Towering Columns

In The Times, Dominic Lawson argues that use of automatic prison time discounts mean that punishment rarely fits the crime.

PC Harper’s widow may not realise just how much the state has deliberately betrayed the victims of serious crime. Last week Lissie Harper added her voice to calls for the government to exclude from “early release” two of those found guilty of the manslaughter of her husband (they were the passengers of a car that in 2019 had dragged the policeman for a mile to an unspeakably agonising death after he had attempted to arrest them and the driver for a reported burglary).

Last week she declared of the proposed release of Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole halfway through their 13-year sentences: “Justice should mean justice and serving the sentence given.” But that would never have happened — in the sense of time spent in prison — under any circumstances. These men would automatically have been released after serving two thirds of their sentences. The difference now, as a result of the government’s latest plans to avoid the prison estate breaching full capacity, is that the discount for such serious crimes is being changed to 50 per cent. The government calls this scheme “earned progression”. It is nothing of the sort. No contrition or rehabilitation is required.

The same is true of all the efforts over decades by successive governments to discount custodial sentences to avoid prison overcrowding. These discounts have been automatic, non-discretionary and statutory, applying to all except those serving life sentences. The parole board (for what that is worth) has never been involved. In fact, the Conservative government in 2020, the year of the trial of PC Harper’s killers, changed the law so that those given the longest fixed sentences should serve two thirds in prison, rather than just 50 per cent. Had that law not been passed, Bowers and Cole would be released next year as if it were completely normal, without any fuss.

For The Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs says that we need to choose punishment over moral ambivalence to crime.

Justice secretaries have spent the last 16 years trying to free up cell space not by building new prisons but ending the tradition of short custodial sentences – arguing that, for “low-level” criminals, prison does not work. But the reforms haven’t been a success. We have discovered the hard way how difficult it is to reform even “low-level” criminals: 40 per cent of those handed community orders reoffend within a year. The more prolific the offender, the more likely it is that rehabilitation efforts will fail…

The last decade has also taught us that while overcrowded prisons may not provide ideal conditions for offenders to turn over a new leaf, neither does community sentencing on the cheap. Arguably in the end, an imperfect system centred on prison is more desirable than an imperfect system centred on community rehabilitation. At least the former protects society from offenders for the time that they are behind bars. The same cannot be said of a system that lets predators like Levy roam the streets under “supervision”.

But, look where our moral ambivalence has got us. As our politicians huddle in rooms weighing up whether the least-bad option is to release rapists, paedophiles or killers, the time has come to choose – and choose punishment. That means prison. That means the three words that delight conservatives and make liberals shudder: lock them up.

In UnHerd, Maggie Oliver says that the early release of dangerous offenders and the grooming gangs investigations are eroding confidence in our justice system.

“Here we go again!” That’s what I find myself thinking as I watch the latest “confusion” surrounding the early release of serious sexual offenders and murderers. Another headline. Another announcement. Another promise. Then, within days, another clarification, as it becomes clear that the “experts” making the announcements hadn’t fully understood the law to start with.

The recent case of Shabir Ahmed, ringleader of a Rochdale grooming gang, illustrates the problem perfectly. His victims were repeatedly told he would be deported upon being released from prison, only to discover that a decades-old legal provision meant this had never actually been possible, with the Government scrambling to find a work-around. And now, we see the same pattern over early release. Grand announcements are made, that serious child sex offenders will not leave prison early — only for the public to discover that the law excludes offenders whose crimes were committed before 2003.

Surely the lawyers and ministers making these high-profile announcements should know the law before standing in front of the cameras? After all, these are hardly obscure technicalities that emerge from nowhere. They are fundamental legal provisions that should already be understood. Though perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that when Whitehall concocts policy on the hoof, reality is quick to catch up. All this does more than expose incompetence. It also erodes public confidence in the Government and criminal justice system, with the wider public left wondering whether anyone in power actually knows what they are doing. I certainly wonder it too.

For The Telegraph, Lee David Evans argues that One Nation Conservatives have lost their pragmatism on the ECHR and Net Zero, and with it, their relevance.

When Badenoch announced that the next Conservative government would take Britain out of the ECHR, she set out the tests that she believed membership of the convention was failing. They included the need to British citizens first for public services, and protecting veterans from vexatious legal cases – as well as those that the Tories were seen to have failed on in the past, such as the asylum system and illegal migration.

For Badenoch, “the only way” to deliver on these issues was to leave the ECHR. If today’s One Nation Conservatives believe that we can fix these problems without leaving the ECHR, they should set out their alternative.

But if instead – as regularly appears to be the case – they believe that membership of the convention is more important than actually solving these problems, then they have departed from the historical instincts of the One Nation tradition. Prioritising alignment with abstract ideals, especially when they risk the welfare and governance of the country, would have been anathema to many One Nation Tories of the past.

For The Times, James Kanagasooriam says that we are are building a society with an antipathy towards wealth.

Those dry numbers reflect a brutal transatlantic reality. If I went to a regional Walmart summer barbecue, the local manager, many of the supervisors and some regional head-office staff could well be millionaires by virtue of higher American wages and ballooning pension pots. An equivalent gathering of Tesco staff would not be such fertile millionaire territory. The US is a place where ordinary jobs can command extraordinary wages. It has more people in regular-sounding occupations — think of the plumber with dozens of contractors or the car dealer with ten showrooms instead of one — who become millionaires. Wealth creation is more socially accessible. Britain is trending the other way.

Many analysts elide our attitudes towards wealth with the trope of widening inequality. This is simply not true. Wages are being compressed. The Low Pay Commission estimates that the adult minimum wage equalled 68 per cent of median hourly pay in April 2026, its highest ever level. It exceeds 80 per cent of local median pay in Doncaster, Wigan and Sunderland, according to the Centre for Cities. This certainly removes incentives to getting ahead.

There are also questions as to why, as a society, we don’t care more about wage growth among middle and high earners, which funds the public services we all need. It suggests an indifference as to how we fund the state. Why is public opinion so harsh towards the rich and their economic contribution?

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Wonky Thinking

On Substack, Neil O’Brien lays out the scandal of student loans owed by people who have claimed through the EU settlement scheme and are costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds a year in unpaid loans.

In 2019 the Home Office estimated that between 3.5 million and 4.1 million people would be eligible for EU settlement. But as of March 2026 4.4 million people had been granted settled status and a further 1.5 million held pre-settled status - so 5.9 million in total. Over 160,000 “late applicants” have been granted settled status since the deadline of the 30th June 2021, along with a further 54,000 family members joining them - so 220,000 people. 124,000 people applying after the deadline got pre-settled status, with 202,000 family members joining them.

In the past 12 months alone, around 66,000 completely new applicants gained residency via this scheme, five years after the deadline. Some nationalities are much more likely to apply. At least one in every 20 Romanian citizens has settled or pre-settled status in the UK. Rather than tailing off as you’d expect, both the number of late applicants and joining family members actually rose sharply in the last quarter.

EU citizens granted settled or pre-settled status via the EUSS are able to bring family members under conditions much more favourable than those available to British citizens bringing their spouses or children. They face no salary test or language test or fee, and extended family members can be brought over, not just direct family.

In the past 12 months, there were more EUSS applications from Indian (15,164) and Pakistani (9,318) nationals, than from French (9,178), German (6,009), Belgian (2,467) or Dutch (5,003). In total there have been nearly 50,000 grants of settled status to Indian nationals via the EUSS. Indian nationals are now the second-largest nationality among new applicants.

People on EUSS are eligible for student loans. In 2024/25 foreign nationals received around £4bn in student loans. One in five people getting student loans were non-UK nationals. 5% of all first time student loans in the UK went to Romanians alone.

The government has no grip on the losses on these loans. Even if non-UK nationals were as likely as UK nationals to repay, we would expect to lose 30% of the £4 billion a year.

But in practice, almost all nationalities have a repayment rate significantly lower than UK nationals. We can see from new data I obtained that the average repayment rate for non UK nationals is just 51% - much lower than the UK repayment rate (68%).

This means that UK taxpayers are losing between £1.2 and £2.2 billion a year on loans to non-UK nationals - probably more like the latter.

Losses on loans to Romanian nationals alone probably cost around £650m a year. As well as any eventual losses from people not earning enough, the British taxpayer is already owed £1.5bn by a total of around 50,000 overseas “non-compliant” borrowers. “Non-compliant” nationals from tiny Cyprus alone (with a population similar to Leeds) owe over £300m.

In a POLITICO long-read, Marc Felix Serrao investigates declining birth rates across the Western world and what is being tried to reverse them, including higher levels of immigration.

There are many competing explanations. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has argued that part of the fall in the U.S. reflects a public-health success: Americans have become better able to avoid teenage pregnancies and unintended births. But beyond that, the story is similar on both sides of the Atlantic.

Housing is too expensive. Women are prioritizing their careers. Men are taking longer to mature. Religion has lost influence. Smartphones and social media are weakening real-world relationships. Fear of climate change makes having children feel useless and cruel.

Each hypothesis has its adherents, along with its own books, podcasts and preferred evidence. None, on its own, fully explains the decline.

Berkay Ozcan, professor of social and public policy at the London School of Economics, has little patience for attempts to identify a single culprit. The decline, says the 47-year-old father of two, is driven by a combination of causes. Insecure labor markets and high housing costs play a role, as do changing values, longer periods of education and rising expectations of parenthood.

But all these factors have a common effect: postponement. Surveys show that young people still want, on average, about two children. But many delay parenthood until they feel professionally, financially and emotionally ready, Ozcan says — and often wait longer than they intended.

Eva Beaujouan agrees, and she speaks from more than just professional experience. When the University of Vienna demographer was 34, she and her partner started trying to have a child. They finally managed five years later, after using IVF.

“I would never have imagined, starting at 34, that I would have issues,” says Beaujouan, who is now 48 and has focused her research on late parenthood.

Delayed parenthood extends well beyond affluent urban professionals. “Postponement is now observed in all social strata,” she says.

Assisted reproduction can create false reassurance. It may improve the chances of conception, but it cannot guarantee a child or fully overcome the effects of age. “It is invasive,” she says. “It is expensive. It creates inequalities. Not many people can afford it. And of course, it often fails.”

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Podcast of the Week

On The Times’ Business Podcast, Dominic O’Connell is joined by RenewableUK CEO Tara Singh and Times columnist Juliet Samuel to debate what is really driving up energy bills - gas price volatility or grid upgrade costs - and whether it’s time to drop or double down on net zero.

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Quick Links

A petition to keep PC Harper’s killers in prison hits 1m signatories.

Housing in Manchester has become more unaffordable since Burnham was Mayor.

CK Hutchinson makes $3.4bn selling off UK assets in transport and communications.

Restrictions on zero hour contracts could cost the UK economy nearly £3bn a year.

Google searches for “eye hurt” were 5,000% higher after this week’s solar eclipse.

A US Congressional investigation alleges that China is funding pro-Palestine marches in the UK.

Towering Columns

Joseph Eve argues in Conservative Home that Benjamin Disraeli’s legacy has been stolen by individuals whose own beliefs are closer to New Labour ideology.

Yet at some point in the early 2000s, the term was adopted by the proto-Blairist wing of our party, conveniently ignoring all other aspects of Disraelian thought. The baby of nationhood was thrown out with the economically progressive bathwater. The One was prioritised over the Nation as certain so-called ‘conservatives’ prioritised supranational courts, liberal migration policies and membership of the European Union over nationhood.

Disraeli’s Crystal Palace Speech of 1872, in which he set out his vision of Conservative principles, centred on the Constitution, the Empire and improving the condition of the people. The first two have largely been forgotten and, as such, the last has been used as a tool with which to completely undermine the first two. An open borders migration policy as a tool for increasing GDP is perhaps the best example of this.

For how you can set out to improve the condition of the people if you don’t know who those people are? A shared sense of national identity is a prerequisite for social improvement. A fact Andy Burnham may well be forced to reckon with when he demands the British taxpayer cough up even more money to pay for social care whilst continuing to put up illegal migrants in hotels and pledging to increase ‘foreign aid’.

In The Telegraph, Lawrence Newport highlights that deregulation and the construction of new infrastructure is essential to shield Britain from droughts.

This is not a problem that can be solved by efficiency alone: even if we fixed every current leak in the South East, we would still need new capacity equivalent to the daily consumption of more than five million households. Whatever the causes of rising demand, one fact is unavoidable: Britain needs far more water storage than it has today – and fast.

Though Westminster has recognised the need to act – the Government designated proposed reservoirs in East Anglia and Lincolnshire as “nationally significant” last year – it has failed to recognise the scale and urgency of the emergency.

Abingdon Reservoir, for example, was first proposed in the 1990s. Located in Oxfordshire, it would be Britain’s second-largest reservoir and help supply 15 million people with water. Alongside other projects such as East West Rail, the reservoir would support the Oxbridge growth corridor, adding almost £80bn to the UK economy by 2035.

In practice, this means new businesses starting, scaling and succeeding in Britain, not abroad, with manufacturers investing with confidence instead of worrying about water shortages and families enjoying the freedom to water their own garden in the height of summer without another hosepipe ban.

Writing for The Times, Kathleen Stock analyses an emerging identity surrounding disability on the rise in Britain - particularly with young women.

This week a video went viral of a young woman in a wheelchair at a train station, filming the laborious attempts of staff to get her chair up some stairs after the lift failed. Towards the end of the video, somewhat unexpectedly, she gets out of her chair and walks upstairs herself, saying she “had a bit of energy that day” so could do it. In another video, she films herself putting on roller skates before pushing off from her wheelchair and skating happily away, Lazarus-like.

Even severely debilitating physical conditions produce good days as well as bad. On some bad days, a person may need extra help. But when a disproportionate number of young women are insisting this applies, we need to find out what is going on. Why do Gen Z females, apparently unlike every generation before them, have strangely unstable bodies that intermittently require support?

When you dig into their explanations, a few officially medical-sounding words tend to recur: postural tachycardia, joint hypermobility, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. What these syndromes all share is a set of non-specific symptoms, versions of which are familiar to all of us: dizziness, a racing heart, exhaustion, brain fog, muscle pain.

And of course, many of these are also symptoms of anxiety, the defining emotion of teenage years. Saying this doesn’t indicate that the syndromes in question don’t exist, but only that it can be unclear whether you really have one.

In Conservative Home, Oliver Dean argues that rehabilitation has limits and some individuals should be barred from holding public office due to past actions.

Reforming oneself is only part of the solution here – the remainder rests on somebody else, and that somebody is the victim. Luciana Berger’s decision to call this out is telling. It shows a mindset that recognises an individual has gone through a rehabilitative programme, but simultaneously recognises that this is not enough for the specificity and severity of the crime carried out.

That, in my view, should be enough for Bonehill-Paine to be prevented from standing.

The situation has developed, however, and the Board of Deputies has asked the party to rescind the selection and to review its vetting. Of these two measures, the second is of far more interest.

Because it means that somebody within the party sat down, opened up his folder, looked over the record and ticked the box – believing that it presented no difficulty. I find the idea of reaching such a conclusion difficult to believe. Again, I reiterate that I am all for second chances. But there comes a point in which one cannot extend the generosity of yet another second chance. Bonehill-Paine – I believe -, despite what he has done since being released, crossed that point of no return, and I think that Kemi Badenoch should do the right thing and prevent him from standing.

This is, after all, the same Kemi Badenoch who questioned the former PM Keir Starmer over his decision to appoint known convicted fraudster Louise Haigh as Transport Secretary, and who has consistently bashed Andy Burnham for appointing her to his Cabinet too. If such criticisms are founded on the fact that Louise Haigh had a criminal conviction (which was spent by the time she entered government, might I add), then it seems indefensible for her to support Bonehill-Paine’s candidacy in Somerset.

Writing for The Telegraph, Ian Acheson makes the case that forecasts for future prisoner numbers may be incorrect, throwing early release plans into doubt.

Once the state starts releasing offenders early because it has run out of room, it is no longer in control of the punishment it has imposed. Public trust withers further. Vigilantism takes on a sinister allure.

The problem stems from a small coterie of activist prison reform outfits that permanently have Labour’s ear on emptying prisons while the public want the precise opposite. And the policy solutions they proffer are based on assumptions that might well be false.

The Government’s defenders will say the prison population simply has to be managed, and that some form of early release is unavoidable. But that assumes that the Ministry of Justice’s prison space forecasting is accurate. These estimates are no more reliable than other government projections.

The case for mass early release on Starmer’s watch was built on these often faulty figures. Forecasts are not immutable truths; they are assumptions on paper, vulnerable to shifts in sentencing, remand, offending patterns and events, dear boy. They have routinely overestimated population growth.

Jacob Phillips writes for The Critic arguing that Jason Arday’s appointment and subsequent removal from Cambridge reflects a declining meritocracy.

One reason why Arday’s defenders seem to have sidestepped actually disproving the allegations, is that they share a set of commitments which amount to a different worldview, rather than a difference of opinion. A commitment to to race “equity” rather than “equality” — to achieving balanced outcomes even if it requires differing standards — is formally embedded in 101 universities that have signed the Race Equality Charter (REC) orchestrated by Advance HE, a charitable professional membership scheme which is ubiquitous (and unchallengedly so) in the HE sector. There are 86 REC award holders, including most universities in Britain, who are awarded bronze, silver or gold on the basis of demonstrating their commitment to racial equity.

The unassailable presupposition for such a scheme is that old chestnut that everything is racist, racism is everywhere, and it no longer means evidenced examples of discrimination or hatred but is rather a systemic and pervasive atmosphere from which no-one can escape. The REC is “underpinned by 5 Principles”, the first of which is that “Racism is an everyday facet of UK society and racial inequalities manifest themselves in everyday situations, processes and behaviours”. In light of this, you might ask, how could concerns be raised about Arday without those concerns manifesting racism?

Advance HE tells us that the “work to drive out racism in all its forms from our sector is imperative and incumbent on all of us”, whether it is “deliberate or unconscious”. This is interesting, given that a key element of any submission for a REC award will involve training in an ideological spaghetti plate of dubious notions like “unconscious bias” which would seem to forestall the awkwardly legal fact, pointed out by the Committee for Academic Freedom, that “latest OfS guidance on freedom of speech states that it is illegal for universities” to (as put by the OfS) “require training or induction that imposes a requirement to endorse any controversial viewpoint or value judgement”.

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Wonky Thinking

Bright Blue’s Working it Out recommends extending stronger employment support and financial protections to the self-employed, including ensuring they have better access to support when illness prevents them from working. The report contends that the current system too often writes people off, and recommends reducing barriers to employment while maintaining a strong safety net for those who cannot work.

The report unearths the key characteristics of the self-employed and benefits and disadvantages of self-employment in the UK. It finds that the self-employed, the number of which has been rising for decades, receive less income protections and enhancements than employees — but which are overwhelmingly paid for by employers in the case of employees — while paying substantially less in tax than employees on the same earnings.

The report argues that the current system taxes identical work at very different rates. An employee earning £39,000 sees £7,214 taken in National Insurance across employee and employer contributions. A self-employed person with £39,000 in profits pays £1,586. The gap costs the Exchequer £10.05 billion a year. Under Bright Blue’s proposal, employers’ National Insurance, currently 15% on earnings above £5,000, would be scrapped entirely, and employees’ Class 1 rates would be cut to match the lower Class 4 rates paid by the self-employed. Income Tax would rise to compensate. This would be done gradually. The self-employed would pay more tax overall but employees would pay no more tax and, under a model that achieves fiscal neutrality rather than revenue raising, employees would actually pay less tax overall.

This reform follows the direction set by the 2010 Mirrlees Review and by Tax Reforms for Growth (2025), which was signed by the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies, the IPPR and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation among others. The US, Canada and Germany already tax employment and self-employment equally.

The report is based on original nationally representative polling of 1,000 self-employed UK adults, two focus groups, cluster analysis of the polling data, an invite-only expert seminar and a series of bilateral consultations.

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Podcast of the Week

Jack Rankin MP and Michael Murphy discuss the current circumstances and future of the Conservative Party, with Rankin arguing that his becoming a Conservative Member of Parliament in 2024 can be likened to ‘buying low and selling high’.

OUTPOST

Can the Tories be saved?

Are rumours of the Tories’ demise greatly exaggerated? Jack Rankin, MP for Windsor, joins Michael Murphy to talk about the past, future and failings of the Tories. He argues that the Conservative Party has learnt the necessary lessons from its stunning defeat to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in 2024. Rankin, who won his seat during that election, arrived in Parliament at a seemingly inauspicious moment — yet he believes he bought low and is ready to sell high come the next general election…

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a month ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · Outpost and Michael Murphy

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Quick Links

Zuckerberg’s Meta handed $567m fine by state of New Mexico, USA.

Conservatives to end social housing provision for foreigners.

Trump turns to executive orders to limit birthright citizenship.

NHS downplays concerns over rise of cousin marriage in Britain.

Towering Columns

In The Telegraph, Kemi Badenoch says that our obsession with Net Zero is undermining our attempts to deal with climate change.

Climate change is real. We can see its effects all over the world, not least the current spate of heatwaves here in Britain. Conservatives have always understood that we have a duty to protect our natural inheritance. We should preserve our countryside, encourage biodiversity, invest in flood defences and ensure that Britain is resilient in the face of a changing climate.

The question isn’t whether we should act. The question is whether the policies imposed in the name of climate action are effective, affordable and honest. Too many people cannot tell the difference between talking about climate change and dealing with it. They have accepted that the Left’s chosen policies are the only practicable policies, and that anyone who questions them must secretly want the planet to burn. This is intellectually lazy. It’s also dangerous.

Net zero has become a slogan where Britain needs a plan. It allows politicians to announce a virtuous destination without explaining how we will reach it, what it will cost, who will pay, which industries will survive, or whether it will reduce global emissions at all.

For UnHerd, Mary Harrington argues that we must not over sentimentalise our history.

Periodically, when Elon Musk decides, in his wisdom, to intervene in British politics, he likes to imagine all of Britain and her inhabitants as basically hobbits: bucolic, small-minded denizens of rural Arcadia, desperately vulnerable to predators. But this is both wrong and unhelpful. Yes, Tolkien’s Shire is one of the most famous evocations of that pastoral idyll. But historically, Britons were the despoilers of the Shire as well as its hobbit inhabitants. The Romantic spirit of Wordsworth, and the Arts and Crafts movement led by John Ruskin, harked back to a mythic, rural deep England; meanwhile, technologists and visionaries in the real-world 19th-century Britain had little compunction about driving roads and railways through those fields of green in pursuit of “improvement”.

This people produced Cecil Rhodes as well as John Ruskin. They invented steam engines, sterilisation, and vaccination, not to mention a host of lethal weapons. They imposed law and order on Britain, routinely resorting to corporal punishment, hanging, or deportation. They did the same to a great many other geographies besides — some of which retain the bones of our common law to this day, even while agitating for reparations. Even education was delivered with unembarrassed, righteous ferocity: the tyrannical, pedantic Mr Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, vividly illustrates the methods used to impose knowledge and manners on the children of Victorian Britain.

By contrast, since the two wars Britain has seemed determined to hold fast to our legacy of wartime solidarity, order, and peace, built on those brusque Victorian foundations — only now, without ever needing to be tough. It’s as though we want Elon to be right; as if, were everyone only to play by the rules, all of England might be forever Arcadia. But instead, it’s allowed that culture of order and common purpose to soften, by degrees, to the point where its goods are rapidly evaporating. We congratulate ourselves on having abandoned “Gradgrindian” teaching, while teachers collapse under the stress of bad behaviour in the classrooms and kids learn nothing. Local policing is nonexistent. Rules are only for suckers. Our border enforcers hand out visa-sponsorship licences to vape shops, or Islamic centres allegedly linked to the Iranian state.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel writes that our lack of gas storage is putting our economic security at risk.

Here’s a peculiarity of British energy policy. Oil and gas each supply about a third of the country’s energy. In case of emergency, we keep on hand 90 days’ worth of oil imports. But for gas it’s different. For gas, we store enough to last just two to three days. Not weeks. Days. Germany can store 90 days’ gas; France, over 100; Italy, somewhere in between; and the Netherlands, about 60.

The discrepancy is a mystery until you realise that the International Energy Agency (IEA) mandates that its members keep 90-day oil stockpiles but says nothing about gas. And there is nothing the civil service reveres more than an edict from an international body, not even the duty to secure our most basic needs.

This ought to be a considerable source of worry. The Hormuz blockade is finally taking its toll and people have noticed that Europe’s gas stores are about half as full as usual for summer, creating the most precarious energy position since Putin cut us off. Come winter, we will be scrambling for supplies from a limited pool of tankers scanning the world for the best price. If Andy Burnham can think as far ahead as winter, he should be fretting about painful bills, for households and industry alike.

In The Spectator, Madeline Grant critiques progressives that hide behind generic statements about ‘hate’ rather than confronting radical ideologies.

Deep down, I suspect progressives know that they are imperilling their traditional voting coalitions. Their responses often reflect this. There is a particularly invidious form of weasel words which play minority rights against each other (something, ironically, which those in power routinely accuse the right of doing). Sadiq Khan reacted to the Berlin attack by saying that it showed ‘why Pride matters’. Actually, it shows why we need stronger immigration controls and a more intense and targeted deradicalisation strategy for young Muslim males.

Khan knows that, most gay people know that, anyone with half a brain knows that. So the reasons for putting out such a statement are necessarily political rather than providing a practical solution. Khan’s inference is obviously that all gay people should get behind the state-approved line that what’s needed is more public displays of diversity, not any action against the specific ideology which commits these crimes again and again.

It will keep happening, and progressive leaders will keep minimising the threat by labelling it ‘hate’. But hate isn’t generic. Hate is horribly targeted. These attacks don’t happen because of an impossible-to-define misanthropy, they happen because their perpetrators believe we should live in a caliphate and it is their duty to bring this about using violence. It’s important to keep pointing that out, even if our leaders refuse to do so.

For The Critic, James Hodgkinson says that we will come to regret the flight of millionaires from the country.

Our disdain for aspiration has made Britain a harder place to do business. And this malaise is reflected in our tax system. In a move that will cost businesses up to £25 billion a year, the Government hiked national insurance contributions and slashed the threshold at which they can be paid. Combined with minimum wage increases and cuts to capital allowances, margins are now heavily squeezed. Faced with this burden, it is unsurprising that businesses are buckling under the pressure. The rate of enterprise insolvency is 20 per cent higher than a decade ago, as entrepreneurs are forced to take ever-higher risks in pursuit of rapidly diminishing returns.

But domestic dynamism is not the only thing to suffer in modern Britain. The attack on Britain’s 200-year old non-dom scheme, commenced by the Conservatives and gleefully egged on by Labour has seen Britain’s attractiveness to overseas investment plummet. While the world’s increasingly mobile wealth creators simply move to a country that welcomes their contributions, it is the countries they leave which end up bearing the brunt. Research from the Adam Smith Institute estimates that the end of the non-dom regime will cost Britain £111 billion in lost investment, employment and consumption in the next decade alone. With unemployment at its highest rate in five years, this is something Britain can ill-afford. A policy enacted in pursuit of equity has had ramifications far beyond its original intentions. And it is ordinary Brits, not wealthy elites, who will shoulder the biggest burden.

Perhaps the most revealing choice this government has made is its decision to raise a levy on independent education. The pernicious policy taxed one thing: ambition. While the wealthiest families and the largest institutions will weather the storm, the story for small independents and working families who make true sacrifices to give their children the best start in life is quite different. Over 100 schools have closed, and the education of thousands of students has been disrupted. When a government discourages self-reliance and arbitrates its political grudges against children, it becomes clear that Britain’s aspirational élan is at breaking point.

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Wonky Thinking

The Prosperity Institute has published new research on energy transition and how we are building up huge costs through an excessive reliance on renewable energy which have large subsidies attached to them, undermining our future competitiveness and driving up bills.

Britain currently has the highest industrial electricity prices and the fourth-highest domestic electricity prices in Europe. While high gas prices contribute to wholesale costs, this paper argues that the dominant driver of elevated electricity bills is the cumulative impact of policies designed to accelerate renewables deployment and achieve Net Zero.

Electricity subsidies (Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs), Contracts for Difference (CfDs), Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs), and the Sizewell C Regulated Asset Base (RAB) levy) have risen from £0.5bn in 2010/11 to £11.8bn in 2024/25 and are forecast to reach £14.9bn by 2030/31. Grid integration costs—covering transmission network charges, balancing services, and the Capacity Market—have increased from £2.8bn to £8.0bn over the same period and are projected to rise sharply to £25.3bn by 2030/31. Combined, these subsidy and grid integration costs have grown six-fold since 2010/11 to £19.8bn in 2024/25 and are forecast to exceed £40bn annually by 2030/31. This will be equivalent to more than £1,400 per household.

Additional policy-driven costs from Carbon Capture and Storage (£21.7bn committed over 25 years), green hydrogen support (potentially £16bn over 15 years for the first two allocation rounds), the Green Gas Levy, and the Sustainable Aviation Fuel mandate will add further billions per year, largely recovered through energy bills or higher consumer prices.

The paper contends that these costs stem primarily from the large-scale integration of intermittent renewables (wind, solar, and biomass). Their full cost and intermittent nature make renewables uncompetitive in a free market, so they need to be subsidised. Their intermittency drives substantial additional expenditure on grid expansion, balancing services, curtailment payments, and backup capacity. In contrast, the direct fuel cost of gas-fired generation remains relatively modest by comparison.

Any incoming market-driven government committed to lowering energy prices and restoring national prosperity will need to treat these costs as a “Day One” matter and begin pursuing cuts immediately.

The Adam Smith Institute has published a paper on how we can support our fishing industry and prevent the loss of native species through strengthening property rights and encouraging greater transparency on the quota system.

• Britain’s fishermen work one of the country’s most dangerous and worst-paid trades, yet the stocks they depend on are being steadily depleted. These two realities should not be possible simultaneously. Britain regained control of her waters after Brexit, but we have failed to fundamentally change how they are managed. The Government has left both EU vessel access and the allocation and governance of fisheries access for British vessels substantially unreformed.

