In 2008, Dame Carol Black said:

Replacing the sick note with a fit note would switch the focus to what people can do instead of what they cannot.

Gordon Brown’s government subsquently replaced the ‘sick note’ with a ‘fit note’ which put a new focus what people could do instead of what they could not.

Yesterday, Rishi Sunak said:

We need to change the sick note culture so the default becomes what work you can do – not what you can’t.

It might seem like money for old role, but nevertheless, let’s focus on what Sunak can do, not what he can’t.

In 2008, 2.4% of all working hours in the UK were lost to sickness absence. By 2022, this had ‘spiralled’—Sunak’s word—to 2.6%. For what it’s worth, at the demise of the last Tory government in 1997, it was 3%.

In 2008, 2.6 million people were waiting for NHS treatment. By 2023, that had almost tripled, from 2.6 million to 7.7 million.

Here’s what Sunak, and perhaps Sunak alone, can do: look at those figures and conclude that people are staying off work too readily, and that the welfare system needs to be—Sunak’s word—’tightened’.

Like me, you may have a dim recollection of Monday 3 September 2012. The Minister for Immigration was thrilled to announce a £5 cut in the cost of a standard UK passport, a result he attributed to his hard work in driving efficiency at the Identity and Passport service.

So good was his performance that the very next day, he was promoted to become Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice.¹

As of next Thursday, the passport fee will increase by £7, capping off a total increase of £27.50 since that 2012 announcement. The fee will reach triple figures for the first time.²

You might note that next week’s £7 increase isn’t being promoted nearly so much as that £5 decrease. We got a fiver off, but then stung for the better part of thirty quid over the ensuing years.

Let me be clear: I don’t begrudge the increase in the passport fee. I’d happily pay twice the price if it protected some of the essential services that are no longer financially sustainable thanks to this Government’s choices.

It’s more that cutting the price then jacking it up gives the impression that there’s no strategy: no ‘long-term economic plan’, no ‘plan that we need to stick to’. And when repeated across, well, basically all areas of Government policy, that begins to feel like something of an electoral challenge.

1. It wouldn’t be until five years later that he’d be sacked for having pornography on his work computer and lying about it, issues which were uncovered during an investigation into alleged sexual harassment. ↩
2. There is an £11.50 discount for applying online these days, but it doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that you’re still much worse off. ↩

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Sitting at the Harrods Champagne Bar last week, I overheard a conversation between two customers. One pulled a book of stamps from a handbag—“Ten pounds! And there’s only eight in it now, not twelve! Can you believe it?!”

“Talk about the cost of living!”

Today, they’d be even more appalled: the price of a first-class stamp rose to £1.35 this morning, so the book of eight sticky portraits of the King now costs £10.80.

If this interaction had been filmed and played to Rishi Sunak, I’m fairly sure he’d deny responsibility. And in a technical sense, he’d be correct: the price of first-class stamps was deregulated by his Prime Ministerial predecessor, and current Foreign Secretary, David Cameron. In 2012, when that decision was taken, a first-class stamp cost 46p; a book of twelve, £5.52.

For the Prime Minister, if the cost of living crisis—aka “cozzy livs”, apparently—is the topic of conversation in Harrods Champagne Bar, you’ve probably already lost the argument. Hailing a “new economic moment”, as Sunak was yesterday, probably isn’t going to cut the mustard.

But then, I don’t know what could save the Prime Minister now. As one Sunak-supporting MP said this week,

We’ve got to stick with the plan. I don’t know what it is, but we’ve got to stick with it and it’s working.

Ho-hum.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

It fucked up my life but I wasn’t upset. You know, they kept talking about “undergoing” surgery, “undergoing” chemo. It really bugged me. I never saw it that way. I was just living my life. I wasn’t “undergoing” it.

— Geoff Dyer, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It

I struggle to imagine how it feels to sit on a bench and record a statement telling the world about your cancer treatment, just weeks after hearing the news yourself.

But more even than that, I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to get up in the morning and know that’s in your diary for the day; or for your family to ask how the filming went; or to go about your day as the news breaks in ripples all around.

It’s not something separate and distinct and different and cordened off; it’s part of life, and that makes it all the more difficult.

Last week, a colleague sidled up to me at my desk: ‘Simon, do you think Kate Middleton is dead?’

Until that point, I’d been only vaguely aware that theories were circulating about the status of the Princess of Wales. I’d seen passing mention of the existence of such discussion, but rolled my eyes, and wondered who had time for such things. After all, she’s been unwell, indications from the start were that she wouldn’t be returning to public life until after Easter, and it’s not Easter yet.

It turns out that I was just out of the loop: it appears that it’s been the hot topic of conversation for weeks, now.

