Stephen Bush

I meant 'of public services'.

To be honest the closest analogy is probably to see it as quite a lot like a LPC government when the Liberals are led from their left flank, but with a disastrous foreign policy.

In that respect it was a v traditional Labour government (which is why our built environment is 1960s modernism, 1970s buildings, and 2000s architecture).

No, the 1997 to 2010 era saw huge increases in public spending for services.

He pulled it right on economics. Not on social policy.

Frank Gehry, architect, dies aged 96 Modern master whose sinuous, billowing forms for the Guggenheim in Bilbao gave birth to the ‘Bilbao Effect’

Frank Gehry, architect, dies aged 96 on.ft.com/49UCrTX

Got the 4yo a cookie in the local café. him to the waitress:"was this on the floor, like last time"? Me: ".....last time the cookie was on the house, it means free"

I can’t believe that I had missed that it runs a two tier fee *and* queueing system.

This is delicious - Jenrick took a risk doing a Lunch with the FT and he's elegantly skewered at every turn.

Right, it’s a terrific ornament: unless you live in, what, a three mile radius of Paddington it has never been a good deal, but it is the simplest and easiest direction to give, does a decent trade, etc etc.

This review is lots of fun if you hate bad writing and grifters

slate.com/culture/2025...

Oh that would be a great place for one! And I do think that the Johnson era one really shows that even if you build them in a dumb place for a dumb reason (which that would not have been IMO) they do quite well.

Love a cable car. Once tried to persuade the good burghers of High Wycombe to build one from the coach station on the hill down to the railway

This 🧵and the replies are delightful - my contribution would be a train composed of giant swans, like the ones in Mad King Ludwig's cavern

Right, it’s a nice proof of concept, if it works then you could also have them look like black cabs if you extended it further, etc etc.

The Johnson era cable car does remarkably well given one end is a residential area cos holidaymakers just like cable cars, but it is in a stupid place.

You can’t get a hop on, hop off bus from Kings Cross to Euston, they’re too close together.

My reason for preferring a cable car is that I think if the “hey, tourists, pay to be moved ten minutes” thing works from Kings Cross to Euston then you want the option of extending the cable car to London Zoo or the British Museum and so on, which a little tunnel car is harder to do with.

He wants a period of negative migration that would see the population shrink, alongside plans to scrap net zero, reindustrialise to spread wealth beyond London and counter threats from China. He'd also cut welfare, while building more homes. I ask him whether he cares about criticism from the political class that his approach has looked, at times, intemperate.

I don’t get how Jenrick can actually believe that we should shrink the population and then start making more of our own things from pots and pans to what iPhones? How does he think that happens?

💯

I’m sure you do, I do too! But I don’t work as long hours as the people I know who work for JPM in London or Glasgow!

I suspect they're unfamiliar with how much their hated lanyard class actually helps things to get made nowadays. *Waves from my shiny engineering consultancy.*

The 2700 people aren’t fake.

Probably just don’t work long enough hours to see, frankly.

You would think that people who want to see the strength of British industry would look at something like the Sanger Centre with absolute awe. But it's in Cambridge and the people who work there have soft hands so 🤷

I sometimes wonder how Blue Laborites would square JP Morgan investing ~£160 million to open one of its largest offices in the world (and it's global technology centre), with the fact they did so *in inner Glasgow*

What more proof do you want that Britain's strength in services can pay dividends

It's utterly bizarre. This country is a WORLD LEADER in vaccines, life sciences, DNA and genetics, pure science, semiconductors, AI, cyber tech, materials, space science, quantum computing etc.

But apparently if your hands aren't filthy and your lungs full of coal dust it doesn't count

What gets me most is it's obvious that for all the thoughts from Lord Glasman about abolishing the treasury, it's not like they have anyone of the level of Evan Durbin planning any actual serious economic interventions. It's all just vibes about deindustrialization and blue collar labour!

Manufacturing productivity growth was strong under Blair, in no small part because energy costs fell!

But manufacturing *employment* continued to contract

Did one of my favourite things this week - had coffees with people making money with science on repeated occasions. All in “industry”! Helped, not hurt, by being in a dynamic business environment with a strong financial services base.