Thanks for the recommendation. Yeah, it’s sludge, but I think obstructive bureaucracy is a specific kind of sludge - moat sludge is inadvertent: regulation with a specific purpose, but that creates barriers to achieving other things.

With obstructive bureaucracy the barrier is the purpose.

It’s that or guillotines.

US health insurers pioneered the Deny, Defend, Depose strategy of deliberately rejecting legitimate claims as a means of reducing costs, boosting company profits and rewarding management and shareholders.

Obviously the DWP doesn’t have shareholders, just ministers beholden to the right wing press.

Yes, obviously.

It’s the same with every call centre on the planet experiencing an “unusually high volume of calls” every single day of the year: those perfectly consistent one hour wait times aren’t actually “unusual”, they just say that hoping you’ll give up and go away.

It’s like all the “stop the boats” policies - everyone knows none of them will actually stop the boats, as that’s not how you’d go about achieving that specific goal, rather the point is to look and sound tough while not actually doing it.

It’s all political Kayfabe.

No, but I think that’s because it’s not really designed to control actual costs, rather it’s designed to create the impression that it controls the fake costs that accrue to comic book villains.

I think it’s fine to tell the politicians: “this whole thing is bullshit and we all know it’s bullshit and you’re only pretending it’s not bullshit because we like to think of ourselves as a noble country, but the reality is voters hate it when they see money being spent on someone who isn’t them.“

I think we can probably abandon the pretence that PIP assessments are there to assess needs and just acknowledge that they are obstructive bureaucracy designed to reduce financial demands.

Systems designed to identify and meet needs don’t look like that.

You’ve gotta respect his no bullshit take on how we know things are, but would rather pretend they aren’t.

i think all the time about the discourse around the oscars slap. i forget who it was who said this but their takeaway was "listen, these are three highly specific and extremely strange individuals colliding at once in a singular event. there is nothing to be learned or extrapolated here"

a couple of years back I looked at the data and one in four PIP applicants with literal amputations had their application refused by the DWP

but yeah this benefit is too easy to claim obv

Only I’m not 100% convinced the political heat from migration actually will disappear if net migration jumps up 50% from 204,000 to 350,000 again - everyone is having too much fun for that aren’t they?

Isn’t it government policy to keep reducing net migration though?

Or at least that’s what all the “let’s kick migrants again” stuff the Home Office keeps announcing seems to suggest

Is the Treasury/OBR just pretending the Home Office will be ineffective? Or migration salience will magically fall?

I feel that’s quite a big contradiction right there that few people seem particularly interested in addressing because everyone seems motivated to pretend that reducing net migration is an unqualified good thing with no negative externalities whatsoever.

So… is the OBR here saying “lol, the government’s migration ambitions are bullshit” or is the Chancellor (and OBR) just cheerfully pretending that current government migration policy isn’t completely counter to this much vaunted headroom their finance policy is based on?

The thing I don’t quite get, & Stephen also points out, is that this “positive” OBR forecast is partly based on net migration being around 340,000 reducing the need for extra borrow, but not only is net migration currently a lot less (204,000), but government policy seems to be to reduce it further?

See also:

bsky.app/profile/samf...

So, congrats on being one of the few Westminster Journo types who hasn’t made a twat out of themselves in this whole affair, by doing it proper 👍

They wouldn’t look like such a bunch of muppets if they approached the briefings as claims about the real world that could be scrutinised and compared against the data - and not just as a piece of political theatre to be played out in that he-said, she-said pantomime way we’re all used to.