Simon Parker

Flashback to William Hague's B.Liar cufflinks. Happier times.

Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change. Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.”

Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability and quality of life.

Common sense.

Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.

Perhaps 'underlying potential' is better?

The second is more clearly a form of privilege, and I think we would be a happier society if the privileged were able to recognise their good fortune for what it is.

Ok this is interesting. I agree that they are meaningfully different - one is good parenting, the other nepotism - but I think these are different degrees of the same unearned advantage. Seeing past this privilege to underlying ability seems important.

The Hefferlump?

I suppose if we could end touting then more tickets would be available at face value, so the average price per ticket will fall, but only to face value.

Ok but I'm struggling with the economics here. We have a monopoly (Oasis) selling a rationed good at a fixed price. Presumably they are already maximising profit. How then does shutting down touting give them an opportunity to increase their profit?

You will be visited by three spirits.

I was speaking with a former pupil who attended as part of the experiment before Farage, and he was adamant that the culture was not particularly racist.

It's a small point but Dulwich ran quite a radical experiment with needs blind admission that I think peaked in the 1950s with 90% of pupils receiving support from local authorities. Basically it was a more diverse place than you might expect.

Love this Prateek.

Serious games to support organisation design Policy Lab has been exploring how serious games can help civil servants make more intentional decisions about organisation design. This post shares what we learned from designing and testing a new gam...

Wrote about how serious games can help public sector organisations align their structure with their purpose. Shout if you think the game we've developed and/or the thinking behind it can help you design (government) organisations better!

openpolicy.blog.gov.uk/2025/12/09/s...

I cannot overstate the ridiculous level of uncertainty we are working under in #localgov. Ministers have completely reset the entire funding system and we won't know what it means until next week. Our budget papers need to be finalised in mid-January. It's no way to run a country.

Bronze plaque saying "A Letter to the Future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. August 2019. 415ppm CO2"

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque:
"This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

Sure if you can get the economy growing robustly again a lot of the other issues will fade into the background. I hope that's what happens.

I just don't think policy matters here - the problem is pure politics. Labour's strategy requires the left to be glumly locked in so the party can win votes to the right. If the left has an alternative vehicle, the strategy no longer works. So which way does Starmer go?

Yeah and also convinced that NATO membership is the clincher for a country whose politics are still dominated by Brexit.

A Hundred Origin Stories – an Unfinished History of Relational Public Services Simon Parker, Becca Dove and Benjamin Taylor explore the history of relational public services, ahead of Britian Renewed 2026, a major one-day conference exploring a more place-based approach to…

From elected councillors to practitioners, from trade union halls and chapels to libraries and school classrooms, people learn it, live it, contextualise it and defend it, often in defiance of the systems they work in www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/n...

Agree with this. No one is supporting Polanski because they think he will be PM. Labour's challenge is they want to have their left wing cake while eating more of the vote to their right, and voters are punishing them for it.

Best civil servant you worked with and what distinguished them?

Yeah the anti-Corbyn playbook doesn't work on someone who is never going to PM.

Which, for the avoidance of doubt, is Adrian Mitchell and not a chat up line.

When I am sad and weary

When I think all hope is gone

When I walk along High Holborn

I think of you with nothing on

Cambridgeshire? Northamptonshire? The Soke? Only @ojgarling.bsky.social has the answer.

Someone needs to make 'Passport to Peterborough'.

Ursula le Guin's The Dispossessed is a product of this era. People just turn up at a computer terminal which tells them what work needs doing.

Yes in large part because they couldn't work out a practical system of planning. As this became clear Labour focused more on taking credit for the welfare state and the NHS. The latter was more a happy accident than a political priority, at least in the form that finally emerged.

Also the Soviets really loved STEM and hated the humanities, because the latter bred critics of the regime. I think about that a lot atm.

Francis Spufford's Red Plenty is a fascinating attempt to dramatise the promise of the thaw. Among other points he lands is that Stalin had murdered anyone with any depth of experience, so there was no one to explain what hadn't worked in the past. It was a naively optimistic moment.

Oh sure the argument in 1945 was all about whether the state or market should rebuild Britain and the state won. The Soviet model was a much more interesting beast during the Khrushchev thaw than it would become later, so Wilson's interest is understandable.