• Despite repeated aims to increase the sustainability of British fisheries, half of Britain’s ‘top 10’ fish species, selected primarily on the basis of landings, are either ‘overfished with critically low population sizes, currently being overexploited, or both’. According to one study, just two in ten of these total allowable catches were set in line with scientific advice.

• This failure is now reaching the supermarket shelf. In 2026, Waitrose became the first British supermarket to stop selling a fish species due to sustainability concerns. The British fishing fleet comprises 5,232 vessels. 79% of these are under 10 metre craft, although they account for just 8% of the fleet’s total capacity.

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Podcast of the Week

In this week’s Econoclasts podcast, Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau discuss how China’s financial repression is interacting with an asset bubble in the United States and the long term impact it could have on the global economy.

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BP plans to sell off its UK North Sea Oil business.

English cricket is thrown into turmoil by cheating at an amateur club.

The Spanish city of Ceuta is overwhelmed by 49,000 migrants enter in 24 hours.

Kazakhstan has suspended oil flows via pipeline that shifts around 80% of Central Asia’s oil to Western markets.

Anthropic’s AI model escaped and hacked three businesses under its own direction.

Towering Columns

For The Telegraph, Robert Tombs says that we have an unpatriotic establishment that is unwilling to put the national interest first.

A large section of the establishment appears not to put the national interest first. They seem not to have – as the Victorians would have put it – “a stake in the country”. Their priorities are not those of most voters. They have been moulded by globalisation, multiculturalism and postmodernism. National pride and “populism” are their enemies. Net-zero, mass immigration, and the Chagos Islands project are the fatal flowering of their mentality.

Every establishment eventually fails and falls, and we may be nearing that point now. Certainly there will be a fight, as always. That is what the “culture wars” are about. I hope readers will not mind my referring, not for the first time, to George Orwell’s essay of 1941, when he wrote that England was like “a family with the wrong members in control”. Orwell could then be confident that the strength of traditional loyalties was “vast” compared with new loyalties. We shall find out over the next few years whether that is still true.

Are we still a family, and are those in control still members of it? That depends whether we can change our present establishment, or whether it will succeed in changing us.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel warns that the government has politicised the energy grid putting our energy supply at risk.

Then again, under Ed Miliband’s plans, wind and solar are meant to account for well over half of power generation by 2030, like in Spain. And there are those whistleblowers. They have made three claims, according to Coutinho. First, the grid wasn’t managed correctly during the June heatwave; second, records about its operation are being kept in live documents that get edited without a record, so you wouldn’t necessarily be able to reconstruct what happened (or released it under FoI) if something did go wrong; and third, the body’s lobbyists are meddling in its operations to protect its reputation.

The grid operator is supposedly independent, though it was nationalised by Labour 18 months ago. But even before that, energy experts noticed that its forecasts about the cost and design of the net-zero grid seemed to be rather more supportive of the government than others are. For example, whereas Neso suggests the cost of a “clean power” system might be £200 billion over five years, the Royal Society estimates a true “clean power” system could cost up to £400 billion, without including full grid upgrades. That’s to cover things like cabling, transformers, redundancy, energy storage, AI power management systems, cyber-defences and so on.

It is obvious why a government committed to the notion that net zero is “the cheap way to go” (Miliband’s words) would want to gloss over these costs. But the Iberian blackout shows what happens when you go too fast and cut corners. Ministers, officials, Ofgem, Neso: they’ve all been warned. Political power is a nice thing, but electric power is governed only and always by the laws of physics.

For The Telegraph, Julian Jessop says that the case for wealth taxes simply does not stack up.

The UK already raises more from wealth-related taxes than any other OECD economy. There is overwhelming evidence that higher taxes on wealth are anti-growth and that they could even reduce government revenues. There are good reasons why so many other countries have abandoned them.

Mercifully, we may now be at “peak Gary”. Stevenson’s documentary has been widely panned, and he has hinted that he is done. But other social media influencers will surely emerge to fill the gap.

There is an unhealthy appetite for this sort of slop. Many polls suggests that a “wealth tax” would be popular, even when voters are faced with the reality that it is unlikely to raise any money. Other “bash the rich” policies are similarly popular, including caps on executive pay and the equalisation of capital gains and income tax. Sadly, it is much easier to look for villains to blame than it is to do the hard work to understand the real problems – and how to fix them.

In The Critic, Dominic Adler writes that the government’s policing reforms will encourage social work over public safety.

Labour is instinctively drawn to bringing police into local authority orbit — in which they traditionally have considerable power. In fact, Mahmood’s policing reforms remind me of Labour’s devolution experiment. Given their dominance of big-city local government, as they once enjoyed parliamentary seats in the Celtic fringe, Labour once gambled on devolution delivering a cunning form of eternal control. How did that work out? The SNP’s legacy of censoriousness, cancelled ferries, men in prisons and dodgy camper vans speaks for itself…

As evidence of working inside local government became a sure-fire route to promotion, did officers develop the same Guardianista groupthink as their town hall colleagues? Of course they did. Now, a cohort of senior coppers possesses identikit progressive views. At this point, Robert Conquest’s second law of politics seems apposite. The apogee of such systems failure was the rape gangs scandal and the West Midlands Police / Maccabi Tel Aviv affair. Both represent police forces effectively colluding with rotten boroughs, either ordered or influenced by local councillors. Imagine, under Mahmood’s new policing model, micro-police forces in bed with Green or “Gaza Independent” led authorities?

This is the model Mahmood, knowingly or not, is proposing. Mandarins and spads, wedded a social work policing model, seem ignorant of the second-order effects their plans will create. Then again, so what? Responsibility is, as ever, diffused. As for the lowly coppers tasked with delivering the impossible, such as delivering quality neighbourhood policing on shoestring budgets? They’re out of mind and sight, many miles from Marsham Street. And as for George Dixon? I doubt the Eighties-born Shabana Mahmood is aware of his fate. In The Blue Lamp, the film in which Pc Dixon originally appeared, the wise old copper was shot dead by a petty criminal. Even the BBC series, like the Home Office White Paper, is based on a ghostly policeman-who-never-was.

For The Telegraph, Guy Dampier says that reversing proposed reforms to indefinite leave to remain will simply force more draconian measures later.

Estimates suggest that in the next few years, around 1.6 million migrants could be eligible for indefinite leave to remain, as permanent residency is known. That will allow them access to public funds, like benefits and pensions. Most are low skilled and low paid, something which prior evidence shows is unlikely to change. Therefore, although predictions vary, they will end up costing the taxpayer billions over the course of their lifetimes. To tackle that, Labour is planning to shift the number of years of residency required to apply for permanent residency from five years to 10. Unspoken, is the hope that this shift will lead to their visas ending and these migrants choosing to go home…

Burnham knows that the British public remain furious about immigration. Although the number of illegal migrants has dropped this year, in no small part because tougher rules in Europe mean that fewer reach the French coast to begin with, there is still a huge backlog of asylum claims and asylum seekers in accommodation.

Similarly, legal immigration has dropped, but the gross number remains high, with more than 750,000 people coming to Britain one way or another. Pro-migration advocates want to argue that lower net migration means that there is no issue, but that misunderstands how immigration works. Even if flows have reduced, the stock of migrants who came here in the last few years is still very high. Only several years of low migration will reduce that.

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Wonky Thinking

New analysis from the Centre for Policy Studies on the impact of increasing capital gains tax (CGT) has found that increasing the rate of CGT would reduce revenue rather than increase it, costing the Exchequer billions of pounds. Their research found that:

• Hiking the higher rate of CGT by 10 points, according to official estimates, would lower revenue by £3.6 billion after three years. This is supported by other studies into real-world increases in CGT in other countries.

• CGT is also overwhelmingly paid by a very few people: just 32,000 taxpayers account for 80% of CGT payments. This means that it is particularly vulnerable to those people deciding to leave the country.

• There are more sensible proposals on the table for reforming CGT rather than purely raising it, not least by only taxing gains above inflation, or a given rate of return. But these would make the tax even more dependent on proceeds from a few wealthy individuals.

• Even if the Treasury’s estimates are wrong, CGT is a relatively minor tax – raising just £24 billion, or 2% of all revenue – so there is little prospect of generating enough revenue from it to fill the holes in the Government’s balance sheet.

New research from the Centre for Social Justice has found that those British boys that do not follow the ‘Success Sequence’ (finishing education, getting a full-time job, getting married, and having children) are likely to suffer from financial and personal insecurity.

Their data has found that amongst British 28-34-year-olds, 87 per cent of those who completed education, entered employment and then got married were in the middle or top third of the household income distribution, almost identical to the US figures. Additional polling of over 2000 people, commissioned for this report, showed a similar result. It found that for men who followed the Success Sequence, 69 per cent described themselves as on stable financial footing versus just 28 per cent for those with no coherent sequence. The report says that we need to do more to promote the ‘Success Sequence’:

In essence, the Success Sequence is about giving boys and young men a positive social script. Boys need fewer lectures about restrictive behaviour and negative masculinity, and more guidance about what a good and stable life could look like. The sequence is also incredibly appealing because it is grounded in data. It gives boys a vision of what their future could look like and how they can achieve it, with the importance of work and stable relationships embedded within it.

We do not claim that this is a panacea to boys’ woes, or the only way to cultivate ‘positive masculinity’. But it is a start. We urge others who share our aim – those longing to help boys thrive – to either get behind this or offer a viable alternative: something that offers boys hope, guidance, and purpose. The gauntlet has been thrown.

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Podcast of the Week

As the country prepares for a change in Prime Minister, on The Politics Show, The New Statesman’s Editor Tom McTague and Political Editor, Ailbhe Rea, discuss what the future may hold for the government and the critical battle for who will control the country’s economic policy: Shabana Mahmood or Ed Miliband.

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A PhD student was frozen out of university for introducing Roger Scruton into a seminar.

Our trade deficit increased by £5.2bn in the first quarter of 2026.

The IMF warns the UK to be ‘very selective’ about any new spending.

Communist China attacks the government for nationalising British Steel.

Japan relaxes the imperial succession rule but still prevents women from becoming Emperor.

The High Court has overturned Natural England’s crackdown on pheasant shooting.

Every region outside the South England operates Greek-crisis levels of fiscal deficits.

Towering Columns

As a former Member of Parliament for Clacton, Douglas Carswell writes in The Telegraph about the potential risks of the Clacton by-election for Farage.

When I ran in Clacton, I sent a personal letter to every household in the constituency, in my own words, explaining why, having switched parties, I wanted to give local people the final say. Farage should do the same – and do it with humility, as a man placing his fate entirely in his constituents’ hands.

Do you remember William Joynson-Hicks? Me neither. But he was the chap who defeated Winston Churchill at the Manchester North West by-election in 1908.

Nigel should avoid going Churchillian in Clacton. Rather than make this about the big things – immigration, the state of the nation – he should go local. During my by-election I baffled Farage’s own team by running leaflets that were all about GP appointments. But as I learned off Lynton Crosby, the great election strategist, it is only by talking about those bread-and-butter matters that you earn the right to be heard on the macro stuff at all.

Reform – like its precursor party Ukip – has a notoriously poor record at actually winning by-elections. I suspect that is because so many have failed to learn the first lesson in politics: learn how to count. I won Clacton on the back of a first-class analysis, division by division, of exactly where our supporters were, and then spent most of the campaign mobilising them. The mantra I drilled into my team was simple: whoever wins in Holland-on-Sea, the Clacton suburb, wins the seat. If Nigel’s team lacks the data to do what I did, that is where he should throw every effort.

In The Times, Munira Mirza argues that engendering patriotism among Britain’s youth will require putting them first alongside restoring prosperity.

Another problem is the sense of unfairness, made worse by scarcity and lack of growth. Andy Burnham has learnt to speak the language of fairness fluently by focusing on the north-south divide.

He articulates the resentment of much of the country, which often feels left behind by London’s success. He also deserves credit for helping to revive Manchester by rebuilding transport and housing and tying it to civic pride.

But to restore solidarity the new government will need to tackle other unfairnesses that impose costs and burdens on British citizens. For example, making cheap, abundant energy the goal rather than asking households and businesses to altruistically pay the costs of tackling global climate change.

Prioritising the welfare of those who live and contribute in the UK over those who have recently arrived or want to come here. Helping young British entrepreneurs grow their businesses rather than be forced to leave because they face costs that multinationals can absorb. Making sure we capture some of the value of AI rather than become entirely dependent on the US. Giving parliament the power to decide who gives away our territory, not international courts.

Writing for The Critic, Matthew Bowles outlines just how little headroom Andy Burnham will have to pursue a soft-left economic agenda.

Economic growth has been stagnant for more than a decade, and productivity has remained stubbornly weak, especially in the public sector. The tax burden is on course to reach levels never previously sustained in peacetime. The Labour Party, in its 2024 election manifesto, pledged not to increase the three main revenue-generating taxes for “working people”: Income Tax (basic, higher, and additional rates), National Insurance and VAT. Despite Reeves fiddling this pledge via threshold freezes, if Burnham stands by his party’s manifesto, the room for manoeuvre is remarkably tight.

The consequence is that many of the policies instinctively associated with the Labour left have become extraordinarily difficult to deliver. Speedy nationalisation would require compensation running into the tens of billions, and even if the plan was to pursue nationalisation by the expiration of contracts, as with the railways, then costs quickly mount in the long-term. Large increases in day-to-day spending will sit uneasily alongside Labour’s own fiscal rules and attempting to borrow on a significant scale would likely invite the sort of market reaction that brought Liz Truss’s premiership to a predictably abrupt conclusion.

That fiscal reality does not eliminate Labour’s instinct to meddle in the economy. It merely changes the form that intervention could take. If the state is too cash-strapped to own industries outright, a Burnham government could seek to influence where private capital is invested instead.

In The Telegraph, David Frost argues that in calling for a by-election in Clacton, Farage has given himself an opportunity to retake the national spotlight.

It must, in effect, be another national by-election like Makerfield, with voters asked to remember that they are giving a signal about the future of the country.

I know the professional political class in Westminster will find this hard to understand. They just do not get how a good part of the country – and let us not forget, a majority of voters on the Right – sees Reform. Westminster can’t really compute a party that is playing by different rules and appealing to voters in novel ways. They think in the end that seemingly serious people following their tried and tested rules will win through. I’m not convinced any more. More and more Britons don’t care about process. They just want results.

The opportunity for Farage now, even if the by-election is effectively sabotaged by the other parties, is to position himself clearly as the leader of the change vote, and make it unambiguously clear that the other parties are simply frightened to have an argument about policy and only want to play political games.

Get this right and it could give Reform a top-up of the political rocket fuel that has been visibly lacking in recent months. Of course, get it wrong and they are back at square one. So they have to make the arguments national, and make this a Midlothian campaign for the 21st century. If anyone can do it, Nigel Farage can.

In Conservative Home, Max Thompson highlights Labour’s growing tendency towards authoritarianism when it comes to online activities.

It is also curious that Nandy was free to leave the platform at all, given that her Cabinet colleague Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, indicated earlier this year that she would consider banning British citizens from accessing X altogether — a platform that has drawn both applause and criticism for its championing of free speech under Elon Musk’s ownership.

If Nandy was genuinely concerned about the spread of misinformation and disinformation on X, her departure looks less like principled protest than an abdication of duty. She should have stayed and engaged in the debate. More conversation, not less, is the antidote to disinformation online. Instead, she has vacated the stage.

What should concern us all is Nandy’s proximity to her constituency neighbour, the self-styled “King of the North” and our next Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. Should Nandy remain in Cabinet, she will be the minister tasked with carrying out the wishes of Andy Burnham — and Love Actually‘s Hugh Grant — which is, of course, bringing the free British press under increased state regulation.

Writing for The Critic, Mike Jones argues that New Labour may have breathed its last breath with the end of Keir Starmer’s premiership.

The New Labour era did not end when Gordon Brown lost to David Cameron in 2010. Cameron proved remarkably effective at keeping much of the settlement alive. Nor did it end during the long years of Tory rule that followed. It ended with Keir Starmer.

After fourteen years of Conservative failure, voters were desperate for something different. Instead, they got the last exhausted incarnation of a political project that had already run out of steam.

That is why Starmer matters. His premiership was not merely another government that failed. It was the government that finally broke the spell of Messrs. Blair and Brown. What comes next, however, may be even more unsettling. Keir Starmer may have buried New Labour. But Andy Burnham could yet bury what remains of the country.

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Wonky Thinking

Prosperity has published new research arguing that Britain is experiencing a free speech recession, driven by the expansion of criminal and civil restrictions on lawful expression. The report proposes a new Free Speech Act that would repeal a range of existing speech offences, replace overlapping communications laws with a narrower offence targeting intentionally menacing and targeted communications, strengthen legal protections for free speech in the workplace, and introduce cost protections to make it easier for individuals to challenge infringements of their free speech rights.

By the twenty-first century social media had given everyone a voice that could be heard beyond the citizen’s family and friends. This should have been viewed as an opportunity to engage the public in a free and wide debate on anything political. Instead, the state, drawing on ground prepared in 1965 and 1986, sought to restrict public debate with criminal laws that inappropriately targeted three types of speech:

• General speech: defined as speech that is not sent via a medium (electronic or traditional) is speech that a potential listener can usually avoid. Its curtailment should be limited to that which is either intended to, or might reasonably be expected to, provoke violence. Yet, since the passage of the Public Order Act 1986 the threshold for curtailing general speech has been too low, as section 5 criminalises speech that may cause harassment, alarm, or distress. It needs to be repealed.

• Communications speech: defined as speech sent via a medium (electronic or traditional) is speech that a potential listener cannot usually avoid. It should only be outlawed if it is either intended to be, or might reasonably be expected to be, menacing and targeted. This principle requires three existing offences to be repealed (under the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003, and the Online Safety Act 2023) and replaced with one offence of communication that is intentionally menacing and targeted.

• Hate speech: defined as political speech that the state has decided to criminalise. Hate speech laws have no place in a democracy, where undesirable political views should be defeated with better ones. Accordingly, all hate speech laws need to be repealed.

With laws that inappropriately criminalise speech, Parliament has engendered a cultural norm that those who express the “wrong” views may be imprisoned or visited with punishments in the workplace and beyond. Underpinned by bad criminal laws, the nation’s civil laws have proven inadequate to protect citizens from what has become known as “cancel culture”.

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On The Spectator podcast, Michael Simmons and Joanna Marchong discuss a report which states that White working-class students are being failed by Britain’s education system. They also discuss the private school VAT charge brought on by this Labour government.

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Dale Vince offers to fund ‘Count Binface’ for Clacton by-election

Ann Widdecombe found dead in suspected murder (rest in peace)

‘Addicting’ algorithms prompt EU to threaten action against Meta

Police released Algerian found guilty of attempted rape

Bank of England warn interest rates may rise

Towering Columns

In The New Statesman, Andrew O’Brien writes that devolution is the sign that Westminster and Whitehall have given up on governing.

The truth is that Westminster and Whitehall have experienced a crisis in confidence. The destructive forces they unleashed to create a “dynamic”, global, service-based economy have deindustrialised and demoralised communities across the United Kingdom through a lack of support for industry and underinvesting in infrastructure. These forces have already seen Scotland and Wales turn their back on the metropole. Now the same forces are ripping through England, particularly the North, creating a new revolt against the centre. Instead of confronting this challenge and forging a new political economy, Westminster has convinced itself that the solution is to give up. Worse, in many cases the plan is to continue the failed economic policies of the past several decades but push political responsibility down to a regional level, in the hope that this will spare the centre from relentless criticism…

If London, with all its agglomerative power, could not withstand the impact of the financial crisis and generate momentum for a recovery, how is the North East supposed to overcome decades of deindustrialisation? How will providing control over 2p of income tax help the Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority save the region’s steel industry or set up new industrial clusters? Even the federalised and much vaunted German states with their Mittelstand of specialised manufacturing businesses are struggling to resist Chinese overproduction.

In many ways devolution is a strategy for yesterday’s economy, an economy that benefited from a stable global order, a temporary boom in financial services and relatively free trade. Ironically, the same was true for the “golden age” of Victorian municipalism in the mid-19th century. However, in the world of cutthroat great power competition and a battle for production, devolution is irrelevant.

For The Telegraph, Ben Houchen says that Burnham will fail if he tries to govern the country like a Mayor.

But the Burnham story has a structural flaw that his admirers have never properly examined. He has governed, for nearly a decade, in a role that is built to shield you from the hardest decisions in public life. I know that, because I’m a regional mayor too. We control devolved budgets for transport, skills and economic development. We attract investment, announce funds and champion our places on the national stage. We rarely make the calls that lose you friends, crater your poll ratings and keep you awake wondering whether history will forgive you. We don’t control welfare, set tax rates or face the bond markets when a fiscal commitment unravels. The architecture of the role keeps you, by design, once removed from the genuine brutality of true governing.

Burnham has exploited that reality brilliantly. We saw it during the Covid pandemic, when all he had to do was criticise the Government – and there was no shortage of material. His mayoralty has become the politics of perpetual announcement: new funds, new projects, new ambitions, all received with something approaching reverence in Greater Manchester. He even held formal responsibility for the region’s police force – one of the largest in the country – while delegating operational oversight to his deputy mayor.

The difficult calls, in other words, were managed away. And for nearly a decade he inhabited a political environment in which the answer to most problems was bashing Westminster, a new fund, and another platform appearance at which people cheered. That environment has no equivalence in Downing Street, and the habits it breeds are precisely the wrong ones for the job he is about to take on.

For The Times, William Hague argues that decentralisation is no substitute for taking tough decisions on the economy.

The new PM will need an iron chancellor to cut welfare spending and central government departments, without increasing tax burdens, if local power is to stand a chance of success. He should make his choice with that in mind, quietly and ruthlessly. At the moment, leaks and rumours about who is in the running risk leading to a power struggle over the job that will make it harder to choose the right person.

The second and perhaps greatest challenge is that the technological revolution sweeping the world threatens to swamp all these hopes and good intentions. Burnham recognised the pressing need for government procurement to support innovative UK businesses. But the “reindustrialisation” he advocates will happen only if we are at the forefront of robotics and entirely new manufacturing techniques. The jobs for young people will only be there if we are home to digital industries. Rewiring the British state for both the opportunities and dangers of AI is the most vital rewiring of all. Yet AI did not feature in this defining speech. The political, ethical and economic issues it raises will insert themselves into every hour of his premiership.

After this speech, the hope that Andy Burnham is trying to offer is clear enough. Devolution of power is his central mission. He should add financial discipline and rapid adaptation to new technology as equally vital missions. If not, they will overwhelm him.

In The Spectator,Stephen Daisley says that we need to learn from the failure of devolution to stop the decline of Scotland and Wales.

Indeed, Burnham has already let it be known what he thinks of the efficacy critique of devolution: in Scotland and Wales, he is proposing to devolve more powers to local authorities, rather than Edinburgh and Cardiff, because ‘the people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster’.

To anyone else, this would be an indicator that something had gone wrong; to the devolutionist, every failing of devolution is proof that more devolution is needed.

A truly radical government would accept that the devolution experiment has failed and resolve to reverse course rather than allow this constitutional malady to fester further. Saving Britain from national decline will require a national government, made up of men and women of ability, united around a common purpose, not the fractured nation-state Britain has devolved into, with power fragmented across rival seats of political authority which share no vision for the future. Why does Andy Burnham want to be prime minister if he would rather give power away than use it?

For The Critic, Charlie Napier warns against the condescending ‘Northernism’ that sees the North of England as different to the rest of the country.

The Burnham phenomenon is the most extreme example of Northern memetic power yet; it also reveals the more condescending side of Westminster’s obsession with the place. Burnham has the right accent. He “talks like a normal person” and so seems like he “gets it”. He was successful in Manchester because he threw lots of taxpayer money (mostly from the South) at showy infrastructure projects. He is, for the Labour Party, the perfect candidate — he can win over the North, without actually having to deal with the grievances of those who live there. But the lazy Westminster fixation on this imagined “North” is profoundly unhelpful. It starts from the wrong place, and reaches the wrong conclusions.

For a start, the North of England is a fairly diverse place, with varied economic interests and cultural orientations. The Irish Catholic, working class cities of Liverpool and Manchester are quite different to the uplands of North Yorkshire, and both are quite different to leafy Cheshire. Many in Newcastle wouldn’t even consider Manchester to be part of the north, being some three hours away by road; for those on the banks of the Tyne, Edinburgh is physically closer. But, more importantly, the North is just not that different from the rest of the country, and certainly not as far as politics is concerned.

When asked whether immigration has been too high over the last decade, 72 per cent of people in the North say that it has been according to YouGov’s latest tracker. But, 73 per cent of people in the non-London South, and the same number in the Midlands, agree with them. 73 per cent of people in the North say that the Government is handling the economy badly — the exact same proportion as in the non-London South.

The average salary in the North West is higher than that in the South West. The North East may have the lowest salaries in the country, but it isn’t much behind the East Midlands. According to the ONS, a town like Blackpool, where 35 percent of people are “deprived” in one way or another, is doing better than many coastal communities in the South — places like Torbay, Gosport, Thanet, and Clacton.

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Wonky Thinking

Onward has launched new research on how to get London building housing again. The report identifies three areas for new mayoral development corporations including Southern Tower Hamlets, Old Kent Road and Park Royal which could add nearly 500,000 additional homes, as well as estate regeneration to double the density of London’s low-rise post-war council estates that can add hundreds of thousands of new properties. The report also proposes:

• Give homeowners greater choice over their properties, permitted development rights should be expanded to allow for full-size loft and rear extensions. Local authorities should create design guides for acceptable extensions within conservation areas. The Housing Secretary should also issue a statutory National Development Management Policy to create a national ‘yes unless’ route for household extensions that require a planning application, and should pass the necessary secondary legislation to implement ‘street votes’.

• The conversion of existing commercial properties into homes should be made easier through the removal of regulations that prevent conversions, stricter limits on councils creating Article 4 directions that stop easy conversions, and the introduction of a statutory National Development Management Policy that explicitly encourages conversions and bans councils from introducing onerous barriers.

• Around £18bn a year is spent subsidising people to live in London via the benefits system. This distorts the housing market and favours people who are out of work over working Londoners – at the taxpayer’s expense. We need to end absurdities like million-pound council homes and encourage more win-win transactions. The Housing Secretary should use existing powers to encourage councils to sell off expensive social housing when it becomes vacant, with the proceeds used to fund the construction of more homes. There should be a national cap on housing benefit and the Universal Credit housing component set at the median national rent for each house size for future claims. Finally, we should revive and improve the Right to Buy and expand it by including housing association properties.

On his Substack, Neil O’Brien lays out the options for tax rises under Andy Burnham. Compared to the last Conservative Budget, spending will be £152 billion higher in 2028/29 and taxes will be £105 billion higher and borrowing will be £47 billion higher. To make the numbers add up, Labour will likely raise taxes and Neil looks at five potential tax areas, including a new land and property value tax:

Burnham criticised the current council tax system and called for a land tax. In his leadership launch speech he said: “It’s a highly regressive tax, and I think it’s not justifiable based on those 1991 valuations. I see a big case for land and property and business taxation to be changed”

Specifically, he signed up to support the ‘Fairer Share, The Proportional Property Tax’ campaign. The proposed tax is a ‘flat rate of 0.48 per cent on the current value of your property’. In the version the “Fairer Share” campaign advocates, the government would use this money to scrap Council Tax and Stamp Duty, and the whole thing would even out. But Burnham needs tax revenues, and it is particularly hard to see him copying Kemi Badenoch’s commitment to abolish Stamp Duty. So he might focus on just the property tax element: the takeaway part without the give-back part.

A 0.48 per cent annual property tax would raise about £44 billion³. Council taxes across the UK raise about £50 billion. So Burnham could do the property tax bit, cut council tax a lot (perhaps abolish it for lower bands) and still raise some money overall.

The argument against this is that you would have a massive and very visible new tax on people, potentially on top of Council Tax. The proposal is basically the old domestic “Rates”. Though no-one now remembers it now (because of the Poll Tax disaster) the old “Rates” were very unpopular. In particular they hit older people who wanted to stay put in areas that had become more expensive over time⁴. Even a shift from council tax to rates would create huge redistribution, with some really massive losers in areas with expensive property. This would be a sort of “core vote” strategy, except that it would also wallop the seats Labour hold in London…

Conclusion

I have already met a couple of people who are changing their plans because of this tax speculation. Either trying to dispose of assets before a CGT hike, or thinking about where to locate business.

Burnham needs to realise that tax speculation is itself damaging - as Reeves’ experience last year showed. The UK economy is really limping along already, and youth unemployment has gone from being lower than the eurozone to higher under Labour.

I obviously think that we need to cut spending and cut tax and get the economy moving.

But if Burnham is going to raise our taxes even more (please don’t) then he should make up his mind fast and end the damaging speculation. But what are the chances of that? Anyone’s guess…

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Podcast of the Week

On his podcast this week, Economist Professor Dieter Helm looks at the nationalisation debate. Using buses, rail, water and electricity as examples, he argues that public ownership and public control are not the same thing, and that different sectors require different models of organisation, regulation and investment. While the nationalisation debate is useful, Helm says that we need move beyond rhetoric towards detailed questions about ownership, regulation, incentives and the proper role of the state.

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Quick Links

Spain’s immigration amnesty has drawn 1.2m applications, more than twice what was expected.

The NHS is going to provide shopping vouchers for people that walk 20 minutes a day.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has quit the X social media platform.

House prices have fallen again in June.

The government is rumoured to be cancelling its contract with Palantir for the NHS.

OpenAI is considering giving the US Government a 5% stake in the business.

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel argues Burnham’s philosophy of ‘Manchesterism’ risks ending up a vague political slogan unless backed by clear strategy.

