Author: L E Bradley

Tim Harford, on this occasion is wrong. I’ve just been catching up with the FT Weekend (it’s half term and things are quite hectic at home, I only manage to get into the shed office on occasion on weeks like this) and, as always, tucked into his column first.

This week (February 14th 2026) (Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email Paywall) he bemoans the overuse of instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp being used for important messages when email is a better format for such. He talks about how IMs ‘ping’ and email doesn’t ‘ping’, how the big advantage of email is it’s asynchronous and so doesn’t require an instant response; how one of the biggest issues with IM apps is that they are closed and the price of exit is too high because you’d either have to leave your friends on the app or take them with you, not an issue with an open standard like email.

Much of what he points out is correct, as I have come to expect from him, but some of it is plain wrong – how is it that he can’t turn off the ‘ping’ of WhatsApp on his mobile but is quite OK to turn of email notifications? By arguing that email is better for ‘important’ messages he appears to be willfully ignoring when an important message is also urgent, in which case an asynchronous system is not what you need. Let’s take a case in point. Important-not-urgent could be the travel details of the in-laws in the next school holiday period so that we remember that we won’t have childcare (admission here that in our case the chance would be a fine thing), in which we need to know this information but don’t need it now. Important-and-urgent could be (Harford agrees that IM is good for urgent messages, but not for long ones) that we’ve forgotten that our youngest needs to be picked up early from school today to go to scout camp and the form, attached, that has been filled and signed needs to be printed and handed in. In this second case, email just won’t cut it unless you are expected to be monitoring your personal email whilst working.

But these are all niggles. My disagreement with Harford’s article is the elephant in the room, and I can only think that he has deliberately avoided this for the sake of building his argument.

I get that these IM apps are closed, which is a nightmare. Some years ago I persuaded a group of friends to move our chat to Signal, in order to stick it to WhatsApp’s Meta – to this day only that group of friends is on Signal, I communicate with exactly no one else using it. But I think this is by-the-by and not relevant to Harford’s argument about using email over IM apps.

What Harford fails to mention is the sheer volume of unwanted email received. I don’t receive unwanted IM messages really at all. But with email I get hundreds a week. I’m not talking about spam, these are for the most part legally sent messages, from businesses I have bought products from etc. but mainly it’s services I actually use.

I’m convinced that they could be sending 25% of the messages they actually do, but I have three children and their schools send around 30 messages per week per child, most of them irrelevant, not sent in any particular way, there is not ‘agreement’ on how they will send messages. So they might send 5 on one day on none for the next two or three days. Some of the messages come from the school itself (often ‘Y4 Boys Football’ – I have three girls, none in Y4) whilst others come from the PTA. Other child-relevant messages are those receipts for dinner money top ups, endless automated messages from the scout portal, gymnastics holiday classes, health advice from the NHS. What’s worse is that many of these emails are along the lines of ‘Dear X, attached is a letter from the Headmaster’, so instead of just reading the letter from the Headmaster, you need to click and open an attached PDF. Given that most emails like this are opened in mobile phones, you then need to pinch zoom to see the message.

I receive reams of this cod informational junk, and no matter how hard I try to unsubscribe, it just keeps coming. Apparently, according to Hardford, Cory Doctorow is an ’email power user’ – what does that even mean? Email is woefully distracting. Does that mean that Doctorow is super efficient in responding to email? Or just spends time tidying up his inbox such that he doesn’t actually get any work done. Doctorow has a child, how has the child-centred email worked out for him?

Perhaps Harford is talking about work email, and not domestic email, but the article suggests not. My partner, a UK Civil Servant, gets 120 emails per working day, each one at least needs to be opened, ranging in response time from 30 seconds to an hour. As she said the other day, if she was generous and said each took an average of just 10 minutes, that’s 20 hours of work per day, and answering emails is not the job she is paid to do.

I guess I digress here a bit, but Harford does seem to be living in a world in which he gets sent twenty completely relevant emails a day to respond to. Not, in my domestic case’ 80% irrelevant rubbish and in the case of my partner 20 hours of emails to deal with in an 8 hour day, if only there were no meeting scheduled. I think the only way I could be happy with email is if I spent hours on a regular basis dealing with it, by which I mean adding filters and folders etc, but I have a life to lead. In the meantime bring on A World Without Email.

Janan Ganesh’s article in last weekend’s Financial Times [Paywall] completely nails the confusion us mere mortals have about elites. Perhaps it’s an itch that we knew there, but couldn’t explain.

