GC views at the heart of No. 10?

[TimeLady]

I spotted this in Dominic Cumming's blog, reproduced in The Spectator

blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/01/dominic-cummings-number-10-is-hiring/

People in SW1 talk a lot about ‘diversity’ but they rarely mean ‘true cognitive diversity’. They are usually babbling about ‘gender identity diversity blah blah’. What SW1 needs is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more genuine cognitive diversity.

Drivel? YESSSSSS!

Looks hopeful! Would be worried if I was a public school educated buffoon though! Oh heck, but then The Boss ......

It’s pure The Thick of It

I noticed that too. It’s cheering.

The rest of the thing is depressing though. (Bonfire of employment law, and the like.) Apart from where it’s hilarious.

'there are also some profound problems at the core of how the British state makes decisions'

terrifies me somewhat. Also

'we do not have the sort of expertise supporting the PM and ministers that is needed'

Great. That's really reassuring.

This is basically an advert for Big Brother architects, isn't it?

Haven't read the blog..
The hollowing out of Whitehall in the name of austerity has left Ministers and MP's woefully unsupported. I hope this is being recognised and something will be done. They do actually need knowledgeable and unbiased civil servants to advise them. Otherwise you just get lobbyists and career 'advisors' pushing agendas.

I think (proably influenced by that tv drama about Cummings) that it is an ad for all the male nerds who congregate at microsoft and twitter, who love number crunching and what ifery but lack any social empathy let alone what is actually involved in real life ie the work that women do to keep things running.

It reminds me of standing at a bus stop me with heavey shopping, an older woman walking with a stick, and a woman with a baby. The a not lycra wearing admittely, male cycled passed in the middle of the road, waving his hands above his head in some sort of victory salute congratulating himself of his fast entirely free of any duties journey. Not forgetting that had a car come round the corner he would have been flattened.

Just what we dont need is another, even if different, group of people who think they can think better than engaging with real life experience.

"In December 2011, Cummings married Mary Wakefield, who became the deputy editor of The Spectator"

Add in Andrew Gilligan, formerly of the Sunday Times and author of some very good GC articles, who is another No 10 advisor, and we can be fairly confident than this PM will not be promoting self-ID.

However...

Cummings led the Vote Leave campaign. In the same way as GC women are angry at not being listened to by the establishment, including the Civil Service, the BBC and major charities, and being called transphobes for questioning a PC status quo, I suspect Brexiteers are frustrated by the abuse they received and the lack of support from Remainers within the Civil Service.

This is a far stronger Conservative Government than we have seen since the days of Thatcher, not only because of the size of the majority, but because it is not longer divided by Europe. It also has the weakest opposition in history, not only in Parliament, but also because a decade of wokeness means that media outlets such as the Guardian no longer have the capacity for reasoned critical argument. Tories are evil type Twitter arguments won't cut it with a Government who will be determinedly one-nation and wanting to keep their new voters so delivering some popular policies along with some serious "reforms". Not least many FWR posters would welcome a halting of the regulatory creep towards self-ID. (I want an invitation to a Serwotka family dinner and a discussion on the pros and cons of a Boris PM.)

However Boris, and Cummings, are not universally liked within the Conservative party so we can expect to see critical analysis from the Tory media.

Here is an example.

www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-7845363/Union-bosses-hit-PM-ally-warns-civil-service-set-seismic-change.html

They do actually need knowledgeable and unbiased civil servants to advise them. Otherwise you just get lobbyists and career 'advisors' pushing agendas.

Read the blog. They think they need maths geniuses and sleep deprived 21 year olds.

I'm happy that they're looking for 'outside the box' types rather than the usual suspects that have served the public so badly.

Whilst it's heartening on the gender self D stuff - Dom Cummings is bloody terrifying. I think he might be an actual psychopath, but without the charm.

I don't think he's a psychopath. Probably a bit on the Autistic spectrum. Anyhow we need people like Cummings who respect science and logic right now.

I am an ex civil servant and I’m afraid I find this to be bollocks. Depts already recruit non civil servants where they can for particular expertise - my department always had a decent number of people who were brought in from outside for specific skills (quite hard to attract because the pay is not comparable). We also had no end of special advisers - often geeky 22 year olds who were full of ideas but had no idea how to do anything. What they needed was a strong CS who knew how to make sensible policy that works and to take the workable ideas and make something of them. In those days we had such a thing as a senior and experienced CS. Now not so much. All the older ones have gone.

