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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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.

Towering Columns

In The Spectator, Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy explains his objections to a mass Muslim prayer event being held in Trafalgar Square.

Opponents of Labour’s ‘Islamophobia’ definition warned it would stop us debating religious ideas. Ministers insisted we were wrong and dismissed concern about the confusion of racial identity with religious belief. Yet the week after the definition was announced, the Communities Secretary accused me of racism and Keir Starmer demanded my head. My crime was to call the ritual prayer by Muslim men in Trafalgar Square – and the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer – an ‘act of domination’. I did not question the freedom of Muslims to gather to break their Ramadan fast, nor their right to pray in mosques. But using public spaces to pray is a growing trend, and it makes a political statement. Islamists do this to achieve what the scholar Ed Husain calls the ‘total Islamisation of public space’. I saw Ed on Sunday, and we discussed how the Quran, like the Bible, warns against proud public displays of piety.

Politicians stick safely to the line that Islamism and Islam are entirely separate. But Islamism is inspired by Islamic teaching and Islamists pursue their goals in the name of the faith. More than other religions, Islamic theology promotes the application of religious principles to the political sphere. And it is far less open than Christianity to the separation of the spiritual and the secular. The people praying in Trafalgar Square were probably not Islamists. They were doing what they would have done had they broken their fast at home. But that does not make it appropriate in a shared public space, and certainly not one of national significance like Trafalgar Square. In public and in private, many Muslims agree with me. I regret that I offended at least a couple of Muslim friends. But many say there is no theological need for the adhan or for prayers before an iftar. Others I have attended have been held without them.

So I wonder why, if the event was supposed to be inclusive, the organisers felt it necessary. The adhan declares – very loudly – the unchallengeable truth of Islam. It asserts there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger. It rejects other beliefs, including the Christian belief in Jesus as the son of God. This – and the Muslim method of prayer when performed in public – is inevitably exclusionary. Indeed, barriers were erected to create a specific prayer area. Those who pretend there is no difference between the iftar and other celebrations in Trafalgar Square miss the point. Everyone is free to enjoy Sikhs and Hindus dancing for Vaisakhi or Diwali, and to watch the Passion Play at Easter. Chanukah events there do not require a special area for Jews to pray alone. There is no declaration of the supremacy of the Jewish faith. This is not a question of religious freedom: there is no automatic right to the exclusive occupation of shared civic space.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says exploiting North Sea reserves could help Britain whether the Middle East oil and gas crisis.

North Sea gas is estimated to generate a sixth of the carbon emissions of imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), especially where it is close to existing infrastructure. But Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, insists that more drilling won’t make a difference to prices and has defeated a push from the Treasury to make Britain’s tax regime more attractive for oil exploration and to overturn a ban on new exploration.

While it is true that British North Sea production is unlikely to scale up to a level that could affect wholesale prices this year, there could still be market-changing volumes of oil or gas left in the ground. The North Sea Transition Authority estimates that the UK slice of the continental shelf contains up to 15.8 billion BOE (barrels of oil equivalent) of hydrocarbons, 15 years’ supply at current rates and equal to a third of all the oil and gas that has ever been extracted from it. The OEUK, an industry group, estimates that 7.5 billion barrels of oil could still be extracted, more than twice the government’s estimate.

Just under three billion of that is “proven and probable”, essentially just waiting to be tapped (versus about 3.5 billion for Norway), while the rest requires more investment to map out and may not all be accessible. Much of the total may not be extractable, with the Economist Intelligence Unit stating that even the industry’s optimistic estimates suggest 93 per cent of what can be used “has already been removed”. But in just the last year before new exploration contracts were banned, the industry added over one billion to the total, suggesting more investment and new technology could well make a difference.

For The Critic, Steve Loftus says the scale of economic disruption AI may cause could destroy capitalism as we know it.

If a large share of jobs disappears, so too does the income that sustains demand. Who, then, buys the products? Who keeps the system turning? The engines of capitalism will stall precisely when they should be accelerating. A system built on mass consumption cannot survive if the masses no longer have wages. The usual reassurance is that new forms of work will appear, as they always have. Perhaps we will all become artisan cheesemakers, therapists, or therapists for artisan cheesemakers. But this time the pattern breaks. The same technology that destroys existing jobs also competes directly with any new ones. Therapy itself can be delivered by an avatar that remembers every sigh since nursery school. There is no obvious new frontier of human labour left untouched.

Only then does the full economic consequence become clear. If machines perform most work, and labour and energy both trend towards near-zero cost, then prices begin to collapse. A nuclear reactor built by robots, maintained by drones and optimised by algorithms could deliver electricity for next to nothing. Vertical farms tended by machines that work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week could outproduce today’s best land with a fraction of the inputs. When a refrigerator can be printed, delivered and installed for little more than raw materials and energy, the cash register starts to look like a museum piece.

What comes after may, in theory, be better. This is the part many people struggle to imagine, because all our political languages were built for a world in which human labour remained central. Capitalism assumes scarcity, wages and mass consumption. Socialism assumes human production and political conflict over how its proceeds should be divided. AI unsettles both assumptions at once. If machines can produce abundance with minimal human input, then neither the free market nor the planned state, in their inherited forms, fully explains the world ahead. There may be some future system beyond both, a post-labour settlement for which we do not yet have a name. It may borrow from markets, public ownership, common governance, citizen dividends and new forms of distributed control. It may look, in places, familiar. But in the end, it will belong to a category we have not yet learned to describe. From inside a wage-based civilisation, it is hard to see clearly what a post wage one would look like.

In The Spectator, Douglas Murray criticises the BBC’s latest drama for depicting concerns about migration data as a conspiracy theory while demonising white men.

Which brings me to this week’s attempt at brainwashing the British public. It comes in the form of a BBC drama called The Capture. In this week’s episode our brave agents are on the trail of a dastardly villain – a white working-class man by the name of Whitlock. What is this villain guilty of? Well, one thing is that he has been found to have put in Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to the UK government in the belief (as one of the agents puts it) that it is ‘covering up the true stats on undocumented migrants’. When two of our agents learn this they immediately turn around their car and get on the chase. That’s great TV drama for you, right there. Not an FoI request!

As we can all agree, only a very perverted mind would ever suspect the UK government of covering up any such thing as migration stats. Everybody with a scintilla of common sense knows that consecutive governments have only ever been honest and open with the public over the levels of documented and undocumented immigration. It is one of the reasons why we have such up-to-date and detailed information on – for instance – the amount of money it costs to house the latest arrivals by boat across the channel. And it is why the government does not have to try to cover up which hotels they are putting illegal migrants in.

But the BBC’s dramatists are not content with a mere FoI-requesting wrong ’un as the chief villain of the story. No – this man must end up taking up a rifle, heading to Dover and trying to sharp-shoot a boatload of illegal migrants, including a young child of the type who almost never make the journey in question. I say ‘almost never’ based on the photographs and evidence I have seen. Most of the people who arrive in these boats are young males who you are also not allowed to describe as being of ‘fighting age’. If I am wrong on this question of age-demographics then I am happy to be corrected. Certainly I would rather be corrected than put in an FoI request and immediately make myself suspected of terrible far-right activity.

In the Financial Times, Gillian Tett says the Iran war has revealed the extent to which high-capex, capital-intensive industry matters.

Maverick economists such as Peter Navarro were often mocked in the past when they decried how the west was outsourcing cheap manufacturing to China. Metal-bashing seemed old-fashioned. So did industrial self-sufficiency. But now the cultural pendulum is swinging. Navarro is a key adviser to Trump, who shares his obsession with manufacturing. Meanwhile western graduates are starting to fear that AI will destroy many service sector jobs.

And now the Iran war has shown politicians why industrial self-sufficiency matters. In financial markets, so-called Halo trades (heavy-asset, low-obsolescence businesses that require significant tangible capital expenditure) are on a tear. “The landscape is reshaping the balance between physical assets and human or digital capital models,” says one Goldman Sachs note, pointing out that capital-intensive stocks have produced 35 per cent higher returns than capital-light ones since 2025. “Physical asset businesses have outperformed sharply, while software and other capital-light models have lagged.”

There is one crucial caveat here, which [Jeff] Currie [analyst at the US private capital group Carlyle] notes. Today’s AI sector cannot function without physical, capex-heavy businesses backing it. Just think of those data centres. That means that “hard” industries are now blending with services to a degree that was not as obvious when Fingleton wrote his book in 1999. Even AI obsessives know that molecules matter. So the big question that now hangs over the west is this: will the cultural attitudes towards “hard” industries also shift? Will elite students now fight for manufacturing jobs? Might industrial engineering command higher status than banking?

In Foreign Affairs, Hugo Bromley saysEurope can no longer be a military power and Britain remains America’s best military partner.

To renew the Euro-Atlantic settlement, European Union institutions must step back from defense issues and focus on fostering economic growth through existing competencies. In the short term, there is no alternative to the United States providing the expensive and technologically advanced capabilities needed to deter Russia. In the long term, new spending programmes should be developed through intergovernmental agreements, with NATO focusing on maintaining interoperability among its members. Washington should not expect increases in defense expenditure to be equal in percentage terms among EU member states. These commitments should instead vary, depending on fiscal space and voter appetite for increased expenditure. Fortunately, it is the states of northern Europe, and on NATO’s eastern flank, that are most able and willing to increase their defense budgets in response to the Russian threat.

European countries should also look beyond their borders for partners. Projects such as the GCAP fighter development program between Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom only strengthen European security. Similarly, Poland is right to look to South Korea to provide military equipment and gain expertise, since both rely on large conventional land forces. EU member states should commit to giving all U.S. treaty allies partner status in Brussels’s defense financing initiatives. This would encourage beneficial cooperation, and limit the Commission’s willingness to use rearmament as a vehicle for integration.

The United States’ most important partner in this rebalancing remains the United Kingdom. Through defenseindustrial and nuclear cooperation, as well as the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, London and Washington maintain an unprecedented and deepening geopolitical friendship. The last Conservative government pioneered “mini-lateral” defense partnerships through AUKUS and the Joint Expeditionary Force— a vehicle for cooperation among Baltic and North Sea countries to counter Russian actions. That is not to say, however, that London is doing all it should. Despite strong bipartisan support for Ukraine, British defense spending is rising too slowly and is not scheduled to reach 3.5 percent until 2035. Washington should encourage the United Kingdom to spend three percent of GDP before the end of the current Parliament in 2029.

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Wonky Thinking

Policy Exchange launched “Sickfluencers and AI How Technology is Changing the Health and Disability Benefits System” by Gareth Lyon and Ticiana Alencar. The report reveals how influencers and AI are driving bogus sickness claims in the benefits system.

The UK’s health and disability benefits system was designed for a very different era. Built around static assessments, binary judgements, and paperbased assumptions about illness, work, and support, it is now operating in a radically altered social and technological environment. The rigid and tick-box nature of the current regime has left it increasingly vulnerable to exploitation by online communities, so-called “sickfluencers”, and artificial intelligence tools. Together, these forces are reshaping how individuals understand eligibility, frame need, and interact with the welfare system, contributing to a sharp rise in successful claims and placing a growing and unsustainable strain on public finances.

This report focuses on the “grey area” within the health and disability benefits system, where entitlement, need, and support are most contested. To analyse interactions with the welfare system, we identify four broad groups:

Group 1: Clearly entitled and appropriately supported

• The first group comprises individuals who clearly require support and receive it appropriately.

Group 2: Entitled but underserved

• The second group comprises individuals who should be entitled to assistance but are unable to access it due to complexity, administrative barriers, or insufficient support, and who are often among the most vulnerable in society.

Group 3: Fraudulent abuse

• The third group comprises individuals who deliberately abuse the system through fraud, for whom enforcement and prosecution are justified.

Group 4: The Grey Area

• This fourth group is the most analytically challenging and occupies what we describe as a “grey area”. It comprises individuals with genuine functional challenges whose circumstances do not clearly warrant the level or type of ongoing state support currently available. In some cases, their challenges may be better addressed through short-term, targeted, or non-financial interventions rather than continued entitlement to disability benefits.

To understand what is driving the rapid growth in claims, particularly in the contested “grey area”, we carried out a deep-dive investigation into the online ecosystems that now shape claimant behaviour. This included analysis of large discussion groups and platform-based creators (“sickfluencers”), and observation of emerging use of generative AI tools to interpret eligibility criteria and draft applications.

This fourth group is characterised not by dishonesty but by uncertainty. Broader societal pressures — including shifting norms around health, work, and identity, amplified by social media — may shape how individuals understand their need for support. At the same time, detailed guidance on eligibility criteria is widely available online, making it easier for some claimants to adopt the language most likely to secure an award. Those without digital access — a disproportionately large share of disabled people — are less able to do so. If left unaddressed, this grey area risks expanding in ways that are difficult to justify, target, or sustain, further eroding trust in the health and disability benefits system.

While the size of this “grey area” group is difficult to quantify precisely, available evidence suggests that it is both real and growing. 16.8 million people, or roughly one quarter of the population, considered themselves disabled in 2023-24, up from about 11.9 million (19 per cent) in 2013- 14. The largest increase has happened amongst those aged 16-25 years old, where disability prevalence has more than doubled to 18% from 8%. In 1993, 15.5% of 16 to 64-year-olds had a common mental health condition, compared to 22.6% in 2023-2024. This is correlated with a rise in those who are now claiming incapacity and disability benefits. There are now over 4.2m people on Universal Credit with “no work requirements”, and it now makes up over half of those on UC. 1.5m people are now claiming PIP for mental health conditions, and that is an increase of over 100,000 in the space of a year. Economic inactivity due to ill-health costs £212 billion per year, equivalent to 7% of GDP.

The system operates within a technological landscape that has changed dramatically since its initial design. Fifteen years ago, people seeking support were mostly likely to approach established charities or welfare advisors. Today, many turn to online communities and sickfluencers to guide them through processes. Artificial intelligence is already beginning to assist claimants in understanding eligibility criteria, drafting applications, and pursuing appeals, and its influence is expected to grow quickly. While claimant behaviour and information ecosystems have evolved rapidly, the structure of the benefits system and its assessment frameworks have largely remained unchanged…

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Podcast of the Week

The Shadow Justice Secretary, Nick Timothy, explained his views on the mass public Muslim prayer event in Trafalgar Square on the Telegraph podcast.

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The Brent crude oil price went back up to $110.

The Bank of England now expects oil prices to drive inflation up to 3.5%.

An imam said the Shadow Justice Secretary was right about the Muslim prayer event in Trafalgar Square.

A North Sea energy company called on Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, to back Shetland gas fields that could power the UK for 5 years.

The social media platforms Instagram and YouTube were ruled to be addictive by an LA court.

The Government’s announced new investment in roads in fact amounts to a 15-20% real terms cut.

Britain could become a net importer of salt for the first time in history, if Inovyn - which produces half the UK salt supply - closes its plant in Cheshire.

The Islamic Centre of England, a registered charity, is due to hold a vigil to commemorate the Ayatolla Khamanei.

A man arrested on suspicion of spying for China accessed the parliamentary estate on multiple occasions and as recently as January.

For The Telegraph, Nick Timothy calls for everyone to resist attempts by groups to dominate the public realm.

And that pattern is clear. We have seen protestors take a break from their marches against Israel to pray in the open air. We have seen symbolic ritual worship in front of national monuments such as the Houses of Parliament. When the extremist preacher Abu Hamza was turfed out of Finsbury Park Mosque, he led his supporters in ritual prayer on the residential streets nearby.

These are all acts of domination: an expression of power. And that power is now shaping our public life. The politics of communalism are already corrupting important institutions like the police, as we saw with the scandal of the ban on Israeli supporters from a football match in Birmingham. We are likely to see it at the ballot box in the local elections in May. And of course, these political trends are behind the Government’s new “Islamophobia” definition.

The purpose of that definition is to shut down debate, and stifle scrutiny of religious ideas and associated political beliefs. This should appal us all, because it is contradictory to the basic tenets of a free society. If we lose the ability to challenge ideas, beliefs and even actions, we can no longer call ourselves a free country.

In The Spectator, Jonathan Sacerdoti writes that we must be more nuanced in how we debate the use of public spaces.

It’s true, I have stood several times under the shadow of Admiral Nelson next to a massive Chanukiah, eating doughnuts and spreading Jewish good cheer. But it is intellectually dishonest, and socially tone-deaf, to equate these events with crowds of Muslim men prostrating on the pavement to the sound of “Allahu akbar” during a full public prayer service. They register differently with Londoners who witness them, shaped by distinct cultural backgrounds and motivations. That, in essence, was the point Nick Timothy was making.

I have often seen small groups of Muslim men praying in Israel’s Ben Gurion airport, unfolding their rugs and quietly engaging in their religious practice. Nobody bats an eyelid. Similarly in airports across the world, many observant Jewish men wrap tefillin in groups of ten when it is time for their morning prayers. These episodes tend be uncontroversial because they are clearly quiet, personal moments of religious reflection, respectfully carried out in an unusual place out of necessity, because of travelling schedules, time zones, or a lack of synagogues or mosques nearby to pray in. Mass street worship is different.

Suppressing discussion of the fears surrounding this sensitive subject will only deepen, for some, the sense of being overridden or subordinated.

For The Times, Tony Sewell calls for policies that improve life chances for all and do not divide the country.

A striking finding was that in many areas it was the white working class who experienced the worst outcomes. African women, for example, had the longest life expectancy, while poor white men in parts of northern England had the highest mortality rates. Educational attainment among poor white boys lagged behind many minority groups. Rather than demonstrating systemic privilege or racism, these statistics suggested disadvantage was primarily linked to poverty and social conditions rather than ethnicity alone.

The backlash was immediate. Critics accused the report of downplaying racism or ignoring historical injustice. Some suggested that highlighting the struggles of poor white communities was politically suspect. Yet ignoring these realities would not make them disappear. Indeed, the frustration of neglected communities has already helped to fuel the rise of populist movements such as Reform UK.

The central principle of the report was straightforward: the most effective social policies raise standards for everyone rather than privileging particular identity groups. A rising tide lifts all boats. If governments improve schools, strengthen families and expand economic opportunity across society, the benefits will reach every community.

In The Telegraph, Allister Heath writes that everyone is too scared to admit how vulnerable Britain has become.

We can no longer afford the luxury beliefs of a bygone peacetime. Why is Britain still obsessed with offshore windfarms, when they pose a double threat to national security, providing costly, intermittent electricity, while sometimes partly blinding missile detection systems? The Swedes vetoed windfarms in the Baltic Sea as they feared the turbines may cut Russian missile detection time to as little as 60 seconds, possibly by introducing clutter and blind spots.

Britain prefers to sacrifice itself pointlessly. In an act of gross geopolitical hara-kiri, Britain’s output of electricity is down 25 per cent since 2004. We slashed North Sea oil and gas and refused to frack. Modern warfare is all about technology, manufacturing and logistics, and that requires cheap and plentiful power, working closely with America (rather than picking inane fights with Donald Trump) and doing everything possible to nurture investment in the UK.

Instead, misled by our third-rate Prime Minister, we cling to appeasement when it comes to Iran and China, in the hope that we can continue to consume beyond our means, to ignore the sectarian divisions racking our society, to worship at the altar of net zero and socialism, to turn a blind eye to the violence and rapaciousness that characterises the New World Disorder.

In The Critic, Chris Bayliss describes how we have traded our energy security for a mythical belief in the long arc of progress.

Miliband sees his role as an agent who bends the long arc of history toward progress, and that justification totally overwhelms trivial questions like “Does this policy make logical sense?”. Like many green zealots — especially those who have been converted as adults — Miliband has a profound sense of his own historicity. As he sees it, these are the critical years in the history of humanity and the entire planet; to have been born in these times when fate hangs in the balance is to have been entrusted by destiny with a unique and heavy duty. That he holds relevant political office during such momentous times only makes this obligation more awesome. For him to back down over the fact a litre of petrol has gone up by a few pence would be a laughable dereliction. A few million households facing financial hardship is a banality that will not even make the footnotes when the history is written.

Furthermore, the point that it makes little sense for Britain to cease oil and gas exploration while we continue to import the stuff is to consider agency and responsibility on a national level. Which Miliband doesn’t. For him, climate redemption is achieved as an individual. It just happens to be that he is a national politician with responsibility for Britain’s energy policy. He would be similarly unmoved by what the rest of the world were doing if he were making decisions as a European commissioner, or as a county councillor, or if he were merely responsible for his own household. If he could completely shut off oil and gas imports, he would, but that isn’t an option yet. However, the decision of whether the British government will issue licences for new oil and gas exploration is his to make right now, so the answer is “no”.

Others may argue that making reasonable concessions to public opinion at critical moments might benefit the green agenda in the long run, by limiting the chances of a backlash. But climate politics lives or dies by its sense of inevitability. There are only so many true believers like Miliband or Al Gore who get near positions of power. The movement is only effective so long as it retains its power over the cynical or weak-willed — the likes of Angela Merkel, David Cameron or Boris Johnson. And that power comes from the green movement’s monopoly on a vision of the future, at least in terms of energy.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel calls for politicians to blast away dogma to successfully build urgently needed nuclear power.

It will take time and ironclad political will. But my gosh, done right, the energy is cheap. The average generating cost for nuclear in Korea is about £30 per megawatt hour — about a third of the UK’s power cost and a sixth of what our own nuclear costs — and that includes future decommissioning and waste management costs. Even if you assume higher labour and regulatory costs in Britain, this explodes the 20-year dogma propounded by dominant factions in Whitehall that nuclear is always just too expensive.

How did Korea do it? The country’s success comes from a genuine sense of urgency about the need to survive. Emerging from Japanese rule in the 1940s as a tiny western-aligned and subsequently war-divided nation in a hostile neighbourhood, with a population of poorly educated peasants and few natural resources, Korea had to do something drastic. Successive presidents and military dictators put their extremely limited resources into nuclear technology, construction and education and placed their fledgling industry under the tutelage of America’s Westinghouse.