With leadership fever gripping left-wing policy circles, however, this rather tedious, technical, business-friendly blueprint has become something different. A paper by two Burnham allies published by Mainstream, a Burnham-supporting group, makes some pretty wild claims for Manchesterism. It is, according to Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, “the practical proof of concept for the Productive State”, which shows why we should embrace “public control of essentials” such as “water and sewerage, energy networks and rail infrastructure, alongside social housing and social care”. Manchester doesn’t have public control of any of these sectors, but let’s not dwell on that.

Let’s assume they just mean that the buses show how the power sector could be run. The main argument is that when such assets are controlled privately, they are optimised for profit, but when they are controlled by the state they “align price with social and economic need”. This means that in “essential” sectors, public companies will always invest more productively than private ones. Well, that does happen sometimes. But at other times, state-owned companies are a complete disaster. How do you avoid the many duds?

To the extent that the report provides an answer, it’s to suggest that public corporations should be “insulated” from “Treasury pressure” and “ministerial direction” — but that they will be well run if they are accountable to “communities” and have “workers on boards”. These are ideas the managers of genuinely well-run public corporations, like Korea’s Kepco or the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, don’t seem to be especially interested in. As for what might go wrong, the words “trade union” oddly make no appearance. Neither, in the treatment of energy costs, does “net zero” get a look-in.

Writing for The Telegraph, Tom Tugendhat highlights the dangerous utopianism of Ed Miliband’s Net Zero ideology.

This socialist vision of utopia exists nowhere. Norway taps the gas fields we share and sells us the energy, and China builds new coal-fired power plants to help make the steel we’ve effectively forbidden to reduce carbon outputs.

Our real emissions have barely moved, they’ve just moved abroad. Poor Ed, he missed the economics lesson that, while taxes are territorial, carbon is global; so we’re paying with our jobs for higher carbon outputs from dirtier industries with lower employment standards overseas. I’m not sure he’s thought this through.Ed is still singing the Internationale, but all we can hear is Stalin’s “socialism in one country”. And it will fail again. You can’t separate economics from physics in just one country.

It is virtue by vice, squeezing the hope out of the economy with a policy based on all sacrifice and no salvation. The deeper tragedy is that he seems to believe the cold is good for us. Wear the hair shirt, he promises, and your sins are forgiven.

But now is our moment of greatest danger. With Sir Keir Starmer gone, Our Andy, the newly elected Mr Burnham, may offer Miliband an even plummer job as the price of his backing. Burnham may think it’s a price worth paying, but we can’t afford it.

Burnham is reported to have cooled on Miliband as a potential chancellor. Let’s hope that’s right. Otherwise, the man who froze our energy policy in the death zone would do the same to the whole economy. We can reverse the energy austerity with abundance, but we’d be left cleaning up Ed’s fiscal incontinence for generations. If Miliband became chancellor, we would all pay and our children would be left with the mess.

In The Telegraph, Fred de Fossard examines how harsh EU tech regulations should make Britons wary of arguments to rejoin the bloc.

While Europe tries to find ways to wean itself off its reliance on US tech giants, it should ask itself a few questions. First: what services do tech companies offer which European citizens enjoy using, and should they be prevented from doing so? For example, EU digital regulations have reduced the integration of services such as Google Maps and Google Flights creating a less seamless experience for many users.

Second: why are investors and entrepreneurs wary about building their own tech companies in Europe and wrestling with EU regulations? The EU’s economic model is failing. Mario Draghi, former European Central Bank president wrote a damning report on the EU’s economic competitiveness in 2024, warning that regulatory burdens were contributing to the relocation of businesses away from Europe. To date, the EU has done little to change course.

Third, in a world where concerns about political censorship have become a major point of diplomatic tension, with the US showing a renewed emphasis on defending values such as freedom of expression in allied countries not seen since the Cold War, is the online suppression of contentious or controversial speech worth the political risk?

These questions cut to the heart of the issue: consumer welfare, economic competitiveness and civilisational vitality. This should be a warning to anyone in Britain about the reality of the EU in 2026. One hopes the bloc might wake itself from its regulatory slumber and embrace innovation, free speech and the rule of law, but that seems a long way off.

In Conservative Home, Lee Rotherham argues that current estimates for shortfalls in defence spending are likely to be extremely conservative.

£70.3 billion is not the figure that’s needed to properly overmatch the adversary and have a good chance of winning the conflict from the off. Nor does it address enduring issues around long term procurement which will have to wait for another paper; nor obviously cover decision-making processes within Whitehall comitology which merely push problems round in circles; nor consider any of the optionals beyond the critical shortfalls that still add real value. I do make a couple of exceptions relating to defence diplomacy and strategic influencing that can help plug some gaps immediately while the ordered kit comes online. But overwhelmingly this is not a fancy Christmas wish list but rather a desert survival packing list.

In our paper we consider the five great and terrible scenarios of our times: Homeland Defence; East of Suez; South of Suez, the Russian threat; and the China menace. The relative importance of these areas for the nation today, and the role the UK would play as these scenarios develop, can and does need to be a matter of political and considerably wider social debate. Acknowledging them to be interconnected does though allow us to tease out which assets are already overcommitted. As the Defence Select Committee has itself noted, in a conflict a given platform can only be in one place at one time, even when it is multi-roled across just the single theatre as opposed to five.

From missile defence and deterrence to plugging the surface fleet shortfall; from cyber defence to Field Army having some actual field artillery to support it; from minesweepers to regenerating a functional expeditionary capability; these are the astonishing gaps that we now need to fill. The details in the paper are for budget managers and strategic analysts to argue over. What’s needed immediately though is the admission that the £28 billion assessed shortfall that got leaked by an MoD insider is only the politest of British understatements in terms of where we need to be at. Because right now we are in a world where General Sanders, the former Chief of the General Staff, as recently as last year said the UK needed to accept that war with Putin by 2030 was a “realistic possibility”.

That, in official MoD parlance, puts war with Russia in the 40-50 per cent probability range. Perhaps more people in charge of budgets should be aware of the stakes now in play.

Robert Jenrick writes for The Telegraph about the prospect of the next Chancellor of the Exchequer being even more radical than Rachel Reeves.

For whatever Reeves was, her successor is likely to be worse. In a sense, I’m not as worried about who Andy Burnham appoints to replace her. Though I confess I would relish the prospect of shadowing Ed Miliband. The (yet further) damage which I expect is about to be inflicted upon us is a consequence not of personality, but psephology.

The next chancellor will be whoever Burnham needs to hold his coalition together, and that coalition means satisfying his Labour members and the band of Green campaigners to their Left. It all points one way: tax more, spend more, borrow more.

Reeves at least pretended to believe in fiscal rules. Burnham recently admitted he didn’t even know what they are and his allies are demanding he loosens them once again. It would be an extraordinary gamble.

We already carry the highest borrowing costs in the G7 and the heaviest tax burden since the war. There is no headroom left that Reeves has not already spent. Reeves might have laden the camel, but Burnham is gambling on piling on more.

To my mind, a decision that big requires a new mandate, only possible by calling a general election.

Burnham will be risking it all without a mandate, and will be implementing a programme that no manifesto contained. In truth, I’m surprised that Reform is the only party calling for the public to get a say on this with a general election.

Because the decision to borrow and tax even more will make the next chancellor far more consequential than Reeves.

In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith looks into why Keir Starmer’s popularity plummeted so dramatically from the point at which he was elected.

Starmer believed in the system. He also believed in the people who had been favoured by the system. It should have been obvious to all sentient observers that giving Peter Mandelson a significant position would be catastrophic. His deep connections to Jeffrey Epstein were hardly the stuff of obscure conspiratorialism. They had been reported on by the Guardian. But while outsiders, like Jeremy Corbyn, could be shanked in the back, Peter Mandelson was the consummate establishmentarian. What could go wrong?

Starmer seemed to have no opinions of his own when it came to moral and epistemic issues. Britain was becoming an “island of strangers” until it abruptly wasn’t. Women could have penises until they suddenly couldn’t. Freedom of movement was going to return until it definitely wasn’t. A man can change his mind, of course, but Starmer never explained how he had changed his mind. He barely seemed to have a mind.

We can’t avoid a vibes-based discussion here because the fact is that Starmer’s vibes have been historically bad. He seems stiff and humourless — the sort of man who says that his guilty pleasure (his guilty pleasure) is a pint with friends — but there is a broader issue here. In an era where Britain should have been trying to avoid a fate of managed decline, Starmer seemed like a man who actively embraced it. So, he did odd things like trying to pay Mauritius to accept the Chagos Islands. But he also had the grim and awkward manner of someone brought in to manage a once great football team that, having been relegated from the Premiership, was now structurally destined to collapse through the leagues. Britain, to him, seemed to be Leicester City with an army — barely — attached.

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Wonky Thinking

A new report written by Dr. Gerard Lyons for the Centre for Policy Studies looks into Britain’s economic performance relative to Europe. According to the report, where Britain’s performance looks weaker is largely due to domestic policies rather than a result of being outside of the bloc, and that moving closer to the EU would serve to hinder rather than enhance Britain’s economic performance.

Our economic problems are certainly legion: an investment shortfall, expensive energy, a planning system that vastly inflates the cost of building homes and infrastructure, an inability to curb inflation that has fed a cost-of-living crisis and an ill-conceived desire to tackle rising prices through intervention in supermarkets and elsewhere, poorly structured and burdensome taxes, a broken immigration system, retrograde public sector productivity, regional imbalances, high and deteriorating rates of economic inactivity and a poor debt position with out-of-control public spending. There are also structural headwinds such as our ageing population and low fertility rates. Since incentives are fundamental to economic growth, it is concerning that many are now badly misaligned.

Yet many of these challenges, like low investment, predated our entry into the EU. Most were not addressed while we were members. And solving them now requires an economic vision, clear strategy and policy actions from Westminster and Whitehall that would take us in a different direction (of the kind outlined in my 2025 CPS paper ‘Breaking the Cycle’).

Of course, the UK needs a sensible working relationship with the EU, just as it does with other major economies or regions. But that should not mean a reset that ties Britain’s hands on domestic policy such as regulation. Nor should cooperation be one-sided. The UK has allowed EU citizens to use eGates at its airports, yet access for British citizens has been partial and uneven. That may reflect weak UK negotiation, but it also points to a deeper problem: the EU has too often treated partnership with Britain as something to be rationed, not reciprocated.

Indeed, we have recently seen how Brexit freedoms can be taken advantage of, though it was not acknowledged as such. In response to cost-of-living pressures, the Chancellor recently decided to cut tariffs on food imports, a welcome move that the CPS has previously called for. This is just one reminder of the policy scope available outside of the EU, which was always one of the key arguments for Brexit.

Pursuing closer regulatory alignment with the EU now would threaten the areas of future economic growth where the UK is now well placed and where we have seen successes that would not have been possible inside the EU, including but not limited to AI and the City.

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Podcast of the Week

On Triggernometry, Ed Husain discusses the origins of Islamism in the West and how the Muslim Brotherhood promotes such ideas and modes of operating.

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Quick Links

For the third day in a row, the hottest June temperature in Britain has been recorded.

Simon Case calls for Burnham to hold an early General Election.

100% tariff threatened by US over new EU technology tax.

Defence Investment Plan sees £1bn boost from Keir Starmer.

Shabana Mahmood to introduce Ukrainian-style refugee sponsorship scheme.

Iran strikes by US resume after cargo ship attack.

Perusing a second hand book shop, I came across a small bright yellow book. Full Text of the Rome Treaty and an ABC of The Common Market (pictured below) by Paul Minet: journalist, bookseller and Liberal Party activist.

The book is interesting because whilst much of the discussion around Britain joining the European Economic Community (the Common Market) focuses on the early 1970s, this book was published in October 1961. This publication aimed to support Britain’s first negotiation, under Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, to join the Common Market.

The early 1960s are a strange time economically and socially, because unlike the unrelenting gloom of the next decade, this was in the midst of the economic ‘stop and go’ that led to periodic waves of optimism and pessimism. Britain in the 1970s was forced to join the EEC because it seemed like it had no alternative, but in 1961 there was still an argument to be had about the future.

The late 1950s had seen the government kick off an economic boom through an expansionist budget under Chancellor David Heathcoat-Amory, strongly urged by Harold Macmillan, to win the 1959 election. Tax cuts and generous investment allowances saw the economy grow by 13% between 1958 and 1961, with real GDP per capita growth peaking hitting 5.5% for the year in 1960. Annual capital investment increased by 30% and house income was nearly double what it had been in 1950. However, despite the historically impressive rates of growth, the fifties had been a disappointing decade where Britain felt the double punch of obvious overwhelming American superiority and the catch up of European powers. Something had to be done. Minet was well connected journalist and bibliophile, who wrote this book to try to make the case for joining the EEC, drawing on the key arguments of the political and economic establishment. In many ways, his book lays out the pattern for the past sixty years of debate.

Politicians today would obviously bite their arm off for economic fundamentals as strong as the ones that Macmillan presided over. Yet, once again a sense of overwhelming American superiority and European catch up growth is creating panic rather than a cold examination of our position.

Minet’s book is fascinating because just like today’s advocates for closer links (or rejoining) the European Union, the decision to look to Brussels is based on avoiding hard choices at home and trusting in the size and scale of the European market to cover up our structural problems.

The political inability to make hard choices comes home repeatedly in his analysis. Discussing what the British economy needed to succeed, Minet is clear “the solution is to trim costs to keep pace with productivity”. This means prioritising investment over consumption (household and public), a focus on exports and avoiding too much capital flight to prioritise the home economy. Reform of the trade unions and managing wage demands were also necessary. This programme “is perhaps the only cure to our present situation, if an internal cure must be found.” The problem is that such a programme “would not attract much support in the country” because it would necessitate short term sacrifices. To avoid this “austerity programme”, as Minet called it, Europe was the only viable way forward. We can see the same arguments being made today for why we need to consider rejoining or developing closer links with the European Union. Easier trade with Europe would increase trade, boosting GDP numbers. We can just ride on the coat tails of the larger market and we’ll be able to avoid structural changes to UK Plc which would likely be unpopular.

The sum of Minet’s argument is simple. In 1961, the growth markets of the future were in Europe. The Commonwealth countries were putting up tariff barriers and switching towards greater domestic manufacturing reducing the opportunities for Britain to export there. If Britain wanted to maintain its industrial and productive base, it needed to get access to the growing European market. The only danger was that European competitors, particularly West Germany, were seen as more productive and efficient than we were. The risk would be that if we joined the EEC, Britain’s manufacturers would get crushed. Minet’s view, like most of the establishment, was that it was worth the risk. Plus Britain needed a “cold douche of competition” anyway. Win-win. The size and depth of European markets has never been in question, then or now, but the real point is whether joining the EEC (or EU) would actually give Britain these benefits and competitive push that it required?

We have the advantage on Minet, because we have experience of what actually happened. The short answer is that it did create growth, but the type of growth was very different to what pro-EEC advocates had hoped for and was fundamentally unsustainable.

The assumption that Minet and the economic establishment were working on was that the British economy would be industrial and broad-based, not only to maintain employment in the nations and the regions but also because the UK would always be a net importer of food and raw materials (including fuel). Industry is the focus of Minet’s analysis, with services getting only a few infrequent mentions. This was not because of ignorance of the earning potential of services. As prominent economists Robert Bacon and Walter Eltis argued in 1976, and was standard for Minet’s time, the “various private-sector service industries make a valuable contribution to the balance of payments, but this has never been sufficient, and it is never likely to be to finance the food and raw materials that Britain must buy from overseas.” The EEC would be a success if it led to a sustained growth in goods exports which could be used to maintain our standard of living. Growth in services was to be encouraged and welcomed, but was not a substitute for a viable industrial strategy.

So what happened? In the years 1948 to 1973, the UK’s trade exports increased by around 6% in real terms. In the following twenty five year period, exports increased by only 2.6% in real terms. In the years leading up to the Brexit referendum and over the past few years since we’ve left, we’ve seen goods exports stagnate. The fact was that joining the EEC did provide the “cold douche of competition”, but we ended up running away from it, rather than embracing it. The robust industrial policies of European competitors, Germany in particular, forced the country into a transition towards a service-based economy to avoid direct competition with Europe, with Britain retreating to its niche strengths in services. The continent would be the industrial heart of Europe, we would be the services superpower. The alternative would have been more investment in infrastructure, supporting foundational industries such as steel and automotives, with relatively less household and public service consumption. All this would have required the country to make some hard choices.

Our reformed service-based economy temporarily benefited from an unreplicable expansion of financial service exports from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, a boom that eventually turned to bust and created a huge debt overhang which has crushed the economy ever since. Moreover, as Bacon and Eltis predicted in the 1970s, this service based growth was never enough to pay our way and finance investment. British households and private sector began to borrow heavily from overseas from the early 1980s until the financial crash to pay for our imports. After the crash, the government was forced to prop up the economy and take on huge public sector debts. Subsequent economic shocks, particularly the pandemic, have forced the state to set in again and again. The result has left the British economy financially exposed and, as Mark Carney infamously put it, dependent on the “kindness of strangers”. Ironically, despite the push for Europe in 1960s being fuelled by concern about America’s overwhelming power and Europe’s strengthening industrial base, we are more dependent on American finance and European goods than ever before.

We live in the political consequences of this gamble. The impact of deindustrialisation and hollowing out of communities has created a demand for social and political reform that has shaped every election since 2017. Old political loyalties have been shaken off and voters in these places have decided to embrace whatever political party that has a plausible programme for change, with huge swings in electoral fortunes as a result.

Minet’s book trades heavily on optimism about ‘expansion’ and how being part of the EEC will lead to the Europe coming together in a shared plan to counter American economic dominance. We know from our negotiations with Europe that although there is much talk about cooperation, EU members remain as protective over their domestic industrial base as they ever were, even when it concerns the military defence of the entire continent. Is it really likely that the EU is going to facilitate the rebalancing of the British economy when they would be losers in that process? Minet’s naivety can be forgiven, with all the soaring rhetoric of European unity during his day, but that of today’s advocate for rejoining the European Union cannot. We have seen golden words turn to ash too many times.

The question which Minet did not have to answer, but which today’s advocates of Europe must answer, is why would this time be any different? Like Minet, therefore, they must return to rhetoric, or ‘vibes’ as kids say today. The ‘model wars’ between various different pro and anti-Brexit all rather miss the point. What has happened since Brexit is immaterial. The point is what happened before Brexit. Here we are solid ground. It also provides the evidence for why we left the EU in the first place. The economic model of Britain simply was not working. The public could see it, even if the establishment could not.

We return full circle. Britain’s weak exports in goods, dependence on overseas food, raw materials and manufactured products alongside our inability to create decent employment (particularly for the young) across all parts of the country remain our central economic challenges. We can repeat the mistakes of Minet & Co, hoping that a dash for Europe will allow Britain to carry on without hard choices. Or we can finally undertake that difficult conversation with the public, lay out the true state of our weak financial and economic foundations, and ask the public for permission to introduce the policies needed to rebuild our industrial base and sustainable prosperity.

Minet thought that such a conversation could not be had, or if it was had, it would lead to electoral defeat. Perhaps Minet was right then and is right now. Yet the thought remains, isn’t it worth trying to do something different?

Full Text of the Rome Treaty and An ABC of The Common Market by Paul Minet (1961) can be found online or, if you are lucky, in your local second hand bookshop.

Towering Columns

In The Times, Patrick Maguire argues that the people of Makerfield elected Burnham out of a desire for radical change.

All the clichés you have read — historic, seismic, unprecedented, make-or-break, most consequential ever — were really written in vain. The result tells us little we did not already know. Slice and dice it however you like, this was always going to be an overwhelming landslide against politics itself — a rejection of what politics has done, and failed to do, to the post-industrial England of 2026. That frustration, despondency and contempt are felt as keenly by voters of left and right alike.

Burnham understands this. He knows the places and the people of Makerfield. Victory would mean he has successfully reconstructed a winning coalition from the wreckage of Morgan McSweeney’s grand designs for the Labour Party, which collapsed under the weight of their implausible ambitions and Sir Keir Starmer’s cowboy building, like the tower of Fonthill Abbey. Scaling up Burnham’s campaign for export, particularly to sceptical customers in the south, demands an altogether deeper understanding of what voters want from a truly changed Labour.

The pollsters Stan Greenberg and Peter McLeod have spent recent weeks in conversation with progressive voters across the country: in Basingstoke, Bath, Bolton, Bracknell, Bury, Doncaster, Filton & Bradley Stoke, Rother Valley and Scunthorpe. All were considering their options between Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. These people were the bedrock of Labour’s 2024 coalition and reuniting them is the bare minimum a Burnham premiership must do to ensure the Labour Party can once again become a going concern in electoral politics.

In The Telegraph, Lord Frost examines the issue of establishment hostility towards Englishness and English Identity.

In short, it was possible to be politically British without having to be English. (It is one of the many ironies of this subject that fashionable opinion has now turned 180 degrees, and it is now near-taboo to suggest that recent migrants who acquire British citizenship are not as English as everyone else.)

Out of this uniquely British muddled mess, it was inevitable that an English identity would re-emerge. After all, it already existed. It had just been largely associated with the wider British state and its achievements. But as people started to doubt those, and as the country increasingly thought of itself as the bureaucratic, technocratic “UK”, then the cultural and emotional component had to go somewhere – and it went to Englishness. That is the process we are living through.

Two interesting questions follow from this current reality. The first is whether a resurgent English identity can remain entirely cultural and historical, or must in the end be political, as well. If the Scots and Welsh have an assembly, why can’t the English?

All the efforts to set up regional mayors and vast new administrative areas based on very little historical or geographical logic are at root an attempt to avoid this question. An English assembly governing England, leaving Westminster responsible for foreign affairs, defence, and the currency, would after all reveal the reality: that the “UK” national identity is thin and bureaucratic, not emotional, not historical, not cultural.

Writing for The Telegraph, Joshua Rozenberg highlights how activist jurors are undermining the ancient British system of jury trials.

Witness the scene at Woolwich Crown Court late last year, where Charlotte Head, an activist supporter of Palestine Action, was on trial with others for violent disorder, aggravated burglary and criminal damage after an attack on a factory near Bristol operated by Elbit Systems UK, which the activists claimed supplied weapons to the Israeli military.

More than three centuries after Penn’s appeal to his jury, Head’s defence counsel, a leading human rights barrister named Rajiv Menon, KC, appealed directly to the jurors. After reading out the inscription on the Old Bailey plaque, he told them they could decide the case according to their consciences. The trial ended with no convictions.

But Mr Justice Johnson, the trial judge, regarded this as a clear breach of his instructions to counsel.

“The effect of Mr Menon’s speech was to invite the jury to disregard my directions that they should put views of the Middle East and the war in Gaza, and emotion, to one side,” he said subsequently. It’s not known whether the judge has decided to refer Menon’s remarks to the Attorney General as an alleged contempt of court.

Because the jury could not agree on charges faced by four defendants, the prosecution sought a retrial which ended when they were all convicted of criminal damage. Last Friday, Charlotte Head, 30, and Leona Kamio, 30, received sentences of six years. Fatema Zainab Rajwani, 21, was sentenced to five years and eight months. Samuel Corner, 23, received five years for criminal damage and a further three years and eight months, to be served consecutively, for fracturing the spine of police Sgt Kate Evans with a sledgehammer.

In The Critic, Mike Jones argues that the tipping point against Keir Starmer occurred during the 2024 Southport Riots.

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was fond of asking, “Who? Whom?”. It is a question that strips politics back to its essence: who holds power, and who is on the receiving end.

For many in Britain, Southport gave a stark answer: A multicultural elite indifferent to mass immigration stood above the rest — backed by the two-tier authority of the state, with Starmer at the helm. (As protests rage in Belfast over a shocking attempted murder, allegedly perpetrated by a Sudanese asylum seeker, the state faces another major test.)

That narrative did not stay on the comment pages. It quickly spilled into the wider public consciousness. Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups showed how fast the “two-tier” charge took hold among ordinary voters. It offered a simple way to package a wide set of grievances into something neat and intelligible.

Combined with Starmer’s failure to “smash the gangs”, this hardened opinion at remarkable speed. Many feel the country they grew up in is being reshaped without their consent, while a political class seems determined to shut down anyone who says so.

For many voters, the verdict is already in. The Prime Minister does not represent them; he resents them.

In Conservative Home, Georgiana Bristol makes the case that advocacy for the oil and gas sector won the Conservatives Aberdeen South.

To fix this, and keep good jobs in Aberdeen, our report called on the Government to grant new licences for North Sea oil exploration, scrap the EPL immediately, and develop a concrete transition plan that supports domestic oil and gas production for as long as it takes for renewables to be genuinely ready to replace it.

As Shadow Energy Secretary, Claire Coutinho has forcefully made this case. Wes Streeting has pledged to grant new licences in the North Sea if he becomes Prime Minister, and Andy Burnham has said that he has an “open mind” on further exploration.

It’s correct that drilling more in the North Sea won’t have a material impact on prices paid by UK consumers. But ensuring continued investment will make sure that jobs and tax revenue stay in the UK – rather than Nigeria – and will help keep the energy supply chain afloat as we continue to move towards renewables.

Whilst the impact of energy policy is felt more keenly on the ground in Aberdeen than anywhere else, there are lessons that the Conservatives can take from this. A relentless focus on good jobs. Safeguarding domestic industry. And, in the words of Al Carns, “energy security shapes economic security”.

In The Telegraph, Stephen Pound argues that unions are advocating for higher immigration - against the interests of their members.

I also found in my decades as a Member of Parliament that those who made it to my advice surgery were never the tragic mothers of Afghanistan but more often the sons of businessmen and farmers who could pay the “agent” to facilitate the journey for what was rather more an economic imperative than a desperate longing for life and freedom.

No one with an ounce of humanity could deny the suffering of those who make an illegal and dangerous journey to these shores.

No one with an ounce of sense could deny that uncontrolled, unlimited immigration may provide a temporary relief to the individual rescued from the Channel but ultimately is corrosive of society and does no favours to those who the idealists seek to support.

Many of us in Britain still squirm with guilt when we remember the then health secretary, Enoch Powell, scouring the Caribbean for volunteers to work in the NHS or those mill owners in Yorkshire and Lancashire luring as many workers as possible from Mirpur to sweat in conditions that undercut the native workforce. Again, a short-term solution led to a long-term crisis and we see the current problem through the lens of that guilt.

We simply cannot, however, allow the error of the past to dictate the policy of the present and I sincerely, and in true fraternal spirit, invite Andrea Egan to spend some time away from the echo chamber and see what is being said and experienced on the streets.

The experience may not be a pleasant one. But it is one that may help to ensure that the trade union movement remains a bastion of support for working people and not a self-satisfied and increasingly out of touch relic in a world that has changed beyond recognition.

In The Telegraph, James Frayne argues that unprecedented levels of immigration shattered the vision that Leave voters had for Britain.

Looking at the reasons voters decided to vote Leave, it’s not hard to see why. Among respondents who backed Brexit in 2016, the top three issues they had in mind when they cast their vote were border control (51 per cent), having control over our laws (43 per cent) and the cost of living (31 per cent).

Overall, taking account of the state of the economy and society, 63 per cent of voters think Britain is on the wrong track, compared to 23 per cent who think we’re on the right track. Among Leavers, the share of people who think Britain is on the wrong track rises to 72 per cent.

It’s important to note that most voters blame other things for our current predicament rather than Brexit, even if many believe there has been a failure to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the UK’s exit from the EU. Most people blame poor political leadership, as well as a turbulent economic and social backdrop and no border control.

Given a choice of two options about the problems facing Britain today, significantly more people agree that they’ve been caused by issues other than leaving the EU.

And, given a short list of possible solutions to deal with our problems, significantly more people say we should have a fresh general election to choose a new government (37 per cent) than advocate rejoining the EU (26 per cent).

The logic is clear – voters can see that recent prime ministers have made a whole series of unforced errors. It isn’t down to Brexit that Starmer piled additional new costs on to businesses, or chose to pay for more welfare claimants, or that his Conservative predecessors chose to house large numbers of asylum seekers in hotels in small towns. These mistakes were all their own.

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Wonky Thinking

The Prosperity Institute has published a new report calling for the replacement of the Equality Act with new legislation which focuses on the negative enforcement of human rights, removing the positive rights framework that currently exists under the Equality Act. It recommends abolishing the Equality and Human Rights Commission as well.

The idea of bringing together various laws on equality to create a single piece of legislation, was first mooted in 1997—the year New Labour came to power—in the course of a project led by two politically influential figures: Bob Hepple and Lord Lester.

Hepple had been a member of the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa before moving to the UK in the early 1960s. He became a QC and a Cambridge academic, specialising in labour and equality law. He also established the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) in 1964 and was chair of its legal subcommittee. In 1997 he was a member of the Runnymede Trust’s Commission for Multi-Ethnic Britain.

Lord Lester was a member of the Labour Party who, as a young human rights lawyer, had helped to draft the 1965 Race Relations Act. A prominent member of CARD, he co-founded the Runnymede Trust in 1968 and was its chairman between 1991-1993. By 1997 Hepple, then Master of Clare College at Cambridge University, and Lord Lester had convened a small group of people from organisations involved in law and race relations, including the Runnymede Trust and JUSTICE, a law reform charity. Their aim was

to review and evaluate proposals for the reform of UK anti-discrimination legislation, based on an assessment of the experiences of those affected by the legislation. The specific objectives were to develop a legislative framework, to propose other measures that will promote equal opportunity policies and to spur compliance with those policies, and to ensure that the UK is in full compliance with its obligations under EU law and international human rights law.[4]

The framework they arrived at in 2008, set out in the Declaration of Principles on Equality by the Equal Rights Trust (ERT) (of which Hepple and Lord Lester were Chairs), differed from previous anti-discrimination legislation in two important respects:

1. It embodied a shift from negative conceptions of law, in which law is an instrument for the prevention and punishment of that which is expressly forbidden, to a positive idea of law in which law itself is seen as the agent by which society will be reformed.