I wonder whether the hollowing out of the CS has contributed to its capitulation to the Stonewall Stasi. Would senior civil servants in their 50s and 60s wave that stuff through as quickly as the current young and inexperienced cadre?

At long last, a male politician whose clothes choices are worth discussing.

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7818037/amp/ELIZABETH-DAY-says-Dominic-Cummings-sartorial-crush-rides-roughshod-style-rules.html

I doubt Cummings is gender-critical. He is a technocrat and this is about his obsession with efficiency.
James Meek wrote about it in the LRB before the election:

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n20/james-meek/the-dreamings-of-dominic-cummings

"Bret Victor, originally trained as an electrical engineer, was a senior designer at Apple, worked on an interactive climate change ebook for Al Gore and now runs Dynamicland, a digital interface lab in Berkeley. His brand of Silicon Valley solutionism is immensely appealing to someone like Cummings, who was dazzled when he visited the lab last year. One innovation that interests him is the ‘dynamic document’, in which all the background numbers in, say, an electronic version of a government report would be continually updated by live datastreams; anyone reading the report would be able to slide policy numbers up or down electronically to see the effect on outcomes. Another is a system, designed for engineers, that would, in Cummings’s dreamings, allow policy proposals to be digitally modelled without human backroom staff doing months of elaborate coding beforehand: when Cummings énarques speak or scribble their thoughts, cameras wired to high-powered computers would interpret their meaning and instantly display costed programmes, which could then be played around with."

A technocrat. Yes, that's the word.

The advert is all about Dominic Cummings, I see nothing hopeful about this. He is looking to hire versions of himself.

If he was looking for a diverse workforce, he would have used plain language and advertised in a number of places, not just his own blog.

Soon this group of 'misfits' will be shaping our services.

Probably a bit on the Autistic spectrum. Anyhow we need people like Cummings who respect science and logic right now.

My experience of working with very intelligent people like you describe is their logical interpretations tend to align to their preconceptions but their self-image as rational and data-driven prevents them from seeing it. I'd much prefer a range of people who acknowledge they will have subconscious biases than a group of similar people who deny it.

If he was looking for a diverse workforce, he would have used plain language and advertised in a number of places, not just his own blog.

I doubt the type of people he has in mind are trawling the public service job adverts in the Guardian.

Anyway, this way he hasn't even had to pay for the ad

www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/02/dominic-cummings-calls-for-weirdos-and-misfits-for-no-10-jobs

www.ft.com/content/0dbb3e3a-2d8c-11ea-bc77-65e4aa615551

www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/dominic-cummings-boris-johnson-job-advert-downing-street-a4325156.html

and plenty more coverage than that

I'd say that was a pretty smart strategy.

Picking this up and discussing it on other platforms also drives people to look. Very clever.

There is a middle ground between an advert via a blog with applicants invited to apply via a gmail address and an ad in the guardian.

A carefully thought out recruitment campaign would be my preferred approach. This is possible for the public services, think GCHQ and even the army's snowflake campaign was successful.

Anyone else reminded of the section in Invisible Women about the perception of male genius in Silicon Valley recruitment? Will dig out the paragraphs I'm thinking of.

I doubt Cummings is gender-critical. He is a technocrat and this is about his obsession with efficiency.

I wouldn't think he was. But I doubt he's TWAW either.

Cummings - during the election kept telling journalists ‘Get outside the M25 and talk to some real people’ Yes he’s a bit odd and a marmite figure - but I think he understands the limitations of obsessing over identity politics and niche causes that 90% of the population are either indifferent to or hostile to eg the female penis and male born people being called women and put into women’s sport, prisons etc. His Brexit and 2019 GE campaign were all about listening to and talking to normal people - critics can call this populism - it could also be called common sense

If his wife is deputy editor of the Spectator, he will be aware of the issue and up to speed on GC concerns.

Populism, to me, is promising people simple solutions to complex issues. Both the left and the right, and so called centrist parties, are in thrall to it right now. So “get Brexit done” was Cummings’ populist slogan that conceals the fact that getting it done is going to be highly complex, expensive and probably lead to the break up of the U.K. He knows all that but it’s a slogan that appealed to a lot of people so he used it.
A different populist slogan is “TWAW”. It conceals the facts like the reality of sex, hard won women’s rights, safeguarding of children. It’s not one that appeals to a lot of people, in reality, so Cummings doesn’t like it. The left populists love it of course.