Viz. Why are the likes of Blair and Mandleson so enamoured, so craving of the meaningless wealth of the super rich? And why, conversely, are the Musk’s, Branson’s and of course Epstein’s so desperate for social cache and real power? Ganesh enlightens on their symbiotic relationship in that making serious money is boring, or rather the people that make it are tedious beyond belief, because their focus, naturally, is laser-like on making (concocting?) that wealth, that having social power as well as this is beyond their ken.

And the reverse is also true. Mandelson, whilst ‘wealthy’ by any normal standard, craved the wealth-beyond-meaning of the Epsteins and wanted a piece of the action. It looks now as if he was prepared to betray the UK to get it. Of course, he could never have that scale of wealth, least of all because the likes of Epstein would never allow it, he would otherwise lose one of his main levers (the other appears to be blackmail).

As Ganesh points out, this makes Davos much more understandable: the super wealthly hoping that some of the social and/or influential cache of policiticans, actors and intellectuals will rub off on them, whilst in reverese, the policitians, actors and intellectuals hoped that some coin would rub off on them, in the form of freebies, ‘consulting’ and ‘cash payments’ (otherwise known as…).

This leads to what is Farage in this scheme? Farage has social media cache, such that some see him as more as Influencer than policitian. Even though his coffers and those of Reform are filled by the superwealthy, he’s shameless about how he will gift and shill for funds, whether it’s bullion, whiskey, or escruciating (at least for us) Cameo performances. But then, for a person who has never been meaningfully in charge of anything, the super-riches association with him is not about cache, it is simply cash-for-access. Farage has no charm, but it is looking more and more likely that he will have power.

If there ever was a Labour MP who should have been sitting with the Conservatives, it was Peter Mandleson. What’s come out in the last few days should come (and I don’t think it does) as no surprise to anyone. Also, for those of us who have been trying for years to point out to those spending too much time on social media that there is no global conspiracy – well, here it is, there is a global conspiracy, and it is centred on a paedophile. Who knew? Clearly quite a lot of people.

It seems to me that Epstein used his (I was going to say ‘peccadillos’, but lets call a spade a spade) paedophilia as both a money maker and as a lever to blackmail those complicit in his other schemes to stay quiet. It’s amazing how some wealthy but not stinking rich grub around for every more wealth. Judging by the amounts of money that Boris Johnson appears to be able to make from various columnist gigs, it strikes me that the $75,000 Mandelson got from Epstein was probably not worth the effort, and as for the reported £15,000 Sarah Ferguson got from Epstein to pay off debts, really? How fucking cheap are these people.

So Peter Mandleson was in effect selling UK secrets to Epstein (and who else?) so that Epstein and his clients could make even more money than they already did/had, giving them yet more power and access. Just to underline, this was a siting UK Labour Minister passing UK secrets to a Wall Street financier so that he could make himself even more stinking rich.

This is what New Labour understood about the cogs of power, that the power lay with the rich, media barons and the like. What they did with this knowledge was get themselves into power and then do everything they could to keep buttering up to these people rather than facing them down (as Starmer is doing now, much less successfully).

None of this is news to anyone who has been around for a while. One such, George Monbiot, has recently shared an article from 2009 excoriating Mandelson and the department he ran, and importantly implicating then Prime Minister Gordon Brown (and of course his predecessor Tony Blair), and the way Mandleson operated as an lobbyist-for-business from inside government (as many have pointed out, businesses are quite good at lobbying themselves) as this was no anomaly, this behaviour, but was a feature of the government at the time (and since).

And Mandelson was never coy about this, he was always famously relaxed about extreme wealth and now we have the proof, seemingly, of what we all knew all along.

Great to see the outspoken Martin Lewis being well, outspoken. Centre Right Chancellor Rachel Reeves stymies her own growth agenda by freezing the threshold at which UK students start to pay off the Student Loans of a scale that none of their competitors in Europe have to face. And in spouting Thatcherite nonsense about individuals, it’s apparently “not right that people who don’t go to university are having to bear the cost for others to do so”, she wilfully ignores that fact that graduates benefit society as a whole, not only in higher tax and spend, but doing those jobs that we currently have to look abroad to employ people for.

By her logic it’s ‘not right that people who don’t use local services should have to pay council tax’, etc. etc.

