‘It’s OK to enjoy the suffering of those stuck in the mud at Burning Man’

“Not since the ineptly managed Fyre festival of 2017 have I taken such pleasure in the suffering of a group of unbearably obnoxious people,” writes Suzannah Ramsdale, after a storm left thousands stranded in the mud-swamped Nevada desert. The origins of Burning Man are “pure”, she says in the London Evening Standard, but the annual week-long event has been “bastardised over the decades by influencers, tech bros and one percenters”. The festival “describes itself as commerce-free”, yet attending can cost up to $20,000. Despite all the cash sloshing around, “not even the wealthy were able to escape” the “apocalyptic rainstorm” that hit this year’s gathering. The organisers “grandly proclaim Burning Man to be a blueprint for a better world, but it turns out even they’re no match for climate change”.

The “knives are out” for health service bosses, writes Polly Toynbee. The “‘lessons must be learned’ impulse” triggered by the “horrifyingly freakish criminal case” against Lucy Letby risks “becoming a general stampede against NHS administrators”. Of course, “the inadequate should be removed”, The Guardian columnist continues, but “beware cheap rabble-rousers looking for ‘savings’ by cutting feather-bedded public bureaucrats, pitting them against saintly frontline doctors and nurses”. A third of hospital chief executives are clinicians, so “stoking culture wars between medics and managers is tricky”, Toynbee adds. “Meanwhile, on another planet, rightwing journalists sharpen their knives”. They list NHS “failures” and “say they want ‘reform’”, yet their demands remain “undefined”.

“How did they not see this coming? Normally that question is one of the laziest you can ask in Westminster,” said The Spectator’s assistant editor Isabel Hardman, but “in the case of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), everyone saw this coming”. The school concrete crisis is such a “potent” issue because ministers have known for years about the presence of RAAC in public buildings. On BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme, former permanent secretary to the Department for Education Jonathan Slater claimed that Rishi Sunak had halved the number of schools in the government’s rebuilding programme when he was chancellor. “It was already difficult for ministers to explain why the crisis had become so last minute, with the announcements just days before term started,” said Hardman. “Now it will be even more difficult to explain why the government saw this coming and appeared to do the opposite.” The government is struggling to find a “convincing narrative” on the unfolding crisis, seemingly thinking “that when the crisis really did become unavoidable, it would be someone else’s problem”.

”Bringing back national service is an idea that is itself brought back as regularly as the Mission Impossible action movie franchise, but with a lot fewer people actually seeing any action,” wrote parliamentary sketch writer Tom Peck for The Independent. This time, the idea is being put forward by Conservative think tank UK Onward, in a proposal that would see the UK’s 16 year olds take part in two weeks of “civic exploration” and volunteering. The idea of national service appears to be more popular among the older members of our society, said Peck, “which you would have to think is more than a little bit correlated with the likeliness of actually having to do it yourself,” he said. If a voluntary national service is brought in for 16-year-olds, why not a similar scheme for the over 65s? It could include “how to reset a broadband router, or how to transfer an existing user profile onto a new iPhone without asking your grandchildren for help”. Although, you don’t need a Conservative think tank report to tell you “that if you go too far down that route, it won’t just be the young that never vote Tory again”.

“Has Keir Starmer traded in his barrister’s wig for a hammer and sickle?” asks Ashley Frawley, an associate professor in sociology at Swansea University. The Labour leader “certainly seems keen for voters to think so, with his repeated pledges to smash ‘the class ceiling’”. He appears “blind to the fact that Labour has travelled so far from its working-class roots that there is no going back”, Frawley writes for UnHerd. The true “essence of Starmerism” is “a commitment to fiscal discipline that doesn’t scratch, let alone smash” these barriers. His attitude appears to be that “just wave the flag, tell some anecdotes about your working-class father, and surely no one will notice”. But Frawley argues that “in clumsily trying to walk Labour back to its working-class roots, Starmer has wound up lost in their labyrinth”.