By the 1980s, as Britain’s civil nuclear programme was running out of steam, Korea was ready to scale up. Incredibly, instead of the programme being shut, its scientists were allowed to treat Chernobyl as a buying opportunity, snapping up US technology on the cheap and beginning an era in which the country commissioned an average of one big new plant per year, even through the Asian financial crisis.

In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank cautions against a naïve faith that AI will fix our economic problems.

Yet polling suggests that less than half the British public trust this policy, and, at a time when public trust in the state is at record lows, this is a very risky gamble indeed. Whatever the technology’s potential, it is very far from reaching it, and as I have written previously, the limitations and risks of the technology are largely ignored or concealed by those touting it. That leaves Britain as an “early adopter”, forking out billions for AI systems that will be far worse and less specialised to the needs of the public sector than what we might see emerge in 5-10 years time.

Nor is this primarily benefiting a domestic British industry — the AI industry is concentrated in America, and Britain’s most successful AI firm, DeepMind, was acquired by Google 12 years ago. Somehow, I don’t expect government plans to extend to renationalising it. And over in Silicon Valley, tech industry leaders openly acknowledge that the pace of investment in AI vastly outstrips its present potential for profitability. Figures like Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman have cheerfully admitted AI is a bubble. The calculation there is that it is a “good bubble” and that, as one investor puts it, “the benefits of innovation outweigh the costs of volatility”.

Yet the sheer scale of investment, which has seen firms like NVIDIA hit valuations putting it on a par with the entire British economy, reflects an unprecedented level of hype. Many of those same figures who see this as a “good bubble” are also claiming that we are on the brink of something called “the singularity”. According to Sam Altman we are “close to building digital superintelligence”.

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Wonky Thinking

On Substack, Archie Hall outlines a number of scenarios for how Britain could be negatively impacted by the emergence of AI given our service-heavy economic model.

There’s an entirely respectable career to be made in conjuring up prophecies of economic doom for Britain. The past few years have offered plenty of raw material. Still, that’s a temptation I mostly prefer to resist. Permit me, though, a brief exception—a moment to indulge my inner perma-bear. I think it’s worth the lapse.

I want to air a possibility that has been troubling me for the past year¹: that Britain could make a real mess of the AI age. Certainly, there are plenty of great AI-adjacent British institutions, like AISI², ARIA, Arm and (further into the alphabet) DeepMind. But that does not, alone, mean that Britain’s wider economy, or its political system, is well-placed to navigate the shocks coming. On the contrary, I worry that Britain is especially exposed.

Here are a few scenarios. They almost certainly won’t all happen, and aren’t even always entirely mutually consistent. But, hopefully, the exercise pulls open a few windows into how the coming years could go wrong for Britain. (A common starting-point isn’t quite AI doom or rapid takeoff, but a case where much of the economy does get remade rather quickly.)

Also on Substack, Neil O’Brien goes through the latest data on youth unemployment including the gap between big tax rises and small incentives for employers to hire people, as well as wage compression that has made it much less attractive for employers to hire younger workers.

In contrast, at present the government has created a big problem but is offering only small solutions.

Employers are still being told that if they plan to take on young people they can soon expect them to be being paid the same as 40 year olds.

The triple whammy of higher tax, much more regulation and the attempt to flatten wages has clearly increased youth unemployment in the UK compared to other countries. And this was all before the war in the Middle East. If we are going to end the tragedy of youth unemployment, the government needs to stop coming out with fiddly small policies - and have a much bigger rethink.

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Book of the Week

Correlli Barnett’s The Collapse of British Power, the first book in his ‘Pride and Fall’ series, describes the deadening impact of liberalism in the lead up to the Second World War which left the country unprepared for rising economic and political threats from overseas.

The swift decline in British vigour at home was not owing to some inevitable senescent process of history. They shared a specific cause. That cause was a political doctrine; a doctrine blindly believed in long after it has ceased to correspond with reality.

The doctrine was liberalism, which criticised and finally demolished the traditional conception of the nation-state as a collective organism, a community; and asserted instead the primacy of the individual. According to liberal thinking a nation was no more than so many human atoms who happened to live under the same set of laws. From such a belief it followed that the State, instead of being the embodiment of a national community as it had been under the Tudors and the Commonwealth, was required to dwindle into a kind of policeman, standing apart from the national life, and with the merely negative task of keeping the free-for-all of individual competition within the bounds of decorum.

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An Iranian man was arrested trying to enter one of the UK’s naval nuclear bases.

Labour backbenchers threaten to vote against the Labour government’s immigration reforms.

British government debt interest was £8.8bn higher than economists expected last month.

Iranian missiles cause extensive damage to the world’s largest LNG export facility.

The South East of England is on alert due to an outbreak of meningitis.

The Bank of England signals interest rates will rise twice this year to combat inflation caused by War in Iran.

One of the country’s largest North Sea Oil producers says that it is ready to exploit UK’s biggest oil field this year with government backing.

The Natural History Museum has overtaken the British Museum as the country’s most popular tourist destination.

Norwich is the best place to live in the country according to The Sunday Times.

Towering Columns

In the New Statesman, former Downing Street foreign affairs adviser John Bew says Britain risks remaining unprepared for its “Fourth Great Disruption.”

As it stands, the likelihood of a catastrophic crisis – or at least a series of overlapping contingencies that become unmanageable – is increasing. But there is nothing inevitable about a descent into war or further anarchy. A new equilibrium is not beyond the wit of man. Nor should we give up on the idea that new norms can be established to allow us to create the conditions for domestic growth and harmony, and more stable and predictable relations between nations. On both sides of the Atlantic, an interesting conversation is beginning about what comes after the current crisis. Might a new economic and security “commons”, based around a re-contracting of interests rather than perfect ideological harmony, be possible to construct?

Yet crucially, even in this more benign scenario, we have to confront the reality that we are in a vast renegotiation of everything: the basis of social contract; the underpinnings of political economy; the legal and constitutional basis of national and international life; the division of responsibilities within our alliances; the inputs and outputs expected from the national security state; the areas of geographic focus for our diplomatic efforts; the terms of international trade; the level of tariffs, export and import controls; the foundations of our energy policy; and our ability to generate or access the benefits of the technological revolution that is the essential precondition of our future security and prosperity.

In this world, process-based punctiliousness is no substitute for being able to move things around on a map. The lesson of the past great disruptions is this: if you want to protect Enlightenment values, a dose of realism is necessary. As a young Lord Castlereagh said in 1792, at the time of the first great disruption: “The language of reason, of enlarged and enlightened policy, has not yet penetrated thoroughly the cabinets of princes. Power and importance is necessary almost to procure a hearing. I am afraid we should cut a sorry figure and exhibit an appearance not very imposing, were we to appear before them simply clad in the garb of our insular dignity and abstracted freedom.” Those words could well apply today, not least with regard to our ability to influence events in the Middle East.

For The Critic, Maurice Cousins says Sir Ed Davey’s record in office and current policies are bringing about British energy disarmament.

The result was a shift toward energy sources physically inferior to the denser and more reliable fuels they displaced. Their diffuse and intermittent nature has raised system costs and pushed Britain’s industrial electricity prices to among the highest in the developed world, driving the loss of strategic industries such as primary steelmaking and ammonia production — essential for fertiliser and explosives. It has also put new sectors like data centres and AI at a competitive disadvantage. This is disarmament — not of our armed forces, but of the nation’s energetic and industrial foundations. Yet Churchill spent much of the 1930s warning that disarmament would embolden dictators like Hitler and Mussolini.

Another catastrophic decision taken by Davey was the regulatory regime that killed Britain’s shale gas industry before it had even begun. The seismic limits he imposed on fracking made commercial extraction impossible. Davey himself later admitted the effect, saying in 2019 that the rule meant the industry “has not developed in this country at all”. Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed Britain’s energy vulnerability, he said in 2022 that he remained “proud” of the outcome.

None of this is to suggest that Churchill himself was infallible. During his time at the Treasury in the 1920s he supported policies that weakened Britain, including the “ten-year rule” that assumed the country would not face a major war for at least a decade. Some held him partially responsible for delays of the development of Britain’s naval base at Singapore. Yet history remembers him not for his earlier errors, but for his capacity to recognise reality when it mattered most and to act decisively once the danger became clear. If Britain can forgive Churchill his mistakes and still regard him as “the greatest Englishman who ever lived”, then we can surely extend the same grace to our leaders today. But that forgiveness comes with a condition. Like Churchill, they must be willing to confront uncomfortable truths, abandon comforting illusions and take the decisions necessary to secure the country’s future. That starts with rejecting the idealistic Net Zero doctrine and embracing hard-headed energy realism.

On his Substack, Archie Hall examines the possible implications of AI for Britain’s service economy, savings patterns, dynamism and skills base.

There’s an entirely respectable career to be made in conjuring up prophecies of economic doom for Britain. The past few years have offered plenty of raw material. Still, that’s a temptation I mostly prefer to resist. Permit me, though, a brief exception—a moment to indulge my inner perma-bear. I think it’s worth the lapse. I want to air a possibility that has been troubling me for the past year: that Britain could make a real mess of the AI age. Certainly, there are plenty of great AI-adjacent British institutions, like AISI, ARIA, Arm and (further into the alphabet) DeepMind. But that does not, alone, mean that Britain’s wider economy, or its political system, is well-placed to navigate the shocks coming. On the contrary, I worry that Britain is especially exposed…

…If there is one defining fact about the British economy, it is that services dominate. That, one could fairly reply, is true of every advanced economy, no matter the hopes of the manufacturing nostalgics. But the skew to services in Britain is remarkable, even compared with its peers. No other G7 country has services made up much more than a third of total exports. In Britain, that figure is over half. That trade comes mostly in the dull, professional sectors you’d expect: banking, law, insurance and the like. Naturally, un-bylined articles about the economy comprise a small but vital slice thereof.

When tariffs started raining down, that tilt offered an under-appreciated advantage: Donald Trump doesn’t seem to believe in services and has largely exempted them from his trade war. Both of the charts above come from a piece of mine from last April, explaining why Britain was well-insulated from tariffs as a result. The same cannot be said for the impacts of AI. Here, instead, the shape of Britain’s economy leaves it vulnerable. Take a look at the chart below, which slices similar data in a slightly different way: looking at the share of Britain’s total output that is services exports—about a fifth, triple the share of 30 years ago. Expensively slinging emails across the Atlantic surely ranks high on the list of tasks that firms are already looking to automate. And when firms abroad do that automation, the productivity gains land entirely elsewhere (New York, say); Britain loses out.

On his Substack, historian Niall Ferguson asks whether the Iran-Israel conflict could be the start of World War III.

A prolonged war in the Gulf would also be a serious problem for American deterrence in the Indo-Pacific as it would run down stocks of all kinds of American weaponry that is expensive and slow to replace: not only PAC-3 magazines but also SM-6 missiles, for example. The race is on to replenish U.S. capabilities in Asia with the next generation of lower-cost, faster-made weapons: what the military men call “cheap kill.” Hypersonic missiles like Castelion’s; airframes like Divergent Technologies’; futuristic supply planes like JetZero’s; autonomous drone swarms like Auterion’s. But it is a race. And the faster the United States runs to apply the lessons of wars in Ukraine and now Iran—above all, the need for low-cost, large-scale weapons systems—the greater the risk that China decides to make its move against Taiwan now. Before we are ready.

Unlike Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, the U.S.-Israeli air war on Iran really ought to be short. However, uncertainty lingers over the Iranian regime’s resilience—the depth and breadth of its fanaticism—and its capacity to inflict enough damage to keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed or otherwise to reduce Gulf oil exports. Under these circumstances, as in 2022, the world’s importers of fossil fuels must scramble for scarcer and dearer resources. The longer the war lasts, the heavier the costs for Asian and European oil and gas importers, and the more money for Russia. Even if there is a swift regime alteration in Iran, the world will not swiftly revert to the status quo ante. Defense expenditures will continue to rise. Investments in the new generation of unmanned weapons systems and drone defenses will grow. There will be more, not less, nuclear proliferation. And the two superpowers will inexorably draw closer to some kind of moment of confrontation.

This year, the war in Iran probably reduces the risk of a new conflict in East Asia. But what happens in 2027 and 2028 will depend on who wins Gulf War III and how quickly they win it. Gulf War I (1990–91) was short. Gulf War II (2003–2011) was not. This isn’t World War III. But if it drags on, Gulf War II is potentially an event as significant as the 1973–74 oil shock. As well as being economically disastrous, that was one of the more dangerous moments in Cold War I. Today is best understood as an equally dangerous moment in Cold War II.

For Compact, Christopher Beha says neither Mill’s liberalism nor Yglesias’s ideal of “abundance” are sufficient for human flourishing.

One of the most salient features of contemporary American life is how anxious, depressed, isolated, angry—simply put, how unhappy—many of us are. If we take seriously the utilitarian view of happiness as the great measure of the good, this would seem to be liberalism’s most profound failure. We are unhappy although in absolute terms we remain the richest nation on the planet. We are far less happy than many far less affluent societies. We already have technological powers beyond the imagining of Bentham or Mill or even our own great-grandparents, and we are not happier than any of them. We have cut the distance from New York to London from months to weeks to days to seven hours. Will cutting it from seven to two finally deliver us from our existential distress?

What does flourishing look like for us? It is all well and good to celebrate the fact that liberalism won’t dictate an answer to that question, but many of us don’t have a satisfactory one to hand, and we are looking for some help. This is the question of meaning that led Mill to his mental collapse. He saw that the strictly quantitative utilitarianism that Bentham and his own father had preached was helpless in the face of this question.

After his mental collapse, Mill began to believe that we could, and must, distinguish between “higher” and “lower” pleasures, and that there was a greater good to be had in life than bare happiness. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” he wrote; “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” Toward the end of his life, he wrote a series of essays about religion and theistic belief. While he never became a believer, he expressed a surprising sympathy for the power of religion to give life meaning, to provide for precisely those emotional needs that his father had ignored in Mill’s upbringing.

Also for The Critic, James Price says Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is foundational to understanding The Wealth of Nations.

He also takes inspiration from Cicero, at one point copying a metaphor almost wholesale. In his De Officiis, Cicero uses a running competition to show the parameters of how to behave with others, even in competitive ways: “When a man runs in the stadium, he ought to strive and compete to the greatest possible extent in order to win, but he ought in no way to trip his fellow-competitor or to push him over; thus, in life, it is not unjust for anyone to pursue whatever he finds useful, but to despoil another is a violation of justice.” Smith’s version is uncannily similar: “In the race for wealth, and honours, and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and every muscle, in order to outstrip all his competitors. But if he should justle, or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end. It is a violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of.”

Smith showed that our moral life begins in what he called sympathy, our ability to imagine ourselves into the lives of others, and that from this natural capacity we develop conscience, and from conscience, virtues. Imagining witnessing our actions through the guise of an impartial spectator (an addition to Cicero’s concept as seen above) helps us check our behaviour.

This is how markets operate, too. If we were to lie and cheat and steal to get ahead, it may give us some temporary advantage. But if we were to continue to act in that way, we would soon find ourselves without others willing to trade with us. Again, the idea that discipline, education and example can lead people to act with tolerable decency first comes about in Smith’s earlier work, and it helps one understand the larger insights of the Wealth of Nations.

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Wonky Thinking

On his blog, Professor Dieter Helm says current energy policy is making Britain more exposed to shocks like the war in Iran, not less.

It takes a crisis to reveal the underlying state of Britain’s energy insecurity, and its defence. By now we should be basking in the success of “getting out of gas”. We do after all have a lot of renewables. These, we have been told, are nine times cheaper than gas. We don’t have much nuclear left, and we have got out of coal, so all our bets are in the renewables basket. We should be well on our way now to being a “clean-energy superpower”, relying on “home-grown energy” that should be bringing down energy bills by the now legendary £300.

None of this is so far realised. Britain has the highest industrial power prices in the industrial world, so no other country is looking to it to see how they could emulate it. On the contrary, everyone else wants to work out how Britain has ended up in such an unenviable position. We turn out to be utterly reliant on foreign supply chains for the renewables and the transmission and batteries needed to deal with all this intermittent generation. It turns out that we already need twice the capacity (120GW and counting), twice the grid, and all the batteries and storage, plus lots more interconnectors to service a firm-power demand peak of 45GW – which we used to meet comfortably with just 60GW of capacity.

Having got out of coal, and betting on intermittent low-density and geographically distributed renewables, it turns out that we have become more rather than less dependent on gas for our energy security. Iran’s interruption of its LNG gas shipments out of the Strait of Hormuz and the attacks on Qatar reveal how threadbare Britain’s energy security actually is. Why, given we don’t buy LNG from Qatar? Why do we seem to be worse hit than China, Japan, India, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which buy a lot of gas from Qatar? And why, given we have very little dependency on Gulf oil, compared with China (40% of all its oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz), India (15%), and Japan and South Korea (12% each)?

China, India and Japan have little gas or oil. China and India have lots of coal, with China burning more than 55% of all the world’s coal (!), and building another 400GW of coal generation capacity – all firm power, as against China’s wind (at around 24% load factor) and solar (at around 20% load factor).

Britain should be in a much better position. It has oil and gas reserves in the North Sea, and Norway nearby to provide over 30% of Britain’s gas, and it has good wind flows in the North Sea too. It is not in the league of the world’s energy superpower: the US. The US is by far the world’s largest oil producer, and its shale gas has translated it from what was supposed to be a major importer of Qatar LNG to first self-sufficiency from its shale gas, and in the last ten years it has become the world’s greatest LNG exporter. Ten years ago, it did not export gas; 20 years ago, the shale revolution had not got going.

Why, then, is Britain in such an energy mess? Part of the answer is its gas policies. Put aside the simplistic slogans about getting out of gas, and recognise that Britain will be dependent on gas for at least another couple of decades and probably more. Because of the energy mix that has been chosen (no coal, a fast decline of nuclear, and lots and lots of intermittent renewables), it will need gas to guarantee firm electricity supplies.

Whatever the political rhetoric from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, this is a reality. It is even clear in the scenarios of the National Electricity System Operator (NESO). It turns out that gas is critical to the renewables policies. It is not renewables instead of gas; it is renewables and gas. Energy security depends upon it, just as it depends on all those foreign supply chains of critical minerals and especially rare earths, and on all the solar panels and wind turbines made in China and elsewhere. If the Iran war has displayed that the emperor of the clean-energy superpower has no clothes, wait to see what happens if and when China invades Taiwan.

It turns out that our energy policies have not just weakened our energy security; it is much worse, they have undermined our defence. Why? Because they have undermined our defence industries and have also exposed us to having our energy supplies adversely hit by cutting the many interconnectors we now need to keep the lights on.

On the former, high energy prices have led to a cascade of exits from energy-intensive industries, and in short order. Gone is Grangemouth, a refinery in Scotland, one in Hull, most of the steel industry, the fertiliser industry, and the fibreglass industry. Our ability to produce the petrochemicals and refined fuels is now more dependent on imports. We don’t have our own steel in the volumes and of the quality we would need for a rapid militarisation.

On the latter, it is hard to think of a way to make Britain more vulnerable to a hostile power. Let’s call it Russia. One pipeline is responsible for 30% of our gas supplies (from Norway). We have virtually no gas storage. The cables are obvious sitting ducks for cutting. The North Sea wind farms are perfect targets for swarms of drones, the new weapon of choice in aggressive attacks. And for all this we have perhaps one boat that patrols all this offshore infrastructure….

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On the Centre for Heterodox Social Science’s podcast, Eric Kaufmann and Danny Kruger discuss the philosophical foundations of modern Western politics, the limits of liberalism and the Blairite constitutional revolution.

Eric Kaufmann's Centre for Heterodox Social Science

Danny Kruger MP on the Crises of Western Society

Eric Kaufmann and Danny Kruger MP discuss the philosophical foundations of modern politics, the crisis of liberalism, and the future of Britain’s social order. Drawing on Kruger’s book Covenant, the conversation explores the distinction between covenant and contract, the role of Christianity in shaping Western institutions, and the tension between indiv…

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London Mayor Sadiq Khan welcomed the “biggest Iftar in the Western world”, held in Trafalgar Square at the weekend.

The CEO of RenewableUK, the wind energy trade body, urged Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to restart drilling in the North Sea.

Unite, the union, also called on Miliband to end his opposition to expanding domestic oil and gas production.

A Guardian columnist received major backlash after he penned a column calling the Jewish-founded coffee shop Gail’s opening near a Palestinian cafe an act of “aggression”, appearing to defend vandalism against the branch.

One in five university students say they would not want to live with a Jewish housemate, a poll found.

A report by the Centre for Social Justice found that the UK’s low birth rate could push the state pension age to 75.

Hate crimes against Muslims are twice as likely to be prosecuted against those against Jews, according to Home Office data.

France applied pressure to the European Commission to to exclude British countries from EU contracts.

In The Times, Ameer Kotecha describes how the Foreign Office is not fit for purpose.

Nearly five years ago, on the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, I was among several thousand officials invited to mark World Afro Day (for those unaware: “a global day of celebration and liberation of Afro hair”) with a panel discussion featuring a director charged with matters of national security. This week, with war raging in the Middle East and the RAF base in Cyprus under attack, the main news on the Foreign Office internal intranet was about the “New FCDO Capability Framework and self-assessment”, with all staff urged to “Take charge of your development”.

These provide a decent illustration of why, after over a decade, I have resigned from the diplomatic service.