Whilst I agree with Lewis that a unfreezing this retrograde tax is a must, we should go much further and do what our European competitors do to a lesser or greater extent: fund education through taxation, thereby freeing graduates to reach their full potential, and, this is for you Rachel Reeves, push growth and productivity in the UK. Does the cowardliness of politicians to face the elephant in the room, the very wealthy – know no bounds?

I’m old enough to have only skirmished the beginnings of student loans in the early nineties, with a paltry three-figure sum to repay as opposed to the five-figure sums of today. However, I do have to admit that I have skin in the game as I have three school-age children and higher education is coming up on the horizon, fast.

I was jolted out of my petrified state by a recent article by Claer Barrett [Paywall] which put numbers on my worries and laid out the issues very succinctly, and it turns out that it’s worse than I thought.

If you break down European countries into groups based on loans / tuition fees etc (see below), there are four groups ranging from no/low tuition to ‘modest fees’ to ‘moderate fees’ to ‘high fees + large income-contingent loans’, England and Wales (which has a slightly different set up, though the core is the same) are the only occupants of the latter group with Scotland nestled amongst the Nordics in the first group. So my first question would be, if other European countries can manage not to fleece the workers of tomorrow, why can’t we? At what point did we move from the European sensibility of ‘getting a degree is good for the country’ to the American ‘getting a degree is only good for yourself’?

Well, it was done in a typically underhand and political way. First it was PM John Major in the early 90s who miraculously doubled (or something like) the number of places at university overnight by turning all Polytechnics into universities (even 30-odd years later I have never once come across anyone who thought this was a good idea). And then Tony Blairs’ government decided it would be a good idea for FIFTY PERCENT of young people to have a degree, without increasing general taxation to pay for it.

Cut forward 30 years and now we’re in a pretty mess. I hate the phrase ‘a tax on ambition’ – it’s usually used as an excuse to not tax the rich enough, but here it has a point. You can find the details in the Claer Barrett article cited above, but the long and the short of it is that Student Loans in England and Wales are a) only begun to be repaid once an certain income threshold is reached, and b) wiped after thirty years. There is no need to get technical about this, as without talking figures, you can see that the incentive here is to earn below the threshold for as long as possible before the thirty-year point is reached and wipes the lot. And in the UK we wonder why we have a productivity crisis when we are incentivising some of the best and brightest to not reach their full potential.

Of course, there are plenty more things wrong with the way the whole thing is set up. Exhibit A is the repricing of the loan that vulnerable teenagers signed in good faith before they started their degrees, breaking any trust they may have had in the system, there is the Rethink Repayment campaign which is trying to do something about this. But it assumes the core of the student loan system is sound. It most definitely is not. As Claer Barrett points out, many refer to the Student Loan system as a graduate tax, which it isn’t. A graduate tax would be fairer as every graduate would be liable to pay it. But in the Student Loan system the children of the wealthy don’t need to pay. For those able to fork out for school fees, affording to pay for a child’s university university could well be a net saving on what they are used to forking out. With grants available for the less well off, the Student Loans scheme is a tax on the children of the middle class (not the wealthy upper middle class), further impoverishing them and widening inequalities. Indeed, a graduate tax would be a step in the right direction. As it stands, Student Loan Repayments are a regressive tax.

If we want to get richer as a nation we need to be investing in the young, we need at the very least to pay, as a nation, tuition fees for our students. Tax cliff edges don’t work, and is an argument against income taxes themselves. In the meantime we should at the very least get in line with our European neighbours.

Institute of Fiscal Studies – Higher Education funding in England: past, present and options for the future (July 2017)

House of Commons Briefing Paper – Update on the sale of student loans (September 2020)

Selected European Countries by University Fee System

I drummed up the following from ChatGPT.

