anatomy of a chortle

the gigglesome style in British politics

(UK readers! Did you want to read “The Unaccountability Machine”, but think “that huge great thing is far too heavy for my puny forearms”? Great news! It’s now out in paperback! American readers! Did you want to read “The Unaccountability Machine” but think “it’s not actually on sale here except for that brief period when the ebook edition was available”? Great news! It will be out on the first of April (or indeed “April First”)

Sigh. I do not want to get into the habit of fact-checking YIMBYism, but nor am I any good at resisting bait. Our Prime Minister, this week:

Is the future of the development really uncertain? It’s not so uncertain that they’ve stopped marketing it to off-plan investors, put it that way. What seems to have happened is that everyone agreed that a risk assessment and mitigation was needed (when you change the use from an office block, which is usually empty at weekends when cricket matches are played, to a block of luxury flats, which isn’t and might have children playing outside). The developer said “nobody can hit a cricket ball that far”, and Sport England (on the advice of the ECB, which has a model of such things apparently) said “yeah nah, professionals can, and this is a ground in the Yorkshire league system which surprisingly often attracts big-hitting ringers”.

And consequently, the Bingley planning committee is going to debate whether the planning condition should be varied – it is perhaps possible that the outcome will be that a £30m development will be abandoned over a few grand’s worth of safety netting, but I would bet otherwise. The development got planning permission in 2021, and then started work at leisurely pace in 2023, so I’m guessing that there have been other factors holding it up rather than just cricket.

Anyway …

This is a bee in my personal bonnet, because I actually do believe that the overuse of consultancy firms, and risk-aversion in planning is a big problem in Britain (watch this space for an extremely exciting publication along those lines!). It is actually kind of scuffed that when Sport England is right there, and the England and Wales Cricket Board has exactly the capacity needed, we have a system in which the only way that scientific knowledge about the trajectory of cricket balls can be part of the process is via duelling consultants’ reports.

But this is a really bad example. It’s not quite as bogus as “Homer Simpson doesn’t speak Welsh” or the “fish disco”. But it’s a bad example, where a minor hitch in a project, caused by what looks like laziness or calculated risk-taking on the part of a developer, is portrayed as a sign of deep sclerosis that makes it impossible to build anything anywhere ever.

And this sort of thing tends to discredit better examples, like the Sheephouse Wood Bat Shed, which I think is actually an important case study.

Which set me thinking about another slight pathology of the system. I would bet good money at short odds that somebody in Starmer’s office saw that he was doing a speech in Hull about planning, googled for examples of planning problems in Yorkshire and eventually turned up news stories about the cricket club thing.

And they did that googling because every policy speech in this area seems to need a “chortle”. (It’s the equivalent of a “Malcolm” folksy anecdote in a non-fiction book). We can’t just have a serious example of problems that the new initiative is meant to address, they need to be slightly whimsical and create a comic image. I think it very much started with the “health and safety gone mad” tradition in journalism, by way of the “bendy bananas” coverage of European regulations.

As I said before, this partly worries me because if you try to claim that the whole system is absurdly broken in every way, then it takes focus away from any serious consideration of which parts of it might actually be broken in specific ways, which in turn is an excellent excuse for not fixing anything. But it’s also just a cheap and unprofessional thing to do.

Seriously, I know I have readers in think tank land – stop doing this. Try to stop your colleagues from doing it. Write things like “is this just a chortle?” in margins. I get it, I know; policy is often difficult and boring, and it’s hard to get engagement without a quirky or amusing hook. But what you’re doing is exactly the sort of thing that has led to so many media death spirals, in that it’s chasing quantitative #numbers while ignoring the deleterious long term effect on the brand.

It's OK for some things to be boring. I might even write “in defence of tedium” one day, because it’s a means for people who don’t actually care about something to select out of having a view on it. Boredom is a form of pain; it takes the place of the wonderful imaginary machine which might administer a small electric shock to anyone publishing a #take without doing the background reading. Engagement has to be measured, at the end of the day, in something closer to kilobytes per second than headcount – it’s a concept of information flow. Don’t spend your time and energy advertising to people who don’t actually want the product.