The dysfunction runs deep. In recent discussions about how the Foreign Office could improve productivity with AI, some senior colleagues were more concerned with the need for an environmental impact assessment than for any proposed gains. Colleagues in the Department for International Development (now merged with the Foreign Office) justified to me their refusal to limit working from home to two days a week on the grounds that they didn’t want to work in a “colonial” office building. This is not culture war mudslinging. It illustrates a civil service culture hopelessly distracted by the peripheral, to the neglect of its core mission.

In The Telegraph, Maurice Cousins says that growing energy production is critical to restoring our hard power.

The numbers tell their own story. Between 2009 and 2024, installed generating capacity increased by more than 20 per cent – from 87 to 105 gigawatts. Yet total electricity output fell by nearly a quarter. Output per unit of capacity declined by over a third. We have built more but produced less power. In war, that kind of decline is a strategic liability. As the historian of grand strategy Paul Kennedy observed, productive force is “the single most important factor in explaining defeat or victory”.

By the end of the decade, defence experts are warning that Russia – an energy superpower – may possess a recapitalised armed force hardened by years of combat and a mobilised war-economy industrial base.

If the Kremlin judges that Britain and its European allies cannot sustain a prolonged war of attrition – that our production lines would falter before theirs – then deterrence weakens. The credibility of Nato, therefore, rests not merely on declarations of solidarity or headline spending pledges but on the capacity to endure.

In The Times, Juliet Samuels says that we are once again unprepared for a gas shock due to war in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, about ten years ago, Europe decided to get out of the gas financing business. Everyone from Mark Carney to the UN, Brussels and any Democratic state in the US urged investors and regulators to blacklist new fossil fuel investment and warned companies in the habit of building pipelines, finding gas or signing purchase contracts that the horrid stuff wasn’t wanted. Green tech was coming, they said, you’d better not get on the wrong side of history.

In the meantime, the plan was just to buy gas at whatever price was offered on the day. Predictable, long-term supply was stripped out of Europe’s most important energy market. Our prices are now set by the whims of LNG tankers — any way the wind blows (especially when it doesn’t).

Asia, by contrast, still signs decades-long contracts. This has the added advantage that when European prices spike, Japan or China divert the LNG they’ve bought at cheaper, pre-agreed prices to us and burn coal at home. This is one dynamic that explains why coal consumption is going up while gas stays flat.

For Conservative Home, Giles Dilnot says the government is not being honest that we cannot afford to pay for our own defence.

Rachel Reeves made a small reference to the unfolding situation in the Middle East at the top of her speech, but therein lies – at times literally – their problem. Not only are the Government being accused of vacillation and dereliction of duty defending our assets and denying their use to a key ally, but they also can’t pay – and have ignored questions about how they’ll pay – to be able to do so.

Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty asked the Chancellor this very question about defence spending. Rachel Reeves seemed to suggest that they had overseen the largest defence spending increase in years, and that was why “we’re degrading the capability of Iran to continue these attacks”

That’s news to everybody, because we aren’t, and the money hasn’t been spent, just promised. Word on when we might actually reach the point where it materialises is not to be found. It risks turning up as much too little too late as a British Type-45 Daring class Destroyer to the Mediterranean.

In The Critic, Charlie Cole documents the rapid rise in grants in British citizenship in recent years.

235,782 British citizenship grants were issued by the Home Office in 2025, with 78 per cent of these grants (182,778) going to non-EU nationals, with the top three nationalities being India, Pakistan and Nigeria. You might assume the spike in grants post-2020 are EU nationals acquiring British citizenship post-Brexit, however this is not the case, most grants have gone to non-EU nationals.

British citizenship grants are down from their peak in 2024, where 269,806 British citizenship grants were issued, the highest since records began. Britain has issued more citizenship grants in the last three years (2023-2025) than Japan has issued since 1967. Applications for British citizenship have been rising since 2020. There were 291,971 applications for British citizenship in 2025, the highest on record. For some comparison, there were 170,692 applications for British citizenship in 2020.

This is not the Boriswave acquiring citizenship, as they won’t have yet met the residency requirements, and pending Labour’s implementation of the Earned Settlement proposals, the bulk of the Boriswave will be prevented from acquiring Indefinite Leave to Remain and subsequently British citizenship until sometime in the 2030s.

On Substack, David Goodhart asks what is being done to preserve the way of life for the majority of people.

All the evidence we have from surveys and observation makes it clear that most people from the majority are happy to live in mixed places where their group continues to dominate numerically and minorities broadly fit in with majority ways of life. This can also happen in places far more diverse than Abingdon where the minority population is already more than one third—Reading, Watford, Milton Keynes and parts of Manchester might fit this description—places with large minorities and relatively comfortable levels of integration that could be the model for a future soft-landing.

What is meant by that phrase majority way of life—open to all comers—is hard to pin down but would include, as a minimum, common language (meaning fluent, idiomatic English), dress, and norms of public behaviour, some local attachments through sport/ media consumption, and easy mixing across lines of class and ethnicity in so-called third spaces (meaning neither home, nor work) such as pubs and cafes. At a national level it would include some sense of a shared history and Britain as a secular democracy but with a continuing attachment to Christian-influenced symbols and rituals, such as Remembrance Day or the 2023 Coronation, and some degree of emotional citizenship, with people feeling part of a common team and national story.

This majority way of life is something shaped by the White British but is fluid and evolving and open to people of all races and ethnicities who are also increasingly coming to mould it too.

For The Telegraph, Ben Marlow shows how our weak economy means we are uniquely exposed to the war in Iran.

That Britain remains this exposed to international markets and so reliant on foreign imports after the obliteration of living standards of the last few years is both unfathomable and unforgivable. Ministers have been asleep at the wheel.

There is a temptation to think much of this will be temporary, not least because most military experts believe the conflict will be short-lived. But that may prove to be wishful thinking.

Even if that is right, the pandemic and Ukraine taught us that prices shoot up much quicker than they come down. Inflation has fallen back sharply from the terrifying highs of 11.1pc in October 2022, but it remains stubbornly above the Bank of England’s 2pc target. After dipping below that level last year, it remains at 3pc, having bounced around for the last year or so.

The truth is, households are at the whim of an American government that gives the impression it is making things up as it goes along. Therefore no one can know how long the war will last. Even the White House can’t make up its mind, perhaps because it underestimated the speed with which it would be facing a broader regional war.

In The Times, Lord Finkelstein criticises the government’s decision to base foreign policy on narrow interpretations of international law.

Our position makes little sense diplomatically. It has been a major aim of the Starmer government to maintain a close alliance with the increasingly erratic American administration. In the long term we clearly need to be less reliant on the US but the prime minister judged that this would take time. Our position over Iran has made a mockery of his entire approach to the Trump administration.

It makes little sense morally. We are now engaged in a war we regard as illegal. We are not on the side of the Iranian people yearning to be free, nor on the side of the opponents of all wars. We seem to have lost a sense of who our allies are and who the enemy is. The cheers ring out from Tehran apartment blocks, while in Britain you hear the sound of humming and hawing. A massive war has broken out. It wasn’t at a time of our choosing, or in a way we would have planned, but surely we should at least know which side we are on. Australia does. Canada does.

And it makes little sense practically. It was obvious that if Iran were attacked it would lash out at its regional enemies and therefore at our friends. And obviously we would need to defend them. It’s ridiculous to think that the US could be in a war in Iran and that we would remain uninvolved. But now we have lost much of the goodwill that would have come with this involvement.

But never mind, at least we can justify our position legally.

For The Telegraph, Bob Seely says that the US is taking out Iran to send a warning to China on Taiwan.

For China, an aggressive Iran – like its other allies Russia and North Korea – is a useful vehicle for fixing the Western adversary and presenting so many diversions that the US risks becoming overwhelmed by multiple threats. It is to create, as the father of military theory Von Clausewitz would say, “friction”, tying down the American Gulliver and giving China global freedom of manoeuvre.

The Trump administration’s response has been dramatic. It is trying to deliver a shattering blow not only to Iran’s despicable regime, but also to China’s hopes of using the country to set the geostrategic conditions it needs prior to a potential Taiwan invasion. Taken in conjunction with Trump’s capture of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro on January 3 – another major oil supplier to China – the US is knocking out China’s strategic diversions, cutting its tentacles one by one.

So, should China start to build up forces to invade Taiwan, the US carrier groups that Beijing would dearly wish to be tied down in the Gulf or off Venezuela can now be sitting behind Taiwan. The message the US is sending is: “China, we see you.”

On Substack, Andrew O’Brien says that getting closer to the European Union is not a solution to our economic weakness.

The Gorton and Denton by-election has put considerable pressure on the government to pivot towards progressive voters who are generally seen to want closer economic and political ties to the EU. The Iran War and ongoing situation in Ukraine has also created tension in the UK-US Alliance and made the EU look more favourable as a partner. There is also widespread concern amongst Labour politicians that the country lacks of a ‘growth plan’. Inevitably, in this politically and economically weakened state, the government is turning towards a closer economic relationship with the EU, and perhaps a pathway to rejoining, as a solution to these problems…

The EU would kill off any domestic reform agenda that seeks to rebalance our economy, and with it any chance for real improvement in living standards or spreading growth across our nation and regions.

The government is full of travellers wandering in the desert desperate for water, with closer ties to the EU looking like the only relief for miles around. But re-joining the EU or a custom’s union is not an economic oasis, it’s a poisoned well. We need to wake up and see our situation for what it is.

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Wonky Thinking

Onward has launched a new Energy Commission, with a foreword from the Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security, Claire Coutinho MP. The Commission’s first report examines the suite of policy costs imposed by the state at various stages of the supply chain.

As well as driving gas scarcity, UK policy choices actually make bills higher directly, too. Onward analysis shows that through taxes, levies and subsidy costs passed through to billpayers alone, the state adds 30% – or £285 – to a typical household.⁵ And the state imposes costly carbon taxes and VAT on gas generators. These taxes add around 40% to the wholesale cost of gas, and 15% to the average family’s bill.⁶ These taxes on electricity generation could be cut almost immediately. This would make gas power cheaper – a vital first step in making electrification and decarbonisation of the wider economy affordable.

Finally, as well as taxing energy producers and imposing levies on suppliers, the state taxes the consumption of energy by businesses through carbon pricing and the Climate Change Levy. These policies are designed to incentivise industrial decarbonisation, but the reality is that they drive up electricity costs for businesses to unsustainable levels, leading to offshoring and industrial collapse.

The UK needs a radically different approach to energy policy, prioritising security of domestic supply and affordability for businesses and families. This will require more nuclear power, an economically sustainable and competitive renewables sector, and more abundant gas for the foreseeable future. It will also require reform of energy procurement, pricing and the auction system. Onward’s energy commission will address all these problems in turn.

In a new report, Higher Ground, Bright Blue outlines two principles and eight policies for how the centre-right can tackle the cost of living crisis for lower income households. The focus of the report is reducing the cost of housing and energy which the report says is making life increasingly unaffordable for large parts of the country.

This analysis presents a distinctive centre-right policy prospectus for improving the living standards of low-to-middle income households in the UK. This means focusing on driving down the costs of essentials, not just boosting incomes, to raise living standards. Low-to-middle income households are defined in this report as those with an income below the UK population median.

This report examines the trends in, and private and public impacts of, stagnant living standards in the UK over the past few decades. It then offers two distinctive centre-right principles to try and boost the living standards of low-to-middle income households:

● Abundance - Abundance is the plentiful supply of all things good. Public policy should make better and more frequent use of supply-side measures, promoting prosperity by producing more of what we value and ensuring its availability.

● Certainty - Avoidable uncertainty is self-inflicted through deliberate government choices. In recent decades, the UK has suffered from pervasive avoidable uncertainty, both politically and economically. Certainty in key essential markets can reduce costs that can lead to savings for low-to-middle income households.

The report focuses on costs rather than incomes as a means of improving living standards for low-to-middle income households. In the UK context, the need for — and potential impact of — lower costs is greatest in two essential markets: housing and energy. Housing and energy costs are the biggest areas of difference between the outgoings of low-to-middle and higher income households.

A new paper published by Policy Exchange calls for a new Politics of Production to replace the consumption and debt fuelled economic model that has weakened the country’s finances and abandoned communities. The report outlines the cost of our current system and the billions being sent overseas at a time of capital shortages at home.

Despite the way that it is reported in the media, Foreign Direct Investment is not a grant but giving away our future income. Debt must be repaid, future profits from firms that have been sold transfer income overseas. Slowly over time the share of our future income that we are promising away is growing largely and larger. Between 2009 and 2024, £468bn left the UK to go overseas in the form of rents, debt interest, dividends and share buybacks. This is equivalent to handing over money worth the entire economic output of Tyneside overseas every year. In the next few years, we are on track to be hand over the equivalent of Glasgow, our seventh largest city, every year. This £30bn a year (on average) is less money for households to consume, less to spend on public services or whatever else we would like to do with it. This is only going to increase in the years ahead.

A third of our national debt is now owned by overseas institutions, which means that £25bn was paid out in debt interest on long-term central government debt in 2024, compared with £11bn in 1997 (2024 prices). This is only going to increase further as inflation and gilt yields increase. Over a third (38%) of the total value (by turnover) of our non-financial businesses are owned overseas, up from 36% in 2017.

In our most productive sectors such as manufacturing, over half of our businesses are foreign owned. In growing sectors, such as professional services or creative industries, foreign ownership rates are growing faster than the rest of the private sector. This is unsurprising. Overseas investors are most likely to buy those assets that have the greatest value. The total stock of business share capital and reserves owned by overseas investors has increased by £500 billion in the last four years. The more they buy, the more of our future income we have promised away, the more we are reliant on foreign debt.

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Podcasts of the Week

The Institute for Fiscal Studies discusses how we can fix our broken fiscal rules which are holding the economy back and driving short-term decision making.

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Links

The Chancellor published her Spring Statement with lower growth forecasts.

New analysis shows the UK has never recovered from the financial crisis.

In every region poor white children are less likely to go to university.

The average income for the first-time house buyer has reached £61,000.

One in seven young Britons are not in work or education.

The Head of the Police Federation has been arrested on suspicion of fraud.

The US Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that federal courts must defer to immigration agencies on deciding what counts as “persecution” in asylum cases.

AI models are allegedly deliberating lying to their users.

Forty per cent of Britons have not read a book in the past year.

Kemi Badenoch has made a major speech on British integration.

Towering Columns

For The Times, Paul Goodman says the illegal practice of “family voting” may have determined the result in Gorton & Denton - and is a sign of things to come.

The practice sees voters joined by other people in the polling booth – often a husband joining his wife – in order to influence their vote: it’s a criminal offence. The practice isn’t confined to voters whose origins lie in Pakistan or Bangladesh. But it is scarcely unknown among them, if Democracy Volunteers are to be believed: in 2022, they claimed that some Bangladeshi-origin voters in Tower Hamlets, “generally men”, were inflicting the practice on others, “invariably women”.

An unseemly row has broken out between Manchester council and Democracy Volunteers about whether election officials were or weren’t notified – and whether they reacted if they were. And although the victorious Greens, with their aggressive courting of South Asian-origin support, are an inevitable target of conjecture, it isn’t yet clear which political party is most at fault: Labour fought the by-election energetically, and is no stranger to the darker arts of urban campaigning.

All the same, it is possible to believe, on the basis of the seat’s composition, the course of the election as a whole and yesterday’s turnout, that family voting swung the contest for the Greens – and deprived Reform of a sensational by-election victory. For if family voting warped voting at polling stations, where observers were present, imagine the scale of it in private homes, where there were none. But whichever party and campaigners are most to blame, this vicious, sectarian by–election – with its leaflets in Urdu, focus on events thousands of miles away, appeals to Muslim solidarity, anti-Indian propaganda, obsession with Zionism and not-so-latent anti-Semitism – is the shape of contests to come. The Gaza independents seized four seats from Labour at the last general election amidst accusations of electoral malpractice all round. Sir Keir Starmer’s Government set up a Defending Democracy Taskforce in the aftermath. Little has been heard of it since. There is a hole where a government anti-extremism strategy should be.

Also for The Times, Matthew Syed visited Gorton & Denton, discovering a case study of decline, distrust and Balkanisation.

Over in Longsight to the northwest of the constituency I glimpsed the other defining story of modern Britain: the consequences of mass immigration. The first four women I approached at the market didn’t speak a word of English; I got no further than a look of fear in their eyes, the only part of their faces I could discern beneath their burqas, before they were shepherded off by bearded men. I saw only half a dozen white faces among hundreds of shoppers on a cold Wednesday afternoon.

This isn’t multiculturalism; it is balkanisation. Like dozens of enclaves in northern towns and, indeed, parts of London, this area is dominated by Muslims; in this case, mainly of Pakistani ethnicity (the same as my late father). According to the 2021 census, more than six in ten residents identify as Muslim, the highest in the Manchester area. Progressives might say: “So what? Don’t you like brown people?” Er, I am a brown person. My point, though, is simple: how can it be good for immigrants, let alone the rest of the community, when there is a sharp divide between communities as if severed with a scalpel? How can it be conducive to their flourishing, to our flourishing, to the ethos of solidarity which is, after all, the rationale of that abstraction we call the nation state?

The irony is that many of the people I spoke to in Longsight concurred that this degree of separation is damaging. Rizwan, who works in a shoe stall in the market, said: “It would be better if more white people lived around here but they moved away and I doubt they are coming back.” I asked Saad, 23, who was shopping for an indoor rug, what he made of the fact so few of the older women here seem able to speak English. “It obviously isn’t good but that is the culture here,” he said. “The men do the talking.” But is this healthy? “Things are changing with the younger generation but it takes take time.” The highlight of my time here was meeting a 14-year-old who spotted me struggling to communicate with shoppers in the market and offered — with a twinkle in his eye — to translate. He was full of what you might call bantz. “Are you famous, bro?” “How much do you earn, bro?” Like quite a few of the Muslim kids here, he spoke with a curious synthesis of gangsta rap and Urdu lilt. “Why you keep talking like a rapper, dude?” I asked, causing him to dissolve into laughter.

In Compact, Benjamin R. Young unpacks Jason Burke’s analysis of how the revolutionary Left embraced militant Islam.

However, a simmering brew of religious fervor was beginning to boil in the Middle East. Sayyid Qutb, a radical Egyptian preacher and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, published a short book, Milestones, in 1964. Calling for Muslims to violently resist apostate regimes and the institutions of “World Jewry,” Qutb’s teachings became the intellectual cornerstone of the modern Islamist movement. Tapping into the anti-colonial rhetoric that resonated with left-wing radicals and Palestinian activists, Qutb’s conspiratorial theories jumpstarted a violent religious movement that would have long-lasting implications for the modern world.

Frustrated with Israel’s growing power in the region and the “apostasy” of US-aligned Arab governments, Middle Eastern radicals in the mid- to late 1970s abandoned the imported European ideology of Marxism in favor of homegrown Islamic teachings, such as Qutb’s works. Instead of reading the works of Mao and Che, they read Milestones and studied the Koran. Most of them became adherents of the most puritanical interpretations of Sunnism and Shiism. Although still full of revolutionary zeal, these extremists dropped communism for Islamism.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran demonstrated the revolutionary potential of Islam and its remarkable ability to transform a society overnight. Although a prominent religious figure by the mid-1970s, Khomeini spoke in terms familiar to many leftists: revolution, class, and the plight of the poor. The broad appeal of this blend of left-wing populist messaging with anti-Semitism and fundamentalist Shiism turned Khomeini into a national leader in waiting. Exiled by the Shah, Khomeini triumphantly returned to Tehran in 1979 and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.

For The Times, Juliet Samuel says UK universities are training five Chinese scientists for every British one - and empowering a strategic enemy.

It ought to be shocking that these venerated seats of science are contributing more to the next generation of researchers in a far-off country with a hostile regime than to the brilliance and enlightenment of their own countrymen. But aside from the warped norms of modern science, in which many scholars consider themselves above petty concerns like loyalty and national security, there is an obvious reason for this. At undergrad level, Stem courses cost more to deliver than universities are allowed to charge British students. Foreign students, by contrast, can pay their way. So, while the pipeline of Brits into advanced study is strangled, there is a vast surplus of foreign students ready to take their place.

The problem is that hosting thousands of Chinese engineers is very much not the same as getting in bulk batches of Canadians or Germans. The Chinese state has an official policy of “military-civil fusion” whereby all civil technology is put at the disposal of defence and security needs as well as technological espionage and economic coercion. Even if a vetting scheme could deal with this risk (which it can’t, because it’s a systemic problem arising from mutually incompatible and hostile political norms), Britain doesn’t have one remotely capable of doing so.

When UKCT tried to get details of how the Foreign Office checks overseas students, it was told the government would not supply China-specific data to avoid hurting “international relations”. Overall, the figures show about 1-3 per cent of applications are refused, but there appear to be yawning gaps. For example, the Foreign Office doesn’t ask Chinese students if they are members of the Communist Party. It doesn’t even seem to require them to record their names in Chinese characters and collects them only in Latinised “pinyin” form. This makes vetting using any Chinese-language resources impossible. I know because during an investigation of a dodgy, pro-Beijing figure some years ago, I came across a person of interest with a pinyin name that turned out to have 24 possible Chinese spellings, and the tantalising trail of breadcrumbs ended there.

In The Spectator, Gavin Rice says Trump may beat the Supreme Court on tariffs, and that “MAGA”-nomics is here to stay.

While the tariff programme is totemic, both in its audacity and its violation of economic shibboleths, in the context of the Trump Administration’s wider economic agenda it is far from the whole story. The MAGA movement’s drive to reshore supply chains and manufacturing jobs is partly about rebuilding national capacity in a fragmenting and more dangerous world, partly about reversing China’s global trade dominance and partly about restoring well-paid jobs to depressed regions. But it is also about a shift of Republican economic priorities towards production in the real economy, and away from the dominance of Wall Street.