For a little while now, I’ve been harbouring a contrarian theory about images generated by artificial intelligence. It’s widely assumed that these will cause chaos as people struggle to work out what’s real.

I’ve been unconvinced by those arguments. In my mind, there are two groups of people:

1. Those who get their news from social media. These people often seem to be surprisingly gullible and develop quite peculiar beliefs. They are vulnerable to being conned by fake imagery, but they’re already conned by any number of weird theories spread by other means. The addition of fake images doesn’t change much.
2. Those who get their news from professional outfits. It is the job of professional outfits to know the provenance of images they share, and so—by and large—they’re unlikely to be fooled for long by fake images.
   

I’ve long felt that AI imagery is unlikely to cause much movement between the groups, and therefore to have much impact on the news or how it is consumed.

On Sunday, Kensington Palace shared a picture of the Princess and her children to mark Mother’s Day. When professional outfits assessed the image, it was found to have been doctored, and was withdrawn from circulation.

To say this caused a furore is a substantial understatement. In his insightful article, Charlie Warzel shared this reflection:

Adobe Photoshop, the likely culprit of any supposed “manipulation” in the royal portrait, has been around for more than three decades. And although the tools are getting considerably better, the bigger change is cultural. The royal-photo debacle is merely a microcosm of our current moment, where trust in both governing institutions and gatekeeping organizations such as the mainstream press is low. This sensation has been building for some time and was exacerbated by the corrosive political lies of the Trump era.

The affair has made me reconsider my views on the threat of AI imagery. Unlike Warzel, I don’t worry excessively about trust in the mainstream press’s ability to separate fact from fiction, but more in their ability to focus on the issues that matter.

A photoshopped image has dominated the news agenda: it isn’t difficult to imagine arguments about AI images dominating in the run-up to an election, drowning out discussion of competing policies.

I still think I’m right that professional news organisations can sort fact from fiction, but I’d underestimated the likelihood of the process of dispelling the myth becoming the story—and the debate becoming framed by hand-wringing on how to deal with this stuff.

Fakery has proven to be more disruptive than I imagined it could be.

Fintan O’Toole is always worth reading, and his latest for The TLS is no exception. I particularly enjoyed this paragraph, which does a great job of summarising the failure of the current Government while setting out the challenge for the next:

Comparatives make Starmer look good, but they also make his task, if he wins, look overwhelming. Income inequality is higher in the UK than in any other large European country, with the exception of Italy. Typical households are 9 per cent poorer than their French counterparts and the poorest households are a staggering 60 per cent poorer than their equivalents in Ireland. Almost a third of young people in the UK are not engaged in any formal education by the age of 18 – compared to just one in five in France and Germany. UK hospitals now have fewer beds than all but one OECD advanced economy. Since 2005 UK companies have invested 20 per cent less than those in the US, France and Germany, placing the UK in the bottom 10 per cent of OECD countries in this category. Since 2008 the UK’s productivity gap with France, Germany and the US respectively has doubled to almost 20 per cent. It is quite possible for an incoming Labour government to do much better than all of this without doing nearly well enough to get the UK back on a par with the countries it used to be able to regard as its peers.

I’ve written many times before about how I could never be a politician, so this is never likely to be a problem for me: but where on earth do you start on sorting out this mess?

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I read Jacob Stern’s article in The Atlantic about the political controversy in the USA related to specific car manufacturers selling certain models without AM radios.

It made me wonder whether my car has an AM radio. I know it did when I bought it, a little over 14 years ago. I remember occasionally listening to Richard Bacon’s afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live in the car. But I’ve replaced the radio twice since then.

For the last three years, I’ve been using a ‘radio’ which uses Apple’s CarPlay system to stream content from my phone. Since then, I’ve never listened to broadcasts via FM or AM. I knew the system had a ‘tuner’ function, but I wasn’t sure whether it included AM frequencies.

Surprisingly, the ‘radio’ unit I bought is still ‘current’. I found it on sale on a national retailer’s website. Despite the technology now being several years old, the retail price has inflated by more than 11% since I bought it.

The retailer’s website didn’t list whether the ‘radio’ had an AM tuner. I can only assume this must be irrelevant to many people’s purchasing decisions these days.

I consulted the manufacturer’s website, but it wasn’t listed on the main product page there, either. I dug into a separate ‘full specifications and features’ page—lo and behold, there it was!

My car radio does, indeed, have a hitherto unused AM tuner.

Some US commentators appear to believe this to be essential to my freedom. I still don’t think I’m going to use it. Given that my car model isn’t sold in the US, perhaps no one will mind.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I was surprised earlier this week to read of the drought in Barcelona, which has been ongoing for the last three years. I don’t think I’ve heard about it previously. Sandrine Morel’s article in Le Monde sets out several drastic actions which have been taken, including painting patches of grass green, restricting the use of showers in gyms and sports clubs, and planning to fill swimming pools with seawater. There’s a concerted effort to hide the problem from tourists, given the degree to which the local economy is reliant on them.

