Dealing with mental health issues or traffic violations leaves our forces with less time to tackle the crimes we rightly expect them to solve.
For starters, a leader with integrity, a reasonably competent Cabinet, a less divisive tone, a new seriousness of purpose on policy and, in particular, some pragmatism on Europe.
The auditorium may be dull but the fringe is not – as questions from our past haunt the future, such as: will the productivity gains come?
My view is that the only way to help square this circle is to rediscover our concern for public service reform.
The State continues to restrict personal freedom in a bid, it claims, to save life, while trying to avoid spelling out the risks to life caused by excess weight.
If it were the critical factor, Belgium should have been superbly prepared for the pandemic. Alas, it was not.
It’s striking that the countries that did best during Covid are those, like Taiwan and South Korea, which live under threat of annihilation by their neighbours.
This is not to say that all of Dodds’ analysis is coherent or correct, but the days of unhinged Corbynite attacks on capitalism are over.
The Government can do a lot in a short space of time. A key question should be: how do we make these towns nicer places to live?
McDonnell wanted a state-run pharmaceutical industry. So now we will never know how it would got on with producing Covid vaccines.
The first of a ConHome series this week on Boris Johnson’s Reset Moment – and what should follow from it.
I was regaled with horror story after story on access to even existing testing. Confidence in the “moonshot” is non-existent.
Post-Covid, the environment is likely to be egalitarian and interventionist. For libertarian, small state Eurosceptics, this must come as a disappointment.
A careful reading of Hayek and Adam Smith will confirm that neither was invariably opposed to state action.