2. It reversed the order of priority in the chain of legislative accountability: instead of being ultimately answerable to the British electorate at the ballot box, equalities legislation was to be addressed primarily to trans-national officials such as the law officers of the European Union and related bodies, and the United Nations.[5]

Accordingly, of the 128 original signatories supporting the Declaration, only 26 were based in the UK; and of the 26, only one was not an academic and/or legal professional working in human rights or equalities law. This was the exclusive social stratum which gave birth to the Declaration, the document which proved to be the dominant influence on the subsequent Equality Act.

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Podcast of the Week

On Quite Right!, Simon Heffer, Madeleine Grant, and Michael Gove examine the complicated legacy of Enoch Powell and how his actions and rhetoric still influence the British Centre-Right today.

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Quick Links

Train collision between Bedford and Luton causes dozens of casualties.

Lord Falconer calls for Keir Starmer to step down as Prime Minister.

Government attempting to force Dartmoor farmers off land, claim farmers.

Moscow oil refinery hit during Ukrainian drone attack.

Towering Columns

In The Telegraph, Nick Timothy says that the public sector equality duty has undermined our legal tradition and protected the wrong people.

How can it be that an Islamist double murderer can successfully sue the British state under our own laws, costing us more than £200,000? How can unequal treatment based on race or identity be official policy within the Civil Service, education and the NHS? And how can it be that guidelines for police appear to have led officers to handcuff Henry Nowak as he lay dying, prioritising instead his killer’s baseless cry of racism?

The behaviour of the police at the scene of Henry’s death is to be investigated. But – as my party’s leader, Kemi Badenoch, rightly said – they were following the guidance and training they had been given. This is not an excuse, but it is a wake-up call: the politics of race and identity are now hardwired into our public institutions, our public services and our laws. One of the main culprits is the public sector equality duty (PSED), which the Conservatives are now committing to abolish…

The Duty has become a weapon even for convicted terrorists and those engaging in radicalisation of other criminals. It is used against those who guard them, and inhibits the ability of the state to incarcerate dangerous people safely and securely. When our laws allow those who hate our way of life to deploy those same laws against us, they are no longer fit for purpose. And they distort our ancient common law tradition of treating everyone as an individual, equal in rights and responsibilities.

For The Critic, Susan Pickard documents how despite the Supreme Court ruling on gender equality our public institutions are still resisting change.

And that is precisely where we are now: not in a world where the ruling is openly rejected, but in one where its implementation is endlessly softened and deferred, challenged both on technicalities and general principles and suspended accordingly in a kind of institutional ambiguity. Outright resistance is already visible. The President of the National Union of Students has called on Parliament to reject the draft guidance in defence of “trans equality”, while the President of the UCU has described the moment as “significant and unsettling… for trans people everywhere.” Across universities, legal academics continue to publish critiques arguing that the ruling is conceptually incoherent, legally unworkable, or socially unjust with a few, isolated voices arguing in favour, such as Dr Michael Foran, who himself was subjected to bullying on account of his position.

A year on, the everyday culture within universities tells its own story. Pronouns remain recommended on institutional emails. University conferences continue to define “women” in ways that encompass trans women. Colleagues who might object keep their heads down. Looking back, my excitement and relief was misplaced. The Supreme Court ruling clarified the law. What it did not, and could not, settle was whether institutions built for more than a decade around gender identity ideology are willing to accept the implications of that clarification.

Of my three academic colleagues who openly challenged aspects of this orthodoxy, one has since taken voluntary severance, and the other two have decided to keep their views private for professional reasons. I remain where I was: still arguing, still formally protected by the language of academic freedom, and still aware that institutional hostility has not disappeared but has merely become more careful. My American friends still think it’s all over. But within British universities, at least, it has become clear that the real struggle has only just begun.

In Conservative Home, Daniel Pitt argues that multiculturalism has not led to peaceful pluralism but national division.

Cicero, the great Roman statesman, argued that “the good of the people is the chief law.” Multiculturalism has not been for the good of the people in our country, nor has social justice. They have had a corrosive effect on our cultural identity, our national pride, and our understanding of justice. Structural multiculturalism has worn away trust within our community and has cut deeply into the roots of public order.

Rather than going to the heart of our problems, defenders of multiculturalism and social justice have sought to increase government intervention in our lives and have sought more bureaucracy to surmount communal antagonism. This has only made things worse. The alternative to a common unifying culture is not the nice and tolerant pluralism that multiculturalists once imagined but ever more intrusive policing of relations between hostile communities. We cannot let this continue any longer.

Multiculturalism and social justice have harmed justice in the country, not enhanced it. Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, taught us in his Nicomachean Ethics that we “refrain from evil” because we fear punishment, but too many people in our country do not fear punishment from the law at all, and far too many of our law-abiding neighbours and friends certainly do fear the evil that criminals get up to.

A fundamental principle of the rule of law is that everyone is bound by it. However, our left-liberal elite has rejected this principle in favour of social justice and structural multiculturalism, and therefore, they treat ethnic minorities differently. The Sentencing Council provided us with a real-life case stating explicitly that the courts should consider “protected characteristics” in their sentencing. This meant that ethnic minorities would receive a lesser sentence than a white man for the same crime. This, of course, strikes at the heart of the rule of law, and we should not stand for it.

On Substack, Andrew O’Brien argues that Westminster is obsessed by ‘storytelling’ as a way to avoid confronting the crushing reality of national decline.

In many conversations in Westminster you will hear people talk about storytelling in a way that essentially tries to change reality. The inference is that if we told a better story or a different story about the country, it would alter the nature of the decisions that we have to make. We can shift from ‘negative’ narratives about financial crisis and spending cuts to ‘positive’ narratives about reform and change.

Storytelling is the last refuge for a generation of politicians that grew up in a world where the economic settlement was accepted and considered to be working, and where politicians could pick and choose their battlegrounds (Europe, immigration, social mobility etc.). When you hear a politician talking about storytelling, it is simply a plea for agency, a hope that we can deflect from the mess we are in.

The truth is that politicians not longer have control over the story. There is a national story and the debate is really about who can communicate it clearly and write a conclusion to it that ends this chapter of our national life on a good note.

The story is a simple one. Our country has gone from being the epicentre of the global economy, first as producer, then as banker, then as consumer to being on the periphery, dependent on borrowing, prone to shocks and without influence. It has been caused by inevitable global forces, bad policy choices, an insular political and economic elite and increasingly squeezed by rising great power conflicts that are making it poorer, weaker and divided. The psychological blow is crushing the national spirit. The financial blow is fuelling the cost of living crisis. The political fallout is creating instability and division. This is the only story that can be told.

For The Telegraph, Michael Deacon writes about the violence in Belfast and how politicians are ultimately to blame for the riots on our streets.

I fear, however, that they will once again merely resort to lecturing us about the dangers of “division”, and spend more time talking about the rioting than about the atrocity which triggered it. Anything but confront, or even acknowledge, the real source of the problem. They have a longstanding habit of this. Let’s not forget that after Sir David Amess, the Conservative MP for Southend West, was murdered in 2021, many of his colleagues in Parliament responded by calling for a clampdown on social media abuse. Sir David’s murder had nothing to do with offensive tweets – he was stabbed to death by an Islamist. Yet it was social media they talked about. So don’t be surprised if MPs decide that this week’s rioting was caused by social media, as well.

In fact, they really might. After all, social media is where footage of the knife attack first spread. “But for that,” MPs may think, “it would have been so much easier to contain the public’s anger.” For all our sakes, though, they urgently need to realise that while setting fire to buses may not be justified, the public’s anger is. We’re sick of having to live like this. We don’t want to live in a country where binmen are slashed to death while walking the dog.

We don’t want to live in a country where hotel workers are slaughtered with screwdrivers. And we don’t want to live in a country where innocent pedestrians run the risk of being beheaded in the street. Britain has quite enough problems as it is, without importing more of them. So, from now on, we would like our Government to put our safety first. This, therefore, should be our message to the nation’s political elite: “Take a piece of your own advice – and respect our wishes.”

For The Spectator, Gareth Roberts says that social media regulation is not about keeping the public safe but shutting people up.

Politicians would dearly love to shut people up; as we have seen in the last couple of weeks, in particular, what I call gammon management – the fear that low-status whites may notice the effect of progressive policies and get angry – is one of their major concerns. I’m reminded of how Napoleon’s control of information was so total that some French people only found out about the battle of Trafalgar ten years after the event. How Keir Starmer must wish for the same level of control over information. He, and his brethren, would love to muzzle their political opponents.

We have seen how politicians concealed the Afghan resettlement scheme. And today, the Daily Telegraph exposed a suppressed report which said that £28 billion pounds of public money – yes, you read that right – was siphoned to terrorists, hostile states and gangsters between 2015-21. Politicians didn’t think the public had a need to know such things. This is their instinct, and introducing digital ID by the back door, via concern about children, hands them even greater power to control what we know.

I could well be accused of cynicism here. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be suspicious of the government’s motives. If there had been a holistic approach to child protection, I might give them the benefit of the doubt. But you will note that nobody was mooting these bans when Twitter, or X, was run by their ‘side’; when it was equally – perhaps more – full of unpleasantness; and when it was throwing people off for having the temerity to say that men are not women. But people are being terribly rude to Chris Bryant now, you see, so it’s suddenly become urgent.

Likewise, there is the ‘division’ Labour keep fretting about. Actually, they don’t mean racial division at all, as Labour has done more to whip that up than Nigel Farage could manage, even if he wished to. ‘Division’ actually means noticing what politicians are up to. As for protecting kids from paedophiles, Labour turned a blind eye to the abuse of countless little girls by the Pakistani rape gangs. You will forgive me if I scoff at their current hand-wringing, given this record.

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Wonky Thinking

On his Substack, Rian Whitton describes the recent sudden decline in our automotive industry and outlines the factors that are leading us to “Carmageddon” with many businesses on the verge of closing factories and cutting jobs. This decline has been caused by the underutilisation of plant, Chinese overproduction and misguided Zero Emission Vehicle regulations.

So how might this collapse start? There are three potential areas of weakness. The car factories themselves, the wider supply chain, or the much-vaunted battery plants. If these are closed down, delayed further or cancelled, they could create a chain reaction whereby they take a large number of businesses with them. Since there are only a handful of automotive clusters in the UK, mass closures at one cluster could spill over into others very quickly.

The best bet may be in Oxfordshire, where the BMW-owned Oxford Mini plant still operates, producing over 100,000 ICE Minis per year. UK-based Mini EV production was supposed to come to Oxford in 2026, but that was put on hold in early 2025. BMW even refused a £60 million government grant to keep the project on track. Meanwhile, in China, they have entered into a joint venture with local firm Great Wall Motor to produce Mini EVs there. Additional Mini EVs are being produced in Leipzig, Saxony. These potential imports face no tariffs and benefit fully from the UK’s electric car grant for consumers.

So Mini EVs produced in China are undercutting the non-existent Mini EV offering in Britain. It begs the question, why would anyone bother to make Minis here?

It is hard not to see the paused decision in 2025 as the first step towards closure, with BMW executives pondering this very decision as we speak. One thing to keep in mind is that while companies, of course, want to make all their plants profitable, when the prospect of closures arises, one plant management team in one country will ruthlessly lobby against a counterpart in another jurisdiction. If the choice comes between the Leipzig plant and the Oxford plant, we can expect only one winner.

This would be a disaster of epic proportions, given the Mini is the second most produced UK vehicle and export model. Immediately, about 1/7th of the total production would be gone, creating cascading effects across suppliers up and down the country.

But this is just one area of potential weakness. A plant closure could just as easily be decided by the fall of a major local supplier. An anonymous source relayed to me that a major international car manufacturer with a British plant is buying components from local UK suppliers for its car production in Eastern Europe, despite the local European industrial base being perfectly adequate to supply itself. They are doing this because if the relevant UK suppliers didn’t have the foreign business, they would collapse, therefore imperilling the company’s own UK assembly line.

The last major threat is that battery plants essential to a transition to electric vehicles do not materialise in sufficient capacity or are cancelled. In October, I mentioned that the UK had very little battery-producing capacity. In 2012, the company AESC built a Sunderland plant, with 1.9 GWh of annual battery capacity. Since then, in late 2025, AESC opened another production line at the plant with 15.8 GWh in capacity. The new capacity gives Nissan a roadmap to scale up BEV production, even if it is likely to lose money on these models.

The next expected gigafactory is the Agratas plant in Somerset. With an expected capacity of up to 40 GWh, it will primarily supply JLR’s electric vehicle range. Originally scheduled for 2025, the Agratas plant has suffered multiple delays and is now projected to begin production by the end of 2027. To keep the project going, it needed £380 million in grants from the UK government in April 2026. Part of the reason for the delay has been JLR delaying the rollout of its EV range in order for demand to pick up.

In 2025, Tata, the owner of Agratas, sold a 12% stake in the company to AESC, the current UK gigafactory operator in Sunderland. AESC is itself headquartered in Japan but is owned by China’s Envision Group. China therefore now has an enormous stake in the battery plant infrastructure in Britain, leading to concerns about diversification.

There is still plenty of opportunity for the Agratas project to go belly up, but even if it gets built, this and the AESC plant in Sunderland do not get Britain the battery-manufacturing capacity necessary to produce over 1 million BEVs a year. Of course, Britain could import the batteries, as they would be cheaper. But then we would lose much of the product’s value, likely reducing the industry’s long-term gross value added. Without new commitments, imports rising, and the ZEV tightening, company executives could easily decide the UK is just not the place to build cars anymore.

The government tacitly accepts that there is a major risk of an industry collapse. It has provided a funding scheme called Drive35, which will distribute £2.5 billion in grants, loans and R&D support up to 2035 in order to provide ballast to the largest clusters. While very welcome, this will not offset a major downturn.

Following a flurry of reports on the ten year anniversary of the Brexit vote, on Substack Warwick Lightfoot analyses the latest data on whether Brexit has damaged the economy. Overall, he finds that leaving the EU has not made a substantive difference to the country’s economic performance because we are more heavily weighted towards services than the rest of the trade bloc combined with the poor performance of the EU on science and technology has undermined its potential growth prospects compared to the US.

An important explanation of the difference in economic performance between the EU and USA is America’s advantage in science and technology. The EU has put huge efforts and resources into its science programme. Yet it has been expensive and yielded disappointing results. The 2024 Draghi report recognised that ‘the EU has an important programme for R&I – Horizon Europe – with a budget of close to EUR 100 billion. But it is spread across too many fields and access is excessively complex and bureaucratic. It is also insufficiently focused on disruptive innovation. The EU’s key instrument to support radically new technologies at low readiness levels – the European Innovation Council’s (EIC) Pathfinder instrument – has a budget of EUR 256 million for 2024…It is also mostly led by EU officials rather than top scientists and innovation experts’.

The Brexit decision has made little difference to the overall performance of the UK economy, given the fact that the Single Market does not cover services that account for over 80 per cent of UK GDP, the UK has a flexible labour market and a flexible exchange rate that adjusts. The Single Market itself has been a disappointment as the work of Andre Sapir over many years explains. The ambitions of the Ceccini report have not been realised. Moreover, the principal policies and institutions of EU economic policy whether it is trade policy, farming, science or vaccines has been defective. Lord King, the former Governor of the Bank of England was probably right in his judgement, that over a fifty year period national accounts data would hardly register a change that reflected membership of the EU in or out. Lord King as Governor was also alert to the difficulty of relying too heavily on differences in reported data and the accuracy of precise national accounts data in establishing strong assertions about causation. It is better to talk in rough terms rather than being precisely misdirected.

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Podcast of the Week

On Generative Futures, David Edgerton speaks with Phil Bell about how we think about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the misguided historical analogies and how businesses are using a lack of knowledge about previous technological transitions to create positive PR around the development of AI.

Generative Futures

David Edgerton on Historical Analogies, Technology, and AI

David Edgerton is Professor of History at Kings College London. His book Shock of the Old challenged the way we think about innovation, arguing that we systematically overvalue the new and ignore the old (including maintenance). He has also written importantly on the British ‘warfare state’ and his book…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Phil Bell

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Quick Links

The economy contracted 0.1% in April due to the War in Iran.

Labour’s former Armed Forces Minister says that government must look to cut welfare to fund defence.

The government has launched the world’s first AI Economics Institute.

We have the highest residential mortgage debt of any country in Europe.

Ex-FTSE100 business Flutter Entertainment has left the London Stock Exchange for New York.

A full list of potential Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s u-turns so far.

Scotland has received £57.3bn in above national average public investment since 1999, Wales has received £1.3bn less.

Announcement: We are delighted to welcome James Gillham as the Conservative Reader’s newest co-editor. James is the Digital Lead for Build for Britain.

Towering Columns

In The Telegraph, Nick Timothy outlines how equality before the law no longer exists in modern Britain.

The Sentencing Council itself, which sets guidelines for judges, explicitly cites ethnicity as a factor to consider as mitigation when sentencing young offenders. The Judicial College’s Equal Treatment Bench Book – which has a whole chapter on race – says “treating everyone the same does not always ensure true equality”, because people with protected characteristics may be disadvantaged by “neutral” treatment. This kind of identitarianism is risible.

Treating criminals as vulnerable – and treating race, religion, age and mental disability as conveying automatic disadvantage – runs through the logic of the whole system.

But it’s not just in matters concerning the race of the victim or perpetrator where justice and policing are going wrong. The judge in the Fordingbridge rape case, when sentencing the three teenagers concerned, said his responsibility was not to “criminalise” them, and that his priority was their “reintegration into society”, rather than providing justice to victims or protecting the public. These comments sound deranged. But they are straight from official sentencing guidelines.

Now David Lammy wants to make things even worse with a new youth justice white paper, which will set an arbitrary target of cutting the number of under-18s in custody by one fifth regardless of the severity of crimes committed. The paper even suggests treating young adults differently based on their age or identity, as happens in Scotland. Labour’s endless focus on the rights of criminals, and engineering the system to benefit certain identity groups, places offenders first and victims last.

For the National Post, Michael Murphy compares the response to the murder of Henry Nowak with the response to the death of George Floyd.

It should come as no surprise that the attitude of senior officers might trickle down to those making life-and-death decisions on the streets. This is, in fact, merely the system working as intended. Britain’s Police Race Action Plan stipulates that “racial equity” does not mean “treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour-blind,’ ” and recommends taking a “racialized’ approach to policing. How could officers responding to Nowak’s death, and the Digwas’ lies, not have been affected by these guidelines? That question is, for Hampshire police, a Catch-22: either they conducted themselves in a colour-blind manner, in violation of their guidelines, or they did not, to Nowak’s detriment.

These vexing questions remain unanswered. Into the vacuum, Reform Leader Nigel Farage declared that “white lives matter too,” and called for a response to Nowak’s death of “pure, cold rage.” On Tuesday evening, protesters in Southampton clashed with police, with some demanding they kneel for Nowak, in the manner that many of their colleagues did for George Floyd, who was murdered by police in the United States in 2020.

The same British establishment that promiscuously embraced the hysteria of Black Lives Matter is now calling for calm and condemning Farage for his supposedly inflammatory language. The contrast of that language to that deployed by the state during comparable outrages is likely intentional. After the Manchester Arena bombing, the public was urged not to “look back in anger.” This response became something of a leitmotif for tragedies resulting from political decisions, like unwanted mass migration, that the establishment attempted to place beyond politics, and therefore beyond criticism. Farage’s pointed language is alien to British politics; it marks a new juncture, in which the grievances of the majority have, belatedly, entered the mainstream.

For The Telegraph, Sam Ashworth-Hayes argues Britain’s institutions prioritise racial justice over all else - including preservation of life.

Concerns over Axel Rudakubana were downplayed when a former teacher was accused of stereotyping him as “a black boy with a knife”. Fears of accusations of racism meant that security staff failed to confront the Manchester Arena bomber. In each case, the mechanisms at play in the Nowak case were on partial display.

The rationale which underlies them remains the same, today, as those which gave way to the bout of self-examination in the Macpherson report. Having embarked on a project to utterly remake the country through historically unprecedented levels of migration, Westminster has been playing catch-up in managing the tensions and conflicts that result, constantly attempting to maintain legitimacy with an increasingly divided and untrusting populace.

The way it has chosen to do so is by identifying the risk of majority rejection of minorities (as opposed to the more manageable minority rejection of majority) as the greatest threat it faces, and accordingly by putting the management of these tensions – racism, bigotry, hatred, whichever description you choose – as the greatest priority for policing.

Even the sentencing remarks for the case bear the imprint of this logic, with the judge noting that Digwa had “stirred up racial tension” and “made many Sikhs worried about their own safety”.

Watch the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak’s death – quiet pleas for help ignored as officers went about the business of managing tensions – and you can see what this means in practice. This tragedy was not an aberration. It was the two-tier machine of law-enforcement doing precisely what it was meant to do.

In Conservative Home, Callum Price summarises the events of the debate between Zia Yusuf and Fraser Nelson at the IEA.

The ‘what’ is easy, and identified by Yusuf, Nelson, Frost, and countless others alike. Energy costs through the roof; a planning system that strangles development of infrastructure and housing; a government structure seemingly incapable of getting anything done; a tax burden that suffocates work and investment; a welfare bill through the roof; a criminal justice system on its knees; and questionable border security, to give the understatement of the century.

The ‘how’ is somewhat trickier. But there is low-hanging fruit, particularly on the economy. First, stop doing harm. The state should lift its boot-heel from the throat of businesses and workers alike. We should make it easier, not harder, to hire new employees. We should stop punishing wealth creators, and make work pay more than welfare. There is common ground here for more than one political party to get behind. What’s more, if we can fix the obvious issues in our economy, the benefits will filter out quickly into the overall mood of the nation.

During Monday’s debate, Lord Frost pointed to 2010 as an estimation of when, he believes, things began to feel worse in Britain. Others point to similar periods in time to make a similar point – one meme jokes that the 2012 London Olympics was the Britain’s ‘season finale’, because everything has been downhill since then. Interestingly, this time frame maps quite nicely on to the chart that shows our growth problem. After the financial crash, the UK economy basically stopped growing in any meaningful way.

In UnHerd, David Goodhart outlines why the 2010s political realignment is here to stay despite recent elections globally.

The emerging cross-party consensus (minus some parts of the Left) echoes the priorities I described above. It now includes: a permanent low level of legal immigration, and a goal of zero illegal immigration; ongoing attempts to hack back the regulatory state; acknowledgement that higher education has over-expanded and technical skills have been neglected; the recognition that the triple lock is unaffordable and welfare spending is out of control with too many dropping out of the labour market (only four in 10 households are net contributors); the need for a rethink on Net Zero, a regional rebalancing to the economy, an openness towards some degree of re-industrialisation, more national control over critical assets, and limits to free trade in the coming bloc-based global economy; more investment in innovation, defence, and the application of AI, including by UK pension funds; greater pushback against the progressive activist war on tradition and authority; more concern about polarisation, anomie and loss of meaning, especially among young people, a concern now focused on social media regulation.

This new consensus tilts more towards the Right bloc (Conservative/Reform) than the Left bloc (Labour/Greens/Liberal Democrats); that does not guarantee the Right will prevail. Minus the scepticism about Net Zero and welfarism, plenty of the above could align with the economics of Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism. Nevertheless, in the short term, internal Labour politics, with or without Starmer, is likely to require more old-school, statist, tax-the-rich Leftism (despite the fact that we already have the most progressive tax regime in the developed world).

But is the new consensus postliberal? There are many schools of postliberalism, each defined by their distinct critiques of liberalism. Matt Sleat, in one of several recent books on postliberalism, complains that it is often little more than an immature rage against liberalism. And it is certainly unformed as a distinct ideology by contrast with older rivals like socialism, conservatism or liberalism itself.

In The Telegraph, Andrew Lilico argues that Covid-era lockdowns are partly to blame for record-high youth unemployment.

This has been a trend for decades, but more recent factors have exaggerated it. Covid and its aftermath coincided with, and contributed to, reduced labour market participation by the young and a sharp increase in mental and physical health problems. Prior to Covid, the proportion of Neets was around 11 per cent, compared with 13 per cent today. The youth is now more likely to experience a common mental disorder (CMD) than any other age group, with 22-23 per cent of those aged 17-25 having a probable mental disorder, whereas two decades ago they were the age group least affected.

Mental health challenges have become strongly correlated with worklessness among young people. Among those aged 16-34, those with mental health conditions are 4.7 times more likely to be economically inactive than their peers.

Some of that is surely a by-product of Covid restrictions such as social distancing and lockdown, not necessarily in the direct sense of people developing mental health issues in that period (though that may have happened too), but in the more fundamental sense that the disruption of those years meant young people with common challenges never developed the habits and life patterns that allowed previous generations to learn to cope.

Having missed critical life windows for that development, it’s now very hard for them to escape. This was of course predicted at the time of these restrictions, but the interests of the young were not understood or weighted highly by policy in that period.

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Wonky Thinking

A new report by Cambridge Circus Research analyses the complex NGO-charity structures that hold huge swathes of influence over our public life. It finds that some charities have been using their money for overtly political purposes, while many are funded by foreign entities such as Iran.

For a political party seeking to govern amid this landscape, the practical risk is posed not by a single hostile organisation, but by a network of actors singularly committed to frustrating their agenda. Major foundations fund intermediaries; intermediaries funnel to frontline organisations; legal charities and advice bodies identify claimants and evidence; campaign organisations supply oppositional narratives; media outlets present campaign representatives as neutral experts; and the same bodies appear in formal consultations and parliamentary evidence. Immigration and asylum provide the clearest examples, including the Conservative government’s Rwanda scheme and Labour’s UK-France “one in, one out” arrangement.

The central institutional problem is democratic displacement. Governments may possess a mandate for an agenda, but implementation can be slowed, reframed, or effectively vetoed by networks that are legally sophisticated, professionally funded, and only partially transparent. The policy response should therefore focus on increased transparency, stricter definitions within charity law, and better preparation ahead of policy delivery.

1. Charity law permits policy campaigning where it furthers charitable purposes, but the boundary between charitable advocacy and political purpose is too permissive and too weakly enforced in practice [S1].

2. The infrastructure is layered: large foundations and public bodies fund intermediaries, intermediaries fund or support campaign groups, campaign groups generate evidence and media pressure, and legal charities or public-law firms translate policy opposition into litigation.

3. Immigration and asylum are the clearest policy fields in which this system operates, but the model also appears in climate policy, protest law, equality policy, procurement, citizenship, legal aid, and public administration.

4. There are also national security implications – weak oversight has allowed networks of charities funded, directed, or acting on behalf of hostile state actors including Iran. Some of these charities propagate proscribed group propaganda and advance antisemitic and Holocaust-denying rhetoric.

5. Public funding can create a “state-funded opposition loop”, in which departments, local authorities, or arm’s-length public bodies finance organisations that later campaign, litigate, or give evidence against the state in the same policy field.

6. Consultation responses, select-committee evidence, and broadcast appearances can give organised advocacy networks the appearance of neutral expertise or broad civil-society consensus.

7. The Charity Commission is responsible for over 170,000 registered charities but possesses only 457 employees, including the board. This is insufficient to pursue meaningful enforcement of 7 Breaking the Blob charities in breach of charities law. As it stands, the Charity Commission is simply not fit for purpose.

8. The data on grants is highly fragmented and incomplete. Many of the numbers disclosed in this report must be treated as lower bounds. Transparency would be greatly improved if an auditable centralised data repository were available to cross-reference grants to charities and track funding flows.

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Podcast of the Week

In The Critic Show, Chris Bayliss, Henry Hill, and Reverend Marcus Walker discuss the intergenerational responsibility that politicians hold, and how they are currently failing to govern with the interests of future generations in mind.

OUTPOST

The Generation Delusion (Full episode)

This week on The Critic Show, Henry Hill and Chris Bayliss are joined by the Reverend Marcus Walker to discuss the erosion of intergenerational responsibility. From defence and infrastructure to fiscal policy, the Government just keeps getting it wrong, repeatedly prioritising electoral gain over the health and wealth of the country. The question is whether this trend is a recent development or a post-Cold War shift, and how political incentives, married with fragmented modern ideologies, contribute to a culture that struggles to implement any kind of constructive plan…

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4 months ago · 3 likes · Outpost

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Quick Links

A Saudi national, Almunthir Daqamah, has been charged with attempted murder after shooting a member of staff of his former university with a crossbow.

Steve Hilton (Republican) and Xavier Becerra (Democrat) top polls in California gubernatorial race with each polling ~26 per cent.

SoftBank opts to build €75bn AI facility in France, with the facility planned to be Europe’s largest.

Polling by Survation suggests that Andy Burnham holds 10-point poll lead in Makerfield, with Reform UK’s candidate trailing behind.

Home Office admits to insufficiently collecting data on failed asylum seekers.

US State Department condemns British government over two-tier policing in wake of Henry Nowak’s murder.

Former Defence Secretary claims MoD may have misled 2011 Chinook crash review team.

Towering Columns

For The Spectator, David Shipley argues that the murder of Henry Nowak was caused by the police putting ideology before public safety.

Robert France, temporary deputy chief constable for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight has said he is ‘sorry’ that Henry was ‘handcuffed and arrested as he lost consciousness’, and told the BBC that the force has referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). He added that the court pathologist said Henry could not have been saved by earlier medical intervention.

Much attention has been on the issue of Sikhs carrying knives. It is bizarre and stupid that we allow one particular ethno-religious group to carry lethal weapons which are illegal for any other resident or citizen of the country, especially when British women aren’t even allowed to carry pepper spray for self-defence. This exemption must now end.

But in many ways the behaviour of the police in this situation is far worse. There are plenty of dangerous, violent thugs in the country. Some have families who will try to conceal their crimes. But the police are supposed to treat us all equally under the law. Or rather, they were, until the wicked, lethal doctrine of anti-racism captured them.

