy writ. It's part of a broader restorationist agenda to wind the constitution back to 1996, which is dumb for several reasons - not least because leaving the ECHR is not a popular policy and the mechanics of attempting it will make us wish we hadn't. To my great surprise, Nobody has done any serious work on this yet.

There is, though, a smarter, simpler way. I don't even think you'd have to pass any additional legislation to get started. You can essentially abolish the asylum system by defunding it (along with NGOs) and reducing the appeal process headcount to half a dozen people. Slow it down to a crawl so that asylum claims have a minimum ten year wait and gut the appeals system.

All you then need do is ramp up local enforcement of Deliveroo type services to ensure they can't make any money on the side, while bombarding them with information on how to return home. The vast majority are only here to make money to send back home, and there is plenty of scope inside existing law to ensure that never happens. Restore briefly alludes to this in their paper but don't realise the significance. It's actually key to repairing a lot of UK dysfunction.

As to accommodations, no party has a solid grip here. The SDP want to send them to Ascension Island while Restore recommends RAF bases. The former is a stupidly expensive and pointless option while the latter is hugely unpopular, and would soon reach capacity limits. The thing to do is build a custom camp on scrubland near to an airport. This would essentially be de facto indefinite detention, but detainees would be free to leave at any time of their choosing provided they arrange to return home.

You can do all the additional legislative work at your own leisure but it is well within the scope of any government to make the asylum system as unpleasant as possible so that it becomes its own deterrent. Repealing the relevant parts of HRA while remaining in the ECHR is actually a smarter bet because you can be sure activist lawyers will clog up the Strasbourg court for eternity - which we then ignore.

https://t.co/64FAeRIhON

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Well indeed. Kissinger's question on who to pick up the phone to still stands.

Our elites all imagine "Europe" either is or should be a geopolitical player but this is simply a category error.

[Blume Industries CEO Balding 大老板 @BaldingsWorld]

Europe can't even coordinate with Europe on China how are the Americans supposed to coordinate with Europe

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

The quote's about right. Rod Liddle was a journo who made it to the top so almost by definition was not to be taken seriously really and I'm sure if I'd ever met him I'd have found a little went a very long way. He did a good job of annoying the po faced though, a useful service

[Michael Murphy @michaelmurph_y]

Rod Liddle’s wit could win over even his most hysterical critics. RIP.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

@rorysutherland *whole

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

@rorysutherland Adjacently there's a while chapter in Freakonomics on why agents take longer to seek their own house than to sell yours: completely different incentives.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Nah. People will do anything rather than admit they were wrong: governments and populations simply panicked.

[Paul Nuki 🦋 @PaulNuki]

We should never be blindly obedient to or unquestioning of experts, but the two examples here - school closures and the covid lab leak stuff - are poor examples.

Schools were not closed because of expert ideology, but because hospitals (which we had stripped of spare capacity in the years running up to the pandemic), were at risk of overflowing - a fact.

Similarly, the possibility of a lab leak causing the pandemic was (famously) considered by experts from the off but faded when the empirical evidence for natural origins overtook it.

@lewis_goodall

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

@JasonPackLibya I think backgammon is taught and used in Danish schools: wise people the Danes.

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

Terrific piece on Sunday's backgammon world championship runner up @JasonPackLibya
on backgammon, risk, finance and life.

https://t.co/PEDQGB5I0V

[The Lentil @HibbertMatthew]

🎯

[Carlo Lancellotti @_CLancellotti]

One could argue that adding false information to your CV is fraud, but creating an almost entirely fictional CV that matches perfectly every possible DEI stereotype is a form of performimg art.