Trump’s economic project, crafted primarily by J.D. Vance, Stephen Miran, Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro, is about a major internal pivot in America’s centre of economic gravity as much as a reset with the global trading order. The overriding thesis is that for too long the American economy has incentivised talent to flock to financial services, rewarded speculation, extraction and rent-seeking, and returns to real estate investment over the growth of productive, long-termist companies.

American workers, the argument goes, have lost out not only from Chinese mercantilist aggression, stripping jobs out of the South and Rust Belt, but also from a set of economic conditions that places them at the bottom of the pecking order. While returns to capital have soared over the last thirty years, returns to labour have been small by comparison – America’s overall higher wages notwithstanding. In the US – unlike in Europe, where productivity itself is the problem – productivity growth of around 60 per cent since 1980 has not been reflected in pay growth, which has been more like 15 per cent. Output and compensation have been diverging sharply.

On his Substack, Andrew O’Brien says Prosper UK has exactly the wrong diagnosis of how Conservatives need to change.

The Austerity Programme was a catastrophic mistake which accelerated a downward spiral that was already taking place. The books did need to be balanced but they certainly did not need to the dramatically balanced in a low-interest rate environment and the manner they were done was totally flawed. The Conservative Party had come to see the public spending of New Labour as pure waste, just a sop to voters. They could not accept that expanding public services and welfare was propping up a failed economic model that had deindustrialised and hollowed out communities. Replacing old industries with nothing. This was a model that the Conservatives had kicked off when they were last in government. Spending cuts, without a new economic model, worsened deep seated social and economic problems and was directly correlated to Brexit voting. The Coalition was New Labour but without any populist public spending, it would survive and fall purely on the strength of its governing philosophy. It fell.

The Conservative Party could not seriously countenance a new economic model because its Panglossian philosophy was the market was always right - this is what backing business meant. If the economy was the way it was, it was because that is what was right. There is no alternative. If businesses wanted corporation tax slashed, they should have it. If they wanted red tape cut, they should have it. If they wanted devolution, they should have it. The immigration system should be as liberal as possible to help them, providing it did not prevent re-election. The only areas they resisted were on planning and environmental regulation. The former where the ‘establishment’ consensus, including business, was to be seen to be green and the latter because voters did not want to be disturbed by new housing. It was necessary to reduce house building to appease the coalition that sustained the ‘back business’ mantra. The Conservative Party’s view was that the British economy was the best of all possible worlds. It was wrong.

On public services, we were not getting good value for money from spending, but that’s because public services were focused on picking up the pieces for a broken society (as Cameron himself identified). Yet we did not seek to fix that social model because it would have required a different economic structure which would have mean admitting business and the market was wrong. So public services are in a doom loop of ever growing demand but with little being done to tackle the fundamental causes of poor levels of education, anti-social behaviour, family breakdown etc. I do not honestly think that anyone can genuinely say that Britain was stronger and more unified in 2016. Events have shown the hollowness of the project. The Cameroonian’s two missions - electability and economic rejuvenation - both failed.

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Wonky Thinking

On his Substack, Neil O’Brien examines the statistical trends of internal migration, in-group preference and demographic shift within the UK.

In this post I have been looking mainly at the level of the local authority. But if we zoomed in further, we would see sorting at the neighbourhood level too - for age, ethnicity and education, compounding these trends.

I think these trends towards sorting matter for three reasons.

1. Disconnection within families.

A report from Onward found that between 2001 and 2020 the proportion of older parents (those aged 55 and over) living within 15 minutes of an adult child fell by 16%, (45% to 38%). The trend for people to sort into older places and for the age gaps to grow is one factor driving this.

As that report notes: “The effects of this variation on the quality of people’s relationships are considerable. Those living close to their family are much more likely to see them regularly: older parents are six times more likely to see their adult child daily if they live within half an hour of each other than if they live further away”.

The family WhatsApp group can’t substitute for proximity. This in turn has huge implications for the care of older people in our (ageing) society, and the use of paid-for social care.

2. Churn and lower trust

The UK model is lots of higher education and lots moving away from home for three years. That has obvious costs in terms of the large debts which so many young people now run up. But it also creates churn, with wider effects.

Churn and transience have political consequences. There is clear evidence that neighbourhood trust is higher the longer people have been in a neighbourhood. That same Onward report notes that:

an adult living in the same neighbourhood for over 30 years is… 15 percentage points more likely to believe that many of their neighbours can be trusted (50%) compared to someone who has been resident in the area for less than five years (35%).

I am of course not anti-mobility. Moving to opportunity is part of a healthy society. But in the UK we see surprisingly little sign of overall movement towards places where wages are higher, and that three quarters of of the local authorities that gain students, lose people overall. A lot of cities are churning but not attracting people in the long term.

3. Political balkanisation

This is maybe the biggest effect, and so I end where I started this piece.

Trends in the online world are certainly balkanising us. Once upon a time we might have read different newspapers, but at least we watched the same TV. About 37% of people in the UK watched the 1977 Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show. Today people have sorted themselves onto different platforms based on their views (Bluesky vs X.com) and even where they are on the same platforms, algo-driven spirals emerge where people are fed more of the same things they watch. If we watch TV at all, it’s on demand, and we get our news in many languages. Social media allows very immersive communities to emerge which can radicalise people in different directions and for different causes. People end up living in different information universes where the other tribe can do no right, while “we” can do no wrong.

There’s nothing so new about that - new forms of media allow people to form themselves into groups and drive change in new ways. Guttenberg invented moveable type, and boom, you had the Reformation and the Peasant War. As the man said, there are many such cases⁴. But the extent is greater than ever.

So if the same sorting happens in the real world too, then you start to compound these problems - you are less likely to be meeting people from outside your filter bubble offline. You have communities of rural oldies and young urban grads not mingling or meeting up. People start to say things like: “I don’t know anyone who voted for X”

And there is precedent for this - Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort looked at how Americans were moving in such a way as to sort people into like minded communities. This had already had political consequences when he wrote in 2009 that:

“People with college degrees were relatively evenly spread across the nation’s cities in 1970. Thirty years later, college graduates had congregated in particular cities… In 1976, only about a quarter of America’s voters lived in a county a presidential candidate won by a landslide margin. By 2004, it was nearly half.”

Bill Clinton (no less) urged people to read the book and take steps to counter polarisation, but alas, the US only seems to have slid into hyper polarisation since.

Could the UK go the same way? Could that happen here?

Well, you be the judge.

Policy Exchange published “Putting Business Back in the Driving Seat”, by Zachary Marsh, Iain Mansfield, Lara Brown and Ben Ramanauskas, with a foreword by Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith. The report calls for major reform of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies so businesses can return to meritocracy.

Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) is a conceptual framework which seeks to promote the fair treatment of all members of a workplace:

• ‘Equality’ refers to an employers assumed responsibility to treat all members of the workforce equally – regardless of their identity.

• ‘Diversity’ refers to the expectation that a company will deliver a diverse workforce – usually in terms of identities like gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability.

• ‘Inclusion’ operates on an assumption that some aspects of a workplace may exclude certain groups and that employers ought to take measures to make everyone comfortable. EDI is known by many terms – DEI in the US and quite often simply as ‘Diversity and Inclusion’. Increasingly the ‘Equality’ is replaced by ‘Equity’ – a word representing a belief that people with different characteristics should be treated differently in order to achieve equal outcomes.

EDI in the modern workplace emerged from anti-discrimination laws, introduced in response to the systematic and widespread discrimination which dominated the workplace until the late 20th century. In Britain, early examples include the Equal Pay Act 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Race Relations Act 1976, and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 sought to end an era of discrimination in the workplace which saw minority groups discriminated against on the basis of their gender, religion, ethnicity or disabilities. Further, often well-meaning examples of what would now be referred to as EDI were frequently introduced by managers who wanted to create an inclusive and open workplace.

The evolution towards the modern conception of EDI occurred gradually, and alongside a broader changing perception of the role of the company.

In 2004 the World Bank produced the paper ‘Who Cares Wins’ which introduced the term ‘Environment, Social, Governance’ (ESG) into public conceptions of the modern company. Companies were no longer expected to simply maximise shareholder value. Instead, they were judged on their ability to maintain good working conditions, tackle discrimination, and promote environmental and social causes. Companies were expected to align their portfolios with guiding principles like human rights, working conditions, the environment, and anti-corruption – with major investors taking this into account when making investment decisions. As Policy Exchange has set out in Corporate Cancel Culture: How ESG came to rule our investments, ESG has grown into an extensive industry, with the global market for ESG data alone estimated at £1.5 billion.

Alongside this, many employers have gradually moved from policies designed to tackle discrimination, to policies seeking to further ‘Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion’ in the workplace. In doing so, modern EDI practices draws upon a range of intellectual and political traditions from both Britain and the United States, including the ‘affirmative action’ policies that arose from the Civil Rights movement, theories of ‘disparate impact’, in which a differing impact on two groups of people may be considered evidence of unfair treatment or discrimination, and approaches drawn from critical theory, which argue that differences in outcome between groups are the result of the unfair use of power and privilege. While laws and permitted practices vary between countries – in the UK, for example, ‘affirmative action’ is legally prohibited, with only the less discriminatory ‘positive action’ permitted – increasingly, instead of simply seeking to eliminate racial, sexual or other forms of discrimination, modern EDI policies will seek to actively promote diversity, and to overcome these perceived structural inequalities in society. Corporate studies and business literature have supported the drive towards EDI. In 2015 McKinsey & Company published ‘Why diversity matters’, a piece of research they conducted into the relative success of diverse companies.4 In the paper they claimed that:

• ‘Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

• Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians (exhibit).’

McKinsey published four more pieces of research presenting the case that companies with more diversity of gender and ethnicity performed better: Delivering through Diversity (2018), Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters (2020), and Diversity Matters Even More: The Case for Holistic Impact (2023). Despite this, in March 2024 Jeremiah Green and John R. M. Hand revisited McKinsey’s claims and concluded that they could not be replicated.

John Miller and Lucy Parker, in their book the Activist Leader: A New Mindset for Doing Business, argued that

• To be a successful business leader in today’s world you are expected to deliver societal value alongside financial value. Not one at the expense of the other.

• And doing that takes a new mindset: the ability to think like an activist about the role your business plays in the world.

Further social developments, including the growth of genderism and trans ideology, the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment in the workplace, and, in 2020, the death of George Floyd and the following surge of support for the Black Lives Matter movement, have all led to further developments in EDI policies and practices.

Support for EDI has become ubiquitous in the workplace. Business leaders, trade associations and major investors have championed EDI. Blackrock CEO Larry Fink’s influential annual letter to investors regularly asserted the importance of EDI and ESG – both an important signal of the acceptance of EDI in the corporate mainstream and itself a driver of further change. Training and monitoring of EDI has also become a major business. Many organisations exist to sell EDI to companies, either through training modules, toolkits on inclusivity, or the promise of auditing a company and rooting out any ‘systematic’ racism or sexism.

But what are the drivers on companies to adopt EDI policies? As this report will set out, the pressure on companies to promote EDI is both internal and external. Both central Government and regulators have imposed direct regulatory requirements related to diversity, whilst voluntary schemes and regular ‘reviews’ have promoted EDI. Many businesses have set up their own schemes to try and meet ever broadening targets. Internal pressure plays a similar role. Staff networks, activist employees, and human resources departments have contributed to the expansion of EDI.

This paper develops a taxonomy of how and why this imposes costs on business – and quantifies these costs where it is possible to do so. It then charts the causes of EDI overreach in the workplace and the external and internal pressures which have driven the adoption of such policies – and sets out how Government, regulators and business can take a more proportionate approach to treating employees fairly.

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Podcasts of the Week

On the Spectator’s Quite Right!, former Downing Street Head of Policy Munira Mirza says the fear of racism and the politicisation of Islam are distorting our politics.

On the Works in Progress podcast, Sam Bowman, Peter Garicano and Aria Schrecker discuss the causes of European economic stagnation.

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Quick Links

Independent election observers Democracy Volunteers found evidence of so-called “family voting” in 68% of polling stations, in violation of the Secret Ballot Act, in Gorton & Denton.

Labour sources complained their activists were intimidated by pro-Gaza protestors.

A Dutch man claiming to support Palestine Action has been arrested for desecrating the Churchill memorial in Parliament Square with anti-Semitic slogans.

A quarter of rough sleepers are not British, a report found.

BP is embarking on a new bout of shale drilling, in contrast to competitors.

The UK has per capita energy use that is almost half the developed world average.

Banning smartphones in schools led to a decrease in diagnoses of psychological disorders, a study found.

The Ministry of Defence has asked for an additional £2.5 billion to cover the cost of asylum for Afghans affected by the department’s data leak.

Towering Columns

For The Times, Ben Judah says that this government can do nothing until it has a plan to reform the failing state.

The state itself is failing. This is what I learnt in government. Discovering this in office has been a shock for my generation of Labour advisers and politicians. It’s not just, as the party believed in opposition, that the Tories, mired in impropriety, were failures. Slow, secretive and sclerotic, the government machinery itself is jammed.

Our good intentions, in a busted system, are not enough. You need scepticism, a plan and some history. When Labour came to power in 1964 it did so not only with a healthy suspicion of the state but a compelling critique. Such thinking has been sorely lacking this time round. As a result, we have ceded any critique of the civil service and the state to Dominic Cummings and Danny Kruger.

Labour back then revolutionised political appointments with special advisers — the Spads without whom you can’t imagine Whitehall — and used Nicholas Kaldor, the leading economist of his day, as an adviser. They even sought to break up the Treasury with a new Department of Economic Affairs. Obviously, 60 years on, not all of these ideas have stuck but they met the measure of their age.

On Substack, Tom Tugenhat calls for a whole-of-nation response to a rapidly changing world.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Rich Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, has said that the current threat environment is more dangerous than at any point in his career and that responding to it requires a whole-of-nation response: building industrial capacity, growing the skills we need, and increasing the resilience of society and the infrastructure that supports it.⁴ That language is not routine. It is a serving military chief telling the country that defence is no longer a problem the armed forces can solve alone.

Building that consensus requires honesty. The British public has not been told clearly what the country faces, what it will cost, or what the consequences of inaction would be. Governments of both parties have preferred reassurance to candour. That must change and that’s why I’ve been writing these articles. The public are not children. They can weigh difficult choices if they are trusted with the facts.

Four pillars of British defence were dismantled in fifty days. They will not be rebuilt on the same foundations. The assumptions that sustained them, American constancy, allied automaticity, strategic predictability, political convenience, belong to a world that no longer exists. The only real question is whether Britain builds something new before events force our hand.

For The Critic, Jethro Elsden warns that we are facing another lost decade like the 1920s.

It was reputedly Mark Twain who said that “history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme”. So far the 20’s have been rhyming strongly with that of a hundred years ago; just as today the 1920s were a decade which began with a global pandemic, marked by political turmoil in the UK, a new party rising to prominence and a near constant churn of prime ministers. And now the 2020’s are on track to be the worst for economic growth since the 1920’s.

While the 1920’s saw truly anemic growth of just 0.8% per year, we’re hardly doing much better, with average growth per year of just 1.1% since 2020. What’s worse is that unlike in the 1920’s we lack the explanation of having just been through one of history’s most destructive wars or made the mistake of reentering the Gold Standard at the wrong rate, or had the disruption of a general strike like that in 1926.

While it’s true that Brexit (and more importantly the drawn out process after the referendum) has been somewhat disruptive and the pandemic caused significant damage, an inherently strong and healthy economy would have shrugged these setbacks off and caught up with strong growth. But that hasn’t happened.

On Substack, Andrew O’Brien argues that Conservatives cannot go back to the ‘coalition years’.

The Austerity Programme was a catastrophic mistake which accelerated a downward spiral that was already taking place. The books did need to be balanced but they certainly did not need to the dramatically balanced in a low-interest rate environment and the manner they were done was totally flawed. The Conservative Party had come to see the public spending of New Labour as pure waste, just a sop to voters. They could not accept that expanding public services and welfare was propping up a failed economic model that had deindustrialised and hollowed out communities. Replacing old industries with nothing. This was a model that the Conservatives had kicked off when they were last in government. Spending cuts, without a new economic model, worsened deep seated social and economic problems and was directly correlated to Brexit voting.

The Coalition was New Labour but without any populist public spending, it would survive and fall purely on the strength of its governing philosophy. It fell.

The Conservative Party could not seriously countenance a new economic model because its Panglossian philosophy was the market was always right - this is what backing business meant. If the economy was the way it was, it was because that is what was right. There is no alternative. If businesses wanted corporation tax slashed, they should have it. If they wanted red tape cut, they should have it. If they wanted devolution, they should have it. The immigration system should be as liberal as possible to help them, providing it did not prevent re-election. The only areas they resisted were on planning and environmental regulation. The former where the ‘establishment’ consensus, including business, was to be seen to be green and the latter because voters did not want to be disturbed by new housing. It was necessary to reduce house building to appease the coalition that sustained the ‘back business’ mantra. The Conservative Party’s view was that the British economy was the best of all possible worlds. It was wrong.

For The Critic, James Mackenzie Smith discusses the possibility of British sovereign debt crisis.

That said, recent volatility in international bond markets — including that seen in Japanese government bonds — combined with a deteriorating global perception of Britain as a stable jurisdiction, mean this is not an entirely theoretical event. Moreover the UK, which runs both consistently high fiscal and current account (trade) deficits, is structurally vulnerable, with natural demand for UK government bonds (gilts) declining as domestic pension funds roll off their holdings.

From a risk management perspective even a moderate likelihood of a debt crisis — combined with what would be catastrophic ramifications — necessitates a response plan. It is for this reason we ran a series of working groups on this subject, with our recommendations published last November, detailing how the Government must respond if the markets decide to strike.

A crisis could be triggered by any number of events: a significant deviation from the Chancellor’s “fiscal rule”, a credit rating downgrade, a failed gilt auction, or even a “black swan” geopolitical shock. The risk of a less fiscally prudent administration following a change in political leadership should not be discounted by investors, either.

For The Times, Nick Timothy attacks the government clamping down on legal transparency.

The government claims access to court information for journalists and the public has not been affected, and that listings and records remain available. But, as the investigative reporter George Greenwood wrote in The Times, “this is simply untrue”. He explained that because he can no longer search the records by keyword, crime type or court, “journalist access to court records has certainly been affected”.

If we want to stop the rape gangs permanently, as we must, the first critical step is transparency. Ministers should be making every effort to get more data and more information into the public domain. But they are not. This matters, because without transparency there can be no accountability, and without accountability there can be no justice.

Yet the government is attacking this transparency. And in so doing it is entrenching the culture of opacity that allowed the rape gangs to go unpunished. Without this archive many more cases will escape scrutiny and lives will be destroyed. Whatever the motive for the government deleting this archive, it is not too late to change course. Lammy must stop this plan to hide the facts. For justice to be done, we must all be given the truth.

For The Critic, Daniël Eloff writes about the paralysis created by excessive legalism.

Human rights governance systematically transfers risk downward. Moral authority, reputational insulation, and legal protection accumulate upward among the professional classes who design and administer the system. Material consequences accumulate below. Elites encounter failure as procedural friction like another court challenge, another policy refinement or another interpretive debate. Communities encounter it as unemployment, crime, electricity blackouts, and collapsing services in South Africa, and as strained policing, unmanaged migration, housing shortages, and declining public order in the UK. This asymmetry explains the widening gap between governors and governed better than ideology alone. Those most fluent in the language of rights are also the least exposed to the costs of governing by them.

Rob Henderson’s term “luxury beliefs” describes ideas embraced by elites that impose costs on others. Transformative constitutionalism in South Africa is a textbook example — with one essential difference. These luxury beliefs were not merely expressed, they were enforced. They became procurement rules, hiring criteria, and regulatory thresholds. Their costs were borne by the poor (overwhelmingly black) while their moral prestige accrued to the professional classes who designed them.

This might be called a form of jurisprudential toxic compassion: the prioritisation of emotional reassurance over long-term consequence. The language of transformation comforts those who speak it — signalling virtue and absolving guilt — but it does not fix roads, keep the lights on, or build capable institutions.

In The Times, Melanie Phillips writes about the recent ruling that Palestine Action was not a terrorist organisation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the ruling was its conclusion that proscription was “disproportionate” because “the nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities falling within the definition of terrorism had not yet reached the level, scale and persistence” to warrant it.

Yet since August 2024, the group had been responsible for 158 “direct action events”, 28 of which had caused damage to property exceeding £50,000 or were events that had required significant police presence. And the court itself noted that the group “encourages the causing of more, rather than less harm … a risk that’s all the greater, because the manual encourages everyone to take matters into their own hands”.

So must the government wait until more people are injured or someone even gets killed by these activities before the judges agree that such a terrorist group should be banned?

In The Telegraph, Allister Heath says a new right-wing government must be prepared for fierce resistance.

Sensible compromises are necessary. French populists have been defeated repeatedly because the middle classes feared for their money under a Marine Le Pen presidency or a euro Frexit: the British Right must never lose the support of prosperous Middle England. It must always protect their wealth.

Ensuring it cannot be attacked on macroeconomics will give a Right-wing government the latitude to fight back on every other front. It will certainly be vicious. Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and United Nations conventions, vital policies, will be met by a campaign to render the UK an international pariah. Abrogating the Equalities Act will infuriate the Left, while slashing welfare and ending gold-plated public sector pensions will lead to a 21st-century version of the miners’ strikes by the nation’s bureaucrats.

There will be endless judicial activism and a constitutional crisis will surely be engineered. Sir Keir Starmer’s Brexit betrayals will need to be reversed, triggering a trade war with Brussels. An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Gavin Newsom presidency in the United States will be weaponised against a Faragiste or Badenochite British government, with sanctions a possibility.