The police chose to ignore the evidence in front of them in order to believe the Sikh family shouting about ‘racism’. The police ignored the appeals of the 18-year-old white boy bleeding out in front of them. Decades of training on ‘anti-racism’, fear of being labelled ‘racist’, fear of not listening to minority groups. All of these no doubt played a part. This pernicious doctrine of anti-racism has captured the police since the Macpherson report labelled them ‘institutionally racist’. Whatever they were in the 1990s, it seems that our police are now institutionally anti-white.

In The Times, Paul Johnson criticises those that say the government has not raised taxes or intervened enough on the economy.

Meanwhile, the pretenders to the throne appear as unprepared for office as the current prime minister was two years ago.

I’m delighted that both Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting are talking about reforming our capital taxes. Capital gains tax is in need of reform. But look at its scale. It raises about £20 billion of £1,100 billion of total revenue. Wise reforms would struggle to increase that by more than a small number of billions. Burnham’s call for a land tax I also agree with. But our problem here is not that we tax land and property too little. By international standards we tax it rather a lot. The problem is our current system is catastrophically damaging. Yes, please reform it. No, don’t pretend that is a way to repair the public finances. And please don’t claim that a wealth tax is the answer to all our ills.

As for Burnham’s general schtick that the current government hasn’t been left wing or interventionist enough. One does wonder whether he has been paying attention. This is, after all, a government that has increased taxes by something like £60 billion and public spending by a lot more than that, has substantially raised the minimum wage, is bringing rail and steel into public ownership, has scrapped the two-child limit and abandoned any effort at welfare reform, is stopping exploration in the North Sea and going hell-for-leather for net zero, and is implementing transformational additional regulation of employment and of rental housing. This is no Blairite tribute act.

The overall impression is that both those occupying the highest office and those vying for it have lost the capacity to focus on underlying problems while continually chasing the next day’s headlines. Any organisation which spends all its time firefighting, while neglecting to focus on its underlying problems and on its strategy will inevitably fail. So it is with governments.

In The Spectator, Michael Gove laments a political class addicted to policy gimmicks and unable to debate the big issues defining our age.

Only last week Rachel Reeves made an emergency fiscal statement to the house, responding to the consequences of war in the Middle East. The most significant headline measure was a VAT cut on fairs, zoos and theme parks. A titanic battle has been raging between a theocratic state sponsoring terror networks bent on acquiring nuclear capability and the world’s pre-eminent military and economic power. That war has choked off the world’s oil supplies, undermined the principle of global freedom of navigation and undermined food security. And our finance minister’s response is to shave a few quid off a day out at Alton Towers.

At least when Ed Davey careered down multiple waterslides during the election he acknowledged it was a gimmick. Reeves appears to think it’s up there with the Marshall Plan as a wartime reconstruction programme. We may be picnicking on the edge of a volcano, but the meal deal itself has never been better value. If the Chancellor’s response to a war raging now is so pettily inconsequential, how on earth do we think she will prepare us for the shocks about to hit us which are even more profound and long-lasting?

AI’s ability to perform almost all basic clerical research and analytical tasks at a speed which no human can match and with a level of sophistication few could outdo is likely to render most entry-level professional jobs redundant. The basic work of accountants, lawyers, management consultants and bankers could be done better, faster and much, much cheaper by machines – all with the barest of human supervision. That change is not a generation away. It is coming within months and years and will hit a generation already alienated from capitalism and democracy by the weight of student loans, the cost of housing and the comfort in which elderly elites now live…

This moment in our national life is, above all, a time for seriousness. Yet our government fiddles with bus fares and funfair prices. And Reform, the opposition party which currently leads in the polls, offers ludicrously unworkable tax cuts – and social media spats between its leaders – for our entertainment. This is candy-floss economics and coconut-shy politics while the world is transformed at a pace and in a manner unseen for centuries.

In Conservative Home, Laurence Fredricks warns that Burnham’s myopic focus on social housing will see fewer homes being built.

Development is too often treated as a public service, something that can be ordered into action by politicians, burdened with social obligations, and still deliver with little regard for the costs. Development is a business. Business runs on profit, to survive, crucially, but also to grow and deliver more homes. This is true at every scale, from SME housebuilders to the major developers. Without a profit incentive, homes do not get built.

Burnham’s “housing first” platform centres on social housing as an alternative to the housing market: “We really haven’t had that approach in this country since the post-war years.” But post-war Britain was not a world without markets or private development. The difference was that homes could still be built at scale. What changed later was the emergence of an increasingly restrictive planning system that chokes supply. That, far more than the commodification of housing, is what created today’s crisis.

The direction of travel being set by the PM-in-waiting should be a grave concern. Instead of recognising the planning system and the mounting burdens placed on developers as the real barriers to housebuilding, Britain risks drifting toward a state led housing model where the delivery of housing comes at any cost – with the taxpayer ultimately footing the bill. The answer is not to berate the commodification of housing, or treat housing as a public service to be commanded into existence. It is to fix the planning system, restore viability, and give the market the conditions it needs to deliver.

For The Times, Robert Colvile highlights the hypocrisy of the left allowing foreign oil and gas imports whilst shutting down the North Sea.

It’s true that Britain, like many other countries, is cutting petrol taxes to help consumers (or rather postponing a planned increase). And if you squint very hard, you can see Rachel Reeves’s gimmicky tax breaks for summer holidays as a backhanded way of saving on jet fuel, on the principle that 15 per cent off a trip to Thorpe Park might make people slightly less inclined to fly to Disney World.

Yet the King’s Speech pledged to make it actively illegal to grant new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. Leading to the absurd spectacle — highlighted by Kemi Badenoch and her energy spokeswoman, Claire Coutinho — of Labour MPs voting through the ban even as the government was relaxing restrictions on the import of Russian oil refined in third countries, to shore up supplies of that precious aviation fuel.

But that’s not the end of the hypocrisy. Miliband can talk all he wants about all the wind turbines he is building. But even if we completely decarbonise the electricity grid in the next few years, we will still be using fossil fuels for a load of other things for the foreseeable future: heating our homes, fuelling our cars, powering factories, smelters and data centres. In fact, in 2024 we imported energy equivalent to 138.9 million tonnes of oil. Netted off against our exports, that translates to 44 per cent of our overall energy needs coming from abroad — the highest proportion in a decade.

And what kind of energy were we importing? The vast bulk — more than 90 per cent — was made up of oil and gas. And our largest supplier was Norway. In short, as I’ve pointed out before, we are paying the Norwegians billions of pounds to send us oil and gas from exactly the same North Sea basin we refuse to properly exploit ourselves — because of a ludicrous piece of climate arithmetic which counts the emissions from the stuff we drill but not the stuff we buy.

In The Spectator, Stephen Pollard says we are giving anti-Semites a cultural veto after a talk on Jewish culture was postponed due to concerns about security.

Interviewed earlier this month at the Cannes film festival, Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes spoke of the ‘shameless orgy of anti-Semitism overtaking the West.’ The director of Son of Saul was stating something both profound and obvious, and here in the UK we see examples every week – and it sometimes feels like every day. On Tuesday, the British Museum informed ticket holders to a talk scheduled for today as part of Jewish Culture Month that, ‘Due to security concerns, the Ancient Israel and Judah in the British Museum talk… has been postponed.’

It was the matter-of-fact blandness of the statement that hit hardest. ‘We apologise for any inconvenience. With best wishes, The British Museum Ticketing team.’ Oh well, just a bit of Jew hunting, sorry if it’s a bother, best wishes and all that…Increasingly, events involving or attracting Jews are being cancelled – and that’s when they have managed to find a venue willing to host them in the first place…

Whatever the actual motivations behind such decisions, they all have the same effect – handing anti-Semites a veto over the staging of events with or for Jews. Let’s accept that the British Museum has acted in good faith, as it says in its statement. So what? The outcome is the same as when the West Midlands police caved in to the Jew hating mob and banned Israeli fans – Jews – from attending Aston Villa’s match against Maccabi last year. Their reasoning might be different, but their decisions have had a similar consequence. The British Museum has allowed Jew hate to determine its programme. By postponing a talk on Ancient Israel and Judah.

Let’s reserve judgement on whether this is actually a postponement or, as I suspect it will end up, a cancellation. One of our leading cultural intuitions has sent out a terrible message. Do you worst, it is saying to the anti-Semites, and we will cave. For shame.

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Wonky Thinking

A new report by Boston Consulting Group has found that our financial services sector is underperforming due to a lack of capital, stalling productivity and declining employment. The sector that once drove UK productivity growth now actively drags it down. Had the sector continued to grow at its pre-crash trajectory, it would be 40% larger than it is today. This equates to an additional £66 billion in output and £100 billion added to the wider economy. The research has found:

• Business lending has seized: Total lending to private non-financial corporations has returned to levels last seen in 1998, standing at 59% of GDP in Q3 2025, with both bank lending and other forms of credit having fallen as a share of GDP. SME loans have almost halved as a share of GDP since 2011.

• Productivity growth has stalled: The sector’s contribution to aggregate productivity growth has flipped from +3.5% pre-2008 to -1% in 2019–2024, meaning it is now actively dragging down UK productivity growth. A more sector-specific productivity metric – annualised change in assets per employee (inflation-adjusted with CPI) – has been zero for the past five years in the UK compared with 1% in the US.¹

• Shareholders have lost out: If £100 was invested in UK financial services stock in April 2011, its total value would be worth £185 less by the end of 2025 than if invested in US financials and £108 less than if invested into UK industrials.

• Employment has declined: Jobs in UK financial services have fallen 1% since 2011, while the equivalent employment has grown 17% in the US and 16% in France. Assets per employee, however, have remained static in the UK.

• Capital is not flowing where it is needed. 53% of total pension fund allocation was invested in UK equities in 1997 compared to 4% in 2022 and 82% of US pension funds allocated to equities. UK households have the lowest share of personal wealth held in equities and mutual funds in the G7, at 8%.

The report also identified three policy choices that the UK government has made that have constrained growth.

Regulation was recalibrated for resilience but not updated for growth
New regulation after the GFC strengthened the sector’s resilience but institutionalised a bias towards removing all risk over growth. The system-wide UK LCR stands at 152% in 2025, far above the 100% Basel minimum and the 120–140% seen in US and EU peers. The UK’s CET1 ratio is 15.4%, two percentage points above the US (13.4%). If UK banks reduced capital buffers to US levels – still within requirements – this could release up to £440 billion in capital, which could be channelled towards lending. Meanwhile, consumer regulation has resulted in 23 million consumers going without financial advice. Compliance and quality-assurance headcount rose 503% from 2009–2021, before settling at 208% of 2009 levels.¹⁹ This compares to just 78% growth in the US.

Business credit has become structurally harder to access
UK businesses are caught in a self-reinforcing credit trap. Businesses seek credit less readily because they expect rejection; lenders pull back because they see insufficient demand. Both sides have rational reasons to behave as they do – but together, this has resulted in total lending to SMEs falling from 12% of GDP in mid-2011 to 6.5% in 2026. It has also become even more concentrated, with the share of lending to SMEs in the real estate sector rising from 39% in 2016 to 51% in 2026 – despite only 3% of total SMEs operating in the real estate sector. The reasons for this appear two-fold. First, it is expensive and time-consuming for banks to find, vet and onboard smaller borrowers. Second, regulatory constraints require banks to hold more capital against loans to these businesses because they are harder to assess – many lack the physical assets that banks traditionally use as security.

Technology underinvestment leaves UK firms exposed to the AI era
In the early 2000s, because of its relatively advanced integration of technology, the UK financial services sector had the highest level of capital stock in software and databases of any advanced economy. However, the capital stock of computer software in UK financial services has grown at a rate of just 2.5% a year since 2010. This compares with 6.7% in the US – meaning total US stock has almost doubled in a decade, while the UK equivalent grew by just 30%. The UK now lags the US, Japan and Spain in terms of capital stock of software and databases as a share of total assets. The divergence since 2010 is a direct consequence of the active choices described above. This gap means UK firms are entering the AI era further behind than many peers.

Why has this happened? High costs and legacy tech stacks are common across the sector in different countries. But UK banks tend to have higher cost income ratios than most, regularly over 60% of income. Furthermore, the UK lacks the scale of the US market or the rapid growth of some smaller economies, both of which make developing economies of scale challenging.

On his Substack, David Goodhart has published an essay on the emerging post-liberal consensus amongst the British public which has rebelled against the neoliberalism that has dominated the political debate for the past forty years. He proposes a manifesto for ‘left-conservatism’ which combines cultural conservatism whilst encouraging a system of national preference on the economy and business.

My own version, that I would categorise as belonging to the Left-conservative school of post-liberalism—a synthesis of moderate social democracy and moderate cultural conservatism—has three main elements.

1. Small-c conservative common-sense.

• Acceptance of the moral equality of all humans but rejection of the moral universalism and post-nationalism of the liberal Left, (promoted in some aspects of international law).

• Restoring authority to elected politicians.

• An immigration pause, plus the understanding that a society with a shrinking ethnic core needs an attractive, broad-based national identity more than ever.

• A belief in personal responsibility and reciprocity, entailing a shift to a more contributory welfare state.

• Money alone is not the answer to poverty and social dysfunction, family structure/upbringing matter.

• More support for stable families, marriage and higher fertility by minimising the motherhood penalty but also by making it easier for one parent to remain at home when children are pre-school.

2. Market-friendly, national social democracy.

• A national business preference in public procurement.

• Tougher paternalistic regulation of industries with power to poison bodies (food) and minds (tech).

• Less market in some key public utilities but more market in areas where competition is weak.

• Transition to Dutch-style social insurance model for health and social care.

• An end to this version of net-zero, and lowest possible energy costs for businesses and households.

• Limited use of subsidies and tariffs to prioritise national industry, reshoring and innovation, and national control over critical infrastructure/utilities.

• Incentivisation of a more patriotic business elite, and clearer distinction in the tax system between the productive and unproductive rich (a land tax?).

• Reduction in the tax/regulatory burden on small business.· Promoting higher levels of home ownership and entrepreneurship, especially among young people.

3. A regional settlement to tackle the crisis of demoralisation in Somewhere Britain.

• Tackle extreme regional divides by promoting not just public investment and growth companies in left-behind places but investing in grass-roots institutions: sports clubs, youth clubs, pubs.

• We need our elite universities but must reverse the over-production of people with generalist academic qualifications and under-production of skilled workers and technicians.

• Create more outlets for public spiritedness. In a more dangerous world, with more erratic climate, we need an expanded military reserve plus a civic and environmental taskforce. We also need an easy-to-use online national volunteering platform.

This is not a radical manifesto but it cuts across still powerful liberal assumptions in key areas: the reluctance to accept discomfort at rapid ethnic change as legitimate; the economism of so much social policy that focuses almost exclusively on higher welfare payments; the persistent belief that more graduates is good for the economy and society; reluctance to re-think rights legislation or international conventions even when they thwart democratic common sense. There are policies here borrowed from Right and Left traditions but the Right bloc in British politics would be most comfortable with it.

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Podcasts of the Week

In The Spectator’s Coffee House Shots podcast this week, Tim Shipman and James Heale interview Joshi Herrmann, founder and editor of Mill Media, who has been closely following Andy Burnham’s career in Greater Manchester. They discuss whether Burnham’s emotional style of politics will be successful in the much tougher world of Westminster politics.

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Quick Links

A majority (65%) of Britons believe that we should stop prioritising clean energy over cheaper energy.

Household energy prices will rise by 13% in July, an average of £221 per household.

The number of young people not seeking work is the highest since records began.

Same review finds we are spending twenty five times more on welfare for young people than helping them to find work.

Energy intensive manufacturing production has fallen by 40% since 2015.

Charity led by Green Party’s Makerfield by-election candidate calls for farming to be ‘decolonised’.

Live births per year by mothers born in the UK have fallen by over 100,000 in the past decade.

We also know that Reader readers are interested in different forms of content, so we are planning to publish book reviews to help keep readers up to date with the latest ideas - The Conservative Reads. If you have suggestions for books that we should review or wish to submit a review, then do please get in touch.

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Centrists of the World Unite! is the more considered print version of one of the fastest growing forms of elite media, the ‘Centrist Dad’. However, unlike the plethora of podcasts that have infected our feeds, Wooldridge brings the knowledge and insight you’d expect from a well-respected Economist, and now Bloomberg, journalist. Rather than endlessly blaming foreign actors or ‘disinformation’ for recent events, like most of the Centrist Dad Universe, Wooldridge has come to see that there is something fundamentally rotten in the state of the Western world.

The essence of the book’s argument is that the positive qualities of liberalism (meritocracy, pluralism, belief in free exchange) have been shunted aside for identity politics, globalism and market fundamentalism. In many cases, these darker sides to liberalism emerged for understandable reasons (the civil rights movement, the opportunities from global free trade, reaction to trade union militancy) but they have simply gone too far. The ‘good old liberalism’ was replaced with “liberal triumphalism” that simply went too far and tried to spread these values at the point of a gun around the world.

In many ways, it builds on the (in my view stronger) argument made by now Shadow Justice Secretary, Nick Timothy, in his excellent book Remaking One Nation which called for a defence of ‘essential liberalism’ rather than the ‘elite liberalism’ of the kind that Wooldridge also attacks. The consequence of this perversion of liberalism, as Wooldridge sees it, is that it has created reactions (Brexit, Trump, Reform - insert your centrist bête noire here) that are pulling society apart. The response is that centrists (and I presume Wooldridge would include many conservatives in this) need to come together and put good old fashioned liberalism back at the heart of our politics.

So much of the book is a Centrist Dad version of the Aristotelian ‘Golden Mean’. Can we have authority and hierarchy, but not too much? Can we have free markets and free choice but also a “liberal paternalism” that stops people making the wrong decisions? Can we have empowered nation states but also keep the global institutions to enforce the rules based international order? Can we be progressive but not have too much progress? Basically, can we go back to that golden period of the 1980s and 1990s where everything seemed to be going quite well?

The obvious answer is no. We cannot. Why not? Simply put, liberalism is not a self-correcting system that allows for this ‘Golden Mean’. The biggest barrier to centrist liberalism is the very philosophy that Wooldridge espouses.

What does liberalism mean to Wooldridge? “Individuality”, “freedom” and “tolerance”. As Wooldridge says:

“Liberals start with the individual and work upwards where previous political systems had started with the collective (the community or the state) and worked downwards. Liberals believe that people should be judged as individuals rather than as members of social and biological groups. They also regard freedom as the signature political virtue…Liberalism broke with the idea that we should pursue collective salvation by worshipping in the same church and living according to the same political code.”

Strangely, Wooldridge says that this political liberalism was born against the ‘extremes’ of the French Revolution. This would no doubt come as a surprise to men such as Robespierre, Danton and Saint-Just who very much saw themselves as embodying these liberal ideals. After all, their so-called Montagnard Constitution of 1793, is a liberal document par excellence. After stating the goal of society is “the common welfare”, it then states that “Government is instituted in order to guarantee to man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights.” These rights are “equality, liberty, security and property…liberty is the power that belongs to man to do whatever is not injurious to the rights of others; it has nature for its principle, justice for its rule, law for its defence; its moral limit is in this maxim: Do not do to another that which you do not wish should be done to you.” The problem has always been, as critics such as Burke and Hegel articulated at the time, that relying on these abstract liberal principles is a recipe for disaster because they create concepts that can never be realised and constantly tear down any positive project to build a better society. This mistake is compounded with political liberalism’s other essential feature, that all decisions must be valid through the logic of Kantian pure practical reason where all traditions, contingencies and faith are removed and only those decisions that the sovereign individual can make into universalising categorial imperatives are valid. It leads to the dead end of Rawlsian liberalism. This is not merely a matter of historical debate, but something that shapes the biggest issues of our time.

The author is a scathing critic of the “politics of identity” on both left and right. He is justly concerned about the rise of Islamism and blasphemy laws but also ethnonationalism on the right. However, as with so many things, the author does not seem to understand that liberalism has created this existential battle for identity because it has stripped national identity of any substantive content. Do not be an Islamist. Do not be an ethnonationalist. But what should one be? A conservative can answer easily. Be British. Loyally support our Crown and our Constitution, participate in those local institutions that give us meaning from the school fete to the local sports club and meet your civic responsibilities through jury service, voting and helping your fellows. What does the liberal offer? Defend ‘liberal values’. In his call for an end to culture wars, Wooldridge draws on similar ideas of ‘civic nationalism’ which Martin Wolf calls for in his recent centrist book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Yet ultimately when you peel away the packaging of this civic nationalism, there is nothing in the box. For the abstract liberal values that they are calling for us to defend are the very values which those on the far-right and Islamists are using to justify their actions (the freedom of their religion, their freedom of speech etc.). This liberal nationalism is not rooted in anything real, it is just people shouting at each other.

The only answer to the extremes that threaten to pull us apart is not to quote John Stuart Mill at people or invent some pseudo-legal sounding rights. Our response to these people is simply to say that “we do not do this sort of thing here”, appealing to our traditions, our institutions and the long-held beliefs. It is a reasoned belief, drawn on our experience and our preferences. This conservatism enables us to see things as they are. We do not really believe in freedom of speech. We have a generous tradition that should be able to speak, write and debate what they like providing it does not disturb the public peace. It is a tradition that emerged through centuries of give and take, experimentation and contingency. It does not depend on liberalism (toleration predates liberalism by hundreds of years, as Wooldridge notes) and cannot be defined or implemented in an abstract way, it is simply a matter of judgement. It is a judgement that we have entrusted to our politicians and our courts because we assumed they would operate within our political tradition or put the national interest (balancing the positive benefits of freedom with the equal positive of public order). This limit has been fairly broad in our recent history because we did the hard work of building a strong social fabric where people shared most of their fundamental beliefs (Monarchy, Parliamentary Democracy, The Rule of Law, Christianity) and assumed the patriotic commitment of others. In times of war or crisis, most people have no qualms with restriction because we know that different circumstances require the boundaries to be reset, but we trust that when peace returns, we can return to normal. British liberty is the consequence of delicate balance based on a shared history and a shared culture. It is a system breaking down because we have tried to universalise it and appeal to abstract ideals, rather than making decisions in the national interest.

The same is true for our economic order and the global order. The biggest sustained rise in living standards was not under the ‘liberal’ economic order of the 19th Century, which the author approvingly references, but the system we developed after the Second World War to avoid mass unemployment and poverty. The global order was balanced at those times when we decided not to trust our security to vague notions of universal citizenship, but when we had strong defences and mutual respect.

Ultimately, it is the British (and to some extent American) political tradition that Wooldridge is essentially defending and with good reason. It is the tradition that conservatives defend because it is our tradition, our living tradition, not because it conforms to some dead philosopher or international treaty. The good news is that you can get all the benefits of liberalism that Woolridge states (meritocracy, equality before the law, market capitalism) without having to embrace the round-about way that he chooses to get to these outcomes.

The author makes many good points, but rather than being a centrist or a liberal, he sounds like a lost conservative. A conservative who has ignored a positive disposition - a liberal, tolerant one - and instead embraced a doomed political project. The only political project that matters is not maintaining a desiccated universal liberalism, but defending the British constitutional and cultural settlement that we have inherited through the generations. You cannot achieve this conservative end, however, with liberal thought because it denies you the very tools you need to do the job.

Wooldridge thinks that liberalism is like the Holy Spear in Wagner’s Parsifal. Where only the weapon that made the wound can heal it. I’m afraid to tell the author, that unlike in Wagner’s magical opera, picking up the spear of liberalism will not heal the wounds it has created, it will simply create more of them.

You can buy a copy of Centrists of the World Unite! The Lost Genius of Liberalism by Adrian Wooldridge online or, even better, support your local bookshop.

Conservative Reader Meet Up

We are hosting the first Conservative Reader Meet Up at 6.30pm on the 21st May at The Ship & Shovel Pub in Trafalgar Square, London. If you’d like to come along to meet other Readers, share ideas about future content and discuss the issues of the day, do come along.

Towering Columns

In The Times, Roger Boyes describes China’s strategy to become the new ‘rational’ lynchpin of the global order.

The Trump armoury includes investing in national champions — he is not leaving that to China — and a readiness to use force at home (in the form of anti-immigrant enforcement) and abroad. The sequencing of recent US military operations against the Iranian nuclear programme, then toppling Venezuela’s China-friendly dictator Nicolás Maduro and then bombing Iran’s regime should be seen as a Wagnerian hell-and-damnation prelude to the Beijing visit.

It has not, of course, shocked and awed Xi. Rather, he smells bombast (as well as bomb-blast) masking weakness. On a philosophical level it saps the US case for being the legitimate point-man for liberal democracy and undermines western cohesion. Hence the procession of western leaders visiting Xi, all eager to make nice. At least six of these recent visitors — Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Finland and South Korea — are formal allies of the United States. Xi will have drawn the conclusion, with a degree of smugness, that these leaders are on the search not just for lucrative contracts but for proximity to a restrained and rational player at a time of global madness. They help him make a point about China’s great power status and America’s retreat from responsibility.

The “madman theory”, a term notably coined by Nixon when he let it be known to the North Vietnamese that he would do literally anything to stop the war, keeps on being played though often with a cynical twist. Henry Kissinger worked it out early (“a madman who is holding a grenade in his hand has a very great bargaining advantage”) but Trump has used it too often against North Korea and Iran. The threat of “civilisational erasure” against Tehran, with its playful hint of genocide, is what shook Xi the most. China would see an open threat to its own cherished civilisation as existential.

For Engelsberg Ideas, David Cowan says we can learn from the national policy of 19th Century Canada about how to survive Great Power politics.

Britain and its European allies are in a situation altogether different to Victorian Canada. Yet in many ways the predicament is similar. Britain is navigating a course between two large entities, namely the EU and the United States, while trying to establish itself as an independent power. The decline of European industry has shown how vulnerable the West has become in the new age of great-power competition. There are undoubtedly strengths, such as British and French membership of the UN Security Council and their nuclear deterrents, as well as the broader institutional strength of NATO. But European hard power must be restored.

They can only do this by regenerating the manufacturing sector. Failure to do this will force Britain and other European middle-ranking powers into a submissive foreign policy that follows the whims of Washington, Beijing and Moscow. But they can realistically follow Macdonald’s example and rebuild themselves as prosperous and sovereign middle-ranking powers. Macron’s decision to expand the French nuclear umbrella and Merz’s rearmament plan are encouraging signs. But there is so much more incredible potential that can be tapped in London, Paris and beyond. It requires a blend of economic nationalism and political moderation.

The current historical moment demands a renewed National Policy. At the heart of Macdonald’s vision was the realisation that national power depended on productive capacity. Canada was able to build its industrial strength and, in turn, make the sovereignty promised by Confederation into a reality. Canada is also an instructive example of successful nation-building that should inform European elites in national capitals as much as in Brussels. Europe must now guard against the immense power of China as the world’s largest manufacturer as well as rebuild its defences against Russia. Navigating between the squabbles of great powers has been done before by middle-ranking powers. It is an art that must be mastered again.

For The Financial Times, Oren Cass argues that America should say ‘no deal’ to China and resist its quest for global economic dominance.

As US President Donald Trump visits China this week, his administration appears torn between the need to decouple and the desire to strike a grand bargain. This is nothing new from America. During the Biden administration, the Commerce and Treasury departments consistently pressed for a more open economic relationship with China while the National Security Council insisted on greater restrictions. Trump has pursued dramatic escalation in some instances and warm conciliation in others. Tariffs on China briefly reached 145 per cent in early 2025 and the White House sought to block sales of even the outdated AI chips that Biden had approved for export.

Less than a year later, Trump was offering chips that Biden would not and suggesting that the US should welcome 600,000 Chinese university students. Biden’s goal was to persuade, cajole or, if necessary, drag China towards increased globalisation and greater international co-operation. Trump believes that China has been “ripping us off” and that through economic coercion he can get a better deal. But the Chinese Communist Party is not possessed of a deeply held liberalism just waiting to be teased out by a US suitor. It is an illiberal regime that sees no advantage in supporting an open global commons. Likewise, China’s heavily protected, state-controlled economy is not an attractive opportunity just waiting to be tapped by American firms.

In the late 1940s, many who harboured utopian theories of world government were sure that integrating Stalin’s Soviet Union into their plans could work. Those who opposed US involvement in conflicts overseas saw the end of the second world war as the perfect time to withdraw. Neither course would have been wise.

For The Critic, Christopher Snowden describes how our command and control capitalism is throttling the economy.

This is not just a story of bad laws and unintended consequences. It is not about the suffocating levels of regulation in every area of economic life, although much could be said about that. This is something different and, I think, new for this country. An activist state is systematically coercing the private sector in the pursuit of a range of social engineering goals, all of which are implicitly assumed to be more important than the economy. It is a form of central planning, albeit with a patchwork of different plans rather than one overarching goal. Some of them have explicit targets. Net Zero by 2050 is the best known of them, but there is also the plan to go “smokefree” by 2030, to “phase out” petrol and diesel cars by the same year, and to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2035.

To meet such targets, recent governments have tightened their grip on the private sector. At the softer end of the scale, they require businesses to make commitments to political goals before they can produce anything. The Procurement Act (2023) contains various “social value” requirements that oblige firms bidding for public contracts to demonstrate progress on Net Zero, diversity, apprenticeships and so on. Developers are forced to add solar panels to all new builds and make a certain proportion of their houses “affordable” (who is buying the rest?). The planning conditions for the new runway at Gatwick include the stipulation that at least 54 per cent of passengers must use public transport to get to and from the airport, a strangely specific demand for something that a builder cannot control.

At the harder end, the government makes threats and delivers punishment beatings. In a fully socialist system, state-owned motor companies would simply stop producing the internal combustion engine in 2035 and politicians would take the blame. In Britain’s command economy, the Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate requires manufacturers to sell a certain number of electric cars. The mandatory number rises each year and companies face fines of up to £15,000 for each petrol or diesel vehicle above their quota. Similarly, when he decided that there would be no new gas boilers in Britain by 2035, Johnson introduced fines for companies which failed to sell enough heat pumps. Again, there was a target: 600,000 new heat pumps a year by 2028.

