On Monday the UK gets its sixth Prime Minister in 7 years (May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, Burnham). Already the speculative briefings are clogging up the airwaves and people’s rage streams (especially around whether he will give the go ahead for more North Sea oil drilling, and who will be Chancellor).
I do not intend to add to that speculation, because, well, who cares what I think about that (not even me) and life is very short.
Instead, a) a failed FT letter, b) the Van Halen test and how it applies and c) the Fafocene.
- I submitted the following letter to the FT. They didn’t publish it.
In her encomium to former leader of Manchester City Council Richard Leese (“Manchester’s turnaround predates the Burnham era” FT, July 4) Professor Marcia Pointon neglects to mention one characteristic Leese and the soon-to-be PM share. On the thorny issue of climate change, both have a history of making big shiny promises and then passing the blame onto others when the promises turn out to be illusions. Burnham, especially, has shown himself adept at defanging critics by inviting them on stage, sometimes literally. As the anthropologist Professor Hannah Knox noted in 2019, at the Mayor’s Green Summit:
“…Extinction Rebellion stormed the conference at the end of the day, shouting out to the now depleted audience, ‘do more, faster, now’, and ‘we demand more’ …. Unfazed, Burnham muted their urgent cries by giving them the microphone and inviting them to put their views across, telling us he couldn’t agree with them more.”
Burnham may find this trick somewhat harder to pull off in Westminster and Whitehall. We shall see.
2. The Van Halen/Brown M&M test
What do you do when there are too many things to check to see if someone is doing a safe/competent job. You set up a very small and ‘easy’ test to see if they have the mechanisms in place to pay attention to detail. Here’s the wikipedia article in full –
A Van Halen test refers to any question that is asked to assess whether the full set of instructions given to another party has been thoroughly and correctly read.[1][2] It has also been used to describe asking necessary questions.[3]
The name of the test refers to the contractual clause Van Halen would give to venues at which they were to perform. There was a clause requesting that a bowl of M&Ms be supplied, with all the brown candies removed. If this bowl with the correct contents was not provided by the venue, they knew their contract was not thoroughly reviewed, and that there may be safety issues.[4][5] The worry was that with complex safety requirements involving pyrotechnics, large voltages, and stage construction, any lapse in following instructions could be a danger.[6] Rumors about this clause date back to 1980.[7]
So, your mileage may vary but for me the M&M tests would be
a) the North Sea oil permissions (obvs)
b) the continuance of the prosecutions under sections 11 and 12 of the PTA (2000) for people holding placards at various venues.
The rest of it, the affable comms, the Greggs visits, the endless invocation of “Labour values” – yeah, mate, nah.
3. The Fafocene
So it turns out the concept of the Fafocene (the ‘fuck around, find out’ -ocene) is getting the imprimatur of university course title. It has arrived!
We are in it, and people like Burnham are, I fear, examples of its progression. We will continue to believe that we can have the nice things some of us have gotten used to, and that changes that need to be made can be made without upsetting anyone important. Yeah, mate, nah.