Naive Right-wingers must stop underestimating the viciousness and power of the status quo forces arranged against them. Winning the election will be tough but merely an early battle in a lengthy war to seize control of a hostile, blue-pilled British state, supported by a radicalised establishment. Without the right plan, it will all be for nothing.

And finally…Henry Hill moves on as Deputy Editor of Conservative Home. In his last article, he questions whether the party has learnt the lessons from its time in office.

The Tories failed for broadly the same reasons that Sir Keir Starmer is failing now, although the specifics are different. Ultimately, there was nothing resembling a proper governance project, and thus nothing to counteract the continual temptation to make the easy short-term decision and hope for the best.

Spending went up, planning applications were blocked, prisons were closed for economic reasons, and eventually we woke up in the future, which turned out to be populated not by the better, braver people to whom we had delegated the difficult decisions but by us, and the consequences of our actions. One is put in mind of this passage by Joan Didion:

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”

Sadly, the capacity of today’s leaders to evade this revelation far exceeds hers, and there remains too little evidence that the party has really grasped this problem. Badenoch has finally found her feet as leader and made some sensible policy interventions at conference, but on the big strategic questions the evidence is mostly bad. The Conservative Party remains committed to both the pensions triple lock and an un-means-tested Winter Fuel Allowance, two of the most obviously correct spending cuts of which it is possible to conceive. Meanwhile if the Tories actually have a housing policy, James Cleverly is being very quiet about it.

None of this is entirely the party’s fault. Our increasingly fragmented party system affords the electorate one refuge from reality after another; where once the consecutive failure of both the major parties of government might have created space for a radical break with the status quo, today there are always others – Reform UK, or the Greens – prepared to pretend that the country can be fixed by way of painless decisions and the targeting of baddies. The best that can be said of them is that, since Downing Street increasingly resembles a machine for destroying its occupant, if they take office by such means they will deserve it.

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Wonky Thinking

Neil O’Brien has published a new ‘Welfare Atlas of Britain’ on his Substack. The atlas shows how over £100bn in working age welfare spending is distributed across the country by local authority, parliamentary constituency and at a neighbourhood level.

O’Brien analyses the data and concludes:

Before coming to office in 1997 Tony Blair promised to cut what he called “the bills of social failure” - and while the welfare bill actually went up on his watch, at least his argument was right - taxpayers’ money that you are spending mopping up problems is money you aren’t spending on preventing those problems.

Obviously we can’t just overnight shift all of the large bill for working age welfare into more productive uses. But over time we need to control welfare spending if we want to have the money for other things that can get the economy moving.

I have written before about getting growth going in poorer places and spreading opportunity. People sometimes moan about poor places receiving lots of taxpayers’ money - but the truth is that that money often comes in a form (welfare) that doesn’t help change their trajectory. It may even compound it in some cases.

The Starmer government is showing how limited the room is for tax increases, with the economy sagging most in the sectors hit by the biggest tax hikes. More tax increases will be counterproductive. So if we want the firepower to fix broken places, we need to look to control spending instead. If we could cut the ever-growing welfare bill then maybe we could get somewhere.

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Podcast of the Week

On The Winston Marshall Show, Lord Andrew Roberts debates the long term consequences of Labour’s victory in 1945 and the illusion of prosperity created by overseas debt and Keynesian economics.

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Quick Links

Households with migrants are receiving more than £15bn in Universal Credit.

Illegal migrants are given £6.5k each in compensation for having their phones seized when crossing the Channel.

Tackling immigration is the top priority of UK voters.

President Trump calls for Chagos Island deal to be cancelled.

The Prime Minister has appointed Antonia Romeo as his second Cabinet Secretary.

Unemployment rises to over 1.8m people in the three months to December 2025.

Youth unemployment rises to a 11-year high.

Job creation is not keeping up with increases in the working age population.

A third of business leaders say that they will cut recruitment due to tax rises.

The government u-turns on cancelling local government elections.

The Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser refuses to become his Chief of Staff.

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel argues that many of our politicians cannot resist the allure of wealth and status.

These types are lured by histories or TV dramas into the political arena. Some of them make it to “the top” and suddenly see it isn’t the top. Layers of elites stretch into the distance above them — and they think they’ve joined the club. There they are at Davos with the special badge, being flown around and asked for advice, handed cash and holidays. And while they are in office, the donors can usually be fobbed off with the odd conference call. They don’t get to dictate specific policies (a rude awakening for some) even if, as a class, they have some power over the direction of travel. But this can give the politician the illusion that he himself is the sole author and owner of the life he’s living.

Then, they leave office. Some, like Theresa May or Gordon Brown, are only too happy, even relieved, to retire into the milieu they know. But others see in the world of globally hobnobbing oligarchs, dictators, financiers and heirs a game they desperately want to keep playing. Often, it’s a game on a scale they didn’t even know existed before.

The problem is that to do that, even just to remain as relevant “staff” for the top echelons, they need very, very large sums of money. And in a relatively non-corrupt society like Britain, politics is not a good field in which to make money. In fact, compared with many other fields an ambitious person could go into, like finance, business, law or even media, it’s uniquely risky to make serious money from politics. Even worse, in a democracy, leaders have only a limited window in which to parlay their brief status into the wealth needed to gain permanent membership of the super-elite.

Not everyone can be a Tony Blair (though one wonders what we’d find if caches of BlackBerry messages had existed earlier). George Osborne has so far collected various advisory roles without too much controversy. Boris Johnson has had some minor run-ins but has enough celebrity to work a lucrative speaking circuit. But David Cameron’s attempt to lobby for Greensill, the collapsed lender, snookered his career after office. Various senior civil servants, including Sir Simon Fraser, Sir Andrew Cahn and John Suffolk, have sold their services to Huawei.

What currency did Mandelson have? His best assets, such as the ability to help out with passports, to influence policy or to share privileged information, declined fast once out of office. This explains why he appears to have routinely taken the incredible risk of directly forwarding sensitive, market-moving government emails to a finance guy convicted of child sex offences.

In UnHerd, Mary Harrington argues that the global elite have become morally detached from the rest of us.

Now, whether it’s the influence-peddling or the snapshot in his scanties, the game seems to be up. Now, the once apparently unassailable “Prince of Darkness”, already fired as Keir Starmer’s man in Washington due to Epstein ties, has resigned from the Labour Party and declared that he won’t be returning to the House of Lords. Starmer, ever on the communications front foot, responded to this statement by indicating he does not think Mandelson should sit in the House of Lords.

So that’s all fine then. Except it isn’t. There is no suggestion that Mandelson was implicated in sexual abuse. But the girls were never the main action anyway. For what’s also clear is that Mandelson was just one actor in a sprawling, incestuous web, that will outlive Epstein, and in which I suspect the household-name celebrities and public figures currently making headlines (and headaches for the Prime Minister) often counted for less in power-broking terms than those less high-profile but seriously influential in politics, finance, or law. For some in this group, raping trafficked children may have been a fun diversion. But the real frisson — and Epstein’s real work — lay in the subtler and more varied trade, in things that money can’t buy.

The nihilistic overclass of transnational kleptocrats and their hangers-on Epstein catered to in this occult marketplace operated, and still operates, at a level where political principle simply does not feature, let alone the moral or spiritual kind. There’s only whatever you want, and whatever strings you are willing or able to pull for someone else, in exchange for it. This was the real feast; those poor violated girls were just the amuse-bouche.

In The Times, Gerard Baker says that Epstein is a window into the everyday corruption of globalisation.

It was ever thus, you will say. That’s how business has always been done at the top — and that’s true. But two things are different about the way this has worked in the past 20 years: the sheer scale of the wealth and opportunity unleashed by the globalisation of finance especially (it’s why Americans and Brits dominate these lists of names — they come from the two leading financial capitals of the world); and the absence of any real regulatory framework to restrain it in the ascendancy of the neoliberal economic order. The rewards to be had from making the right connection, untrammelled by legal restraint.

Most of this is perfectly lawful — that’s the point of an unregulated system. But the advantages gained from a connection available to no one else mean the playing field isn’t level. It can be manipulated by invaluable information the network provides you.

And some of what goes on is probably neither fair nor legal. We only know now about how Mandelson is alleged to have shared valuable information with Epstein because of the latter’s criminal depravity that led to his exposure. How many other exchanges are taking place daily that will never come to light?

The irony is that the populist revulsion at this network of mutually back-scratching elites resulted in the rise to power in the US of someone who was once a member of them and who still essentially acts like one. (It’s not true, by the way, that the Epstein story has had little fallout in the US. Many an American titan has been felled by the revelations. The endless search for the smoking gun on Trump himself is probably futile: whether by fortune or judgment, he does seem to have ended his connection with the man after his conviction in 2009.)

Yet as the network gets more money and more power — and those outside it lose more and more ground — a real populist backlash is surely inevitable.

In The Telegraph, Trevor Phillips writes how our legal system has been corrupted by the rich to silence their critics.

Legal bullying now threatens many who are not rich and privileged. The UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition, co-founded by Index on Censorship, has documented SLAPPs brought against survivors of sexual violence by their attacker after the criminal justice system failed them and they went public to warn other women.

We have reported on former patients of cosmetic surgery who posted negative reviews to inform others considering going under the knife, only to face legal actions and damages claimed at £10,000. We’ve seen a victim’s advocate threatened by the very crypto-fraud they had lost money to, just because she didn’t want others falling into the same trap she had.

And even success against a SLAPP can carry a cost. Nina Cresswell who successfully beat a legal action brought against her by the man who sexually assaulted her told us that the SLAPP “took three years of my life fighting and I will never be the same again.”

The Government has promised to tackle SLAPPS. But to date we only have flawed and narrow protections in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, which only cover reporting on economic crime and depend on an excessively restrictive definition of SLAPP, which can easily be side-stepped.

For The Times, Jonathan Ames argues that we must protect our juries from external pressure.

Juries can be mercurial. There is no better illustration of this than the verdict at Woolwich crown court in London this week in the prosecution of six Palestine Action members.

The activists were accused of causing more than £1 million of damage to an Israeli defence company’s British factory, and leaving a female police officer with a fractured spine. After deliberating for more than 36 hours, the jurors acquitted the six of aggravated burglary while failing to reach verdicts on counts of criminal damage, violent disorder and assault occasioning grievous bodily harm. A retrial is now a possibility.

Many who have seen the video of their arrest, which was entered in evidence, will consider that verdict perverse. Astonishment is a fair reaction. But it should be remembered that a two-minute video clip cannot be equated to sitting through hours of evidence presented during a criminal trial.

Still, the latest verdict will recall the furore over the 2022 acquittal of four protesters accused of criminal damage by throwing a statue of Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour.

There is clearly public disquiet. But what the trial of the Palestine Action activists highlights is the need for criminal trials to be held in appropriate circumstances free of potential outside influences. The judge at Woolwich was forced to remind jurors to ignore the noisy commotion caused by protesters outside the court building.

For The Telegraph, Rory Geoghegan documents how we have stopped protecting police officers from violence.

In the past week, it has been reported that no one was convicted following a break-in by Palestine Action protesters at an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol in 2024. This was despite a police officer being hit with a sledgehammer, fracturing her spine.

This was not a minor scuffle. It was an attack capable of causing life-ending or life-changing injury. We also heard from Ned Donovan, a former special constable who intervened while off duty to apprehend a thief on Westminster Bridge and was violently assaulted.

His case sat gathering dust for four months, as the DNA went unprocessed and CCTV images uncirculated. The glacial pace of the investigation and subsequent failings prompted him to pen an open letter to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, laying bare the failings and demanding better. These are not isolated cases: they just happen to be high-profile ones. Even when assaults on police officers do make it to court and defendants are convicted, outcomes are often derisory. I remember the first time I was assaulted as a serving officer. A seasoned colleague advised me not to expect much – the going rate for having a crack at a copper was widely understood to be a £50 fine. He was right.

In The Times, Melanie Phillips writes that liberal universalism has warped Britain’s foreign policy.

In the conflict between Israel and Hamas, Powell has been lobbying for Hamas to keep some of its guns. This is to break the deadlock in which the Islamist group is resisting President Trump’s demand for “demilitarisation” before the next stage of his Gaza peace plan can be reached.

This has echoes of the Northern Ireland peace process but using the Good Friday Agreement as a kind of global counterterrorism template is a category error. The IRA wanted a united Ireland. Unlike Islamic jihadis, they did not want to destroy Britain and kill or conquer everyone there.

Powell denies the desperate unwisdom of negotiating with people who have fanatical, absolute and non-negotiable agendas. But Islamists or Chinese communists don’t suddenly become convinced of the benefits of pragmatism. They become convinced instead of the endless gullibility or amoral cynicism of western diplomats bent upon making concessions which these implacable foes rightly perceive as weakness.

Powell’s world view — shared by Starmer and the attorney-general, Richard Hermer — is shaped by the liberal universalists’ perfect faith in negotiation, compromise and legal process, based on their arrogant assumption that everyone in the world thinks like the West and is accordingly governed by self-interest.

The idea of actually defeating bad people with absolute agendas, which might involve things like “principle”, “victory” and “surrender” and even require people to fight and die for freedom and justice, are to be dismissed as evidence of inferior intellect and moral deficiency.

In The Telegraph, Philip Johnson spotlights the growing sectarianism corrupting our electoral processes.

Once again, the spectre of sectarianism is stalking British democracy. At the last general election four candidates standing on a specifically pro-Palestinian platform won seats in parliament.

Sectarianism is a new departure for elections in England, if less so in other parts of the UK such as Northern Ireland and Scotland where divisions between Catholics and Protestants have for decades determined voter preferences in some seats. Liverpool, with its two cathedrals, was the one English city divided along similar lines but it has largely moderated.

Decades of immigration from the subcontinent has seen pernicious new ethnic and religious tribalisms emerge, the antithesis of the assimilation needed to forge a national identity. They are exploited by ideological Islamists in an unholy alliance with the far-Left with whom they share little, other than a desire to undermine our institutions and our way of life.

Yet at this perilous moment, the Government is preparing to reveal the outcome of its lengthy consultation on what constitutes so-called “Islamophobia”. The draft wording was disclosed a few weeks ago, defining “anti-Muslim hostility” as “harassment and intimidation whether physical, verbal, written or electronically communicated, which is directed at Muslims or those perceived to be Muslims because of their religion, ­ethnicity or appearance”. Such hostility would also include the “prejudicial stereotyping and racialisation of Muslims, as part of a collective group with set characteristics, to stir up hatred against them, ­irrespective of their actual opinions, ­beliefs or actions as individuals”.

It has taken a committee a year to come up with this definition and ministers have promised an announcement shortly – presumably before the Gorton and Denton by-election in a bid to win some of those Muslim votes back.

And for The Telegraph, Robert Jenrick questions the Prime Minister’s decision to pursue our soldiers in the courts.

Of course, improving his own lot at the expense of his country’s long-term security is nothing new for this Prime Minister. His legal career was founded upon so-called human rights claims that undermined our Armed Forces. He claims he was obliged to accept such work but as The Telegraph revealed this week, he worked with the disgraced solicitor Phil Shiner for free.

His work “challeng[ing] the government over the reach of its anti-terror legislation and taken on the British military”, according to The Guardian, led to his appointment as Director of Public Prosecutions and subsequent political career. The question is, will Starmer be allowed to repeat the trick of enhancing his own career at the expense of his country’s interests?

To boost our country’s growth and living standards, the Prime Minister doesn’t even need to fly to Beijing to offer himself as tribute. One of the fallacies of globalisation was that manufacturing could be outsourced to the East, but Britain could remain a powerhouse of innovation. The idea was that companies like Dyson could make their products overseas, but bright sparks here could continue to design them all thousands of miles from the production line. It doesn’t work like that. The two are too inextricably linked, as every Western economy has now learnt to its cost.

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Wonky Thinking

New research from Onward has found that people already claiming Universal Credit are getting £10bn in additional payments and free services on top of their benefits, reducing the effectiveness of the system as a means of incentivising work. The report calls for “radical rationalisation” and returning to the guiding principles of Universal Credit, particularly encouraging independence and resilience.

An expansive menu of extra payments and freebies for those already receiving benefits is weakening work incentives at a staggering cost of £10 billion. Working age benefit claimants negotiating this sprawling system are met with incoherent rules fragmented across over a dozen different schemes. This paper is the first systematic review of the costs of all benefits passported through receipt of Universal Credit and their average value to those claiming them. Alongside discretionary local schemes, this paper reveals how they collectively total over £10 billion in additional working-age welfare on top of Universal Credit payments.

From its inception, the purpose of Universal Credit was to create a simplified benefits system where people were always better off starting work, taking on more hours, and progressing in their careers, rather than staying on benefits. It promised to consolidate payments into a simpler single award, smoothing out the cliff edges that saw support sharply withdrawn once you worked a certain number of hours or earned a certain amount. It was meant to save taxpayers’ money too.

But, thirteen years on since the rollout of Universal Credit began, it has become anything but a single, universal payment. The benefits system for those of working age has ballooned in size, scope and cost. Reform that was meant to streamline multiple income-replacement legacy benefits has instead carried over and expanded multiple sub-schemes that are accessed by virtue of already being a claimant. These are collectively known as “passported benefits”: benefits for which eligibility is conferred via another benefit for which eligibility requirements have already been met.

A two-tier benefits system has been created: one in which savvy claimants can gain thousands of extra pounds a year, but those with the least awareness or capacity still miss out on support. Jagged cliff edges have been carved, whereby being on benefits grants access to a wide array of top-ups, but reaching certain earnings levels risks suddenly losing these too. For everything from children’s meals to energy bills, there is an associated concession largely or exclusively for benefit claimants, almost half of whom are not required to look for work at all. In turn, passported benefits have created a deeply unfair two-tier state, where many of those just beyond benefit eligibility are fundamentally worse off than many claimants.

To avoid political fights, successive governments have ended up double-handling certain living costs through passported work-arounds. Policy failures have been mitigated with more bureaucracy, rather than addressing the drivers of the high prices that affect everyone. Worse still, pervasive passporting has made it more rational to remain a client of the state rather than struggle through the jobs market, risking losing bonus entitlements once in work. Paternalism has triumphed over aspiration, undermining the core purpose of working-age welfare reform.

This paper exposes the value of these schemes to claimants, the cost to taxpayers and consumers, and the cumulative effect on incentives for claimants to work at all and to progress in work. It proposes a radical reshaping of this area of state support, creating a welfare system with greater certainty, consistency and simplicity for claimants, and better value for the taxpayer.

On the Prosperity Institute’s Substack, Alexander Baker discusses the 200-year decline of our jury system and the need for the Right to not just defend a failing status quo but put forward genuine measures to fix it, including strengthening juror qualification.

The role of the jury in Britain’s legal system is grounded in centuries of practice and can arguably trace its roots back to Magna Carta, if not further. Many have traced its emergence over the past thousand years of English history—Ed West has an excellent primer on his Substack.

Yet the system has already previously undergone major reform along the lines proposed by Lammy. At the start of the nineteenth century, trials for most criminal offences, including all felonies and serious misdemeanours, involved a trial on indictment before a jury.[2] The most common indictable offence at this time by far was larceny, with a court return from 1838 showing that of 23,094 persons committed for trial, a total of 15,915 or 69 per cent had been charged with some form of larceny.

However, growing case numbers were starting to put serious pressures on the justice system— a problem not too dissimilar from our contemporary woes. The preference for pre-trial detention over bail meant that more suspects were being detained for longer periods of time. The expense of criminal trials was also rising, with counties paying one-fifth of the country rate (a partial precursor to Council Tax) to the payment of prosecution expenses in 1834. By the late 1840s the Treasury, which had taken over covering these costs, was spending an eye-watering £400,000, roughly one percent of the total expenditure of the state.[3]

Unsurprisingly, pressure grew to transfer some of the burden from juries to judges in the Summary Courts. Yet despite the above defects being widely acknowledged, proposals to transfer jurisdiction met with stubborn opposition. The arguments were manifold. The quality of justices varied, with many qualifying by virtue of property ownership and having no legal training. There was also a perception that justices favoured harsher sentencing practices, known as the ‘Justices’ justice’. To address these concerns, reformers suggested that expanding summary jurisdiction include several safeguards, such as ensuring that the power of the Summary Courts should only be exercised by two or more magistrates, or that penalties imposed by justices could be limited to six months imprisonment.

Legislative reforms also contained provisions allowing a defendant to object to a summary trial. Provisions in the Criminal Justice Act 1855 required a justice to specifically ask a defendant whether they objected to a summary trial, a system which evolved into our modern category of ‘either-way’ cases (crimes triable in either magistrates’ or Crown Court).

Despite opposition, and the fear that, in William Blackstone’s words, “the new and arbitrary methods of trial… may in time imperceptibly undermine this best preservative of English liberty”, the Criminal Justice Act 1855 passed.[4] A year later, committals for trial by jury had dropped by 25%, with most of the decline being due to a drop in committals for larceny. Between 1855 and 1900, annual committals for trial more than halved.[5]

The legal scholar Douglas Hay noted that “from being the epitome of English criminal law in the eighteenth century, the jury trial became the little used symbol of it in the nineteenth”.[6] The decline in the use of jury trials has continued to present day, with around 90 per cent of all criminal cases now being handled by the magistrates’ courts.[7]

What should contemporary conservatives make of this historical precedent? The broad tone of opposition to the Justice Secretary’s proposed reforms today (proposals in step with frustrated party ambitions dating all the way back to the first Blair premiership) is that they are an unprecedented assault on ancient rights, and merely the next step in a thirty year project of Blairite constitutional vandalism. Yet this position is hard to sustain given that the biggest blow to the widespread use of trial by jury was struck not by David Lammy but by Lord Palmerston.