• 1) Nordics-style: no/low tuition, but loans are common for living costs
  • Denmark — no tuition fees for home/EU students. SOURCE
  • Sweden — no tuition fees for Swedish/EU/EEA/Swiss students; student support includes grants + loans. SOURCE
  • Finland — no tuition fees for home students; fees mainly for certain non-EU/EEA cases. SOURCE
  • Norway — public HE has no tuition fees; student support includes loans. SOURCE
  • Scotland — tuition paid for eligible Scotland-domiciled undergrads studying in Scotland; loans exist for maintenance. SOURCE
• 2) Modest fees: low tuition/registration charges, targeted aid
  • France — regulated low public fees (e.g., €175 bachelor / €250 master noted by Eurydice). SOURCE
  • Germany — generally no tuition fees in public universities (admin fees may exist). SOURCE
  • Austria — fees waived for home students within standard duration (+ tolerance); regulated semester amounts where charged. SOURCE
  • Switzerland — tuition set by institutions/cantons; generally low/moderate compared with England. SOURCE
  • Italy — income-related fees; ISEE < €20,000 exempt (from 2021/22). SOURCE
• 3) Moderate fees: tuition exists (often a few thousand), support layered on
  • Netherlands — statutory tuition fee (e.g., €2,530 for 2024/25) plus support via student finance. SOURCE
  • Ireland — “Free Fees” for eligible students but a student contribution still applies. SOURCE
• 4) England outlier: high fees + large-scale income-contingent loans
  • England — high regulated fee cap (e.g., £9,535 for 2025/26) and income-contingent repayment. SOURCE
  • Wales — tuition fee loans exist; maintenance support uses a grant+loan package (still within a high-fee + loans model). SOURCE

So, another shitshow for Labour, though at least the media has moved on to Starmer’s trip to China.

It’s incredible that Labour has managed yet another own goal, and there is plenty of coverage about this in the press, all of it that I have seen either blaming Starmer himself or his stooges on the NEC. What I’m amazed about is the fact that Burnham himself appears to have come out of this as the thwarted hero. And I don’t understand why.

I’m London-based, so I don’t know for sure how Burnham is seen within his mayoralty, but certainly the image of him at least is of someone doing a good job, a bulwark against the madness of Reform and of Westminster, perhaps in equal measure. And he does appear to be doing a good job, much like Sadiq Khan, but without the racist rhetoric of both Reform and Trump lined up against him. So in that sense he’s got a pretty cushy number: a broad powerbase in a populous and rightly proud region, that very much stands up as ‘not London’, even defining itself as such to some extent.

But there are important differences to London. Khan is mayor of one of the world’s great cities and as such gets the deserved scrutiny from that. Beyond going to the voters every four years, Khan answers to the Greater London Assembly of which more than half are not Labour, whereas Burnham is scrutinised by the GMCA, made up of the ten council leaders in his patch, all Labour. Starmer, meanwhile, has a huge majority in Westminster, but equally vociferous opposition.

Clearly, therefore, Burnham has a cushier number as Mayor, and one might wonder why he’d want to go through the hell that is becoming an MP only to then start on the road to unseating Starmer as PM, which he clearly does. The answer, of course, is messianic ambition, brought on by his current lack of opposition in the Mayoralty. But surely he’s got advisors? Can no one speak truth to him?

This brings me onto my point. I don’t understand why Starmer’s allies on the NEC have been getting it in the neck for blocking Burnham from selection for the Labour candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election. Of course they have, they could have done none other. Reform are ludicrous, but they are riding high in the polls and any move by Burnham to become a backbench MP would trigger an election for Burnham’s vacant seat as Mayor, with the very real risk of Labour losing far more than a single Westminster seat. Of course, Burnham causing this fracas has now, I’d guess, made it far more likely that the seat will be lost to Reform, as many Burnham supporting Labour voters will now stay away.

Thanks to Burnham, the NEC found itself in a Catch-22 – if it had allowed him to stand and then Reform had won the Mayoralty, things would have been far worse than the current situation.

No one could have done anything about this mess, except for one person. Burnham could have easily predicted all this and could have kept his powder dry for another run when the situation wasn’t a lose-lose situation for Labour. I don’t understand why anyone but Burnham is being blame for this mess.

Also, anyone old enough to remember, Burnham was not one of the towering figures of New Labour. Whilst he was the Culture Secretary for two years, overseeing the delivery of the 2012 Olympics, following that he hit the big time as Health Secretary, a post he only held for 11 months, a post in which he was accused of being overly political and not candid enough. In short, Burnham didn’t set the world on fire at Cabinet Level in the run up to the 2010 election defeat. If Labour wants to rid of Starmer and revitalise with a new, inspirational leader, Burnham isn’t it.

The problem with Cory Doctorow’s term Enshittification is that it’s just too good. The word encapsulates so well so much of the digital world we live in, and even beyond that. In the UK we still sometimes describe Kafkaesque moments when butting up against intransigent bureaucracy as ‘Computer Says No’ moments, but I wonder how long before we describe that kind of experience in Doctorow’s terms.