In The Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that our nimble approach on nuclear fusion shows we do not need to re-join the EU.

In short, the UK has created a fusion ecosystem in concert with the Americans that is now reaching critical take-off. It is becoming a fusion superpower in its own right. Would this have happened under the inertia of EU membership and faced with endless squabbling over the division of spoils?

Fusion is not a minor matter or a technological luxury. The global energy and economic system will be changed forever the day that the first megawatt from a fusion reactor hits the grid at a competitive cost. The rewards will be immense. It is unfashionable to credit Boris Johnson or Sir Keir Starmer for anything in our petulant society but both deserve a few hurrahs for this at least.

There may be many compelling reasons for the UK to tie its fate closer to the EU – or, indeed, to rejoin – but please stop telling me that higher economic growth is one of them. Listening to insular Labour backbenchers bleating piously about a Europe that exists only in their heads is worse than enduring the hideous noise of fingernails on a blackboard.

For The Times, Paul Goodman says that we must get tougher on our enemies at home in a new insecure age.

Ministers have promised to scale up the government’s specialist disruptions unit to detect, expose and counter extremist influence across the UK. But a more systematic approach is required, modelled on the education reforms introduced by the Conservatives, developed by Labour, continued by the Coalition and preserved in essentials to this day. Just as Ofsted was put in place to monitor school standards, so a new counterextremism regime should be established based on inspections, fines and enhanced rights to sue.

The universities and the arts were identified as problem areas in a Downing Street seminar last week. Are Jewish students being harassed while university authorities turn a blind eye? Widen the Office for Students’ inspections remit, fine the institutions concerned and, if necessary, hold vice-chancellors and principals personally liable. Are artists subject to silent boycotts by venues? Let a new ombudsman investigate.

The Best Value regime, which requires local authorities to seek continuous improvement, should include councils’ response to antisemitism. An “extremism duty”, modelled on the “Prevent duty”, is required for prisons where Islamist gangs, in some cases, rule the roost. Above all, the Charity Commission needs new powers to suspend trustees and shut down charities, with funding barred from specific states, organisations, groups and individuals approved by parliament. An inspections regime wouldn’t be a cure-all. Nothing can substitute for effective border control, swifter prosecutions and deportations where necessary. The government promises to keep foreign preachers of hate out of Britain. It should also act against those who are already here: the time has come for some speakers in mosques to be prosecuted for stirring up religious hatred and incitement.

For The Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs argues the country is beginning to rebel against big budget welfare socialism.

Blaenau Gwent – the poster child of benefit-addicted Britain – has started to rebel against its fate. This should send a powerful message to Labour. With the welfare bill set to exceed tax income by the end of the decade, benefit dependency is the single greatest challenge facing the country. Yet Keir Starmer looks set to leave office without even attempting to grapple with it. The reason that no senior Labour politician is willing to put their head above the parapet is that the party’s MPs are convinced that they have a moral obligation to protect the benefits of the vulnerable. But the shifting mood in places like Blaenau Gwent suggests that this view is sentimental and out of touch.

It is true that the people of Blaenau Gwent do not particularly blame or resent those among them living on benefits. But there is a growing understanding that welfare socialism is horrifically damaging to the very people it aims to help.

Places like Blaenau Gwent are often labelled the shame of Britain. But spending time there this week as the Labour leadership psychodrama unfolded, it struck me that it is Westminster that has become the stain on the nation. If there’s one thing people need to understand through the current chaos, it is that Britain itself isn’t broken; it is being failed by an embarrassing excuse for a political class.

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Wonky Thinking

On his Substack, Rian Whitton lays out how we have been doing industrial strategy wrong and that we cannot just focus on supply-side reforms, but need to ensure that we build up British businesses that are able to be effective partners for industrial renewal. This means policies that effectively target and support critical industries and retain domestic capability.

British industrial policy fails partly because it tries to promise everything to everyone. Decarbonisation gets mixed with regional redistribution, which gets mixed with job creation, which gets mixed with desires to be an innovation superpower in the most speculative technologies, with quantum computing being a clear example. What never gets defined is what size the industrial economy should be, how much growth can be expected, or what share of employment and output manufacturing should represent. We have a panoply of desires with no clear mission.

Instead, small amounts of money are spread thinly across the country, with little willingness to make difficult decisions about where industry should actually be concentrated. Because Britain’s housing market is so constrained, policymakers rarely even consider large-scale internal migration towards productive industrial regions. Instead, struggling areas receive scattered subsidies with no broader strategy behind them.

The UK also misses another key component of industrial policy. It only works in the context of a wider political economy. In Taiwan, China, Japan, Germany and Sweden, industrial policy is directed through a partnership, implied or otherwise, between the government and powerful domestic industrial conglomerates. In many cases, the industrial elite of those countries have power and political influence far exceeding that of British billionaires. The Wallenbergs of Sweden, the myriad industrial foundations in Germany, the keiretsu and the chaebols all continue to wield significant influence.

Industrial policy is often seen as an alternative to markets and the power of the wealthy. The truth is that successful industrial policy is historically a compromise between the wealthy and their societies; you are given government support, protection and priority, and in return, you invest domestically and think beyond immediate shareholder returns. To some, this is a grubby relationship, but we already accept it on a small scale, whether it’s Anthony Bamford’s donations or the government supporting Jim Ratcliffe.

Britain no longer has many large, domestically owned industrial firms capable of competing globally. Our car industry is now almost entirely foreign-owned. This may help headline productivity figures, but foreign firms generally prioritise their home markets and domestic supply chains. So to summarise, much of our industrial policy is flawed. However, it is also worth noting that supply-side reform has already been enacted, and the more ambitious elements of it are politically contentious.

New research by the Energy Institute at Haas by Lucas Davis has found that the shale gas revolution has saved the US economy nearly $5 billion since 2007 through providing cheaper energy and reducing dependence on more expensive imports. The paper demonstrates the importance to the economy of securing domestically produced supply of energy.

It may seem like a distant memory now, but back in the mid 2000s, U.S. natural gas production had been flat for a decade, and the U.S. was importing liquefied natural gas (LNG), with plans to import much more. As of February 2007, for example, there were four additional U.S. LNG import terminals under construction and another 10 U.S. LNG import terminals had received approval from FERC.

Then shale gas happened. Advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling opened up vast new areas to development and dramatically increased U.S. natural gas production. Figure 1 plots monthly U.S. natural gas production. Since Daniel Yergin and Robert Ineson wrote about “America’s Natural Gas Revolution” in the Wall Street Journal in November 2009, U.S. natural gas production has approximately doubled, driven overwhelmingly by shale gas. Along the way, the United States went from being a net importer of natural gas to the world’s largest exporter. The United States has been the world’s largest LNG exporter since 2022, and in 2025, the United States exported 9 billion Mcf of natural gas.

This paper calculates how much shale gas has saved U.S. natural gas consumers. We first compare natural gas prices in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Prices diverged sharply in 2007, just as shale gas was accelerating. The paper then uses these price differ ences, together with information about U.S. natural gas consumption, to calculate various measures of savings. The paper finds that U.S. natural gas consumers have saved $4.5-$5.3 trillion since 2007, equivalent to $237-$276 billion annually.3 Incorporating demand elasticity the savings are $164-$189 billion annually. These large savings reflect that the U.S. natural gas market is very large.

U.S. natural gas consumers now use 30 billion Mcf of natural gas annually. Combine this high level of consumption with price differences that have averaged $9-$11 per Mcf, and it makes sense that the savings from shale gas would be very large. The paper then examines the pattern of savings across sectors and geography. Natural gas consumers include electric power, industrial, residential, and commercial. We find that 38% of savings went to electric power customers, with 30%, 19%, and 13% for industrial, residential, and commercial customers, respectively. In terms of geography, Texas has saved more than any other state, and Louisiana has saved the most per capita.

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Podcasts of the Week

On The Critic Show this week, Graham Stewart, Henry Hill and Tom Jones debate whether “Britain is done” through a combination of unsustainable welfare spending and a lack of an alternative vision.

OUTPOST

What has become of Britain?

May marks the beginning of summer, and this month Tom, Henry and Graham are here to talk you through May’s edition of The Critic, leading with the question of whether Britain has any vision left…

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3 months ago · 7 likes · Outpost

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Quick Links

DWP has increased welfare payments for polygamous households.

Henry Jackson finds that 574 ‘sectarian candidates’ were elected councillors last week.

New Energy Independence Bill will ban new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

Implosion of Market Financial Solutions costs UK and US lenders over £1bn.

Historic British business Tate and Lyle subject to £2.7bn US takeover bid.

The Royal Household’s grant is to be cut by the government.

The Prime Minister faces leadership challenge from Mayor of Greater Manchester.

Conservative Reader Meet Up

We are hosting the first Conservative Reader Meet Up at 6.30pm on the 21st May at The Ship & Shovel Pub in Trafalgar Square, London. If you’d like to come along to meet other Readers, share ideas about future content and discuss the issues of the day, do come along.

Towering Columns

For The Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs argues that London no longer offers a clear route to a better life for the young.

But now that dream has lost its sheen. The American dream is based on a promise that if you work hard, you’ll make it. The London variation promises those who are willing to put up with high rents, stress and crowds, the prize of better career opportunities and a more exciting life. But this compact is breaking down.

Londoners on higher wages used to have more disposable income than their fellow Britons to splash on fun and fine things. But surging rents have terminated this advantage. When housing costs are factored in, the average London household income is now estimated to be lower than that outside the capital.

A generation ago, settling down in London was a perfectly reasonable lifestyle choice. Things have changed. Almost 60 per cent owned their home in 1991; today that is down to around 45 per cent. Everything from expensive childcare to family-unfriendly homes is creating a hostile environment for those planning to settle down. Career prospects for strivers are dwindling. As AI slashes the graduate job market by a third, it is more difficult than ever to get one’s foot in the door.

In Conservative Home, Arthur Reynolds writes that higher taxes and costs for pubs risk cutting off a route into work and skills for many young people.

Both Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White grew up on council estates, and a number of young people who walked into our pub from humble beginnings have gone on to achieve great things. A lad who started washing dishes at 16 – incredibly shy and unsure where he wanted to go in life – is now the Head Chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant, attending glamorous award ceremonies and hanging out with the country’s best chefs.

I was studying for my A-Levels when he turned up, dreaming of university and the bright lights of the city: he’ll make more money as a great cook, and make more people happy, than I ever will tapping away behind a desk.

Another who began as a teenage waitress went on to become a hostess on luxury yachts – living a life many could only dream of. Some have travelled the world as private chefs, others have stayed local, using their skills to command good wages (many a chef earns more than their employers) and get on the property ladder. Without pubs, and the opportunities they offer, none of this could have happened. In their determination to squeeze every ounce of tax from them, Labour risks breaking an industry that offers a lifeline to thousands of young people who know the classroom isn’t for them.

In The Critic, Fred de Fossard argues that new rules raise risk creating a legacy of fewer jobs and homes for the young.

That is the sad reality of an overregulated economy: small and medium-sized businesses are squeezed out of existence, many unable to shoulder the burden of complying with new laws. Those who do remain in the market have to take a number of steps to reduce their risk. For example, if a landlord is unable to terminate a tenancy or increase the rent at the end of a contract, it is likely that the overall rate of rent will increase to mitigate this. There are already reports of prospective tenants being vetted for their character and financial circumstances before securing a room to rent. These are undoubtedly unpleasant things to go through, especially for young people at the start of their working lives. But if the law imposes huge new risks and costs on landlords, it should be expected that these costs are eventually passed onto tenants.

A flexible labour market and a flexible rental market are two fundamental components of a market economy. They are also vital for young people who want to start working and start building independent lives of their own. A meme has swept X called “Londonmaxxing” recently. In some respects, this is a charming online tribute to London as a place to live, to eat and drink, to innovate and to work. It has become especially popular among those who are bullish on London’s future AI economy. It is a nice idea. But if the people who make Londonmaxxing a reality cannot either find a job in the city or a room to rent, there will be nobody to max out what the city has to offer. The Employment Rights Act and the Renters Rights Act will erode the flexibility which makes economic activity and prosperity possible, and we will all pay the price. For some, the bill is arriving in their letterbox already.

For The Telegraph, James Johnson argues that Zack Polanski’s poor approval ratings set the Green Party up as a radical non-mainstream force.

But what if that is not the Green Party’s goal? A fall in mainstream support might not hurt Polanski if the real aim is to be an insurgent radical-Left party that can win, say, 50 seats. In fact, it may even help his cause. For there is a phalanx of radical-Left voters, making up around 15 per cent of the voting public, who will quite like what he says.

In a YouGov poll last year, Green voters were the least likely to favour custodial sentences for a number of crimes. For a criminal who attacks someone with a knife, they favoured a shorter prison sentence than any other party’s supporters.

The Greens’ position may also appeal to a significant number of British Muslim voters, one in four of whom in key population centres around the UK are planning to vote for the party at the next general election. One reason is their position on the conflict in Gaza, a bigger driver of vote for British Muslims than the economy.

A recent Policy Exchange poll with JL Partners found that one in four British Muslim voters had a positive view of Hamas. As many as four in 10 British Muslims believe the Jews have too much power in society, and almost half support banning all Israel-built technology from the National Health Service.

On Substack, Neil O’Brien argues that high asset prices mask weak public finances and that when conditions shift, the state will have less room to respond.

At Spring Statement Reeves got a £5bn windfall from assumptions about CGT increasing, which helped offset some of the extra spending she has announced since the Autumn.

Some of the growth is from Reeves’ own tax increases (like the family farm tax and family business tax) - and some from an assumption that the assets she is taxing will keep on going up, while frozen thresholds for IHT and stamp duty drag more and more into paying. (This is “fiscal drag.”)

That’s why Reeves will be keeping her fingers crossed for increases in asset prices - if anything happens to them her numbers will start to unravel in a big way. This is a kind of “fiscal fragility”.

This isn’t just inflation - these taxes are also increasing as a share of GDP. Stamp duties have long been about 0.5% of GDP, but are going up about half that again to 0.77%. Having been in a range of 0.15 to 0.25% GDP over recent decades inheritance tax is forecast to increase to 0.40%. The three taxes taken together will have gone up by about three quarters of a percent of GDP from 2024 to 2030/31.

For The Telegraph, Guy Dampier argues the current framing of migration understates its impact and this misleads the public.

Critics have raised concerns. Freezing out the courts won’t necessarily prevent them from challenging these measures, which could cause delays even if Parliament exercises its sovereignty. To remove the numbers promised requires a tenfold increase in the detention estate and very little operational friction. In many cases those who arrive illegally destroy their identity documentation, making it hard to work out where they are from. Even when we know, their home countries may refuse to take them back.

These are not insurmountable problems, however. Visa sanctions will encourage recalcitrant countries to take back their nationals. Those whose origin cannot be identified can still be removed to a third-party country, the threat of which may be enough to encourage them to leave or seek a voluntary return, as many have done in the United States. Building more detention estate rapidly is perfectly feasible when the NHS was able to build a 4,000-bed Nightingale Hospital in just nine days.

Such a large volume of removals will upset some, as mass deportations have in the USA. It has to be remembered, however, that this is a necessity. If it were not for mass breaches of our borders, then mass deportations would not be necessary. Any politician unwilling to do so is in effect saying that they will condone illegal arrivals, as well as the costs and crime that go with that. Only a rigorous response will create a deterrent capable of ending mass attempts to enter the country illegally.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel argues that we should copy the Gulf states in their approach towards Islamism.

I reject the dissolution of my tradition and I reject Brenton’s suggestion. Instead, I suggest, given that Islam is now an enduring feature of British civic society, we ought to study the way modern, functional, Muslim countries stamp out its pathological variants. The governments of Morocco, the UAE and Jordan, for example, all deploy some combination of mosque and imam licensing, theological guidelines and sermon vetting. The UAE, which no longer funds students coming to Britain because of the risk of campus radicalisation, even regulates donations and study sessions.

You might ask how such practices are consistent with hard-won British freedom of religion. Manifestly, they are not. The tussle between state and religion in Islamic countries has not generated the same settlement as in Christian countries and there is no reason why we should have expected it to.

We have to develop a new way of policing ideology in our country, one that is more sophisticated and interventionist, which roots out, and where possible, deports, promoters of strife and the networks that enable them, yet which preserves as many of our liberal norms as possible. As a minimum first step, we should urgently stop importing and naturalising people who harbour ideologies we don’t want.

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Wonky Thinking

Policy Exchange has published a new report which examines the new emerging trend in British politics of ‘Islamopopulism’. JL Partners polling surveyed over 1,000 British Muslims and found differing views from the rest of Britain’s population on issues like gender segregation, Gaza, and the presence of dogs in public spaces.

In addition to populist movements of the right and left, Britain faces a growing populist movement among its four million Muslims. This highvoting faith group, once 80 per cent Labour, is turning in far greater numbers to alternative candidates across a range of parties who are willing to issue a communal appeal. Among Muslim voters of Asian origin, Labour’s vote share dropped by 28 percentage points between the 2019 and 2024 general elections – a remarkable fall in five years1 – and, as our polling shows, is set to fall further. Four independent candidates were elected to Parliament in 2024. Others missed out only narrowly. Many hundreds more are standing at this month’s local council elections.

While less secular and more communal “independent” candidates are the movement’s most prominent standard-bearers, Islamopopulism is also finding a home in the Green Party and Your Party. And two new, interlinked national bodies, The Muslim Vote (TMV) and Vote Palestine, have arrived on the scene. These seek to direct Muslim voters to the candidates most able to “punish,” in TMV’s words, Labour and the Conservatives. At the recent Gorton byelection, in a seat nearly 30 per cent Muslim, TMV backed the Greens and no independent Muslim candidate stood. The Greens won with a significant Muslim vote.

Policy Exchange’s programme is dedicated to understanding Islamopopulism: its goals, its methods and from where it draws its supporters. Such scrutiny has hitherto been turned upon right- and leftpopulism, but to a much lesser degree on Islamopopulism. What does Islamopopulism want? How far does it fit the classic populist template? How much does it reflect the actual views of British Muslims? Are the independent candidates really independent, or are they working together? Is TMV a “Muslim Momentum,” a central organising body akin to the Jeremy Corbyn fan club? What links has the movement to Islamism and other movements hostile to democratic values? What are the issues, values and policies they are seeking to advance, and how far do they align with the views of the majority in this country?’

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Podcast of the Week

In The Spectator’s Quite Right! podcast, Michael Gove and Madeleine Grant discuss the increasing normalisation of antisemitism in Britain, and how populist forces on the left of British politics seek to exploit this for their own gain.

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Quick Links

Chief Executive of South East Water quits after supply chain issues.

Chief of organisation funded by Arts Council shares Golders Green conspiracy.

Britain pays Norway £20bn a year for North Sea oil and gas.

Chinese spies attempt to silent dissidents in Britain.

Nurse who lied about qualifications ordered to pay back £278.

Starmer pledges to stay on as PM after Labour defeats in local elections.

Conservative Reader Meet Up

We are hosting the first Conservative Reader Meet Up at 6.30pm on the 21st May at The Ship & Shovel Pub in Trafalgar Square, London. If you’d like to come along to meet other Readers, share ideas about future content and discuss the issues of the day, do come along.

Towering Columns

On Substack, Neil O’Brien writes about how radicalisation of our campuses is shaping growing levels of political violence.

What’s really happening is that these universities are being pushed around by militant staff and students. For example, UCL’s branch of the University and College Union passed a motion calling for “intifada until victory” shortly after the Hamas attacks. UCL’s “Director of equality, inclusion, and culture”, Addeel Khan, is a trustee of Save One Life UK, a charity under investigation for links to Hamas.

What does this culture mean in the real world?

Zahra Farooque, who graduated from UCL in 2021, was charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage, and violent disorder for targeting an arms factory. UCL neuroscience student Mohammed Nasser was arrested after allegedly assaulting a pro-Israel demonstrator in Brighton. Qesser Zuhrah, 20, was studying social sciences at UCL before being arrested over alleged offences linked to the activities of Palestine Action. These problems have been going on for a long time. In 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had run the Islamic Society at UCL, attempted to detonate explosives on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Nor is it confined to UCL. The Office for Students reported 70 cases of Islamist radicalisation cases in higher education institutions which were escalated to Prevent officers in the 2023-24 academic year. This represented a 75% increase on the previous year.

For The Telegraph, Jonathan Goldstein says that we must summon the courage to tackle home grown radicals.

A country’s strength rests on shared standards – on a clear sense of what is acceptable and what is not, and on the confidence to enforce those boundaries consistently. When those standards begin to blur, the consequences extend far beyond any one group.

They extend, too, to how Britain is seen from the outside. Reputation is not built on rhetoric but on lived reality. When countries such as the United Arab Emirates begin to question whether it is safe to send their students here, it should give us pause. When businesses and investors start to factor social instability into their decisions, it becomes an economic issue as much as a social one.

We should be clear: this is not about inflaming division or assigning collective blame. It is about recognising that radicalisation, in any form, cannot be ignored simply because it is uncomfortable to address. The longer we defer that conversation, the more entrenched the problem becomes.

In The Times, Sebastian Payne documents the growing political extremism and antisemitism in the arts and culture.

On Monday, a new report was launched in parliament by Freedom in the Arts, a campaign group, to tackle “the new boycott crisis”. It states that 77 per cent of the almost 200 artists surveyed have either directly experienced or witnessed boycott-related activity.

Their research argues that there was a problem before the October 7 terror attacks on Israel, but it has ramped up significantly since. Something has gone badly wrong in the arts sector, it says, with an ecology based on talent, artistic judgment and meritocracy replaced by one of fear, and informal or direct sanctions.

Freedom in the Arts argues that artists are being targeted not for their political beliefs but simply for their identity, with Jewish artists facing “wave of boycotts”. It notes that many have been “accused of Nazism, Zionism or moral complicity [in Israel’s conduct] simply by virtue of their heritage”, something that would be lambasted as discriminatory were it another ethnic group. The most disturbing thing is the perniciously quiet way that this censorship is happening: those who do not voice correct right-on views are treated as “suspect”; cancellations happen behind closed doors without any process; and boycotts gather rapidly online. And then there is self-censorship, those artists who decline to publicly say anything heterodox because it risks disrupting their careers. A previous survey by the campaign group showed over half of nearly 500 artists said they did not feel they could speak freely on social and political issues.

Meanwhile, for The Times, Richard Morrison highlights the loss of arts and culture for local communities.

Kent is not the first council to venture down the slippery path of flogging its family silver to make ends meet. In 2013 the London borough of Croydon auctioned off its collection of Chinese ceramics for £8 million. The following year, in a notorious deal, Northampton borough council sold a 4,000-year-old Egyptian statue to a private buyer for £15.8 million, even though it had been donated to the council expressly so it could be displayed in public. More recently Hertfordshire, Derbyshire and Cambridgeshire have also sold hundreds of artworks.

But until now the vast majority of local authorities have shown an admirable resolve to uphold the principle that their collections, often donated by people who wanted everyone to enjoy their art, should be sources of civic pride, not financial assets to be flogged when times get tough. That civilised view is now under attack. Two years ago the Taxpayers’ Alliance published a paper asserting that the UK’s local authorities possess, between them, nearly two million artworks valued at £1.5 billion. As only 28 per cent of this hoard is on public display at any time, the Alliance argued, councils facing huge financial pressures should “assess what they do and do not need to hold on to”. In other words, they should turn paintings languishing in dusty storerooms into hard cash and use that to pay for essential services…

The works in storage may be valued at a certain figure for insurance purposes, but that doesn’t mean they will fetch this price if sold in a desperate dash for cash. There are horrible stories that suggest some local authorities (including Kent) may have bundled together dozens of fine prints or paintings and auctioned them all for a few hundred quid…although local authorities are technically the owners of these artworks, they are really holding them in trust for their communities, and especially for generations yet to come. In Maidstone, for instance, the art students and schoolchildren of the future will no longer be inspired by the very tangible link to Gormley that Two Stones provided for so many years.

In The Telegraph, Robert Buckland argues that threats against our elected representatives is warping our political debate.

For generations, when it comes to our relationship with our elected representatives, we in Britain have taken pride in what many other countries regard as an unusually direct and personal link. MPs continue to hold open constituency surgeries, walk our streets without escorts, cultivating the impression that politics in the United Kingdom is accessible. Yet that settlement is now increasingly under strain.

This week, the deteriorating situation was brought into stark relief by the disclosure by Nigel Farage MP, Reform leader, that continuing and serious threats to his safety led to his acceptance before the 2024 election of a private donation to cover the costs of his own security. Assaults by milkshake might seem amusing to some, but the reality for Mr Farage and many others is that this is the tip of a very large and frightening iceberg.

Not only does his own security dilemma call into question how we protect MPs other than the most senior government ministers, but it asks fundamental questions about how public life itself functions, who chooses to enter politics, and how democracy at all levels is experienced by voters. As large parts of Britain go to the polls in devolved and local elections next week, and campaigns and candidates actively seek election, this question is even more topical.

In Conservative Home, Katie Lam argues that we are failing to protect those that serve to protect us.

The previous Government legislated to put a stop to these prosecutions. This Government plans to repeal those protections, and throw open the doors for a whole new wave of lawfare. They are so determined to do this, they have even made it one of only two bills carried over from this Parliamentary session to the next. They insist that this is necessary, because the protections put in place by the last Government are not compliant with the Human Rights Act, or our obligations to the ECHR.

But if protecting our veterans from vexatious prosecution really isn’t compatible with ECHR membership, this only strengthens the case for leaving the ECHR altogether.

The action taken by our security forces in Northern Ireland was necessary, in order to keep us safe. The same is true of the action taken by those who are currently serving across the world. Their ability to take that action relies on the knowledge that, if they have acted according to instructions given to them by the British Government, then the British Government will give them full support in future. It is, in other words, a relationship which relies on trust.

The Government’s plan to repeal the Legacy And Reconciliation Act totally undermines that trust. So it is no surprise that, as a result, many currently-serving SAS soldiers are resigning. Who can blame them? When they can’t even rely on the support of their own Government, and may face decades of legal harassment in future, why would they take the kind of risks that they’re being asked to take?

For The New Statesman, Andrew O’Brien writes that we have given up trying to pay for our standard of living.

The Sterling Crisis and IMF Loan of 1976 are perhaps the most misunderstood economic events in recent British history. Columnists and politicians love to reference them, particularly in reference to the current Iran crisis and our own beleaguered Labour government. But they barely understand the events they’re describing. The point is not that our current crisis is the same as then, despite some passing similarities. In fact, in many ways, the current crisis is worse than 1976.

The reason why is simple. We cannot afford our current standard of living. We do not produce enough of what we want – or enough of what the rest of the world wants – to pay for the things we cannot produce ourselves. Add on top of that a global economic crisis, like the US-Iran war, and the economy begins to buckle. As the world scrambles to secure fuel supplies, food, fertilisers, plastics and other essentials in its wake, we will struggle to secure our own supply. Even if we do so, we will have to sell off more of our businesses, our property, our future tax revenue to pick up the bill.

We have allowed ourselves to get into this position by forgetting the iron law of international economics: every country must pay its way. Ensuring this was the goal of politicians like Jim Callaghan and Healey. This is what maintaining our balance of payments meant in practice. It is the very heart of what it means to deal with the cost of living. And it has been forgotten by our current political class.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel argues that the right needs to stop relying on outdated theory and embrace national economic renewal.

The question is, when a third of the world’s goods are produced by an economy run on the basis of “Marxist-Confucianism”, can you actually claim to be operating according to the natural laws of the free market? Or are you in fact just participating in the role of global “capitalist” chump — a “non-player character”, as the video game wonks put it — in some weird power struggle of sub-regional Communist Party officials with production targets to hit…

But beyond its practical consequences, the ultra-liberal analysis also has limited explanatory power. An honest reading of economic history disproves the absolutist theory that the state is always bad at picking and developing winners. Nuclear power, mass vaccine production, space shuttle development, semiconductors, solar panels, car-making: all have relied at different points upon the might of government research, subsidy or procurement to grow. And in all sorts of cases, strategic government support has led to the emergence of genuinely competitive companies that end up trouncing global rivals. That’s before you even enter into the debate about how various savings and fiscal policies favour or hinder particular industries.

Unfortunately, neither the Tories nor Reform are close to formulating a coherent world view. Reform is throwing out sporadic promises of nationalisation, but policymaking is still stuck at the stage of working out who owns the keys to the whisky cabinet. The Tories are doing some work on fiscal and energy policy, but have neither the attention span nor the cash to expand beyond that. If this work doesn’t happen, we’ll just end up with contradictions and truisms about the extraordinary innovative power of markets. But a right-wing programme for the economy needs to incorporate the way things actually happen, not the way the old theories say they should. There is, in short, more than one way to boil a pot.

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Wonky Thinking

The Prosperity Institute has published a new paper with a draft bill on repealing the Human Rights Act and returning to the traditional constitutional settlement with accountability located in Parliament rather than the courts.

We envisage two primary effects of withdrawing from the Convention and repealing the HRA 1998. One is that public authorities will be able to discharge their functions in ways that are presently unlawful because they are incompatible with the Convention rights. Two is that there will be a significant reduction in the grounds upon which individuals and corporations can challenge the exercise of state power.

The result is that it would become easier for public authorities to take many decisions, to take them quickly, and they would face a lower probability of judicial scrutiny. This would extend the capacity of those public authorities to take positive, or at least popular, decisions in a timely fashion. It would, however, also expand the scope for them to make significant, perhaps grave, mistakes. Some of those mistakes would not be easily susceptible to ex ante or ex post judicial inquiry without the HRA 1998 in place.

Were our Bill to be enacted, the United Kingdom would return to something closer to its historic, Diceyan constitution in which there are no limits on Westminster’s parliamentary authority. In such a constitution, the political accountability mechanisms of Parliament take on decisive importance. The capacity and willingness of parliamentarians to question, probe, expose, deny, censor, and direct the executive, its agents, and the wider emanations of the state would become the central protection against excessive and authoritarian government.