One is of course free to argue that the mid-nineteenth century criminal justice reforms were a reckless act of Whiggish innovation, and that we must turn the clock back to restore a judicial settlement which even most of our great-great-grandparents were not old enough to have known. Stranger reforms have happened. But no one is served by ignoring the fact that jury trials have not merely been in decline since 1997, but since the mid-1800s.

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Podcast of the Week

Professor Dieter Helm discusses how several key industries have fallen back to production levels last seen in the 1950s. Helm argues that the UK needs to focus on three big areas: competitive business taxes; affordable and globally competitive energy prices; and major investment in skills if we want to get back on track.

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Quick Links

A new campaign has been launched to scrap carbon taxes on electricity.

The government is accused of spending millions on ‘massaging’ NHS waiting list figures.

The government has pulled the Chagos Island treaty legislation for the second time.

The Prime Minister proposes joining the pan-European defence fund for a second time.

A former Labour MP is arrested on suspicion of rape, sexual assault and upskirting.

Reform u-turns on two-child benefit cap to spend more money on saving pubs.

The Prime Minister is reported to have called for the ECHR to be used to prosecute British troops when he was a lawyer.

The Health Secretary plans to offer resident doctors an even bigger pay rise to stop strike action.

The number of police officers has fallen by 1,300 under the new government.

The government has redesigned the ‘Lesser Arms’ crest for official communications.

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel criticises the backward-looking agenda of Tory “centrists”.

For one thing, by far the largest chunk of Tory votes — a quarter of their 2019 support — were lost to Reform at the last election, according to analysis by the Tory think tank Onward. But as long as Davidson and co stick to pro-business, anti-welfare waffling, and repress their urge to call anyone who would like a radical cut to immigration stupid or racist, they can be safely left to their own devices. They are not leading the party anywhere, and will reliably follow so long as the polling moves gradually in the right direction, which it tentatively appears to be.

It is left to the leader, then, to lead. Happily, on many issues, the direction in which the electorate would like to go and the changes required are increasingly aligned. Most people would support reshaping the state so instead of pouring money into welfare, fraud and truancy, it gives businesses room to grow and hire and spends on improving our innovative power, defence and industrial capacity. Most people would rather we imported small numbers of highly specialised migrants in fields such as nuclear physics and civil engineering rather than large numbers of poorly paid care workers from developing countries. Most people would rather see the state provide efficient services by promoting civil servants on merit rather than kowtowing to public sector unions by maintaining a vast payroll of pointless rule-makers, box-tickers and naysayers.

As for culture, Britain is in a revivalist mood. Our institutions need to be purged of the small-town tribalist corruption that enables grooming gangs and soft-touch policing of extremism. The utility of mass migration has been tested to destruction and it is time to admit that entry and settlement ought to be subject to a test of cultural compatibility as well as economic value. And the government needs to take a more forceful approach to breaking up ethnic and sectarian enclaves, promoting a unified patriotic identity over the violent squabbles of diversity politics. None of this involves a veer to the left but nor is it a return to the comfort blanket of Thatcherism and the worship of global “openness”. It is neither boring nor frightening. It is something new but also something conservative. And perhaps, with some luck, it is where Badenoch will take her party, and the country.

For The Spectator, Gavin Rice says the Tory-Reform civil war masks a remarkably coherent emerging intellectual consensus on the right.

But where the most exciting departures are taking place in centre-right thinking is in political economy. For both Tories and Reform, aspects of the old Thatcherite commitment to lower taxes and deregulation remain attractive, and some of these insights are right. Our tax structure has indeed become too redistributive, and far too many are now paying the higher rate. We have failed to embrace the challenge of proper regulatory reform after Brexit. But this rather thin soup of personal responsibility and state retreat while the forces of ultra-globalisation tear out the heart of the real economy is no longer enough.

It was heartening to hear [Robert] Jenrick talk of reindustrialisation in his interview with The Spectator this week. This is an agenda Nick Timothy, Neil O’Brien and I have been pushing for a long time. The argument has strong parallels with the drive to restore manufacturing and productive jobs in the US. Where it’s older but vital hard manufacturing like chemicals – which has collapsed by one-third in as many years – we must implement supply-side help, most obviously securing cheaper energy. But advanced manufacturing, AI infrastructure and our now-evaporated steel industry are examples of sectors that may not take off or survive without a more active state strategy. The global free market does not owe us a competitive tech or pharmaceuticals sector, and Britain’s high cost base has resulted now in two decades of rapid offshoring.

A restored commitment to economic solidarity and justice through opportunity is now orthodoxy from Badenoch and Jenrick to the libertarian online right and elements of the ‘Yimby’ left. Telling millennials and Gen Z they must work harder when the economic returns are a mere fraction of what they were in the 1980s is not good enough. The system must reconnect work, effort and material reward. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for another ‘national conservative’ goal: the creation of strong, resilient and happy families, where parents can have the number of children they want, not the number that penury and a broken housing market say they can.

For The Critic, pollster James Johnson says the maths simply does not add up for a Tory recovery unless the party can win back millions of defectors to Reform.

Of course they would also have to find ways to differentiate: leadership, experience, better plans, the economy, and presenting themselves as the most competent option. But to earn the credit of that differentiation, voters need to feel there has been wholesale change in the way the Party runs. That needs ultimate contrition and disowning of key parts of the Tory record in government. Evidencing that means policy change, but also decisions on personnel to show the party is serious — whether that is ejecting former leader Liz Truss, or sacking current Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel (an architect of the high immigration levels that put the Tories in the quandary they are now in). If this sounds familiar, it is because these are similar points made by Rob Jenrick when he was in the Conservative Party and since.

What is certain is that the status quo is not an option. The Conservatives cannot simply present themselves as an option in the middle of Reform or Labour — even if such a position is intellectually coherent, they will be squeezed out of the conversation. Some say that the Tories should focus on the economy, and that by the next election this could be the defining issue at the expense of migration. But that misunderstands how voters vote, especially those who have defected to Reform: they do not look down a list of parties and decide which is best on the given issue of the day, they vote based on which party feels like it shares their values the most.

The numbers show the only path to power for the Conservatives is through those who have left the party to Reform. It is a path that goes through a group that has defined British politics for the last decade: working and lower middle class, white, Leave-voting people in late middle age and older. If you are a Tory or Tory MP reading this: they are the only way you keep your seat or get more seats at the next election. If you are a liberal or centrist Tory or Tory MP reading this: there are not many people in the country who think like you, and there are very few people in the country who think like you and would consider voting Conservative.

And on ConservativeHome, Karl Williams teases out some of the tensions and commonalities in New Right political thought.

One of the greatest fissures in the New Right is on political economy, on free markets versus industrial strategy, between what Daniel Hannan has termed the FreeCons and NatCons. Leftists like Zack Polanski seem to see the British economy as a neoliberal hellscape of unfettered free markets, rampant exploitation and vertiginous inequality. But New Right free marketeers point out that the highest tax burden since the war and intensive government intervention through a sprawling regulatory state, industrial subsidies and price controls – the product of 14 years of Conservative government – is hardly ultra-Thatcherism on steroids.

New Right industrial strategists accept much of the free marketeer argument, notably on housing and net zero. But they also argue that the state has not been active enough in shaping the British economy according to national security considerations, for example on industrial capacity and the balance of trade; and especially in the face of Chinese, European and now American mercantilism.

Another important cleavage is around natalism and family policy. Few on the New Right would go as far as Hungarian-style birthmaxxing, but there are large differences on how to respond to the fertility decline and the fiscal challenges of an ageing population, differences that partially map onto the free market versus industrial strategy divide, but which are also partly refracted through religious commitments…These divisions on the right could be seen negatively, as a morbid symptom of the decadence and decay of an old order. That is certainly the tendency in left-wing reportage of the New Right in general. But this process could also be seen in a more positive (and almost Nietzschean) light, as creating the soil in which new and hybrid ideas can take root and grow.

For UnHerd, David Smith says Labour has no compelling story to tell the electorate, and has not grasped the brokenness of Britain’s economic model.

Our opponents are telling a clear story: Britain is broken; you have been shafted by a corrupt elite, the “uniparty”, or the 1%; the worst possible outcome is more of the same. We are not fighting Reform or the Greens so much as we are fighting this story. And if we lose, it will not be because of who the people at the top are, but because the stories we offer don’t have the same power. That is why the most urgent questions are not personal but political: in a rapidly changing world, how does this government define and deliver a decent life for ordinary people?

Beyond “we need to do better”, I am struck by the dearth of thinking in politics. Successful movements have always found ways to counterbalance personality politics via the rich seam of ideas, most obviously with Thatcherism’s dependence on the work of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. There is no shortage of policy proposals circulating at any given moment, but what are they anchored to? There is a near-total absence of ideology, or even of deeper thinking, both about how to define the problems we face and how to judge which answers are the right ones.

Over decades, Britain’s economic model has concentrated wealth and decision-making in Westminster while weakening the institutions, such as local government and trade unions, that once gave people real agency over their lives. Growth on its own will not resolve this if it is delivered through the same extractive dynamics that produced stagnation and insecurity in the first place. A different approach would prioritise productive capacity over rent-seeking, reciprocity over atomisation, and contribution over consumption. It would rebuild domestic supply chains, devolve economic power, and re-embed markets within social obligation. One could call it a new socio-economic covenant.

In The New Statesman, Paul Ovenden says Britain needs to embrace a Gaullist spirit of genuine sovereignty.

That light of national renewal is going to be harsh. It will require an honesty about what needs to change that is simply not in sight at the moment. Watching politicians dig their ideological trenches ever deeper – tax the rich vs shut the borders – one is left with a sense that we are surrendering to our troubles rather than taking arms against them.

Where people (wrongly) used to talk about polarisation, they now talk (rightly) of fragmentation: an electorate breaking into clusters. The temptation is for politics and political strategy to follow this, becoming ever smaller and shriller. Back to our values, shore up the base, hold what we have. In effect, this is to write off tens of millions of voters across the country. It is no recipe for creating a national story for a new era: it is an active choice to postpone any chance of renewal and instead take comfort in the schisms.

A modern Gaullist response to this moment would be to take on the frailty of our position and the smallness of our politics by acting bigger. It would be to give people a clear sense of what the sacrifices and the collective effort are all in aid of. In the spirit of comradeliness, let us take a generous interpretation of what Andy Burnham meant when he bemoaned in this magazine that we are “in hock to the bond markets”. It is both a cold, hard reality and a source of shame that we ended up here. But the challenge for Britain is more profound than mere market dependency. Whether it is our reliance on an unreliable ally for our defence, the fragility of our health system, our bloated but weakened state or our exposure to global energy prices, the story is the same: the life of the average Briton is not in hock just to the remorseless logic of the markets, but to outside events and actors everywhere.

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On his Substack, Sam Dumitriu defends the Fingleton nuclear review from critique by the Wildlife Trusts.

Nuclear is described as a ‘potentially risky technology’. Clearly, they are trying to tap into radiophobia and fears about Chernobyl style-disasters. Chernobyl, by the way, was the result of a reactor design that lacked a containment dome – Hinkley Point C’s containment is built to withstand a 1 in 10,000 year earthquake and direct hit from a jumbo jet - and the decision to run it in extremely unsafe ways. (For more detail, I recommend this paper from Prof Gerry Thomas, who ran the Chernobyl Tissue Bank at Imperial College London until recently.)

No form of energy generation is without risk, but nuclear stands out as the lowest-risk. Our World In Data reviewed multiple studies and found that nuclear power is one of the safest ways there is to generate power. Only solar is safer, but that doesn’t account for casualties as a result of mining the rare earths used in renewables.

EDF is described as a ‘company owned overseas’. As if that invalidates their arguments or makes them commenting on public policy in Britain (a country where they employ over 12,000 people) suspect…

…Let’s remember what’s at stake. Nuclear power is the greenest form of power there is. Not only does it generate zero carbon emissions in operation, it is also the most land-dense form of electricity generation. To produce the same amount of power as Hinkley Point C would require a solar farm the size of the Isle of Wight. And that’s before you get into the need for backup generation and new transmission upgrades.

If we are to tackle the biggest driver of nature loss (climate change) then nuclear must play a role. But nuclear’s role is limited by its cost. Yet the high costs paid in Britain are not inevitable. France, Finland, and South Korea all build plants for much less. Britain could bring costs down, but not when rules and regulations undermine long-term investments in supply chains and push up costs. Rules and regulations that even the NGOs concede have not prevented a ‘nature crisis’. That’s why the Fingleton Review is so important (and why it has seen such strong support). It explains clearly what’s needed to bring those costs down.

If the Government delivers the plan in full, then it will be transformative. But, they must hold their nerve in the face of organised opposition and misinformation from green groups.

On his Substack, Andrew O’Brien says the language of “reindustrialisation” must be backed up by serious plans and serious funding.

Reindustrialisation risks becoming just another ‘vibe’ in politics, like planning reform. So what would a genuine shift to reindustrialise the country look like? As someone who emphatically agrees that we need to reindustrialise, here is a five-point test for whether any politician or political party is serious about it.

1. How much are you prepared to spend?

Dismiss out of hand anyone that says that his can be done by just letting the private sector get on with it. In a world where China is flooding markets with cheap products, where Europe and the United States are pumping tens of billions of pounds worth of subsidies every year, where Britain is starting from an incredibly weak position, this is not a cost-free policy.

I do not think anyone has a credible figure on how much it will cost to rebuild Britain’s industrial base, but we are likely talking about hundreds of billions of pounds over several decades. Of course, some of this can come from the private sector, but whether it is rebuilding our energy system, spreading the use of robots through industrial grants (as Rian Whitton has advocated), infrastructure development (e.g. freight rail and road), underwriting loans and investment (as South Korea did effectively post-war), rebuilding industrial skills and training (we could be short of 1.5m engineers by 2030) facilities, there are a lot of things that need cash. This is before we consider the basic raising capital for firms and R&D expenditure.

Any reindustrialisation programme that is not backed by at least £20-30bn of British capital (see below) a year, every year, for several decades is not credible. This cost element is important because a major factor for why we deindustrialised is that governments were not prepared to spend what was needed to help industry, they wanted to cut taxes or increase welfare expenditure or the NHS. It is not easy to resist those pressures, but ultimately, we will have lower welfare and more sustainable tax revenues if we reindustrialise. It’s a long term bet.

Now in the grand scheme of things, that isn’t a huge amount of money, we are spending over £1.3 trillion in the UK every year in the public sector alone, but it will mean privileging reindustrialisation over ‘retail politics’ that is easy for newspapers to report but does nothing to advance our fundamentals.

If someone is talking about reindustrialisation and not talking about the huge cost, then you know they are not going to do anything in office about it (see this Labour Government).

2. Where are you getting the money from?

This might seem like the same point as above, but it isn’t.

Money can always be found from overseas. However, we have learnt from bitter experience that depending on overseas capital for industrial investment is a hiding to nothing. For every Sunderland Nissan ‘miracle’, there are dozens of British manufacturing firms bought up, hollowed up, split up and shut down. British firms are not perfect, but they do give us more strategic control.

If we aren’t planning to reindustrialise using primarily British private and public capital, we are not going to get very far. In a globally uncertain world, we need to ensure that we are in control over investment, not hoping that boards in Delaware, Frankfurt or Tokyo do us a favour.

Foreign investment will, to a large extent, take care of itself. If international firms wish to invest in Britain, we should welcome it with open arms and support it (provided that it is genuine investment and not geopolitically risky). However, we should not depend on overseas capital to deliver reindustrialisation. If we think something is important, we need to put our own money behind it. If we believe an industry is key to our future (e.g. steel, automotives, pharma, defence etc.) then we need to mobilise domestic capital and ensure that domestically owned firms are in the driving seat.

How do we do this in practice? A combination of putting the National Wealth Fund / UK Investment Bank at the service of reindustrialisation, using pension funds and other domestic savings institutions to invest in British energy production and changing corporate governance to ensure that Britain has a seat around the table when decisions are made about the future of strategically important companies would be a start.

If the plan, as per our current and previous industrial strategies, is just to say Britain is ‘open for business’, then you know it is not credible.

3. What are you doing beyond energy?

We need to reduce the cost of industrial energy. This is clear and obvious.

However, as the chart below shows, lower prices does not equal boost in production. In the case of iron and steel, we know the problem was a lack of investment alongside allowing overseas products (e.g. China) to flood the domestic market. You could develop the same chart, I am sure, for other heavy industries.

So anyone that says their reindustrialisation strategy is simply to ‘scrap Net Zero’ or ‘energy abundance’ and hope for the best is not being serious. Cheap energy is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for reindustrialisation. Let’s not become a new MATE.

We need a huge range of other interventions, including…

4. What do you think about protection?

Donald Trump has politicised tariffs and now people seem to be taking position on tariffs based based on vibes, rather than substance. However, it is very hard to see how Britain is going to be in a position to reindustrialise in many areas (e.g. automotives, steel, chemicals) without some form of protection.

It is a cliché, but almost every country around the world that has successfully industrialised has used a combination of tariffs and other forms of protection (e.g. favourable terms of capital, regulation, tax concessions etc.). Britain did it. The United States did it (and is doing it again). Germany did it. South Korea does it. China does it. The list goes on.

Britain is in a weak position and any form of protection is going to hit consumers in a way that is unlikely to be popular when considered on a measure-by-measure basis (although I believe that politicians can make the case and win, just as Thatcher / Blair did for deindustrialisation). However, there is no long term gain without some short-term pain.

Are you prepared to use tariffs to protect domestic production and ask consumers to take the hit? Are you prepared to sail close to the wind of international trade agreements? Are you prepared to get British institutions to work very closely with firms to pin point opportunities to set global regulations in favour of British production (and privilege economic wins over other forms of diplomacy)? Are you prepared to bailout companies that invest big but fail so that they can try again?

If you do not hear that from someone advocating reindustrialisation some conversation about broader protectionist measures, then they are not serious.

5. What do you think about planning?

Don’t worry, I am not going to be writing about planning reform (although we do need to reform planning to make it easier for industry, as I have written about previously). I am talking about economic planning.

Economic planning does not necessarily mean state ownership. It does not necessarily mean collective bargaining or Industrial Development Certificates. However, at its core it means not simply reacting to events and consciously seeking to create a particular economic structure. A structure that markets (or the public) may at times resist.

Reindustrialisation is not the ‘natural’ bend of the UK economy. We are a highly service-based, highly-financialised economy; heavily weighted to city-based agglomeration. These are not things that lend themselves to growing industry as a proportion of GDP. So tweaks or rhetoric are not going to change much. We are going to need to take several steps to get to the result we want and we need to prepared to intervene constantly.

So you need to plan. There are formal (e.g. stated policy objectives like manufacturing as X% of GDP) and informal methods (e.g. bending state institutions to favour particular activities, as we have seen with financial services since the 1980s). But you need to boost state capacity (and private / independent capacity too) to understand, monitor and develop interventions that can support industry. Governments produce a lot of policy papers but in my experience are not good at planning and analysis. Look at the OBR, which has scored 1/10 in terms of forecasting ability compared to other agencies in The Sunday Times. We need to build up state capacity to understand what is going on and develop new models for how to transition our economy towards industrialisation.

Reindustrialisation is planning heavy compared to other sectors because there are so many moving parts. This is not like ‘tech start ups’ where someone in their garage can buy some computers, develop code and then start selling it. The physicality of industry, the long investment time-frames, the need for infrastructure, the interdependence of supply chains, the geopolitical challenges, all mean that planning is inevitable. It is not surprise to me that the death of planning effectively marked the rapid decline British industry (and the US to some extent).

Philosophically this is difficult for both left and right. The right cannot bring itself to accept that its ‘market knows best’ ideology was flawed. The left cannot accept that it was wrong to turn its back on planning to look ‘modern’. But they will need to accept that there is nothing ‘modern’ about letting things run their course and that markets do not always know best.

Anyone who is serious about reindustrialisation will need to embrace some form of economic planning and building the state apparatus to achieve it. If they are not prepared to countenance planning and building up state capacity, then they are not serious.

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Podcast of the Week

On The Winston Marshall Show, Reform MP Danny Kruger lays out the radical reform needed to the British state, arguing that all roads lead back to Blairism.

On Times Radio, Juliet Samuel goes head to head with Matthew Parris on the claims of Tory “centrists”.

Quick Links

The Prime Minister said Chinese premier Xi Jinping can visit the UK, despite China’s sanctions on British MPs.

Investment in Europe’s chemicals sector plummeted 80% in 2025.

Longstanding members of the Tory Left launched “Prosper UK”, claiming to appeal to centrist voters identified in as yet unpublished polling.

The OECD forecast that global fertility rates are falling faster than expected.

Payrolled employment has continued to decline.

The CPI inflation rate ticked up in December from 3.2% to 3.4%.

Supporters of assisted suicide were accused of “bullying” as they threatened to use the Parliament Act to force the Bill through the House of Lords.

The Conservative Party now has the youngest average membership, though total numbers remain at a historic low.

US commentator Tucker Carlson said he felt safe as a Christian in Saudi Arabia - a country where Christianity is banned.

Towering Columns

In The Telegraph, Tim Stanley says that Britain must become independent from the United States.

So it goes with contemporary Europe, where American corporations dominate and profit, yet also avoid paying a lot of tax. Ireland, for example, has rightly denounced Trump’s tariff war on the nations that oppose his aggressive takeover of Greenland – yet the country is a model of globalist acquiescence at the cost of sovereignty. It has embraced free markets (low corporate taxes) and free movement (mass migration), with the result that Dublin is outwardly Irish – still beautiful – yet unaffordable and embroiled in a violent identity crisis.

These are economic policies that its elites justify as essential to modern nation building (“we need money, we need workers”), and it’s striking that the SNP has proposed doing similar things should Scotland gain independence. As Grant observed in 1965, the modern nation state can only develop by opening its arms to global capitalism, but global capitalism “entails the disappearance of those indigenous differences that give substance to nationalism.”

