In other words, there isn’t a meaningful conversation about reforming special needs that doesn’t also include reforming mainstream.

If you have kids on the edges of this (as I do) you have to fight like hell, constantly, to stop them being crushed. If the Treasury wants to save money, ban silent corridors. Ban detention because a kid forgot a pen. Ban constant testing to measure attainment.

How about we ban supermarket loyalty schemes? At least then the market for groceries might actually have a chance of working...

Phrases like "in that building, they want you to think this" abound. They seem to have internalised a sort of meta-journalistic journalism about political journalism as an alternative to actually saying what has happened and why it's significant. Political journalism is not normally like this.

It may not be apparent to anyone who doesn't access news from other jurisdictions, but the narrative structure and voice of BBC politics analysis is particularly odd. Stories are always framed in simplistic "palace intrigue" or "prince across the water" narratives, but delivered as opinion analysis.

By the same token, Irish law recognised foreign divorces at a time when divorce was unconstitutional (producing a similarly tortuous case law on domicile and residence).

Is Asha still going?! (Sorry, I know this isn't the point; just overcome by a wave of late teenage nostalgia).

"BARK LIFE. They had it all and said 'walkies'. Today in the Saturday Times Magazine, we speak to a Chow Chow, three Yorkies and a Labradoodle who gave up six figure salaries in Magic Circle law firms to set up an artists' commune in the Brecon Beacons."

Puma Disc System all the way...

AI is to software in the 2020s as weird buttons, wires and pumps were to trainers in the 1990s.

I don’t think there’s any harm in recognising that it’s good for people to know what they’re doing, but an abstract formal rule to that effect is probably going to be a bad or unworkable. And as you say, non-experts have often performed better than professionals In health in particular

Who defines merit and how should it count is an absolutely fundamental problem in democratic theory, and historically lots of people hated the idea of democracy precisely because it meant rule by unqualified people.

Fair point regarding the Taoiseach’s nominees a lot of the time, I think, but a formal merit/aptitude criterion for ministers is undemocratic in principle and unworkable in practice. Informally, you have to hope politics achieves this as an outcome most of the time, but it’s not straightforward.

On current career patterns, everyone in management who had any responsibility for these decisions will have moved university by then