Sunday, October 02, 2022

Correctly Framing Queen Elizabeth’s Excellent If Partial Development Model #1

Posted by Peter Quennell


Context

The Queen experienced the key deflection point shown here in 1944-45.

From then-on, with the companionship of King George VI through 1952, and PM Churchill in 1945 and again in 1952, and the Duke of Edinburgh for the next 75 years, she was energized to play a major role in making a better world.   

The Queen was nothing if not enigmatic. She never gave an in-depth interview about her strategic intent, and she never wrote a book. The myriad well-meaning takes on her impact that we saw aired in the past several weeks are all over the map.

These several posts are an attempt to connect up the dots, given what we know about development now.

Of relevance to Meredith’s case? Yes, sure. Long ago, Meredith’s father John concurred with us that it was systems in Italy and to some extent UK that had let Meredith down, and that her legacy should be to push to correct some of those.

On a larger scale, the Queen was trying to do the same.

 

Posted by Peter Quennell on 10/02/22 at 04:25 PM in

Comments

.
“Britannia Unchained”. Now Prime Minister Liz Truss’s road-map. Full of crackpot ideas. The very opposite of how development has been seen to work for the past 20 years. 

The UK pound just hit the lowest-ever point against the United States dollar. Why? Well, one major reason is that the global investment community here in New York has just woken up to this astoundingly dopey 2012 book.

Around 80 of the 140 reviews on Amazon UK assign the book a single star, which has to be a record of sorts. See examples below.

AndyB123
Applied the lessons. Crashed the economy. Oops
Imagine my excitement on being elected Prime Minister of a G7 nation by about 20,000 bewildered retirees. My mate Kwasi was so happy too. It really cheered him up during a dull funeral in St. Pauls.  Let me be clear. I tried this book out, and a week later, Labour is looking to win a 650 seat majority and I’ve doubled the cost of living crisis.

Mr. T. Chan
Good Points: Exposes the Brexit con. Bad Points: Everything else.
The only good thing about this book is that it exposes to the British working class and the left-wing brexiter (Lexiter) the confidence trick that is Brexit. The true motivation of the elite Brexiter (Kwarteng, Raab, Patel, Gove, Fox, Leadsome) is to deregulate the economy. They believe in absolute dog eat dog capitalism with practically no protection for the worker or the consumer, or, for that matter, the environment. If you know nothing of economics and know nothing of the drawbacks of trying to run complex systems from simplistic models, you might get taken in by this book. Hence the health warning: This book does not contain any useful information on how to run countries in the 21st century.

David Hall
Lazy, hackneyed, clueless.
“Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world…”  Which is factually incorrect, dishonest and frankly insulting. Coming from figures from the laziest most incompetent government in British history. Truss, Kwarteng, Raab, Patel. Clueless, ineffective, wasters of public money. Failed politicians who are utterly clueless when given real power, with the brass neck to preach to others

David Gladwin
Deluded, outdated fantasy. No stars.
The writers of this juvenile and right-wing free market tract have the zeal of a religious cult and the same level of contact with reality. Read any other book, but not this one. The writers don’t need or deserve your money. If you must read it, Google for the text or steal a copy. And then use it to wipe something.

Jack Wilkin
Disaster capitalists manifesto
Poorly written right-wing drivel full of typos. Feels like it was authored by children with only a slim grasp of the English language. Insulting to the British People and acting as a “how to” for disaster capitalists and neofacists.

Paul Baldwin
Urgh
This is an amalgamation of the worst libertarian and neo liberalism I have ever seen. This is basically akin to what Stalin did with the Soviet Union in the 1930s but with neo liberalism taken to its extreme.

Just_A_Dad
Dangerous and deluded
Made-up economics based on fantasy xenophobia and a brand of capitalism that serves the super wealthy at the expense of ordinary people. Who cares about interest rates and energy prices as long as the wealthy are making more money?

Russ
A lot of vacuous waffle but no concrete ideas
I hope this review is helpful to those considering whether to elect to back this book and its authors. The book mainly consists of what I believe is called “filler” in the trade; however they do have a wonderful sense of irony e.g. “The British have overspent badly in recent years, but the examples of Australia and Canada show that is it possible to keep finances under control” (Liz and Kwazi have really taken this to heart). The insights into our real strengths as a nation are doubtless going to find their way into the national curriculum e.g. ” The British are working less hard than they used to, but pockets of work ethic still exist among the industrious taxi drivers or in the culture of the City of London.” ...the rest of Britain doesn’t really get a moment’s thought.  There is a lot of talk about being more like China without actually being China. I did wonder if it had actually been ghost written by a taxi driver or possibly by one of those chaps in bars that knows what is wrong with the country and what to do about it.

John W. Kramer
This aged well…
Surely it’s time to give all purchasers their money back given the recent performance of the authors has demonstrated this book is utter fiction, and dangerous tripe at that

Mr. J. A. Smith
1 out of 5 stars for “Growth and Prosperity”
The title claims to know the policies to unlock ‘Growth and Prosperity’ in the UK, but careful, because in the vast majority of cases for the people of the UK it will not be their prosperity. The vast majority will likely be pushed into insecure employment where they have no bargaining power and see their wages depressed. Some people will prosper from this, but likely it will not be you or me - just on numbers - the majority of people will be wage earners not wage payers.

confused
You couldn’t make it up
Imagine a group of people writing a book explaining how everyone is doing it all wrong and setting out their ideas on how to turn the UK from a sleeping giant to an economic force to be reckoned with. And, through a quirk of fate, this same group gets elected into govt where they have the opportunity to actually put these ideas into practice.  And then, on day one, they completely tank the entire UK economy, sinking the value of the pound to the lowest level on record.  I would buy a book about that…

Amazon Customer
Juvenile tripe from immature privileged know-it-alls
This terrible trope of a book explains why the UK is in such a mess at present. The simplistic view that working all hours, including employment of children on minimal wage, would make Britain great again is so imbecile and immature, with a total misunderstanding of how society and economics work. It states that the root of all evil is the pursuit of money. If that is the case the authors of this drivel are exactly that. Pure evil.

Jonathan s.
A masterpiece of delusion
Essentially a crazed right-wing fever dream which has a fleeting relationship with reality. If anything, a cautionary tale about what happens when a section of the political class abandons the idea of morality or government as a force for good. Come, friendly bombs.

John Gleeson
Dangerously nationalistic
This book is at the low end of right wing ideology. It fails to acknowledge the global world & Britain’s role within it. Nationalistim & isolationism is its mantra.

Sarah
Unintelligent, and based on poor, highly selective, evidence
Contrary to Simon Heffer’s review, this is unintelligent, poorly evidenced, propaganda. Simon Heffer himself might have changed his mind by now since, more recently, he says that Johnson’s ‘ministers [which include all this book’s co-authors] with few exceptions lack the wit and the experience to exercise judgment and common sense satisfactorily’ - a statement (unlike his original opinion) with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 10/05/22 at 09:52 AM | #

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