In short, American capital has made all of us rich, but it has also made us duplicates of the US. I’m convinced that many Britons are desperately unhappy, even mentally ill, because they don’t feel like themselves anymore. It’s obvious in the way we now talk (badly) and emote (too often) but most apparent in our politics, which is imported and detached from our real history. Identity politics was Made in America: when federal agents shot and killed a protestor in Minnesota (murder in my book), Labour mayors felt obliged to write a letter of support for the Democrat mayor of Minneapolis. Why?

For The Critic, Robert Clark lays out Britain’s threadbare defences and inability to project power overseas.

Whilst most can readily agree that indeed Putin should be deterred from further acts of aggression in Europe, the legitimate concerns of the nature of our armed forces should now be fully laid bare – especially when the stakes are this high. Only this week the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Marshall Richard Knighton, revealed in an extraordinary and heated evidence session with MPs of the Defence Select Committee, that Labour’s flagship defence strategy could not be fully funded — compounding dizzying estimates that the Ministry of Defence requires and additional £800 billion by 2040 just to meet current obligations.

Whilst these figures reveal the degree of financial mismanagement, a multi-year recruitment and retention crisis means the Army has missed their manpower targets consistently for a decade. There are problems with steel as well as flesh; with so few tanks now being upgraded to the next generation Challenger Three, there will only two regiment’s worth of tanks left for an Army that is supposedly able to field an armoured division.

That armoured division was Britian’s core promise to Europe for almost a century. In the last decade, due to this country’s obsession with ploughing money into the welfare state over the nation’s defence, that has been utterly trashed. We are now in a situation where we cannot even deploy 5,000 troops — never mind the government’s mooted Ukrainian deployment number of somewhere closer to 7,500.

In The Times, William Hague says the Greenland crisis must be used as a moment to rebuild our strategic power.

The best outcome of the Greenland crisis would be that it shakes western Europe from its torpor. The PM’s speech referred to the importance of “shaping the world around us”. But on current trends the world — particularly the US and China — is going to shape us more than ever before, with the continent of Europe humiliated and exposed as weak. Seeing this coming, some states are stirring into action: Germany’s defence budget is soaring; Poland and the Nordic countries are raising the resilience of their armed forces and civilian populations.

The prime minister should realise that to keep shaping the world around us we will have to wake up and shape up ourselves. Whether we will be protecting an international system based on law or defending ourselves in a lawless world, we will need to recreate essential instruments of our own power. That takes many forms, including a growing economy, a healthy population, strong education and pioneering technology, but it starts with defence. Britain needs armed forces that our enemies fear and our allies, including any US president, regard as invaluable.

The Greenland issue is becoming a grave danger to the cohesion and unity of the West. We have every right to look to Americans with a conscience to speak out. But we should also be looking at ourselves, at our own diminishing ability to influence events, and decide that we cannot sleepwalk into a more dangerous world.

For CityAM, Richard Ekins shows that the Chagos Islands deal is even less credible in the wake of US opposition.

The government’s case for surrendering the Chagos Islands is thus that unless we do so, ideally having agreed favourable terms with Mauritius, then Mauritius will leverage the 2019 Opinion into rulings from ITLOS and maybe some other unnamed bodies, which will make it impossible for us to operate out of Diego Garcia. As my Policy Exchange colleagues and I have shown, this is not a good argument for surrendering sovereignty. It also suggests that Mauritius is far from a friendly state. Handing over the Islands on this basis amounts to a surrender to the prospect of further abuses of international adjudication, in which the UK’s rights as a sovereign state are ignored. Lord Hermer KC, the Attorney General, seems to see surrender of the Chagos as an opportunity to display fealty to the (international) rule of law. In fact, it is a landmark for UK failure to stand on its rights, to resist a loss of integrity in international adjudication, and robustly to defend its strategic interests.

For the Chagos Islands are utterly vital for our defence interests, not least to our relationship with the United States, which the government is rightly trying to preserve in the current turbulence. The deal that the UK has agreed with Mauritius is limited in time and creates further vulnerabilities in terms of our strategic position, exposing future operations to new legal risks and to the prospect of third parties, such as China, subverting a future Mauritian government.

None of this can be justified in terms of justice for the Chagossians, most of whom are now British citizens and do not seem to support this deal. The UK-Mauritius Agreement pays lip service to their historic connection to the Islands but in fact leaves Mauritius entirely free to do as it wishes in relation to the Chagossians, with only a tiny fraction of the substantial payments to be made to Mauritius earmarked for them, with payment at the Mauritian discretion in any case. In addition, as Policy Exchange showed in a paper published only a fortnight ago, handing over the Chagos Islands will gravely compromise the protection of one of the planet’s most important marine environments.

In The Times, Dieter Helm writes about that we can save our industries from destruction if we redesign our energy policy.

How to get out of this mess? What is needed is an international competitive price of energy, and especially of electricity. How might this be achieved? The same way it was under the “bad old days” of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). Start with the price that would be competitive. How it was done in the UK (and in France) pre-privatisation was to charge industry the long-run marginal costs of energy, rather than the full fixed and sunk costs of the capacity.

Under the CEGB’s bulk supply tariff, there was an energy price and a capacity cost, to which was added, where appropriate, the transmission and distribution costs. Energy-intensive industry paid the first energy element, covering its variable costs, and it made some contribution to the capacity and network costs.

How could this be a sensible economic approach? Because everyone was better off with these industries rather than without them, as long as they made even a small contribution to the capacity and network costs. Think of the scenario where they are charged the full costs. Imagine that this is uncompetitive and the industries close down. Is everyone better or worse off? They are worse off, since these industries no longer contribute to the capacity and network costs — nor, indeed, to the wider economy. To head this off, set a competitive price by charging them the marginal costs and a little of the fixed and sunk costs.

At Conservative Home, David Willets says Conservatives must keep their focus on economic reform.

Britain has levels of investment, public and private, significantly below most of our competitors. Promoting effective public investment matters and that means speeding it up. Badger sets are still holding up major infrastructure projects when they aren’t even a protected species. This is absurd. And we should be going flat out to attract overseas investment, trying to get some advantage from Brexit. Grimly denouncing “black holes” in the finances or describing Britain as “broken” is no way to win over big international investment. We can boost wages with more effective, more productive work.

The good news is that the increase in employment over the past decade, notably amongst families on low incomes, has to some extent offset the effects of cuts in their benefits. There is still more we can do to get young people working. This is where increases in the minimum wage could do most damage. And it remains the case that people with a university degree are more likely to be working, more flexible and able to get back into work as business sectors shrink or grow, and more likely to be working into their fiftes and sixties. So perhaps tone down the attacks on universities just a bit.

The Resolution Foundation’s Economy 2030 Enquiry showed how important it is to revive our twin second cities. If Manchester and Birmingham performed like Frankfurt and Munich or Milan or Lyons our overall economic performance would be so much better. That means investing in radial transport links and also radical devolution. Andy Street helped shape that agenda and should be a key figure in shaping it again. It means more investment in the golden triangle of London, Oxford, and Cambridge.

On his Substack, Neil O’Brien outlines how the welfare budget is on an unsustainable trajectory over the rest of this Parliament.

Rachel Reeves’ Budget at the end of last year revised up forecasts for working age welfare spending significantly. In fact, over the 5 years from 2025/26 to 2029/30, the government is now planning to spend £36.4 billion more on benefits than they had planned to only a few months earlier.

The difference is shown in the chart below as the little grey gap. But it isn’t really that little. Spending in 2029/30 alone is now predicted to be nine and a half billion a year higher than it was in the spring forecast. That’s a lot of extra taxpayers’ money over just a couple of months. Overall, between Spring Statement on 26 March and Budget on 26 November, Reeves lost about £150m a day.

In future posts I will come back to the reasons why we are seeing more people on benefits, and growing claim amounts from people on benefits. The short answer is a combination of:

• A labour market reeling from higher taxes and more regulation,

• A series of benefits where people have learned how to play the system, (“system learning” in the jargon) and people have become more likely to seek a claim,

• The growth of mental health claims, particularly among younger people.

For The Critic, Alex Yates makes the case for the intellectual bankruptcy of a left that has failed to keep up with the modern world.

Just as the left has failed to provide a cogent analysis of the economic trends of the last decades, so too has it failed to understand the enormous impact of demographic changes wrought by mass migration. Opposition to immigration has been treated as a pathology to be deconstructed or explained away rather than a rational political position, with adherents to such views categorised either as unwitting victims of false consciousness, or irredeemable bigots cruelly lashing out due to their own failings. National identity is treated as an anachronism, something the left always assumed would naturally dissolve away as class identification superseded such confused and artificial divisions. When the left has approached British national identity, it has been either to deconstruct it as artificial and therefore implicitly invalid, or to scold it for its association with perceived historic wrongdoings and upholding the categorical evils of white supremacy, colonialism, racism, and so on.

Britain is indeed confused about its own national identity, having never properly interrogated what it meant to be British once the Empire had dissolved and its settler colonies gone on to develop national identities of their own. Since the turn of the century, multiculturalism was imposed from above as the guiding light of Britain’s post-Imperial identity. There was no rigid definition of Britishness, no need to be of a certain ancestry or even to have been born in the country. A piece of paper declaring one British would suffice, with adherence to a set of vague liberal values preferable but not mandatory. But demographic developments have rendered this vague definition unsustainable. Much to the left’s consternation, older conceptions of national identity tied to ancestry have been growing in popularity despite a concerted effort by all organs of the state to convince people otherwise. So what is the left’s response? What convincing alternative do they put forward? “Mr Blobby patriotism” and a conception of British identity centred on TV adverts and fart jokes.

Such a profound failure to confront the realities of modern-day Britain means that the left will continue in its failure to deliver in government and form a coherent understanding of why it keeps failing. Instead of taking this moment to look outwards to the country and offer a constructive vision, the British left can offer only a continued project of deconstruction of Britain’s institutions and passing obsessions with global social movements — climate, Black Lives Matter, Gaza — that elicit flashes of fanatic zealotry before being dropped and forgotten. Perhaps before continuing to misdiagnose why Britain is broken, the left would do well to look inward and analyse why it too has ended up intellectually broken.

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Wonky Thinking

New research from the Institute for Family Studies has found that families which pray regularly are likely to have larger numbers of children in Europe. The research has found that prayerlessness is now a majority-phenomenon among young females in the UK and Belgium. Germany and Spain are near the tipping point. Moreover, a 2% increase in GDP per capita raises fertility by just 0.0081—the same effect as a mere 1.12 percentage point increase in the share of women who pray. This suggests that faith is as important as the economic fundamentals in determining fertility rates. Christopher Sandmann explains his research.

Sympathetic observers with whom I’ve shared my results are quick to argue that higher fertility rates among the religious are plausible; however, they should be attributed to cultural norms linked to religiosity, not active religious practice. This is certainly possible. But how would we know? Polite society’s taboo not to talk about religion only ensures that the question remains unanswered.

Keynes famously argued that ideas change the course of history. I agree. Ideas are powerful. But only so if they are believed. A norm, lacking belief, has the qualities of a decapitated chicken: it might keep on running for show, but won’t overcome obstacles like the opportunity cost of parenthood. Indeed, one must be out of their mind to pursue parenthood just because tradition demands it. I am reminded of the title of a book on parenting: All Joy, No Fun. If you are not prepared for true joy, the lack of fun will bring great disappointment. Joy is reserved for those who are prepared to serve. Faithless countries with greater vote shares for conservative parties have certainly not experienced a baby boom as of late. As I see it, the association of faith and tradition has it all backwards. Deference to tradition is the exact opposite of faith in an active, living God. Rather: where the faithful do adhere to past wisdom, they do so out of discernment, not deference to past tradition.

The data supports this distinction. When I include church attendance in my regressions, it proves insignificant for fertility—whether or not prayer is also included. This could reflect data limitations, but it may indicate that interior transformation through active prayer, rather than social participation, drives the effect. My sense is that the insignificance is reflective of the dynamics of irreligiosity and demographic decline: Individuals stop worshipping with others before they stop praying. And loss of prayer precedes demographic decline. In today’s Europe, belief still exists outside of church pews. The body of the faithful, however, has disintegrated into many disjoint parts.

Why?

Many Europeans (perhaps unknowingly) have grown up to become existentialists: we create our identities on a blank sheet of paper. In ‘existentialism is a humanism’ Sartre writes: “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards.” I sense that no generation that has felt this more strongly than mine, which came of age after the Cold War. When first conceived, such philosophy feels like freedom: It promises liberation from parental missteps, history’s errors and severs supposed obligations before citizenry and God. It is also redemptive: If we define ourselves, we need no longer call our selfishness as such. Our Augustinian brokenness is a construct, no longer caused by sin but imposed on us by an oppressive ideology. This is redemption without sacrifice. We are free.

Seen through the lens of existentialism, prayer is as effective as meditation or a self-help group. It becomes an act of self-expression, self-creation. Part of the personal project of curating among the pleasures in life. The greatest prize that this philosophy offers is the aesthetic: sublime music, the sensual as in romantic passionate love, grandiose architecture as in temples of art, enriching culinary experiences, and mere observation of nature. The aesthetic is not a small prize. God’s creation and the wealth of human experience that may live within it truly are wonderful.

The Prosperity Institute calls for the complete separation of climate and energy policy. The climate change agenda, the report argues, has warped energy policy and led to a series of failed policy agendas that have burdened Britain with higher bills and diminished capacity.

Over the last four and a half decades, when they were each given the chance to take the lead, the markets worked and the British state failed. Why? Because energy policy was used as a tool of industrial policy in the vain hope of creating a world leading offshore wind industry; Whitehall committed the error of adopting multiple conflicting policy objectives (e.g. decarbonizing the grid and keeping energy bills down); and policy was captured by vested interests.

The foundational error of Phase Two was subordinating energy policy to climate policy. If you have a climate policy, it should be economy-wide, not sector-specific, as this leads to continuous state interventions and becomes a licence for rampant rent-seeking. The essential first step to energy policy rationality is to separate energy policy and climate policy.

Policymakers should then define what they want their policy to achieve and the policy instruments to achieve it. Policymakers also need to face up to the risks posed by Britain not having enough dispatchable capacity, thanks to the political decision to push coal off the grid. If they want energy prices to fall, supply needs to increase, which means having more non-intermittent generating capacity. This is likely to require a rapid build-out of gas-fired capacity, or even coal.

Whichever party or parties form the next government, they have only one chance to get energy policy right by applying the lessons of the past and decisively breaking with two decades of policy failure. The fundamental step is to divorce energy policy from climate policy. Parliament has, since 2007, enacted legislation to lock-in Net Zero energy policies, such as the Climate Change Act 2008. Such legislation needs to be repealed or amended. Additionally, this paper recommends:

• Shutting down the current Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (which has overseen the worst policy disaster since 1945 and has been captured by vested interests), and replacing it with a new department focused exclusively on policy.

• A wholesale clear-out of Ofgem’s senior leadership.

• Establishing a New Generation Task Force to replace around 20 GW of missing nonintermittent capacity, consideration being given to use of the Government’s balance sheet on value-for-money grounds via Ed Miliband’s Great British Energy.

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Podcasts of the Week

John Bew on the UnHerd this week says that the Davos World Order is finished and that the country needs to see Greenland as an emergency “break the glass” moment on defence and security spending.

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Quick Links

The United States temporarily lifts threat of tariffs on UK and Europe over Greenland.

New research has found that Government u-turns have already cost taxpayers £8.2bn.

The government has cancelled 29 local government elections for 4.5m electors.

The government u-turns on a ban for under-16s using social media.

The security services say that the risk of the Chinese mega-embassy cannot be completely eliminated.

Pubs are the only businesses to be spared from business rate hike.

Government report says that judge-only trials will not wipe out backlog.

The UK refuses to join the Trump-backed ‘Board of Peace’.

Former Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick said ‘reindustrialisation’ should be an economic priority.

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says approving China’s new London super-embassy is a far too big a risk.

What seems likely is that the new embassy will allow the Chinese Communist Party to scale up its espionage and interference operations across Europe. As The Sunday Times revealed, China’s list of authorised diplomats, already among the longest in the UK, has grown 50 per cent since 2010, including a whole roster of education, policy and cultural officials no doubt helping to surveil and schmooze scientists, students, business contacts, activists and spies. And MI5 and others have explained repeatedly how Chinese intelligence banks upon its superior scale to extract the maximum commercial, military and diplomatic advantage from these operations.

Another favourite CCP hobby is showing it can harass and punish its critics wherever they are in the world. Again, this occurs at scale. Safeguard Defenders, a campaign group, found that Beijing has forced at least 12,000 people to return to China to face “justice” from 2014 to 2023, under the aegis of so-called “anti-corruption” operations. Consular officials in the relevant countries have been known to prepare the ground for these “persuasion” operations.

Perhaps they also help to manage the properties and recruitment of staff for Beijing’s foreign “police stations” or further its useful links to organised crime. In its annual assessment last year, after all, the National Crime Agency stated that “offenders linked to China currently pose the biggest non-British serious and organised crime threat to the UK”. Does that sound like a country you want building an iceberg basement within spitting distance of your critical internet cables?

For The Critic, Sebastian Milbank says the biggest divide in British politics is that of worldview and experience between generations.

If you grew up in the 60s-80s, and your career reached its peak sometime in the 90s to 00s, you experienced events and conditions that taught you that certain assumptions were true and historically inevitable. You witnessed the victory of civil rights battles on race, gender and sexuality, and formed your opinions about them at a time when they were vigorously contested by a powerful political right. You saw communism fall in your lifetime, and liberalism triumph. Throughout most of your working life you saw high levels of economic growth, technological progress and new industries and opportunities arise. Cultural and social change that was opposed by conservatives led, in your experience, to new artforms and exciting subcultures.

And, as an individual, for so many boomers and gen Xers, especially in the educated upper middle classes, you ascended a ladder that was about to be kicked violently away. People in older generations attended schools before the quality of teaching and discipline plummeted, and went to university whilst it was still free. They benefited from public services of the post-war era, then cashed in on the deregulations of the 80s and 90s. They got on the property ladder when it was still affordable, and just in time to see their housing equity explode in value.

And, crucially, you didn’t see the dark side of progressivism. When you were young, you experienced the civil rights fight as a positive experience, and at the time you were ascending the ladder, the ideal of a non-divisive, “comfortable” egalitarianism in which we would be sexually free, post-racial, post-class, and post-gender divides predominated. By the point that #MeToo and BLM arrived in anglophone offices, you had already reached the peak of your career. For liberal older white men, the idea that young white men are systematically disadvantaged for employment in much of the white collar world, especially some of the most elite institutions, simply existed outside of their experience. Younger colleagues were becoming “more diverse” and more politically militant, but this was just merit shining through from your cushioned perspective.

In The Spectator, David Shipley says London feels lawless as the types of crime most ordinary people are likely to experience are on the rise but under-reported.

The problem for Rowley is that the homicide rate is a poor indicator of how safe Londoners feel. While it is true that London’s homicide rate did fall last year, and that there are more murders in other cities around the world, thankfully almost no one is killed in the capital in the 21st century. There were 97 homicides last year, compared to 109 in 2024 and 153 in 2019. Of course, every such killing is a tragedy, but really they don’t happen anywhere near often enough for the typical Londoner or visitor to spend time worrying about whether they’ll be murdered in the city. What people worry far more about is crimes which they are likely to be victims of. There were 837,826 ‘victim based’ crimes recorded by the Metropolitan police in 2025. These crimes include robberies, phone snatching, sexual assaults and rapes. Such victim-based crimes have soared in London in recent years.

A decade ago, in 2015-16, there were 16,147 recorded sexual offences. Last year saw the Met receive reports of 27,694 such offences, and year-on-year reported rapes are up somewhere between 8 per cent and 12 per cent. Phone theft too is at endemic levels, with 117,211 stolen handsets reported to the Met last year. This morning Rowley was insistent that phone theft at least is falling, and I understand the official internal data supports this. The Met Commissioner also tried to encourage listeners to ignore reported crime in favour of ‘crime surveys’ which try to estimate the overall level of crime. Many politicians and senior police officers prefer these figures, perhaps because they have generally shown that crime is falling. The Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) has a number of weaknesses, not least that it tends to ‘oversample’ from low crime areas and ‘undersample’ from high crime areas. Even then, it has shown some crimes becoming dramatically more prevalent, with ‘selected knife offences’ up from 26,370 ten years ago to 53,047 in 2024-25.

The Met doesn’t police all of London. British Transport Police are responsible for mainline trains terminating in the capital, and for the underground network. Their last annual report described ‘an overall challenging environment of increasing crimes ranging from higher reports of anti-social behaviour to our highest ever number of homicides’. That report also states that sexual offences increased by 10 per cent compared to the previous year. Meanwhile the City of London Police, responsible for the Square Mile, reported an increase in thefts, violence, public disorder, criminal damage, sexual offences and robberies.

In The New Statesman, former Downing Street adviser John Bew says the world is now re-entering a “hemisphereist” approach towards foreign intervention.

[A] new paradigm is emerging for how the military power is deployed, in an age when defence technology companies like Palantir and Anduril are the darlings of the Department of War. It is one that places a premium on information and technological superiority – often associated with the use of special forces and set up in contradistinction to the idea of long campaigns and “forever wars” in godforsaken parts of the world. It is not an unpopular argument with the American population given the long tail of those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the costs paid in blood and treasure. So far the distinction is enough to keep the splits within the Maga movement under control, given the considerable distaste for any type of foreign interventionism that exists in the base.