To be clear, enshittification, as defined by Doctorow, is quite specific in describing digital platforms that have captured or created the ground between customer and other parties (be they suppliers, advertisers and so forth) such that both become customers of the platform itself. Once captured, the platform then proceeds to make itself indispensable to both, before amping up the attraction of the platform to other parties at the expense of the customer and then, once that has been achieved, doing the same for everyone connected with the platform, because, by now, everyone is locked into the platform and the switching cost of is just too high.

Amazon is perhaps the best example of replacing existing market places with itself, whilst Uber created a middleman, itself, and proceeded to undercut competitors to put them out of business before turning the screws on the drivers and customers themselves. So enshittification is quite specific, but it feels like it should be used elsewhere.

If you want to know more about this Doctorow’s book is excellent and can be bought HERE.

Virgin Media

Two recent examples spring to mind. I have kids and am constantly missing school emails and events as everyone uses email to just pass responsibility for things onwards. As such, I miss a lot of emails. But the other day I happen to catch one from my broadband supplier, Virgin Media. They emailed to give me notice that my 18 month contract was ending and that if I did nothing it didn’t matter because I would just be put onto their standard tariff. In line with what I assume is the law they told me what I was currently paying and what the new monthly rate would be. Are you sitting down? The increase was going to be 52%.

Naturally, or so it would seem, the UK does NOT require companies to tell you in communications like this how much notice I needed to give in order to cancel my contract. Whilst my bile was rising, I logged on to their site and found that it was 30 days. I checked the date of the end of the contract. It turns out they had given me 31 days notice. By this stage I wasn’t surprised, just very angry. I assume from what they did that they had to give over 30 days notice. And they had: 31.

I live in outer London and work from home, as does my partner and few days a week. So a decent broadband connection is very important. A quick panicked search (it was 4pm, the kids were back from school, but if I didn’t cancel this immediately it would be too late to cancel for another month) revealed that in the last 18 months, nothing had changed, Virgin Media was my only choice. But I would have to cancel anyway and try and find an alternative. Another article needed on why UK broadband market is clearly not working.

I called and spent ten minutes making it very clear that I needed to cancel, possibly more than ten minutes, as I got angrier and angrier and they offered me a 30% discount off the new price. I demurred and insisted on cancelling, to do this I needed to be put trough to another person who could cancel it for me (only after I had given all my details once more). In the end, another 25 minutes on the line and I was convinced to sign up for a 24 month contract for an almost 10% discount on the price I was currently paying.

This might not be enshittification, but it sure as hell is shit. I was still seething once I got off the phone even though I had saved almost 41% off the price they were going to charge. Their standard rate has no basis in reality, it’s that Loyalty Penalty writ large. Virgin Media, I’m sure, would claim that this isn’t a loyalty penalty, just bouncing onto the fixed rate. Yeah right.

So, Virgin Media’s approach to its customers might not be the textbook definition of enshittification, but it certainly ticks some of the boxes:

• it’s shit and unnecessary
• it’s monopolistic behaviour – it is the only fibre broadband provider I can use. I am trapped using its service, and Virgin Media knows that (I’m sure). The appalling broadband infrastructure in the UK means that whilst 250mb speed is the lowest tier that Virgin can supply, it’s about three times faster than anything else I could find.

Duolingo

I weaned myself off Duolingo about four months ago. If you haven’t used it, it’s brilliant at getting you to commit to a streak. Its gamification is second to none. As a former English Language Teacher I know that I wasn’t learning much Spanish, but I was improving my vocabulary, albeit slowly. But I needed a break, and we were going to Spain. I had a 400+ day streak and once I stopped, Duolingo spent the best part of a week telling me that it wasn’t too late to keep my streak.

Streaks work, as for the four months after breaking my streak I didn’t touch it. We are off to Spain again soon, so I got myself started on it again, and the experience has degraded markedly in the short time that I’ve been away. We’ve a paid family subscription which allows me plus 5 others to use Duolingo without the ads. For me, this is a Premium service, because I’m paying for it. But now I see there is Duolingo Max, requiring a steep cost upgrade for some more features. Fair enough. Was is not fair enough is the constant upselling… every third lesson is now an upsell opportunity, to remind me on what I’m missing out.

I’m not the first to point this out, and note that Trustpilot scores Duolingo extremely low. Duolingo has become focussed on the gamification and monetisation as the expense of its core offering, this is enshittification, even though Duolingo is an end in itself and not a platform. I do wonder, however, where it will go next in order to squeeze more from its userbase.