We are presenting this Bill for two reasons. The first is to raise public understanding that withdrawal from the Convention, and repeal of the HRA 1998, is not a purely mechanistic process and involves significant policy choices.

The second is that the policy ambitions of Labour, Reform UK, and the Conservatives, particularly their commitments to improve deportation rates of those individuals deemed ineligible for asylum or humanitarian protection in the UK, will continue to be difficult to achieve for so long as the HRA 1998 remains on the statute book.

The Social Democratic Party has published a new Green Paper calling for the return of an investment state. This would shift spending on social security towards building new homes, energy infrastructure and return to the post-war levels of public investment. The paper argues that this would significantly increase living standards and boost productivity.

Prior to the mid-1970s, British government spending on public investment roughly equalled that spent on entitlements and cash transfers to households, with each item constituting 6% of GDP. However, in the subsequent fifty years, successive British governments have averaged just 1.7% of GDP per annum on public investment, and 10.2% on entitlements.

This reallocation of government spending – what we call the shift to the entitlement state - has caused a long-term, secular reduction in British productivity growth. The cost of this long-term fall in productivity growth has been momentous. We estimate that British output per hour in 2024 would have been 90% larger had this shift not taken place, representing an increase in 2024’s Gross Value Added (GVA) from £2,500bn to £4,900bn.

We argue for a reallocation of government spending towards a pattern that better resembles pre-1975 levels: at 6% of GDP per annum on public investment, and 6% on entitlements.

To avoid the patterns of economic mismanagement that derailed the pre-1975 system, we propose the creation of an overall body for national economic development called the Department of Economic Planning (DEP). The DEP will pursue targeted five-year plans that use public investment to resolve supply-side constraints facing the British economy and create the conditions for long-term growth, such as infrastructure investment, housing, and industrial coordination.

We name this new mode of economic management the investment state.

To achieve the investment state, we will need to realise a significant reduction in current entitlement spending. To achieve this, we propose a ten-year “taper” period which will see spending on the state pension reduce by £4.9bn per annum, disability and incapacity benefit by £3.8bn per annum, and housing benefits by £3.7bn per annum.

To illustrate the power of the investment state at resolving structural crises in the British economy, we present three five-year plans by the DEP focused on housebuilding. Using half of the proposed entitlement savings, we detail a plan to expand national housebuilding capacity to build 4.3mn additional homes within fifteen years.

In total, we project that the higher productivity growth achieved under the investment state will increase national income significantly over a thirty-year period. By 2055, it will increase national income by nearly fifty percent – from £3,040bn under the current trend to £4,440bn.

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Podcasts of the Week

In The Spectator’s Reality Check podcast, Michael Simmons and John Power discuss the Green Party’s policy on drugs and have decriminalisation could lead to a rise in drug deaths and create broader social problems.

Chris Bayliss, Henry Hill, and Nigel Biggar discuss on The Critic Show the questionable historic justifications for the Church of England - and Britain more widely - to pay reparations for actions of the past and what it means for modern Britain.

OUTPOST

The Reparations Game (FULL EPISODE)

This week on The Critic Show, Chris Bayliss and Henry Hill are joined by the Anglican priest, historian and ethicist Nigel Biggar…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · Outpost

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Quick Links

The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre has raised the national threat level to Severe.

The Act of Union came into effect today, 319 years ago.

Total government spending on course to be 60% of GDP by 2073.

The number of Channel boat crossings has reached 70,000 since the General Election.

Investigation has found multiple instances of antisemitism in local election candidates.

Canadian Armed Forces platoons with over 80% non-Canadians descend into infighting.

Towering Columns

For The Times, Patrick Maguire calls time on a Starmer Ministry that has been sustained by the collective denial of The Cabinet.

It is not just that ministers are giving up on Starmer. His premiership has always been sustained by a collective suspension of disbelief, so they did not have very much to give up in the first place. What is different, and new, is that they no longer feel they owe the prime minister the courtesy of hiding it. It is not as if he is in the habit of putting his colleagues first, so why bother defending the indefensible? Starmer cannot sustain the fiction of his own authority alone. When cabinet ministers are privately despairing to the chief whip of their leader, as at least one did this week, the die is cast.

But these ministers cannot conscientiously object to the political consequences of their inaction, just as Starmer has for six long years. Soon they will have to act. As one cabinet source says: “It’s all f***ed in fast forward.” So unbearable is the status quo for a critical mass of ministers that a new consensus is taking shape: that, once the scale of electoral devastation his leadership is wreaking on the Labour Party is made clear next month, Starmer should be made to set out a timetable for an orderly transition, with a new leader in place for conference.

It would be a fittingly mild flavour of regicide for Starmer’s Labour Party: procedural, bloodless and probably too late. But it suits all players. For Miliband, Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh — the soft-left powerbrokers who hold the whip hand over the prime minister — it buys time to chart Andy Burnham’s course back into the Commons. It spares any one ambitious minister, not least Streeting, the fate of James Purnell. And it would permit the prime minister himself another six months or so of gladhanding on the international stage.

In The Spectator, Patrick West writes that the flag of St George has become a symbol of resistance to rampant cosmopolitanism.

In recent times, the flag has unquestionably assumed more political connotations. But contrary to Starmer’s assertion, one that reflects a mindset endemic in metropolitan circles, it has not been hijacked ‘to spread hate’. It has been deployed in great numbers by a class of people in this country who feel they have been consistently ignored, denigrated and traduced over the past thirty years. There would be no proliferation of St George flags on lampposts, pavements or on the front of houses and pubs today had not the English people been remorselessly insulted and belittled by a cosmopolitan Anywhere class, and one in hock to a lopsided version of multiculturalism.

This is an echelon that is untroubled by the sight of Palestinian flags fluttering on street corners, one which enthusiastically celebrates cultures, all except the indigenous one of England. This is an entitled class which is apt to smear without distinction anyone with old-fashioned, sensible or moderately conservative views as ‘far right’.

While it’s true that the St George’s flag is sometimes flown by xenophobes and racists, for the majority of English people who aren’t of this persuasion it has become more a symbol of resistance and defiance. It’s a flag used to convey discontent with a detached class that has ignored their plight and dismissed their concerns, to one which continues to parrot platitudes about diversity while turning a blind eye to its manifest defects, to a ‘two-tier’ Keir who seemingly cares about some sections of society more than others. In that regard, Starmer is unwittingly correct. The St George’s cross has become a symbol of ‘unity’. It has united under one banner great swathes of the populace who don’t like him or how his people have treated them.

For The Critic, Henry Hill questions whether Starmer has truly failed given the lack of any governing project.

And on one level it is a stupid question. He is failing. What follows is not an exercise in clickbait contrarianism. The statement “Starmer is failing” strikes me as just as intuitively correct as it does everyone else. But on another it is a very interesting question indeed. Because if Starmer is failing … at what?

Seriously, what is he trying to do? One could say “governing”, I suppose, but that is so broad as to be rather a cop-out and when you try to define governing, it isn’t obvious that he’s actually attempting it. The Government’s agenda has devolved into a Labour backbencher’s Christmas list, individual enthusiasms — hiking welfare, hiking the minimum wage, hiking taxes, hiking regulation on housing and employment — pursued without any apparent reference either to the national finances or to the Prime Minister’s stated intention to go “hell for leather” for economic growth.

Perhaps the Starmer project, whatever it was, has simply failed already, buried when mutinous backbenchers broke the back of his Chancellor and forced a u-turn on welfare cuts? But this confuses cause and effect. The Prime Minister lost control of his MPs so quickly because he hadn’t prepared them for unpleasant realities, nor furnished them with a plan which might justify pain today with glory tomorrow. Absent any programming, his historic majority simply reverted to factory settings.

For The Spectator, Tim Shipman highlights the growing militancy of civil servants in response to calls for reform.

Insiders say the collapse of confidence of the civil service in the government goes back to when Starmer, in his first months, denounced civil servants wallowing in ‘a tepid bath of managed decline’. One said: ‘It was straight from the Boris playbook. Beat people up then try to tell them to reform.’

From the start there was disappointment. ‘Civil servants were optimistic about Labour,’ a former official says. ‘They were sick of the chaos. But quite quickly it was clear the government had no idea what it was doing.’ Even a Labour politico agrees: ‘The biggest problem is that Starmer didn’t know what he wanted civil servants to deliver.’

Officials did not conceal their disdain. One political aide says: ‘Some in the higher echelons of the foreign office regard themselves as Jeeves to the government of the day’s Wooster. And there are civil servants at all levels who make it clear you are just passing through. You can see it in their eyes. They’re like the Taliban: “You have the democratic mandate, but we have time.”’

The view of Starmer is astonishingly negative. ‘He can’t get the basics right of governing,’ says a former mandarin. ‘The senior leadership of the civil service are particularly acute at observing how well power is being wielded. They might not like it, but they’ll respect power being wielded. What you have is a prime minister who can’t set political direction. He can’t take his party with him and use his majority. And he won’t take difficult decisions. This guy delegates to a fault. He is becoming very well-known in Whitehall as the man who wants to avoid taking responsibility for decisions. He’s the man with invisible fingerprints.’

In The Telegraph, Kemi Badenoch calls on the Attorney General to resign in the wake of fresh allegations over the prosecution of Iraq War veterans.

So now we know. Keir Starmer’s closest ally in Cabinet and chief legal adviser led a witch hunt against brave British soldiers. Thanks to The Telegraph, we can see how Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, disgracefully sought to profit off the misery of decorated war heroes, using Iraqi militants claiming to be farmers, and hounded decorated war heroes through the courts for years. British soldiers were put through hell by Hermer and his team, before finally being exonerated in 2014. Hermer’s close associate Phil Shiner was struck off over the case. There was no censure or punishment for Hermer…

Of course, British soldiers should fight within the law. But hounding our veterans through the courts will have a chilling effect on our ability to recruit people to the Army. It is a brain-dead strategy at a time when the priority should be growing our Armed Forces.

Former Labour defence secretaries are pleading with the Prime Minister to increase defence spending. The long-awaited Defence Investment Plan is nine months late. But the Government seems to have no trouble finding time to harass our soldiers. These are serious times Britain is living through. War in Europe and in the Middle East.

It’s not just Labour. The Greens want to leave Nato and scrap our nuclear deterrent. The Liberal Democrats seriously think that more borrowing is an option while bond markets are wobbling. Reform hasn’t even bothered to appoint a defence or foreign affairs spokesman. The Conservatives’ shadow attorney general, Lord Wolfson, is representing veterans in the Supreme Court for free. That is the difference.

For The Times, Juliet Samuel writes that ideological complacency from officials has let Chinese interests to penetrate the British state.

It surely cannot hurt that Chinese companies hire our political elites and officials on wonderful salaries. Huawei at one point had in its pay the government’s former chief information officer (John Suffolk), a former head of the Foreign Office (Simon Fraser, via his PR firm Flint Global) and the former head of UK Trade & Investments (Andrew Cahn). A former No 10 chief of staff and Foreign Office director, Eddie Lister, helped China buy its mega-embassy site in London while being paid by the buying and selling side.

But these appointments don’t exist in a vacuum. Around them is a friendly network of legitimising organisations focused on promoting “links” and “engagement” with Beijing, chief among them the Great Britain China Centre. The GBCC is a Foreign Office-funded quango that holds snazzy receptions, takes MPs and retired judges on junkets to meet Chinese officials and “trains” civil servants on Chinese matters. It “partners” with Beijing institutions like China’s Supreme People’s Court and Ministry of Justice. This is a regime, lest anyone need reminding, that keeps hundreds of thousands of people in labour “re-education” camps, locks up petitioners in psychiatric hospitals and faces credible allegations of organ harvesting. What better way to “engage” than with a “legal roundtable”?

But what makes the GBCC particularly instructive of the Foreign Office’s attitude to risks posed by China is its choice of “honorary president” from 2015 to 2022: one Peter Mandelson. It was a job that gave Mandelson excellent networking opportunities. He was convening events in ministries and banks to introduce Chinese officials to British lobbyists, meeting executives from Chinese state-owned companies, leading delegations to China and so on. In other words, he was using the convening power and funding of the British state to build his contact book.

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Wonky Thinking

The Centre for British Progress has published new research on the adoption of AI and has found the UK is keeping pace the United States so far. However, the research has also found that the diffusion of AI has already started to have an impact on the jobs market, particularly in software development.

UK workers currently use AI across 385 distinct work tasks, roughly 2.1% of the 18,429 unique task statements identified in the O*NET database. These tasks range from the granular to the broad: drafting and proofreading legal opinions, adapting teaching materials to different types of learners, or tailoring sales scripts to specific customers are all distinct ONET entries. The same number for the US is 1,563, a considerable gap that largely reflects the size of the US economy. Countries with a larger number of users have more tasks that cross the threshold for inclusion in the dataset. This means raw coverage figures are not necessarily informative of the degree of adoption, because we cannot fully adjust for the size of a country.

Therefore, while the gap between the US and UK appears significant, in practice it is narrower than it appears: when the comparison is restricted to tasks adopted in at least ten different countries, both the UK and the US cover all of them. When expanded further to tasks identified in at least five different countries, the UK is second, with 94% of those covered. The UK largely matches the pattern of adoption for advanced economies across task types, but doesn’t have enough users performing less common tasks, to a significant extent because of its smaller population relative to the US…

Software illustrates the pattern in a microcosm. Employment in the computer programming sector (SIC 62) grew by 18% between 2019 and 2025, roughly three times the economy-wide rate of employment growth, while output grew even faster, at 36% over the same period. But both series turned down in the second half of 2025: employment fell 4.5% from its March peak, and GVA dipped from its Q2 high. While the sector remains well above its pre-pandemic level, the timing coincides with both a broader technology-sector correction and the introduction of tools like Claude Code that can automate large amounts of tasks.

Vacancies have fallen from their 2022 peak, and the overall composition of IT roles has shifted toward higher-level tasks. On the whole, the sector appears to have inelastic demand: AI-driven cost reductions are expanding the market for software rather than shrinking the overall workforce, albeit less slowly than output growth. These trends may have partly reversed more recently, a development which coincides with the release of, but there isn’t yet enough data to suggest either that it is a causal pattern nor a persistent one.

This data point is likely the strongest kernel of evidence of any displacement effects of AI, but it is complicated by that decline coinciding with a reduction in the GVA of the sector. We should be mindful not to overanalyse a single data point that may well be revised in subsequent releases, but it is clear that the data point that would most clearly signal the beginning of the displacement of output cannot be cleanly reconciled with an account of increasing productivity leading to higher output and lower employment.

For the Future of the Left, Blue Labour thinker Jonathan Rutherford writes an essay asking the simple question: what comes next after the collapse of the liberal market order which has been governing Britain (and the world) for fifty years?

We are living in the aftermath of the liberal market order which has been the governing consensus for over three decades. Its ideology and policy solutions no longer work in the emerging new world order characterised by great power rivalry and the rise of China. Its style of government, technocratic and incremental, has only reinforced the failing status quo in the West. In the United Kingdom, the Labour and Conservative parties which upheld this consensus are now trapped in the past. Their vote share is collapsing. A generation of politicians, schooled in a managerial politics, is unable to enact the change the country needs. They flounder in an unfamiliar and threatening world as the old multinational British state fragments.

Britain led the world in liberalising its national economy, deregulating the financial markets in 1986, and opening up to global flows of capital. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organisation. With its vast pool of cheap labour, the manufacturers of western capitalist economies transferred their investments and factory production to the Guangdong Province and the Yangtze River Delta. The effects of globalisation lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty while laying waste to the old industrial heartlands of American and Britain. President Trump and the rising power of China emphatically brought liberal globalisation to an end. The so-called liberal rules-based order so celebrated by the Financial Times and The Economist is an illusion.

The war in Ukraine, and now the energy crisis caused by the Iran war have exposed Britain’s continuing dependence on global supply chains and its vulnerability to global capital flows. For Britain, indebted to the bond markets, there are no easy routes to national economic recovery and no political party willing to make the case for them.

We can identify political, economic and cultural elements of this change, but we do not yet have a way of describing the emerging world we are living in.

Post-industrial, postmodern, post-Marxist, post-liberal: these explanatory frameworks do not describe what is here now and shaping the future. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls this kind of liminal state a ‘boundary situation’, which pushes us to the margins of our living experience and forces into consciousness the open-endedness and instability of the world.

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Podcast of the Week

Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau discuss on UnHerd’s Econoclasts podcast the state of Western Europe’s dependence on US and Chinese technology as well as Russian oil and gas. They argue that these geopolitical and technological weaknesses will force European countries to make a new deal with Russia in order to secure access to cheap energy supplies.

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Links

The United States considers dropping support for the Falkland Islands.

British workers were hit by heavier tax rises than in any other rich country last year.

The Bank of England says that stock markets are overvalued and set to fall.

Business costs jump by 5.4% in wake of Iran War signalling higher inflation to come.

Internal Green Party projections say that migration could increase to five million a year under their policies.

Catholics now outnumber Anglicans two to one amongst Gen Z and millennial churchgoers.

In The Telegraph, Tom Harris says the Mandelson vetting row has become a test of Starmer’s honesty and authority, because either he misled Parliament or his government failed to tell him crucial facts.

The Prime Minister’s constant parroting of his determination to put the country’s best interests first – as if he were the first holder of the office to realise that’s what the job has always been about – has put him in a bear trap of his own making. And the oft-shared video of Starmer telling an applauding audience that “I never turn on my staff, you should never turn on your staff” has gained a wider reach in the wake of his sacking of two chiefs-of-staff at Number 10 and now Robbins.

Given that he knew of his boss’s repeated commitment to putting the national interest before everything else – even before the desire to appoint a political celebrity from a bygone era to a senior diplomatic post – would it not have occurred to Robbins that allowing the Prime Minister to go ahead with Mandelson’s appointment against the advice of our security services might not comply with his stated principle? If the appointment was, in the view of security officials, not in Britain’s national interests, is that not a pertinent piece of information that should have been shared with at least one minister?

Instead we are asked to believe that this was known only to Robbins, who thought it best to withhold it from Starmer, and the rest of the Government, including his own boss, the then Foreign Secretary.

In The Critic, Aleks Eror argues that despite a change of governing party, policies implemented in Hungary may not change much.

Little is known about the incoming prime minister. He claims to be a conservative and there’s good reason to believe him. A former mid-ranking civil servant in Orbán’s once-dominant Fidesz party, he was reportedly passed up for promotion by the party hierarchy multiple times until he eventually lost patience and quit in February 2024 while going public with allegations of corruption against a number of Fidesz insiders. He launched his political campaign the following month, promising to clean up Hungarian politics and also mend relations with the EU. Since then, he’s served as a perfect blank canvas onto which all of Orbán’s critics could project their hopes and dreams.

This has led to a weird situation where he has been portrayed as some sort of democratic freedom fighter by both the liberal media and Brussels elites alike, even though he promised to keep Orbán’s big beautiful border fence, refused to comment on Fidesz’s attempted cancellation gay parades last year, and expressed only lukewarm support for Ukraine — all while wearing traditional folkloric shirts that would probably be described as “white nationalist” coded by the #FBPE crowd. The only reasonable assessment of Magyar at this moment is that he’s an unknown quantity and that we can only speculate about his true convictions and how they will affect Hungarian politics.

For now, the only thing that is likely to change is a shift in tone from confrontational illiberalism to a more restrained patriotic conservatism because Magyar’s focus will be on purging state institutions of Fidesz appointees so he can rule with a free hand and unlock some €18 billion in frozen EU recovery and cohesion funds that Brussels withheld from Orbán. His response to Budapest Pride this summer will be a possible indicator of just how far he intends to dismantle the Orbánist state. State officials with Fidesz loyalties are almost certainly doomed, but the Hungarian capital could yet remain a bastion for rightwing think tanks and networks that will help sustain Fidesz-style populism as a political force in the long run.

In The Telegraph, Guy Dampier illustrates how one obscure case in Diego Garcia displays the ineffectiveness and impracticality of Britain’s asylum system.

They began by trying to process the asylum claims, with Home Office asylum interviewers “seconded” to the authorities and the cases reviewed by independent reviewers, who were mainly retired judges and barristers. However, a legal challenge by lawyers in London against the process led to it being withdrawn, all negative decisions revoked, and the whole thing having to begin again. For three long years the migrants were stuck there, in a camp costing British taxpayers over £108,000 a day.

The asylum seekers were housed in military tents on a site nicknamed “Thunder Cove”. They leaked and soon ended up infested with rats. There were sexual assaults and harassment, as well as hunger strikes, suicide attempts and self-harm. Some asylum seekers had to be sent to Rwanda for medical treatment. Others chose voluntary return. The total cost rose into the tens of millions, with the Foreign Office warning it could rise to £50m a year. Attempts to restrict the asylum seekers from leaving the camp, to prevent them wandering into the base, have been ruled illegal, meaning that compensation is likely to be paid.

Following the general election in 2024, 39 of the asylum seekers were granted humanitarian visas to come to Britain, although this did not constitute permanent settlement or recognition of their refugee claims. When this was announced in the camp, most of the single men who were not granted these visas began to self-harm, some in front of children. There were also two suicide attempts. This blackmail worked, with the visas extended to cover 61 of the 64 remaining migrants. Those excluded were the three who had criminal convictions.

In UnHerd, Andrew O’Brien outlines Britain’s unique vulnerability to external economic shocks and why this means American threats matter.

Trump is not stupid. He knows that Britain needs easy access to American markets to sustain its fragile economy. Keir Starmer also knows this, and has said that he wants to get closer to Europe to reduce dependence on the United States. This is to misdiagnose the problem. The British economy needs America precisely because of its imbalanced trading relationship with the European Union.

There are three great trade powers in the world at present: the United States, the European Union and China. Britain is currently running trade deficits with two of them: China and the European Union. The British economy is importing £42 billion more from China than it generates in exports. The deficit with the European Union, however, is more than twice as large and stands at just under £90 billion a year. The only major success in terms of trade is with the US, where Britain’s surplus currently stands at roughly £73 billion.

In essence, the problem is that Britain can sell services very easily to the United States because of cultural, linguistic and historic ties, but it is much more difficult to sell them to the EU. On the flip side, demand for European goods has never been greater. This has nothing to do with Brexit but with the country’s dependence on Europe’s energy and goods while solely selling services. In 1999, Britain’s trade deficit with the EU was £11 billion, but by 2015 it had reached £69 billion.

For Conservative Home, Bob Seely says Britain risks being crippled by hybrid warfare because political leaders still think too slowly about defence.

It’s very likely that China and Russia have malware in the UK’s critical national infrastructure. How do we know? Because China has done so on the US grid and the US has been public about the problem: hidden kill switches in solar panels, persistent access to the US electricity grids and hackers embedded into the US infrastructure. Russia has also embedded itself into US systems; in the highly significant 2020 SolarWinds cyber-attack, Russia maintained a persistent presence on US government servers for months. If they have done it in the US, they will have done it here.

Any sustained cyber-attack, potentially backed up with physical sabotage of the system, might knock out the grid for days, weeks or months even. Worse, it may be controlled by others with the ability to turn it off and on.

Most people are not prepared for a world without electricity; no lights, no heat, and for some, no cooking. Our just-in-time supply chain is designed for speed and efficiency, not resilience. The average person stores three days of food. Within a few weeks food might have to be rationed. We saw panic buying at the start of Covid, especially in large urban centres. How long would social cohesion survive? Judging by the rampaging mobs in south London, we seem to have enough difficulty keeping law and order even in times of plenty.

For The Telegraph, Danny Cohen highlights the serious threat posed by the Green Party.

There is no doubt that many voters have lost faith in the mainstream parties that have dominated British politics over the last century. Their failures in government, along with a sense that the UK is stagnating, have led growing numbers to feel they have nothing to lose, that they may as well roll the dice and try something different.

But there is more to it than that. Gaza has clearly been a driver of Green Party support amongst the disgruntled far Left and some sections of the Muslim community. The Greens have a lot more to say about a war taking place thousands of miles away than any issue that would improve the day-to-day lives of British people. But do these pro-Gaza voters also want to legalise Class A drugs and prostitution? Have they taken a proper look at the policies they would be supporting?

Increasingly, voters appear to be ignoring what political parties actually say they plan to do. It’s dangerous and the consequences could be far-reaching for us all.

So if you don’t want to tank the UK economy, if you believe Britain should have borders and you are not in favour of legalising heroin and crack cocaine please think carefully before voting Green. This is no joke. The future of our nation may depend on it.

In The Telegraph, Ian Acheson describes how our weak institutions helped make the Rudakubana tragedy possible.

Prevent, the very scheme that should have escalated this kind of case to urgent intervention by others, was treated as a box-ticking exercise. Rudakubana was referred three times, but each referral was prematurely closed because he did not fit the neat category of a clearly defined terrorist ideology. The inquiry shows officers following processes while missing the point: a dangerous young man obsessed with violence, whose ideology was incoherent but whose trajectory was obvious. Compliance with paperwork became a substitute for professional curiosity and moral courage.

Mental health services fare no better. The inquiry describes emails never answered, assessments delayed for months, and a specialist high-risk children’s service that never saw Rudakubana because he fell between bureaucratic stools. His autism diagnosis became a reason not to act decisively on risk, as if neurodiversity were a shield against serious intervention rather than part of a complex, dangerous mix. Time after time, professionals accepted the most comforting interpretation of his behaviour and moved him on.

Layered over this is a suffocating ideological capture. In children’s services and mental health, the language of vulnerability and trauma has crowded out an honest recognition of dangerousness. Rudakubana was seen through the lens of “a child in need”. I heard this mantra repeated at a gathering of Home Office officials and NGOs convened ostensibly to encourage reflection after these ghastly events. The result is a system exquisitely sensitive to causing offence, soaked in the lexicon of piety and compassion but strangely numb to the potential and actuality of mass murder.

In Conservative Home, Sarah Ingham argues France now outperforms Britain militarily because it spends smarter, plans better and takes sovereignty more seriously.

France is, in corporate-speak, Britain’s peer competitor, but recent events are highlighting its defence superiority.

Defence procurement in Britain is currently synonymous with wasting time and money. The current defence crisis raises many questions, not least why France is apparently getting more bang for its buck – or should that be plus bang pour l’euro?

NATO’s former longstanding target of spending 2 per cent GDP on defence is a rough guide to an alliance member’s commitment to investment in national security. In 2024, Britain spent 2.28 per cent and France 2.04 per cent. In 2024/25, Britain spent £60.2 billion on defence: last year the Ministère des Armées’ budget was €61.8 billion. (£53.7 billion at yesterday’s rates)

France’s Armed Forces’ regular strength was almost 200,000 in 2025: in January, Britain’s was 143,560. France has one aircraft carrier to Britain’s two, but in most other classes – frigates, destroyers, corvettes – it has more ships. A database for military geeks suggests the Armée de l’Air et de l’Espace has 988 active aircraft, the RAF 640.

An in-depth study by Britain on how France’s Armed Forces are getting more for less is now urgent. Le Crunch last month was the final, thrilling, match of the Six Nations. Le Crunch Nouveau is French vs British defence.

President Macron alluded to the “reordering of US priorities” in relation to NATO. Should the US leave the alliance, it will be like the current exodus of the world’s wealthiest from Britain: celebrated by most in Labour, disastrous for the national bank balance as the capability gaps would need to be plugged.

Wonky Thinking

Policy Exchange’s new report on schools and gender safeguarding argues that far too many schools are still mishandling issues related to gender. It highlights that social transitioning is often facilitated by schools without informing parents, with unclear guidance facilitating inconsistent practices. The report calls for clearer guidance on gender in schools with clear statutory rules and stronger enforcement.

Nevertheless, in the majority of cases, schools adopted an inconsistent approach across the questions asked, meaning that vulnerable children were not always afforded the necessary safeguarding protections. For example, in cases of gender distress, some schools involved parents but did not inform the Designated Safeguarding Lead or a medical professional. Some schools involved some of the relevant parties but still adopted a broadly permissive approach to social transition, often indicating that they were struggling to balance their responsibilities to promote equality and provide anti-bullying and pastoral support with their safeguarding duties.

Moreover, the rights and interests of other pupils in school were not consistently upheld. Some schools required other pupils to accept a transitioning child’s new name and pronouns, potentially infringing on their right to freedom of expression. This was frequently justified on the basis of equality, pastoral care, or anti-bullying considerations. While most schools maintained single-sex toilets and changing facilities, many did not maintain single-sex sports or, if they did, only did for some sports. Schools often suggested that this was not a priority, instead indicating that decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis, with reference to safety considerations, but rarely to fairness, dignity, or privacy.

Most strikingly, a minority of schools continued to adopt a broadly permissive approach. 10% of schools did not inform parents when a child disclosed feelings of gender distress while also operating a policy of self-identification. In practice, this meant that some schools permitted a child to self-identify as a different gender and begin a social transition within the school environment without parental involvement. In such cases, vulnerable children may be denied access to multi-agency support and instead supported to begin a process of transition in school without full consideration of the potential risks or long-term implications. In these instances, contested beliefs about gender identity appear to have become embedded within school practice, shaping responses to vulnerable children in ways that risk compromising the effective discharge of safeguarding duties.

Podcast of the Week

Pollster Scarlett Maguire joined The New Statesman’s Anoosh Chakelian and Emily Lawford to discuss findings from Merlin Strategy polling that suggest young white women are becoming radicalised.

Quick Links

The COVID inquiry finds the UK’s vaccine rollout was an ‘extraordinary feat’.

The V&A changed catalogues at request of Chinese publisher.

A Jewish university student highlights growing antisemitism on campuses.

Prime Minister claims he did not know Mandelson had failed vetting.

The Chancellor u-turns and calls for a ramp up of North Sea drilling.

Towering Columns

In The Critic, James Jeffrey warns that we are forgetting the moral component of national resilience.

