Duncan Robinson
@duncanrobinson
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Bagehot columnist and political editor at The Economist.
London, England
Joined December 2008
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This week’s column starts with me in a Porsche Taycan on the M40 and ends with a joke about Christ’s foreskin | Jeremy Clarkson, patron saint of the Great British bore
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Easy to understand why people want to preserve such beauty
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Something very funny about calling an archbishop a "virtue-signaller". I mean...yes?
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I have covid. I am getting by with the support and best wishes of my friends, who are happily not infected.
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Bit weird that a supposedly key part of the British constitution is a pdf that can be updated on a whim. Cool system!
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Reckon every Conservative voting 18-24 year old has appeared on television at some point in the past year
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A discount on tuition fees (which he didn’t pay) as an inducement for conscription (which he didn’t do). Tough sell!
"You could say to young people: 'Right we'll knock a bit off your student loan debt if you come and take part.'"
Sir David Lidington expresses the need for both 'a stick' and 'a carrot' to draw young people into conscription, and makes some suggestions himself.
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British voters want American taxes and European public services and have instead ended up with European taxes and American services.
A story to go with my earlier calculations
UK graduates face 50% tax rate on additional pay from next April
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Job news: I'm taking over The Economist's British politics column, Bagehot, from January. Please get in touch and tell me things about British politics.
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If it honestly costs £20bn to rebuild House of Parliament, then just go full Victorian: level it, and build something new for a tenth of the cost
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HS2 was/is amazingly bad at framing the costs of the project. It was a few billion a year over a few decades. Gov budget is about £1,000bn or so. In household terms, it's roughly equivalent of a Netflix sub for the year.
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Welcome to Britain. Nothing works.
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Britain
A train named after Sir Captain Tom Moore was stuck for two hours after it hit a trampoline just outside of Cardiff Central station.
It comes as amber weather warnings are issued across the country for
#StormDudley
.
Follow live updates:
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Oddest thing about industrial action is why we haven’t seen more of it in past decade
Huge collapse in relative pay for UK teachers over that 15yrs
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20% of British consumer spending in 1900 was booze.
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Slightly obsessed with this tiny bit of greenbelt holding the line and stopping the chaotic and disastrous merging of Leeds and Bradford.
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Purge Britain: Crime is legal. Crimes with no charges: have police given up on low-level offences?
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The outcomes were terrible but the process was immaculate
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I don't think a single building should cost 1% of GDP to renovate
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Mayyyybe setting the curriculum around random moral panics isn’t a good idea
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Son developing a blueberry habit. Smack addiction probably cheaper
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There is this insane idea in British politics that if you cut the biscuit budget enough and force your chancellor to stay in Il Premiere Inn, you will have enough cash left over to fund Our NHS
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Odd idea that investors should never lose money, in any circumstances.
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This, to me, is soft power
The fights, fashion and fizz of Ladies Day at Aintree Festival, UK: photos
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Netflix: the secret weapon of European integration
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Who had “Grant Shapps becomes 21st century Franz Ferdinand” in their 2024 predictions?
🚨 Exclusive: Grant Shapps was forced to abandon a trip to Odesa after British intelligence revealed there was a credible threat he could be targeted in a Russian missile strike
I spent three days embedded with his team in Ukraine - here is what I found:
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Theresa May has these occasional flashes of insight
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This week’s column: UKSA! UKSA! UKSA!
Westminster’s obsession with America leads to bad policy, silly economics, dull conversation and homogeneous bookshelves
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Gonna stick my neck out and say that if Labour win nearly 15m votes and Tories win 8m votes, Labour will win the election. Bold call, I know!
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Better yet: throw open student loans to all young people. Everyone gets £30k, with less usurious rate, to spend how they please. You wanna go to university, buy a house, go travelling, start a business? Go for it.
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Britain’s Reform UK party does not exist. It’s fake. Made up. A bogeyman to scare Tory MPs and make them go to bed on time
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Germany goes Dutch (with political fragmentation), while the Dutch go Belgium (with ceaseless coalition talks)
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Incredibly easy for businesses to ignore laws in Britain. National minimum wage barely enforced. Sweat shops in plain sight. Dodgy sweet shops on premier shopping streets. Hand car washes seen as amusing productivity problem rather than law-breaking
One of the most striking charts here on the incredibly weak enforcement of the minimum wage
Today's report suggests the detection rate for min wage underpayment is no higher than 13% putting the entire system deep in the red zone. No incentive for employers to comply
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Fun angle is that little has changed. The by-elections are just confirmation of Labour’s big, consistent lead in the polls (which has been solid for a year now). But the excuses for ignoring that poll lead have now disappeared
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Quite like the bathos of world leaders in shit meeting rooms
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The British state detests spare capacity in all its forms
The perversity of all this is that if the UK had more gas storage this would be an ideal time to replenish it, locking away the gas ahead of a grim winter. Instead, we retired our biggest storage reservoir a few years ago and have next to no space to put all this cheap gas
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Hearing that the party that’s been 20 points ahead in the polls for a year is on track for a majority. More as and when
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Slap some Talking Heads over this and whack it straight into the new Adam Curtis doc
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Effectively taxing households rather than energy companies is, err, bold
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Peculiar that "building a new railway line" seen as preposterous idea
IFS's
@PJTheEconomist
on
@TimesRadio
on HS2:
"This whole thing makes me want to weep... it makes me despair. The original sin was agreeing to do it in the first place."
But he says having started it, should look at added value of connecting to Euston+Manc, otherwise more waste
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Easy to forget that most of the bad stuff hasn't happened yet, from a consumer perspective. Boilers yet to be switched on; new mortgage bill yet to be locked in; effect of inflation won't properly be felt until the annual payrise fails to make up for it...
