Why the FT is going down the pan

[DaveCinzano]

800 words on not properly chewing your roast chicken.

I write this a few days after a near-death experience. Well, near-death might be a slight exaggeration but it was certainly adjacent and, in any case, it was quite near enough for me.

I would like to say that death came in a heroic guise — that I was facing down a gang of armed muggers or storming the box office in a quest for Hamilton tickets — but, actually, it came as a piece of roast chicken. The incident occurred as I sat with a colleague in the FT’s office in Westminster, trying to write about Philip Hammond’s Budget speech. You see what I mean about the lack of a heroic backdrop. The cultural context to my near demise, then, was a plate of poultry and a politician they call “Spreadsheet Phil”. (I suppose Spreadsheet Phil could have a Goodfellas-ish quality to it, along with other noted cabinet gangsters such as Theresa Two Shoes and Boris the Gob.)

Anyway, writing on deadline, I had snatched a meal from the canteen and was eating at my desk...

...As my terror subsided, my mind turned to what had just happened. I imagined my family receiving the call from one of my colleagues. I remembered the parent from the spawn’s school who had a heart attack while watching a football match — one of those who left home on a normal afternoon and didn’t come back. But mainly I tried to figure out how I had managed to swallow an entire bird without noticing.

This piece ought to end with a moment of epiphany — a life-changing event that saw me heading home, hugging the family and vowing to live each day as if it were my last. But I am not that guy. I have, however, resolved to try to eat less quickly. While I may not be living each moment as if it were my last, I have resolved to eat each mouthful as if it were. You know that figurative advice about not biting off more than you can chew? It turns out to be true of eating as well. Who knew?

EIGHT. HUNDRED. WORDS.

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[mauvais]

Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@theguardian.com

 

[DaveCinzano]

Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@theguardian.com

 

[DaveCinzano]

If only urban75 had an inside person at Pink Towers to dish the dirt

 

[mauvais]

If only urban75 had an inside person at Pink Towers to dish the dirt

Is this a confession?

I quite like the FT. I'm not sure if that's permissible or not, I would guess 'not'. I don't understand the vast majority of it, but there's often plenty in the rest to crack a smile about.

 

[NoXion]

Roast chicken can be a bit dry. Did this fellow not have a drink to swig?

 

[DaveCinzano]

Is this a confession?

As if!

No, the former Akela of the Tiller Cub Scouts (1st Radical Autonomous Troop) moved on to more profitable pastures

 

[DotCommunist]

IN CAPITALIST LONDON CHICKEN CHOKES YOU

 

[bluescreen]

Was that Robert Shrimsley? I never bother to read him.

 

[DaveCinzano]

IN CAPITALIST LONDON CHICKEN CHOKES YOU

Post of the Year

 

[cantsin]

decent writer, but Janan Ganesh is a wrong un...I've screengrabbed some heinous tweet vs Corbo supporters from last year that he deleted, but can't actually remember what it said, or be arsed to find it...long week .

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edit : f*ck their paywall - was just some deliberately provocative 'gentrification is good / we are the engines of capitalism' type drivel.

Gnight.

 

[Rob Ray]

So this thread doesn't get a lot of love eh! Nevertheless I was particularly taken by the following bare-faced lie, from Keir Starmer and big business, a love story

Under its former leader Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s 2019 election manifesto promised higher corporate taxes and a plan to seize 10 per cent of the shares in every major company in the UK — worth £300bn — and hand them to employees over a decade. With businesses fearing the worst, donors took fright. As it campaigned to win over voters, the party was outspent not only by the Tories, but by the much smaller Liberal Democrats. When the results came in, Labour had crashed to its heaviest election defeat since 1935.

Like Jfc you can criticise Corbs for a lot of things, but failing to maintain Labour's financial health and donor base was not one of them. And in fact it was Starmer who threw the party back into debt. Pretty shameful stuff from George Parker and Jim Pickar.

 

[emanymton]

So this thread doesn't get a lot of love eh! Nevertheless I was particularly taken by the following bare-faced lie, from Keir Starmer and big business, a love story



Like Jfc you can criticise Corbs for a lot of things, but failing to maintain Labour's financial health and donor base was not one of them. And in fact it was Starmer who threw the party back into debt. Pretty shameful stuff from George Parker and Jim Pickar.

Those are 2 separate things.

The quote says they were outspent not that they were in a bad financial situation. Focusing on getting the party out of debit could be why they got outspent.

It gives a misleading impression, but itnl is not clear if it is untrue.

 

[Rob Ray]

I think you're being way too forgiving of them, the point of that par is specifically to compare Corbyn's money raising unfavourably with Starmer's, whereas in fact the opposite is true, as Labour was both more financially stable and less beholden to a handful of benefactors in the mid-late 2010s.

 

[two sheds]

and less beholden to a handful of benefactors in the mid-late 2010s.

and again now

and I wouldn't call them benefactors now - more a case of 'time to pay up for mumsy' with the NHS in a year or so.

 

[ska invita]

 

[Pickman's model]

800 words on not properly chewing your roast chicken.



EIGHT. HUNDRED. WORDS.

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Being as the ft was founded by Horatio bottomley there's always been something of down the pan about it

Horatio Bottomley - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Rob Ray]

Quite outstandingly misleading piece by Janan Ganesh here, in which France and Italy apparently don't exist in a wider context of neoliberalism and have thus remained entirely unaffected by, eg. the economic pressures of outsourcing, so have not in fact been forced into attacks on pensions, working rights etc that produce fertile ground for the far right. Step right up and watch him express his sincere bafflement that the same conditions persist in a global context after decades of globalisation.

Don’t blame neoliberalism for the rise of the hard right

 

[Rob Ray]

Genuinely amazed this fawning drivel got published.

A new Republican future is emerging — the return of actual conservatism

Unlike party predecessors, Vance’s foreign policy is neither romantically overambitious nor narrow-mindedly isolationist, but hard-headed and realist.

A man who kicks off his foreign interventions by sneering that the British government, America's most reliable patsy, is "Islamist" isn't narrow-minded. Riiight.

On a quick squiz, it appears Oren Cass is on the loon wing - his American Compass project is on the advisory board of Project 2025.