The UK continues to miss the wood for the trees. It frets over the size of its military. It frets over its lack of economic dynamism. It frets over the loss of civil liberties such as freedom of speech. All of these concerns are valid, but they pale in the face of the existential malaise that afflicts this country. The UK has no spiritual depth; it is a moral vacuum. The country’s default mode nowadays is flippancy and irreverence toward everything (we have always prided ourselves on our supreme “banter” that other nations can’t manage).

In her book The Need for Roots, the French writer, political activist and mystic Simone Weil wrestled with the question of why France fell so easily to the Germans at the start of WWII. Writing while exiled in London and working for the Free French movement, she said the country had crumbled because it had lost its spiritual dimension. As a nation, the French had nothing of depth and value to coalesce around; hence the Germans had walked all over them — while a sizeable number of the population willingly turned collaborator.

As others have noted, while the UK prides itself on its WWII performance, we never had to undergo the stress-test of how we would have responded had the Nazis managed to get boots on England’s soil. The English Channel saved us from having to face this uncomfortable question that confronted the French. I am not sure we would have done as well as we like to think. “What was everywhere, was moral incoherence,” Weil wrote of the state of France in 1940 when Germany invaded, noting especially the absence of “the spirit of truth” and the prevalence of “the spirit of vanity and falsehood”.

For The Telegraph, Jeremy Warner writes that the Iran War has merely strengthened China’s industrial dominance.

China promotes industrial development over consumption for a reason, and it’s not about to change tack. To the contrary, China has further doubled down on the mercantilism of its approach since Xi Jinping came to power. Economic resilience is routinely prioritised over growth in consumption and household purchasing power, with welfare made to take second place to industrial hegemony.

Government policy deliberately combines foreign asset accumulation, capital flow restrictions, currency manipulation, financial repression and other mechanisms that boost national saving but suppress consumption. Don’t knock it. If your objective is that of enfeebling the US and its allies while insulating China against the sort of supply chain vulnerabilities we again today see buffeting Western economies, it has been highly effective.

Trump’s war in Iran has further strengthened Beijing’s belief in the efficacy of its policies, and nothing the IMF says – eminently sensible and guided by the catastrophically destructive lessons of history though it might be – is going to change China’s view. Conversely, pursuit of economic resilience has indisputably been vindicated by current events. If Trump’s war in Iran were intended as a demonstration of continued US hegemony and military might, it has already largely backfired, having closed the Strait of Hormuz and exposed Western economic dependence on cheap Gulf oil and gas.

Western welfarism is in any case hardly an economic model you would want to follow. To the contrary, it is proving increasingly unaffordable and politically destabilising.

In Conservative Home, Miriam Cates makes the case for conservatives to tackle the triple lock.

Apparently without embarrassment, some conservatives complain that Britain’s benefit system is increasingly socialist – with growing expenditure on asylum seekers and those who don’t want to work – while being unwilling to contemplate reform to our most socialist benefit of all; the state pension. The same people who argue that disability benefits should only go to those who really need them seem remarkably comfortable with millionaires (one in four of today’s pensioners) and higher rate tax payers (three million retirees by the end of next year) receiving a state pension. Britain’s pension system now functions as a cash transfer from poorer young to wealthier old, in a reverse Robin Hood phenomenon that has become known online as ‘Boomer Communism’.

The delusion is so potent that it has led some to claim that those calling for pension spending restraint are ‘far left’. We really are flying upside down. Is it any wonder Britain’s young people are so demoralised? My eldest son turns 18 this year and, once he enters the workplace, a large proportion of the tax he pays will fund an income not just for poor pensioners, but for many who don’t need the money and are sitting on unearned asset wealth that he can never hope to acquire. If this is ‘capitalism’ then there are no prizes for guessing why young people might reject it.

In their press conference, the Reform Party pointed to polling that shows young people support the triple lock. But young people also support puppies and kittens; it doesn’t mean it will be a deciding issue for them at an election. And both Farage and Jenrick had some choice words about the apparently work-shy young, which is a bit rich considering they are the people who are being forced to fund a state pension that will be long gone by the time they reach old age. Campaigning for economic reform should not be the preserve of the radical left.

For The Critic, Henry Hill says that we must back the public to tackle petty crime when they see it.

We do need a stronger police response to “petty” crime, and a major prison-building programme to allow for the proper and effective punishment of serial offenders. But even if that could be delivered, retailers would need to be willing and able to confront and detain shoplifters long enough for the police to arrive; absent those conditions, businesses and individuals should have the law on their side if they choose to protect themselves against crime. Nor should we forget that our modern conception of British policing evolved in an era of much stronger social norms, and retailers having a zero-tolerance approach to crime is a step towards re-establishing those norms.

Finally, broader reform to liability law would also help to lift the burden on retail workers by making it easier for actual security staff to take a muscular and effective approach to tackling offenders themselves, and employers to build new security procedures that aren’t designed to minimise the risk of being sued by a criminal.

Retail workers brawling with criminals in the isles of our shops is nobody’s ideal world. But we should back them up when they do. It is a modern British vice to make policy fit only for an ideal world (perpetrator-centred, risk-averse) when we don’t live in one, and we are all poorer for it.

In The Telegraph, Eliot Wilson argues that the abolition of hereditary peers has left the House of Lords less able to challenge government.

When the House of Lords meets for the first time at the beginning of the next parliamentary session in May, it will be less independent than the House that Henry VIII faced in the 1520s. The arc of the moral universe really is long, but it is bending in an unexpected direction…

The Tudor House of Lords was made up of peers and prelates who owed their positions to a number of sources; it was no rubber stamp. How has the Prime Minister, 500 years later, managed managed to design a reformed chamber lacking that independence?

The answer is prioritisation. Last November, I described how the Labour Party had gradually shed most of its commitments to specific reforms of the House of Lords. It has focused on what it finds most obnoxious, the residual presence of up to 90 hereditary peers, 10 per cent of the total membership. Having eradicated the hereditary principle, the Government has scored a victory, and increased its powers of patronage. No other measures of reform are promised, merely nodded towards in a possible future; but what government truly wants to strengthen Parliament’s powers of scrutiny?

In Conservative Home, Peter Franklin say that the space race has shifted from a progressive to a conservative project.

Musk isn’t some idle theorist. He’s actually building the industries necessary in not one, but all the sectors needed to realise his vision: AI, robotics, satellites, solar power and, of course, launch systems. In the process, he’s already transformed the economics of spaceflight. Thanks to reuseable rockets and other innovations, costs have plummeted. In 2021 prices, the cost of using the Space Shuttle to lift each kilogram of payload into low orbit was over $50,000. But now, using the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket it’s less than $2,000. Unsurprisingly, the spaceflight sector is experiencing extraordinarily rapid growth — with 2025 another record year for launches. What used to be the most statist of human endeavours is now propelled by free enterprise.

So in that respect, spaceflight really is conservative and becoming ever more so. Perhaps that’s why parts of the Left are souring on what JFK called our “greatest adventure”. It’s not just the involvement of Right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos that they hate, but the very nature of the underlying project. Academics and activists are now using the language of imperialism and colonisation to problematise mankind’s expansion into the rest of the solar system. The flaw in that critique, however, is the notable lack of indigenous populations for the folk back home to sympathise with.

So, no, the woke objections aren’t going to fly. The same goes for the environmental objections. Spaceflight is very much not carbon neutral and each rocket launch does damage the ozone layer — a genuine concern given the rapid growth in launches. But there is a solution, which is to explore space from space. In 2028 Artemis V is scheduled to begin the construction of a permanent base on the moon. By developing the dead worlds of the solar system — and the yawning voids between them — we have an opportunity to move every polluting industry from the only living planet that we know of. So environmental pain in the short term, in return for what could be the greatest possible gain.

In The Times, James Kanagasooriam argues that ‘Blue MAGA’ risks destroying the consensus that has built America’s prosperity.

A Democratic victory at this year’s midterms might reassure some within the party. It should not. Winning a low turnout election with an electorate that is more left-wing than a national election is not validation that a pivot to the left is a long-term path towards sustainable success. Trump won in 2024 because more voters than not thought he would keep America’s borders secure, and growth abundant; he won over about 80 per cent of voters who thought the economy was the most important issue and 90 per cent of voters who thought that immigration was the top issue.

The main significance of the rise of Blue Maga is that it threatens the broad but thinning pro-market and pro-business environment on which America’s prosperity is founded. One of the trends in US politics over the past decade has been Democrats edging closer to corporate America and Republicans growing sceptical of big business. Blue Maga threatens this balance. With more of the Republican base captured by anti-trust sentiment, a distrust of crony capitalism and private equity super-gains at the expense of ordinary Americans, Blue Maga v Maga may leave business out in the cold.

Americans who favour low taxes may be looking ahead to the 2028 presidential contest nervously. A debate over the balance between labour and capital could take centre stage, in favour of the former. In an age of tech billionaires and with suspicions about the super-rich friends of Jeffrey Epstein lingering, the contours are certainly shaping up that way.

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Wonky Thinking

The Great British Business Council’s new report on industry and energy supply identifies the continued critical dependence of the UK on oil, gas and coal. The report calls for Britain to change course in energy policy if we are to preserve what remains of our energy-intensive industries. Unfortunately, a wide array of legislation has embedded misguided climate and energy policies into law. The report calls for all this legislation must be unwound, starting with regulations and taxes that reduce supply.

Despite all the additional taxes and regulations on hydrocarbons over the last twenty years, 78% of the UK’s energy needs are still met by oil, gas and coal. Electricity accounts for only 22% of final energy consumption in the UK, and 31% of that was generated using gas in 2025.

It is unfortunate that successive UK governments have chosen to encourage companies to import just under half of the oil the UK uses, half of the gas it uses, and almost 90% of the coal (mostly used for industrial processes).

The UK also imports approximately 10% of its electricity. The UK is dependent on imports for more than 40% of its total energy, including 10% of its electricity, even though it has ample reserves of coal, oil and gas. This outcome also negatively impacts the UK’s balance of payments.

The sum total of the UK’s pursuit of Net Zero CO2 emissions has been to offshore energy-intensive industrial production at the cost of 100s of thousands of jobs, billions of tax revenues, higher imports and lower exports.

Of 195 countries, Britain is one of only 40 with ample hydrocarbon reserves of coal, oil and gas – while over 100 have no hydrocarbons and the remainder have very small reserves.

Oil and Gas is a significant but dwindling source of tax revenue, delivering £4.5 billion in taxes in 2024/25 – down 27% from £6.1 billion in 2023/24. Tax revenue is declining because tax rates are too high and allowance for exploration and development costs has been reduced. So producers are bringing forward decommissioning, lowering tax revenue even more.

Offshore oil and gas are taxed at 78%: comprising 30% ring-fenced Corporation Tax (set separately from the main rate of Corporation Tax at 25%), 10% Supplementary Charge, and 38% Energy Profits Levy.

200,000 UK direct or indirect jobs provide an estimated gross value added (GVA) of £25bn/yr, with PAYE/NIC contributions likely to exceed an additional £1bn/yr.

It is also estimated that unlocking additional resources from Britain’s coastal waters could add £150bn of gross value on top of the £200bn of economic value expected from current plans.

While this resource is being left in the ground, the UK endures higher taxes and annual trade deficits. Meanwhile, we import the coal, oil, and gas we need while exporting industries and jobs to countries that are happy to let their manufacturers use them.

In a detailed essay for UnHerd, Rian Whitton asks whether it is too late for Britain to reindustrialise.

At a sprawling Texan-owned oil refinery overlooking Milford Haven, an estuary town in Pembrokeshire, crude oil from America and Norway is distilled inside 200-foot steel towers. The oil is heated to 400℃. Hydrocarbons with low boiling points, like gasoline and kerosene, rise to the top of the column, while heavier chemicals like asphalt remain at the bottom. Out of the towers come the fuels that power cars, trucks, shipping, aircraft, and much of the chemical industry, not to mention almost all military vehicles. Britain was formerly home to over a dozen refineries. Yet the Milford Haven site is now one of just four refineries left in Britain, with two closing in 2025 alone, one in Scotland and another in Lincolnshire. Similar scars are borne by many towns and cities across the country. Just recently, we’ve lost production of salt in Runcorn, synthetic textiles in Brockworth, steel in Rotherham, bearings in Newark-on-Trent and ceramics in Denby. British Steel in Scunthorpe limps on, if only with government support.

It has been a steep decline. At the turn of the millennium, Britain possessed the fourth-largest industrial economy in the world. More than 800,000 people worked in foundational sectors: oil and gas extraction, refining, metals, chemicals, and inorganics. Contrary to popular belief, Britain’s energy-intensive production did not peak in the Seventies — but in 2002, supported by relatively cheap energy and booming global demand.

Then, between 2006 and 2008, Britain’s output and productivity began to fall. Globally, heavy industry shifted decisively toward China, hollowing out Western industrial employment. Britain, like its peers, lost jobs — but suffered more acutely. Heavy industry employment has halved from over 800,000 workers in the early 2000s to just over 400,000 today. Since 2008, Britain’s steel sector has nearly collapsed multiple times; the ammonia industry has died out; salt production has ended and aluminum production has rapidly declined. Production of cement and glass is down, while imports of the same materials are up. Those jobs were lost during a time of perceived economic and political stability, where countries would specialise and become ever more integrated. But due to tariffs, wars, pandemics and a general sense of insecurity, talk of reindustrialisation, once dismissed as pangs of nostalgia, is becoming de rigueur in Westminster. Robert Jenrick, who stands a good chance of being the next chancellor, has argued for “creating the conditions for Britain to reindustrialise, restore our proud industrial heritage and create good jobs for British workers once again.”

For different parties, “reindustrialisation” means different things. Ed Miliband envisages a “green industrial revolution” where Britain’s reindustrialisation is directly tied to his ambitious carbon reduction targets. For Nigel Farage, the term means cutting red tape and reopening the mines.

If reindustrialisation has cross-party appeal, it is because it intuitively makes sense that being able to manufacture complex equipment makes a nation stronger, more productive and more prosperous. This intuition has been tempered by economists who argue for economic specialisation and enjoying the reduced cost of goods by offshoring manufacturing to cheaper locations. But recent global events — Covid’s effect on supply chains; the Ukraine war’s effect on energy prices; the Iran war’s effect on shipping — have made this view increasingly hard to defend. Deindustrialised Britain grows its economy anaemically, if at all. The same is true of its productivity. As a result, the country’s hard power has rapidly diminished.

Hence the cheerleading for reindustrialisation. This high-spirited rhetoric rarely acknowledges tradeoffs, but it ought to. This is because deindustrialisation was a price willingly paid for cheaper consumer goods from imports, increased welfare spending, periodic tax cuts, and progress towards meeting Britain’s environmental and emissions targets — or, at least, those targets that pertained to onshore activity rather than activity handed off to the developing world. Reindustrialisation, then, might require some of those dividends to be relinquished. Partly for that reason, none of the cheerleaders have yet made firm commitments for how much of our economy should be manufacturing, or what level of growth they would aim for. Currently, the concept of “reindustrialisation” is comparable in rigour to “soft power” and “clean energy superpower”.

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Podcast of the Week

In The Spectator’s Reality Check, Economics Editor Michael Simmons argues that those on welfare are not enduring the cost-of-living crisis, with successive governments fiddling with prices and prioritising claimants. His work builds on Onward’s report The Hidden Bill which found that Universal Credit claimants can get up to £10bn in additional benefits.

Podcast of the Week

A third of our refineries closed down last year.

The number of patents filed in the UK has fallen by 50%.

Nearly half of children in migrant families are living in poverty.

Welfare spending has reached £333bn surpassing income tax revenue.

99% of the UK’s data transmission accounting for £1.15 trillion of economic output relies on just 60 undersea cables.

Claude Mythos causes cybersecurity panic by identifying vulnerabilities in every major operating system.

The CIA reportedly used secret quantum magnetometry sensors with AI that can detect human heartbeats to find missing US airman in Iran.

P.S.

Congratulations to long time Conservative Reader Editor Gavin Rice, who has now joined Nick Timothy’s staff as senior political adviser. Gavin will be taking a pause from the Reader for a while but we wish him every success in his new role.

Towering Columns

For The Times, Juliet Samuel says closer ties with the EU will not fix our fundamental problems.

Labour is not interested in models of success, however. It is plugging away with its dreary “reset”, promising to follow various sets of EU rules to no obvious benefit. Even the plodding Starmerites at the Institute for Government admit that “so far, the EU has done better at securing its objectives”. Well blow me down. It’s almost as if this is a mug’s game.

What, anyway, are we trying to achieve by reintegrating our legal system with a bunch of countries in exactly the same rut as us? Maybe it will do away with some passport queues and export hassle (or maybe not). But is it going to change our destiny? How is any of it going to help us do what’s necessary: replace half the civil service with AI, curtail legal delays, restore our dynamism, end reliance on immigration, and secure public support to spend less on welfare and more on industry, science and defence?

To do these things, you need a vigorous state free to tear up the rules, champion Britain’s strengths and take risks. Compared with the opportunity, the costs of Brexit are a rounding error. And with every new crisis, the need for radicalism becomes clearer.

In The Critic, Will Solfiac writes that an unwillingness to drop outdated ideologies is preventing necessary reforms at home.

One of the most bizarre characteristics of those who struggle to maintain what’s left of the liberal international order is their refusal to accept reforms that might head off its destruction. It’s not hyperbole to say that the entire rise of what is termed “right-wing populism” by its opponents stems from the unwillingness of mainstream political parties to control immigration. Considering that the continued growth of right-wing populism makes the position of the old liberal consensus ever more precarious, you’d think the latter’s defenders would have decided to compromise. Mostly, they have not.

And they could have; the forms of immigration that voters most strongly object to are also those which have the fewest practical benefits. If mainstream political parties had managed to shut down the fraudulent asylum system, enabled deportation of foreign criminals, and heavily restricted flows from countries where immigrants are particularly likely to be net drains on the state or to cause social problems, this would have taken a lot of the wind out of the sails of right-wing populist parties. Yet with the partial exception of Denmark, mainstream parties have been unwilling to do this. Currently, Shabana Mahmood is attempting to save Labour from electoral extinction by adopting aspects of the Danish model, but is being met with vociferous opposition from within her own party.

The reason for this unwillingness is, of course, ideology. It’s obvious that the asylum system functions primarily as a way for young men, and later on their families, to bypass formal immigration routes and achieve settlement in Britain. It’s also obvious that a disproportionate amount of the problems of immigration in general come from a few parts of the world. Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the Second World War takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where “asylum seeker” meant a political dissident from the Eastern Bloc, does not matter. The system’s advocates seem to live in a world made up of rhetoric, where principles take precedence over reality.

For Conservative Home, Katie Lam criticises those that want to close down the debate on mass migration.

Speaking at a panel event hosted by the Demos think-tank, Liberal Democrat MP Max Wilkinson said that “social media…is making sure that you can have your voice heard in a really easy way that you couldn’t in the past”.

He went on to argue that this is a “massive problem”, because it allows members of the public to highlight problems with mass migration. For Wilkinson, the issue isn’t the impact that mass migration is having on our public finances, or the healthcare system, or our communities. It’s that people can now freely express and debate their concerns.

This approach is frighteningly common in our politics. Far too often, politicians have tried to make difficult problems go away by encouraging people not to talk about them. In some quarters, there seems to be a genuine belief that real-world problems are conjured into being when people talk about them, and that problems can be made to disappear if only people would just keep their concerns to themselves.

In The Telegraph, Tom Harris warns that Starmer’s reset has echoes of David Cameron’s failed negotiations with the EU.

Previously, Starmer insisted that a firm cap on the number of citizens arriving in Britain from the EU must be set at a specific level. This was rejected by the EU, which nevertheless has accepted the need for an “emergency brake” on the scheme. This would focus on “the management of flows rather than an upfront number”, according to an EU source.

This has the whiff of David Cameron’s unsuccessful negotiations in 2016, when he returned from Brussels having had most of his own proposals for reform rejected by an EU establishment that clearly did not believe that the threat to British membership was real. Cameron had pleaded for radical change. His proposals included restricting immigrants’ access to benefit for seven years and preventing them from sending their (UK) child benefit payments home. This was a bridge too far for the Commission and so Cameron returned to Britain with a few very minor cosmetic changes to our membership terms…

If Keir Starmer really wants his reset to offer a taste of what life might be like for Britain were it safely back in the loving embrace of the EU, he needs to tread carefully. Evoking the days when Britain ceded control of immigration to the EU and forced UK taxpayers to pay for the privilege would be a perfect way not only to reignite the Brexit wars but to ensure Labour would once again be on the losing side.

On Substack, Andrew O’Brien argues that both the right and left have given up on our ability to fix our own problems.

For those of us living in the real world, our economic model was broken whilst we were in the EU. The EU was not the cause, but it certainly did not help check against poor policy decisions. Crucially, joining the EU does not offer any real prospect of fixing it, because it would not suit the other members of the EU to change our economic and trading relationships with them to our benefit at their expense. A closer relationship with the European Union would set in aspic all the economic problems we have today and perpetuate our slow economic and social decline.

Increasingly, in rooms where discussions about the UK’s economic future, the issue of European Union membership keeps coming up. My overwhelming feeling is that advocates for a closer relationship are just hoping that the EU will solve our problems because we are incapable of doing so. We are experiencing a profound crisis in faith: faith in our people, our culture, our businesses. They are hoping that a closer relationship with the EU will be a Tolkienesque Eucatastrophe - a sudden miraculous event that will save us. However, this is not merely a crisis for the ‘centre’ and the left. It is one that is shared in the right, except this time the target is the United States.

How many years were wasted after Brexit fawning over Donald Trump to try and get a ‘free trade’ deal with the United States, rather than actually fixing our problems? A deal that is never likely to happen and if it did, would be made under conditions of considerable disadvantage in negotiations and would likely see our domestic agriculture (and many industries) crushed in return for little. Moreover, when did a trade deal alone ever really solve anything?

For UnHerd, Jonny Ball says that we must adjust to the reality that we are now a developing country.

Rather than busying ourselves with the dead end of Gaullist posturing, in short, perhaps we should start thinking of ourselves as the developing country that, in many ways, we so obviously are. Certainly, financial analysts have already begun tempering their investments in Britain, a country now displaying the dysfunctional features of an “emerging market”. Rather than Anglo-Gaullism, then, surely a far better model is Anglo-Dengism. Echoing the Chinese example, Britain today should look inwards, focus on problems closer to home, build, develop, reform, innovate, and Make Britain Rich Again, before finally concerning ourselves with the global status games beloved of men-of-a-certain-age who played too much Risk as a child.

As the pro-market reformers of the Chinese Communist Party understood, following the privations of three decades of peasant communism, to project yourself abroad, you must “hide your strength, bide your time”. Before sending aircraft carriers to reopen faraway straits or threatening foreign regime, we must first become a country capable of raising real wages and living standards for our own British citizens.

Ernest Bevin once demanded a nuclear bomb “with a bloody Union Jack on top of it!”. The Anglo-Gaullists fancy themselves his heirs. But Bevin — and Glubb before him — knew that power had to be consistently built at home before it could be brandished abroad. Today, we are attempting a reverse Bevin: indulging in a fantasy of power without the necessary foundations, painting the flag onto imaginary weapons we no longer have the means to sustain.

In Prop Views, Jack Airey writes that the YIMBY movement needs to move beyond just planning reform.

A more effective YIMBY movement would take those market realities more seriously. So much time in government is spent discussing reforms that sound good in theory but run into difficulty when confronted with the economics of development. If campaigners want to help unlock delivery, they should be as interested in who will buy, rent and finance new homes, and on what terms land will come forward, as they are in whether policy allows them to be built in principle. A movement focused only on the legal right to build, rather than the conditions under which building actually happens, will only get so far.

Second, YIMBY groups need a more mature relationship with the development industry. That does not mean becoming their uncritical cheerleaders. But it does mean engaging seriously with the companies that will build almost all new homes for the foreseeable future. Much of the YIMBY movement seems at best uninterested in how the development industry actually functions, and at worst openly suspicious of the firms and commercial models that will deliver most new homes. That matters because the more practical and operational constraints on development get downplayed.

There is a tendency in pro-housing circles to romanticise micro-scale, street-by-street intensification while disregarding the role of larger developers. The former might play a role in decades to come, but the reality is most new homes in England are built on larger sites by larger firms with complex delivery models. A serious pro-housing movement should want those systems to work better, not keep them at arm’s length.

For The Telegraph, John Bew and Guglielmo Verdirame say we need to drop our sentimental attachment to the dying international order.

Our concern starts from the way that the idea of a rules-based order is treated as an almost theological abstraction, as a God-given gift from which dissent cannot be contemplated. By this argument, the answer to our current discontent is to make fidelity to international law the organising goal of our foreign policy and the premise of every decision we take. This risks creating an imbalance in our foreign policy in a world where ever-fewer states share this approach.

Importantly, it is an approach that goes way beyond the astute Chilcot checklist in which international law is treated as one of 10 critical points to consider in the making of national security decisions. Yet those who may question this prioritisation – international law crowding out all other considerations – have been accused of being followers of the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, as somehow willing to give up on international law in favour of might over right.

The danger is that we end up as curators of an old system rather than active participants in a new world in which power is being more nakedly asserted. It is by a combination of tenacity, risk-taking and creativity that we have made ourselves present at the creation of previous international orders. If Britain is to have any say in the shaping of a future one, it cannot do so based on an abridged or ideological version of what has served us so well in the past.

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Wonky Thinking

On his Substack, Fraser Nelson analyses our public debt and how an attachment to inflation-linked gilts (so-called linkers) and quantitative easing are creating the conditions for a ‘debt bomb’ that could blow up the British economy.

These ‘linkers’ - inflation-linked bonds - worked very well for Britain until they didn’t. Offering to make loans inflation-proof helps flog them, so you borrow at a lower rate - so it’s a saving assuming (as they all did) that inflation, as we once knew it, would not come back. From its independence in 1997, HM Treasury had high confidence in its ability to control inflation and imagined the old tiger had been slain.

The linkers is just one part of the story. Perhaps just as big a factor is the way we did QE. Every country printed money after the crash, but the UK wanted to put HM Government at the front of the queue for cheap debt. The Bank of England bought bonds and turned long-term, future-proofed debt into short-term exposure at the overnight rate. According to the OBR, it has increased the speed at which higher borrowing costs jack up our debt interest bill by a factor of six (!). As its report explains:-

“The impact of a 1 percentage point rise in interest rates within one year has increased by around six-fold from a less than 0.1 per cent of GDP hit to net interest costs at the beginning of the century to about a 0.5 per cent of GDP hit by 2022.”

So QE swapped long-term security for short-term risk by replacing fixed-rate gilts with floating-rate reserves. The Bank of England created £713 billion (!) of these reserves — paying interest at Bank Rate — to buy long-dated gilts during QE. What once seemed a clever accounting trick ended up becoming fiscal hazard: a third of Britain’s debt now tracks monetary policy in real time. It has left us with a unique level of exposure.

A new paper by academics at the University of Manchester of productivity gaps in England has found there is less of a ‘North-South’ divide on productivity and more patches of poor performance. There are many low productivity centres in the South of England, whilst there are parts of the Midlands and North that have seen much more rapid growth. The paper calls for more a targeted and localised approach to spatial planning and investment.

Previous research by Wong and Zheng (2023) found that there was a very weak correlation between the labour productivity index and its change rate. This study goes further to unravel the spatial patterns and finds that while the headline of a pronounced productivity divide between the Greater London-South East region and the rest of the country broadly stands, there are however major variations in productivity level within the region, ranging from below national average (Group 6), through average (Groups 5, 7 & 9), to very strong (Groups 8, 10, 11 & 12) performance. Indeed, a much more complex and paradoxical picture emerges after factoring in the temporal dimension of annual growth rate. Nearly half of LADs perform below national level on both productivity level and growth rate and only less than a fifth show strong performance on both counts. Many high productivity LADs in Greater London and the South East have experienced stagnation or decline over the last twelve years, whereas many lagging LADs in the Midlands and northern England, starting from very low levels, have had positive growth trajectories. The productivity puzzle can be interpreted as a new ‘hare and tortoise story’: many high performers are losing ground in the race, when some poor performers are trying hard to catch up but have a long way to go. This rather bleak picture prompts for more tailored policy actions to accelerate or shift the trajectories of growth in different localities…

In policy terms, the uneven geography of productivity dynamics underscores the importance of place-based interventions to sustain the momentum of high-performing areas and to address structural weaknesses in those lagging behind. Indeed, many LADs south of the Severn-Wash line and in coastal areas have below national average productivity levels and growth rates. When zooming into the Greater London Authority and mayoral CA areas, the picture of spatial interactions is rather mixed and sporadic. While there are positive spatial spillovers found in Greater London and Cambridgeshire & Peterborough CA on productivity levels, the situation flips when positive spillovers of productivity growth are witnessed in their northern counterparts such as LADs in West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester CAs. There is also no one size fits all approach, as different combinations of driving factors are operating in different places. All these findings point to the need to have more contextualised approaches of spatial planning and resource allocation. These differential spatial trajectories require long-term strategic policy actions and local capacity building through further devolution of power and resources.

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Podcast of the Week

In The Spectator’s Coffee House Shots this week, Conservative MP Jack Rankin lays out the case for a more radical conservatism based on wealth creation and aspiration, building on the work of ‘Next Gen Tories’.

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Quick Links

The government has u-turned on granting North Sea drilling licences.

The Conservatives pledge to scrap carbon taxes on industry.

Britain has developed a new AI powered drone for finding hidden bombs.

The new mansion tax will cost the Treasury £275m before it raises any money.

President Trump has fired the US Army Chief of Staff.

Food inflation is set to hit 9% by the end of the year - three times higher than previously predicted.

One of the country’s key ball bearing manufacturers has shut down.

The government predicts it will miss its 1.5m new homes target by 400,000.