Posts

The Starmer Problem...(18.5.26)

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A confession: I find Keir Starmer genuinely irritating. There, I said it.  I want to get that out of the way now because I am trying to make a broader structural argument about managerial culture, institutional thinning, and the kind of political class Britain now produces, and the hapless Starmer happens to be an unusually clear example of it. The structure itself is equal opportunities, and I am not seeking to single out Labour or declare my political allegiances, which are irrelevant. Also, I don’t want anyone thinking I arrived at my irritation through dispassionate analysis. Nope. It came from prolonged exposure to a man who somehow manages to radiate the atmosphere of a compliance seminar while standing perfectly still. That voice. The prosecutorial cadence, nasalling away about international law. The rolled-up sleeves that are supposed to signal ordinary bloke but instead signal someone who has been briefed on what ordinary blokes do with their sleeves. He is, on a purely vi...
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The Interpretive Ratchet...(16.5.26)

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Why some professional frameworks become impossible to challenge Earlier this year I co-authored an open letter to the BACP, signed by many practitioners and academics, raising concerns about the embedding of anti-oppressive practice as a discrete principle in the profession's revised Ethical Framework. Please do read it if you haven’t. The letter made structural points. It warned of the risks of one interpretive tradition, rooted in critical social theory, being elevated from one valid perspective among many to a requirement of ethical competence. It asked what this would mean for practitioners who understood social harm through different frameworks. Crucially, it asked what it would mean for clients. The BACP’s response was revealing in ways I don’t think they intended. Our structural concern was reframed as a misunderstanding of what anti-oppressive practice involves, and the reply was handled by a “member experience manager” - as though these fundamental ethical questions were n...
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The Further Away You Are, the More Certain You Get...(3.5.26)

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  Distance & Certainty... I sit with people for a living. An hour at a time, several times a day, listening to the inside of someone’s life. Selecting one day from last week, I had conversations about a marriage that is failing but might not be, another about a big decision that looks obvious from the outside but is not obvious at all once you are close enough to see what it would cost, and a parent who loves their child and is also, in ways they are only beginning to understand, making things worse for their child.  None of these situations have clean or simple answers. What they do have are trade-offs, and those trade-offs have serious costs, and sitting with that weight without rushing to resolve it is actually most of what I do. When finished, like millions of others, I'll probably plonk down in a chair and open my phone at some point. And there (on X) I invariably read someone explaining with complete confidence what people in these kinds of situations  should...
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Conviction Cascades: Why people adopt beliefs without evidence or persuasion...(1.5.26)

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  Conviction Cascades...(1.5.26) 1 May 2026 | 2026 posts Why people adopt beliefs without evidence or persuasion    I recently came across a Substack piece called "Why Did Everyone Go Crazy All At Once?" It was asking the same kinds of questions I have spent the best part of two years trying to answer: how do ideas that most people privately find implausible come to dominate the professional classes, seemingly overnight, and with so little resistance? His answer involves a concept called preference falsification, an idea from the economist Timur Kuran that has had a moment lately, particularly since Marc Andreessen started tweeting about it after the 2024 US election. The basic claim is elegant: people hide their real views under social pressure, and when the pressure lifts, the truth comes flooding out. A preference cascade. I think that is partly right, but it is not complete. It misses important parts of the mechanism. Kuran's framework goes like this. People have priv...
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RielleUK: The Gap Between Impulse and Catastrophe... (27.4.26)

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  RielleUK: The Gap Between Impulse and Catastrophe... (27.4.26) 27 April 2026 | 2026 posts I came across the story of Klaudia Zakrzewska (Klaudia - left in picture) and Gabrielle Carrington (Rielle - right in picture) on social media. Although I know very little about the "influencer" world (I have virtually no interest), I've found myself following it with a kind of grim attention as my brain tries to make sense of one awful moment of drunken rage and a lifetime of consequences.  The facts, as far as they are publicly known, are these. In the early hours of Sunday 19 April, Klaudia Zakrzewska, a 32-year-old Polish-born influencer known online as Klaudiaglam, was outside the Inca nightclub in Soho after a night out with friends. There was a heated argument with another woman, Gabrielle Carrington, a 29-year-old social media personality and former X Factor contestant who uses the name RielleUK. Both of these women are competitors in a similar "influencing" space...
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