The View from Cullingworth

The View from Cullingworth

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Some thoughts on the costs of a ‘National Care Service’
Nothing here is definitive or a proposal, just a look at the realities of creating a new. free at the point of need, service
 • Simon Cooke
What this Englishman has written about being English
I’ve pulled together - for my convenience and yours - all I’ve written about being English, England and Englishness.
 • Simon Cooke
Are twee comms, influencers and TikTok clips all we’ll get from an Andy Burnham government?
Everywhere, not just in politics, comms is replacing marketing meaning that the focus shifts from longer term brand building towards immediate media…
 • Simon Cooke
p(doom) = 0 (thoughts on the imminent AI apocalypse)
We need to democratise security, to provide people and businesses access to the tools that protect them from the stupidity of that mindless cloud of…
 • Simon Cooke
Liberalism didn't just make "the west", liberalism made a better world. A criticism of the “common good”
I wrote this criticism of now Tory MP Nick Timothy’s ideas around the common good back in 2020. But you also get a good idea of the direction for part…
 • Simon Cooke
Why “The Lord of the Rings” is the 20th century’s most important book.
The book reminded the world storytelling matters more than great prose or elaborately nuanced characters, and above all put courage back where it…
 • Simon Cooke

August 2026

Why wouldn’t you leave Britain? Your government seems to hate you.
There is a video doing the rounds of social media where a young man wearing what appears to be a striped dressing gown explains at some length why he is…
 • Simon Cooke
"A little bit of business here, a little bit of business there": Burnham's mission to save the High Street is doomed
Hoagy’s little old lady sits in our memory as an image of something lost. We’d like her back without giving up buying on our phone and loading up the…
 • Simon Cooke
Musings on Britain's lack of productivity growth (and why we ain't been remotely neoliberal since the '90s)
Britain’s problems are that, since at least 1997, and probably since 1990, the nation’s governments have done the opposite of ‘neoliberalism’.
 • Simon Cooke
English devolution is fake. A Yorkshire Day rant
Mayors simply act as local agents for Whitehall in the same way that No 10 North isn’t radical let alone devolution, just Whitehall making Whitehall…
 • Simon Cooke

July 2026

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