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People have forgotten that a government with a large majority and a relatively united party can actually just…do things
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Google Translate is the most underappreciated invention of the past few decades
Just thought about it for the first time in a while,... the Google translate Ukrainian to English is amazingly good.
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Peculiar situation where the British state is getting bigger (as % of GDP) but doing less.
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Magnificently depressing read: The horror story of HS2. Favourite bit is HS2 effectively paying a council to oppose HS2.
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It’s always like this in Brussels. Don’t believe the propaganda
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Final column. Bye!
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Incidentally, this is my last column for three months as I’m off on pat leave!
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Writing about false economies in the British state. What’s your favourite example? Big or small. From no tea and biscuits for civil service to banjaxing the NHS by not funding social care
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"Sunak stayed in the five-star Hotel Danieli in Venice when attending the G20 meeting of finance ministers in July 2021 as chancellor, with more than £4,500 spent on accommodation for Sunak and his aides." This is pointless tight-fistedness.
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Fun that Clegg has an outside shot of becoming one of most powerful people on the planet
Nick Clegg promoted at Meta (Facebook). Will now be president of global affairs, was previously vice-president.
This puts him at the very top table with Zuckerberg and Sandberg, demonstrates how central a figure he's become.
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Debate about energy pricing is too focused on domestic situation rather than this horror show.
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Something low-key brilliant about Britain: no stupid jay walking laws
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Seeing "Network North" start to unravel is good for my theory that infrastructure budgets aren't really fungible. It's the politics that's hard, not the money.
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Tabloids a fine example of unpopulism. They maintain influence because they shape elite opinion - among ministers and the BBC - not because they speak for the people, who no longer buy them. (Favourite troll stat: Britain's most popular red top is now The Economist.)
The rise of unpopulism
"That tabloids still hold any influence at all is due not to their connection with voters, but to their hold over the elite."
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Going from best and easiest job in government (foreign secretary) to worst and hardest job (home secretary)
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Can recommend a big pot of coffee and the Ukrainian Eurovision entry if you want start the day absolutely fucking wired
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Treasury brain in action
Seems like an odd time for the Government to put its new Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Centre up for sale.
“Things are tight and so they’re looking for a way to recoup some of the [£215m] cost.” 🤔🤔🤔
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There are five types of countries. Developed countries, developing countries, Argentina, Japan, and Britain
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Trains setting off early is total bullshit and should be illegal. You haven’t left on time if you’ve left early!
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Extra taxes for average zoomers. If this goes through a 25 year old grad on 25k faces marginal de facto tax rate of 40ish%. 69 year old doing same job would pay 20%
Exclusive: The threshold above which graduates have to pay back student loans is set to be lowered by the Gov.
Currently £27k. Ministers looking at £25k or as low as £22k. Announced within weeks. Would save Treasury billions… but squeeze grads further.
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If you’re gonna call it the Windrush line, you should give Brixton a stop on it by reopening Brixton East (which I think was here)
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Luton Airport is hugely underrated. Zone one to gate in 32 minutes
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The British economy: London, the M4, bit of oil, Edinburgh and Cheshire. Lovely sutff
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Good back of a fag packet comparison between efficacy of Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs. AZ works really well.
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Service charges gonna be PPI sized mess
Everyone is worried about rents going up in flats or cost of ownership but follow the money…
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“Clean Brexit” was easy for the EU to deal with. Poland’s “Dirty Remain” is trickier to fix.
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Cranking up National Insurance under Brown (and now Sunak) rather than just raising normal tax was a massive error. It's just an unfair income tax (pensioners don't pay it, while very rich stop paying it) and people think it's a pot of money with their name on it.
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I spent this week heroically eating in fancy Warsaw restaurants in the name of journalism. Please read so I can justify the expense bill.
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The Economist doesn’t have bylines because everything is actually written by Shashank
🧵 I have a few pieces in this week's
@TheEconomist
, two on nuclear issues (including a detailed briefing) and two on cyber-security.
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bit of dissonance when it comes to the way young men are portrayed in media (woke wetties) and how they appear on social media (legends)
If the human race leaves behind one artifact about our existence, I vote this video.
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Lot of crack being smoked in British politics atm
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Britain has a shadow tax system. So headline rates are still a bit below European peers, while real rates are same/higher when things like tuition fees or childcare - which are provided free, or subsidised elsewhere - are included.
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This week's column: the British state is getting more costly and providing less
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After "the Pinch" comes "the Punch": Britain's boomers are losing for the first time
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We have precisely the wrong amount of local democracy. Just enough to have all of the problems; not enough to have any of the benefits.
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My favourite dumb policy idea is just letting every 18 year old borrow 60k from the government, which they can spend on whatever they like. Uni? A business? A big holiday? Whatever they want
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Fun how society is shaped by 500 page documents that not even the people who write them read in full
Americans often mock Europe for not embracing air conditioning, despite our summers becoming hotter annually.
Turns out the London Plan specifically warns local planning authorities against permitting air conditioning systems in new developments.
Crazy stuff
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Big chunk of Britain’s productivity problems would disappear if we stopped pretending to work in late July and August
I love the endless out-of-office responses I get (and send) in summer. Everyone's off having a lovely holiday! It's so nice!
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Raab: “There was speculation that the May 20 party was held in my honour to thank me, it’s just ridiculous.”
@KayBurley
: So it was a party!
“No, exactly, er, no, er, the, no no no no. This is the claim that was made, it was nonsense, I wasn’t invited and I didn’t attend.”
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(small voice) the foul for the Danish free kick shouldn’t have been given
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