On February 12, Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni visited the Pedralbes monastery and asked the nuns to pray for rain.

Two new desalination plants will come online in 2028, but I’m sure that feels a long time away for residents who can’t shower after playing friendly football games on the municipal pitches. As the summer looms, there are interim contingency plans to import (relatively small) quantities of water by ship, as became necessary during a less severe drought in 2008. The drought also affects trees: as more of them die off, less carbon dioxide is absorbed, fuelling climate change further.

It continues to be confounding how little impact these sorts of events have on UK politics. We still drown in endless debates about what’s ‘affordable’ in mitigating climate catastrophe, seemingly disregarding the costs associated with the inevitable consequences of inaction. It’s unconscionable that climate change is nowhere to be found on Rishi Sunak’s list of five priorities—though given his singular inability to make progress on his priority areas, perhaps it makes little difference.

Sometimes, it takes distance to understand the culture that surrounds us.

I’m vaguely aware of the popularity of Mrs Hinch, who posts cleaning tips on social media. For many months, I assumed the lady in the Fariy Non-Bio advert was Mrs Hinch, but that turns out to be Vogue Williams, whose claim to fame has passed me by.

I didn’t know that Mrs Hinch posts exclusively on Instagram, nor that she now works for Procter & Gamble, nor that her early social media posts had transformed the fortunes of a cleaning product called ‘The Pink Stuff’. I had heard people casually mention ‘The Pink Stuff’ and assumed it was a reference to a Vanish product: ‘trust pink, forget stains’ and all that. I buy all the cleaning products for our house, and I’ve never seen a tub of it in real life.

I, therefore, learned a shocking amount about British culture from this New York Times article by David Segal. It’s an education.

Thirteen years ago, Apple launched the iPad—the device that seemingly every technology journalist in the world was certain would be called the iSlate. This is handy, as it provides a ready-made search term for anyone interested in transporting themselves back to those days of fevered speculation of quite what such a device would do.

Even after its launch, I was certain that the iPad wasn’t for me. I wasn’t alone in thinking that the market for an oversized iPhone that didn’t even function as a phone would be minuscule. I was wrong. I’m typing this very post on one of the two iPads I used regularly, the third and fourth that I’ve owned.

Partly because of that experience, and partly because I’m older, I’ve reserved judgement as I’ve read the coverage of the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro. There’s another element, too: I can actually see a potential benefit in sitting at home and working with lots of different large computer screens without having to clutter up the house with hardware. It’s not worth the financial cost or the practical tradeoffs at this stage, but I can see a future for this kind of device that would work for me.

As so often, though, Benedict Evans’s writing on the subject widened my perspective. He makes the point that simply projecting 2D screens into 3D space is not really the point of ’spatial computing’—‘That’s cool, but it seems like using a desktop service on an iPhone. It’s not native to the experience. I can use an iPad for that.’

Evans says that the device is really for 3D work. I was—and still am, to a degree—sceptical that 3D is the future of everyday work. As he asks, ‘is our work 3D? Is your data 3D?’ I have strabismus and sometimes think that I barely see in three-dimensions to begin with, so my scepticism is, maybe, unsurprising.

But, ‘is that like looking at a colour monitor in the 80s and saying that your spreadsheets don’t need colour? Putting maps or messaging onto your phone changed where you used it and how it could be useful: what’s the equivalent for 3D?’

It was the ’spreadsheets’ line that got me. I remember being taught, in the 1990s rather than the 1980s, that one really ought not to use colour in spreadsheets. I’d forgotten all about that. These days, it’s entirely normal to see spreadsheets filled with colours: does a risk register even exist if it isn’t pasted into a spreadsheet with colour-filled RAG ratings, which the colourblind among us struggle to interpret?

I think, too, of PowerPoint presentations. These seem, in many cases, to hand supplanted Word documents as the preferred way to share lengthy text-based narratives. They’re not the logical nor most accessible option, but perhaps people find uses for the tools they’re given.

Perhaps in fifteen years’ time, the Vision Pro 15 will be as every day as iPads are today. Perhaps it will be de rigeur to present things in 3D, regardless of whether it’s actually the best approach for any given task. Or maybe the idea will fade away, like Google’s vision for Glass.

‘Of course, most people didn’t realise how big the iPhone would become, and conversely, some people thought that everyone would have a 3D printer. Predicting tech is hard, and predicting human behaviour is harder: we all do things every day that “no-one would ever do”.’

Well, quite.

The image at the top of the post is by Miyako Fujimiya.