Hi @EdinburghNapier @ProfAndreaNolan @EHRC @EHRCChair @KishwerFalkner @RJHilsenrath @trussliz @GEOgovuk

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1/9

The numbers on their face for the @FCC RDOF auction are exciting - lots of Gigabit winners. But it’s important to remember the job is just starting. These rural areas don’t magically get Gig today or tomorrow. 1/

The job is only done and the celebration can really only begin once we see that rural Americans are actually going to get the broadband they’ve been promised. 2/

And that’s the rub here - at least from preliminary indications, there are LOTS of question marks clearly hanging out there once you look past the gloss and proclamations. And since we won’t know for maybe 5 years if it worked, due diligence is essential now. 3/

A number of big winners have offered some service but never done Gig. This would be like giving hundreds of millions of $ to firms that have repaved residential streets to now design & build our interstate highway bridges. 4/

A number of big winners are using tech that has done Gig (maybe) only in tightly controlled applications that don’t look anything like rural America. This would be like giving interstate highway $ to firms who’ve built lots of scale models but never actually built a bridge. 5/

As many of you know, I was apart of the white evangelical tradition. I have talked about things I learned about being Black in white spaces. Now I want to say some things about what I learned about once being a Black evangelical returning back to the Black church.

A thread.

Spending years in white evangelical churches and schools, specifically from 2012-2018, shapes Black people in more ways than we would like to admit. It shapes us to diminish Blackness, devalue our people’s story, and always test what we have against the white logic and litmus.

This is particular reality for us Black men in that space. White Christians exploit our vulnerabilities, give us the room to speak, while simultaneously subverting and devaluing Black women and their struggles and their grievances. Opportunities abound for us and we take them.

We are invited into the meetings, we are given the mic, we are asked to lead groups on race, the Black church, etc. We are asked though often we actually haven’t read or thought deeply about each. We become a weapon. Profiting and policing/punishing those who get out of line.

All the while, white Christians feel good about themselves and other Black people are left to clean up the mess we’ve made, the ways we’ve made fools of Black folk, and the harmful ways we’ve learned to think, and to preach, and to be around us. It is profoundly depressing.

A story of inappropriate technology: in the 1970s it was decided to modernize the rice farming of Sri Lanka, whose system that had not changed much for 3000 years. The goal was to replace the water buffalo with the modern tractor, but the attempt had disastrous consequences...

Buffalos create "wallows", pools of muddy water without which they cannot control their temperatures. Always filled with water, these wallows create many eco-services: in the dry season the become a haven for fish that then migrate back to the paddies when these fill with water.

The fish is a valuable source of proteins for landless laborers and greatly help control the population of malaria causing mosquitoes who breed in the rice paddies. The vegetation around the wallows are breeding and hunting grounds for snakes and water monitor lizards who prey...

...on rats that eat the rice and the crabs that burrow into the sides of the rice paddies eventually causing them to lose integrity, leading to collapses of entire paddy systems.

Without the water buffalo wallows, villagers no longer had a place to soak the palm fronds they needed to thatch their roofs, leading them to rely on locally made clay roof tiles, which caused massive deforestation as trees were cut down to fuel the tile kilns.

Overall I think Labour will be a bit disappointed with how the ‘relaunch’ has started. Labour have given themselves a mountain to climb anyway through a year of inaction but the speech today lacked coherence, purpose and distinction from the government.

Starmer is (funnily enough) making a lot of the same mistakes Corbyn made in 2019. He is listing a ‘bold’ set of policy proposals that come across as disjointed and lacking connection to Britain’s priorities.

The policies themselves were basically good, I wouldn’t argue against them. But I would cringe whenever Labour came out with spending proposal after spending proposal in 2019 without any rationale or connection to a larger economic strategy. That’s what Starmer did today.

The questions that voters will have about Starmer’s speech are the same ones that voters will have had about Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto: why are these policies your priority, how can we afford them and why aren’t we doing these already?

The first one needs to be answered by diagnosing Britain’s problems and their causes. He doesn’t have to diagnose all of them. For the purpose of today he could have picked three that feed off each other: inequality, stagnant income growth and stagnant productivity.