Unconventional as it is, the commander in chief and the maker of deals inhabit the same strategic brain. Thus, the use of the military instrument is repeatedly used to buttress an unsentimental and hyperactive realpolitik. Witness the situation in post-Maduro Venezuela. Here the early signs are that Trump would rather cut a deal with the chastened remnants of the old regime than usher in some colour revolution in which the democratically-elected opposition takes the reins and the credit. To be clear, he is not solving for a queasy Western liberal audience who would be better able to stomach the political decapitation of Maduro if there followed the anointment of the highly palatable Maria Corina Machado, the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. As we have seen in the administration’s Middle East policy, being a person with whom one is able to do business, not trade in virtue, is the order of the day.

The second and most interesting aspect of what happened in Venezuela, is what it reveals about a new form of brutal mercantilist logic that underpins the administration’s broader approach. A major reason why the trajectory of Venezuela was deemed so unacceptable was that it saw one of the most oil-rich nations in the world – in addition to having vast reserves of gold, gas and iron ore – flaunting its assets to Chinese and Russian bidders in ways that cut across American commercial interests. This was understood in Washington and Florida as a direct affront to American dominance of international finance and commodities markets in its own backyard. The icing on the cake, and the casus belli, was Maduro’s tolerance of drug running and destabilisation of more pro-US neighbours in Guyana and Colombia, who also host vast US investments.

For UnHerd, Paul Sagar says the number of students being diagnosed with ADHD is exploding due to “looping effects”.

To understand the complexity of the issue, it is helpful to consider the work of the philosopher of science Ian Hacking, who spent much of his life trying to untangle this sort of thing. One of the most important lessons that Hacking taught us is that when it comes to medical diagnoses with behavioural aspects, humans are “moving targets”. This is because of what he termed “looping effects”: that when people receive a label, they respond to it by changing their behaviour accordingly. But because their behaviour has now changed, the label itself must evolve to capture the very thing purportedly being labelled. This then sets off new kinds of behaviour in those receiving the label — and thus the looping continues.

Hacking’s work on autism helps to illustrate the point. When autism was first established as a diagnostic criteria in the Forties, it applied only to the severely mentally impaired — typically those who were non-verbal and highly socially dysfunctional (they were unable to live without extensive support provided by parents and professional carers; many were institutionalised). Over time, however, the criteria were relaxed, in particular the (controversial) introduction of Asperger’s syndrome in the Eighties, which applied to “high functioning” autistic people especially: those who were not only fully verbal, and often living independently, but crucially were diagnosed as adults (previously autism was something identified almost exclusively during childhood, precisely because it was so severe).

Yet this expansion of autistic criteria and the birth of the idea that autism is a spectrum, rather than a single category of psychological impairment, inevitably set off looping effects. An Asperger’s diagnosis, for example, changed not only the way certain kinds of adults (i.e. those receiving the diagnosis) viewed themselves, but how they behaved. Rather than being shamed and shunned for being “weird” (the fate of earlier generations), they could now (justifiably) protest that they were simply different, as validated by science, and deserving of relevant accommodations. Indeed, many advocated for precisely this distinction, refusing to suppress their non-typical behaviours simply to accommodate “normal” people. (This is one important origin of the modern distinction between the “neurotypical” and the “neurodivergent”.) Such a development has quite clearly benefited, in real and important ways, many people, allowing them to access better resources in a world of reduced stigma. Yet, as the criteria was relaxed, more and more adults started to see themselves as possessing features enveloped within the ever-growing “autistic spectrum”. Ever-growing, because the spectrum diagnostics kept changing to incorporate and accommodate the growing range of correlated symptoms. Which led to more people meeting the criteria, and so on.

On his Substack, Andrew O’Brien says Britain has addressed inflationary pressures by subsidising consumers rather than raising production.

Outside of war, the usual approach in Britain (or much of Europe) was targeted financial support for those that need it to help afford the essentials (e.g. tax credits). However, since the financial crisis, we have started to drift towards a consumer subsidy model which is closer to developing countries in Latin America, like Venezuela, or Asian countries such as India or Iran. These are attempts to manipulate prices and household incomes for political ends. Just like in developing countries, our consumer subsidies not particularly well targeted and risk becoming hard to shift in the future (as we have seen from the fuel duty freeze). Directly subsidising the cost of something makes any price rises ‘political’ in the future. Already, too much of our economic attention is being taken up by how to maintain what we already have in place (e.g. fuel duty).

The real solution to the cost of living crisis is, as I have argued before, two-fold. Firstly, it is boosting domestic production (if we want cheaper food, provide support that grows more of it here, if we want cheaper energy, produce more of it) through long term investment. Secondly, we need to rebalance our trade (e.g. reduce imports, increase exports) so that inflation is not made artificially higher through the weakness of our currency. The billions spent on the measures in this Parliament alone could have been used to invest in these measures that would have long term benefits.

Mass consumer subsidies are attractive because they are a lever that can be pulled immediately and are perceived to provide ‘credit’ to politicians. The latter is particular dubious and has a very low opinion of the public. The Conservatives efforts to offer pre-election tax cuts (and introduce the energy price cap) did not boost their popularity in the last election. Moreover, I’d argue that giving people something temporarily that will create losers when you take it away is a recipe for political disaster. I am sure that is what Treasury officials advise when these measures are considered.

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Wonky Thinking

Policy Exchange published A False Compromise by Sir John Jenkins and Andrew Gilligan. The report explains why a definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” is at least as bad as “Islamophobia” and should be resisted.

According to leaks, a government-appointed working group to devise an official definition of “Islamophobia” has proposed a draft which avoids the word “Islamophobia,” substituting instead the term “anti-Muslim hostility.”1 Members of the working group have sought to present this as a compromise which will “resolve” opponents’ concerns.

A definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” is, in fact, at least as broad and dangerous as one of “Islamophobia,” possibly more so. And because the term lacks (for now) the same negative political connotations, it is also more deployable by activist groups.

The dictionary definition of “hostility” includes “not liking” something, “not agreeing” with it or being “opposed” to it. It is perfectly accurate, for instance, to describe the National Secular Society as hostile to the growth of Muslim (and other religious) schools. No hatred is present here, merely opposition.

This note details multiple other examples where the term “hostility” has been used, including by members of the working group, to attack legitimate criticism or scrutiny of Muslims, Islam or religion.

We show that even as the police now propose to scrap “non-crime hate incidents,” an official definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” risks giving this enormously controversial practice a new lease of life – if only for “non-crimes” against Muslims.

We have also learned that the leak was incomplete. Not disclosed was that the proposed definition includes examples of speech which would not be deemed “hostile” to Muslims. These examples of permitted speech are narrow – for instance, they include theological criticism of Islam, but they do not include saying that disproportionate numbers of British Pakistanis are involved in group-based sexual offending (one key instance where speaking the truth has been attacked as “Islamophobic.”)

Also not disclosed, the definition states that public bodies and companies will be free to adopt their own definitions of “anti-Muslim hostility,” even broader than the one proposed – effectively carte blanche. We show how the term “hostility” has been used to further the second goal of many of those involved in campaigning for a definition – to bring about political change by the back door, including weakening counter-terrorism and immigration laws.

We raise concerns that one of those who devised this expansive definition has already been given a government-funded role which, in effect, makes her into an arbiter of what constitutes “anti-Muslim hostility.”

We argue that giving Muslims special protections not available to others will be disastrous for them, and for everyone else. It will fuel, not diminish, hostility towards Muslims. It will empower divisive extremes – both in Muslim communities, by creating new opportunities for challenge, grievance and attack in every institution and workplace; and on the nativist right. It will increase, not reduce, social tensions.

In The Spectator, Lord Nash lays out the conservative case for an under-16 social media ban.

Before discussing a ban, it is worth keeping in mind what our children are being exposed to on their social media feeds every day. One study found that 70 per cent of children had seen real-life violent content online, with only 6 per cent seeking it out.

Algorithms which are designed to reward attention constantly push videos of stabbings and beatings into young people’s feeds. What kind of effect is this content having on them?

When you speak to police officers, battling hard to keep the public safe, it is clear that there is a clear link between social media use and criminality for young people. Drugs are glamourised, leading to early experimentation. Gangs use social media to recruit children as young as seven and control their movements. Social media sites are the backbone of the county lines networks which force children to sell drugs.

They are also having a radicalising effect. That’s why the heads of MI5, Counter Terror Policing and the National Crime Agency took the unprecedented step of issuing a joint warning about online safety to parents last summer, and likely why young people are being arrested for terrorism offences among the highest on record. We picture radicalisation happening in backstreet corners of formerly industrial towns. We imagine shadowy but charismatic figures recruiting vulnerable young men in person. No longer – young people are being groomed in their bedrooms, on their phones and tablets, while their parents sit downstairs completely unaware.

And then there is the exploitation we do not talk enough about. Predators don’t just lurk in the shadows; they operate openly on platforms grooming vulnerable children in plain sight, with ‘com groups’ blackmailing teenagers into sharing explicit images or harming themselves.

On mental health, the statistics could not be clearer. There has been a 15-fold rise in eating disorders amongst 17 to 19-year-olds in recent years.

Beyond the human tragedy, this terrifies me economically. What hope do we have of turning this country round if we have an entire generation warped by social media? A generation too anxious to form relationships – too unwell to work or too distracted to achieve. Our public services are already buckling because they are fighting a mental health epidemic – all while social media inflames the crisis.

And yet I hear the understandable lament of The Spectator reader: this is just basic parenting – parents should just refuse to let their children use social media. But that effectively means making your child a social pariah when everyone else in their class is already online. There is a reason 86 per cent of parents want this ban. They’re not asking the state to replace them, they’re asking for intervention to break the network effects of social media.

Others worry that a social media ban for under-16s will be used by governments to stifle free speech. But this is nonsense. We don’t let a 12-year-old get behind the wheel of a car and drive up the M1, or let a ten-year-old buy a couple of pints at their local. The state, for very good reason, bars children from doing certain things while their brains develop and they acquire the knowledge and experience to navigate them wisely.

Conservatives believe in law and order, in strong families, and in a state that knows when to act and when to get out of the way. We trusted parents with academies, and we were right to do so. We should trust them now when they are crying out for a line in the sand. This is the moment to act, not out of moral panic, but to give children their childhood back.

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Podcasts of the Week

Nick Timothy and William Clouston appeared on the SDP podcast discussing Britain’s need for a new economic model.

Greg Jackson, founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, appeared at The Spectator’s energy summit explaining the flaws in Britain’s system of pricing and taxing energy.

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Quick Links

Nick Timothy, our founder, was made Shadow Justice Secretary.

The chief of the West Midlands Police has been “allowed to retire” instead of being sacked over the Maccabi Tel Aviv football ban.

The police used unregulated AI when taking their decision to ban Israeli away fans - but denied this several times, it was revealed…

…and the Home Secretary was informed about the likely ban eight days in advance.

Pro-Palestine activists plotted to “spy” on Israeli football players, it was revealed.

The West Midlands police and crime commissioner (PCC) has been accused of offering to give the controversial Green Lane Mosque a “blank cheque” for public grants.

The UK was ranked third globally for FDI projects between 2022 and 2025.

The Government rejected calls from the automotive industry for Chinese-manufactured EVs to be eligible for taxpayer subsidies.

Data from the US showed radical expansion of housebuilding caused rents to plummet.

The birthrate plunged to just 1.4 children per woman.

Towering Columns

In UnHerd, Phoebe Arslanagic-Little documents how the NHS is failing mothers contributing to falling fertility rates in Britain and across Europe.

The UK’s total fertility rate is 1.41 and falling. A future of ever fewer children has serious social and economic consequences for us all. Making becoming and being a parent easier, tangibly improving the lives of parents, are clear ways in which we can help those who already want to be parents or have a further child to do so.

And that is what history tells us. By the 1920s, more than 50 per cent of Europeans lived in a country with a below replacement fertility rate. In 1935, the UK’s fertility rate had dropped to only 1.79. Then, the Baby Boom happened and people in countries all over the world began having more children and doing so earlier in life. There is strong evidence that better maternal medicine was a major contributor to the Boom. The widespread availability of blood transfusions and antibiotics made having a child significantly safer and so women became more likely to choose to become mothers or have a further child.

The experience that women have bringing children into the world matters, to those individual women and their partners and families, and to all of us as the need to make parents’ lives better increases. An NHS that believes aromatherapy, sterile water injections and relaxation techniques belong in the same category as highly effective analgesics like epidurals has gone down the wrong path.

In The Times, Melanie Phillips says that Europe needs to return to Christian civilisation in order to survive.

The enemies of the West understand the cultural vacuum that has developed and the opportunities it opens up for them. Vladimir Putin understands it very well as the collapse of European Christian civilisation. The problem is that he imagines himself as a latter-day Russian emperor leading the restoration of Christian Europe. This is held to justify his invasion of Ukraine and potentially the Baltic states too. Far from saving Europe, therefore, he menaces it.

In America, elements within Maga-world can’t grasp this baleful reality. Instead, they identify with Putin in what they credulously believe is a common defence of Christian civilisation. But those in Britain and Europe who are horrified by these Maga ultras should check their own hypocrisy. As Gordon Sondland, a former US ambassador to the EU, has said, it was Europe’s spinelessness that enabled Putin’s aggression.

Britain and Europe have long leeched off the US for military protection while trashing their own defences, along with their historic culture. The NSS warning, Sondland said, was a wake-up call intended to alarm Europe sufficiently to rearm itself and beef up its defences.

Only Britain and Europe can save themselves. That’s what the Trump administration is saying. That’s what Britain and Europe don’t want to hear.

In The Telegraph, Claire Coutinho calls for dropping the government’s clean power target to avoid deindustrialisation and bigger bills.

Britain simply cannot afford to spend the next 25 years with uncompetitive electricity prices. We would continue to deindustrialise, miss out on the economic growth opportunities of AI, and see living standards suffer. Britain’s prosperity derives from our ability to be at the forefront of successive industrial revolutions.

The AI revolution is happening now. If we do not address the cost of our electricity in the immediate term, Britain will fall behind the technological curve for the first time in two centuries and we will be poorer because of it.

The report is also explicit that overbuilding wind power, as the Government plans to do, will mean costs go up as we pay first to build the wind farms, and then pay again to turn them off when it’s too windy. That’s why I’ve been arguing Ed Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 mission, far from saving billpayers £300 as promised in the General Election, is going to cost consumers a bomb whilst multi-million-pound wind developers laugh all the way to the bank.

In Conservative Home, Sir John Redwood argues that Britain would be foolish to ignore Trump’s call for Europe to change course.

How should the UK respond to this underlining of the US approach? There is nothing in the document that should come as a surprise to observers of the presidency. It should encourage Britain to believe in itself, to see and seize the opportunities of Brexit more clearly, and lead the Government to make faster and better provision for a stronger military to take care of our own defence. We need an enhanced shield against incoming drones, missiles and aircraft, stronger defences against interference in our waters, and more attention to cyber warfare and drone technology. It should also persuade ministers to take more urgent and effective action to cut illegal migration. We also need to examine drug dependency and drug trades into the UK as we too like the US have too many people with a serious drug dependency.

It is difficult to know how to handle the breakdown in relations between the EU and the US. The UK agreeing to provide practical military support to help police a Ukraine settlement is currently not relevant, as there is no peace to police and Russia is against European states putting military personnel onto Ukraine soil. The Government is right to rule out committing British forces to fight Russia on the side of Ukraine – but this decision means we should not try to change Ukrainian views over the peace or its commitment to the war, as they are the ones that have to bear the pain and the losses.

The Government is right too not to rush to reply in detail to this extraordinary statement. When an ally speaks out like this it is best to do what we think is right and to let our actions speak rather than any critical words. The message that we need to take more care of ourselves is one we should not ignore.

In The Telegraph, Lord David Frost writes that the left are debasing British culture to undermine support for the nation state.

This ideology asks us to idolise a vision of tolerant, diverse people in strong communities celebrating their differences. But even the Left can see that tolerance, diversity, and equality are firstly not uniquely British, and secondly far too abstract to get emotional about.

So, to bed them in, they have to be given a specific British quality. And since the Left rules out of court all the traditional elements of national identity, all they are left with is this debased version: Paddington the refugee, “meal deals and Mr Blobby”, British greatness encapsulated as a montage of Chicken Shop Date and Sam Fender hungover on breakfast TV.

It isn’t good enough. This isn’t patriotism. It’s a pathetic retreat into kitsch, politics as soft play, a denial of the country’s challenges, even at some level a rejection of the view that those challenges are important because all we need do is be nice to each other. Those of us who still believe in the nation state, in its British or any other version, and who think our civilisation is worth preserving, must not be tempted to go down this road. Instead we must get back to meaningful patriotism, to serious stuff, to this country’s contribution to Western achievements and the things that make this country distinctive.

In The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh says that the world does not face a conflict between civilisations but a clash within civilisations.

Before he died in 2008, Samuel Huntington could have said “I told you so” without too much dissent. The US was then several years deep into its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such violence between the western and Islamic worlds seemed to vindicate the Harvard scholar, who had once segmented the globe into civilisations and predicted a clash of them. As our troubled millennium got going, the word “prescient” followed him around like an extra name.

It is crass to speak of such a thing as a well-timed death. Had he lived to this day, however, Huntington would be taking as much flak as poor Francis Fukuyama does for getting the world all wrong. The important conflicts now are within, not between, civilisations. The C-word has seldom been so popular (the US government talks about Europe’s “civilizational erasure”) and so useless.

Look at the world’s trouble spots. The war in Ukraine is a war within the “Orthodox” Christian civilisation, at least as Huntington classified it. The periodic stand-off between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan is another example of a tussle inside a cultural bloc — what Huntington called the Sinosphere. A candidate for the deadliest current conflict on Earth, Sudan’s civil war, does not pit a coherent religious or cultural group against another, as such. Even the external patrons of the combatants, which include the UAE on one side and Egypt on the other, are mostly from within the Islamic world rather than distinct civilisations.

In The Telegraph, Nile Gardiner says that the US is right to work with allies in Europe nations to weaken the power of Brussels.

The EU is a real problem for the United States and for the transatlantic alliance. It is dominated by big government, Left-wing ideology, and is sinking under the weight of decades of open-borders policies, threatening the very future of Western civilisation. As Trump and his vice-president JD Vance have made clear, Europe faces an existential crisis of its own making, while adversaries such as China and Russia are seeking to exploit Europe’s weakness.

It is in America’s national interest to work with sovereign nation states that share its values, and are based on democratic accountability. As Musk has declared, “The European Union is not democracy – rule of the people – but rather bureaucracy – rule of the unelected bureaucrat.”

Obviously, the United States cannot unilaterally abolish the EU, which was originally established as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 with American support. But it can actively back the cause of national sovereignty and self-determination across Europe, challenging the power of Brussels, and stand with European movements that seek to throw off the shackles of the EU machine.

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Wonky Thinking

Rian Chad Whitton has published a new report for the The Prosperity Institute detailing how Net Zero is destroying the our industrial foundations.

Given the dire straits of Britain’s energy-intensive industries and the expectation of significant turbulence in the global economy going forward, it is clear why governments feel compelled to offer industry exemptions and even subsidies for energy prices, and to takeover failed operations like British Steel and Speciality Steels. However, these are reactive measures that do not alleviate the largely self-imposed conditions of decline. Time is running out to change the course of Britain’s deindustrialisation. Improving British electricity price competitiveness will take between five and ten years, but large sections of the energy-intensive industries could be severely diminished within just 24 months without course correction.

Any government support for industry must be supplemented by a real plan to improve industrial competitiveness, prioritising low energy costs, reducing and removing onerous regulations, and cutting back self-defeating mandates. Approval of active industrial policy has to be contingent on supply-side reform.

British government policy can immediately be improved at the conceptual level. The Office for National Statistics annually provides estimates for the LCREE. This collection of industries is prioritised through Government policy in the form of subsidies, levies, research grants and direct funding. Yet it has a small turnover of £70bn versus over £200bn for the foundational industries. From now on, the energy-intensive sector should take priority over the green sector when considering government targets for revenue growth and improving prosperity outside of London.

The Migration Advisory Council has published a report on The Fiscal Impact of Immigration: Static and Dynamic Estimates for the UK which estimates the contribution of migrants.

Overall, the SW [Skilled Worker] visa route is clearly fiscally positive for the UK. This is almost inevitable given that main applicants on the route must have a job offer paying above a set of salary thresholds. This means that these migrants have higher employment rates than UK residents since employment is a condition of the visa and as we shall demonstrate, salaries on the SW route are significantly higher than UK average wages. For the 2022/23 cohort as a whole, we estimate a present value net fiscal contribution of around £47bn over their lifetime. However, this estimate hides very substantial heterogeneity. The entire positive contribution comes from main applicants – particularly those outside of H&C [Health & Care]. Dependants have relatively small overall lifetime contributions which are negative in aggregate. Furthermore, even within the highly positive SW (excl. H&C) main applicants, 72% of the fiscal gain comes from the top 30% of earners.

More broadly our results highlight two key determinants of fiscal contribution over the lifetime for migrants. First, the age at which the migrant arrives in the UK. Migrants are typically aged in their 20s and 30s when they arrive, and this is an age at which the future lifetime contribution is most likely to be positive since it avoids the fiscal costs of childhood and allows for a substantial period in the labour market to make significant tax contributions. To put this £47bn figure in context, the present value of total government spending over the lifetime of this cohort is estimated to be around £26,700bn.

Second, the employment rate and wages that migrants achieve. Those who arrive on sponsored work routes are more likely to be fiscally positive, whilst the contribution of their dependants (adult partners) will depend on the extent to which they work and the wages they receive. Visa routes that do not have work requirements will therefore generally be less fiscally positive (or be fiscally negative) than the results reported here for the Skilled Worker cohort. Furthermore, just like for UK residents, fiscal contributions are heavily skewed toward high earners given the progressive tax system. This highlights the importance from a fiscal perspective of attracting global talent and creating a policy environment than encourages such workers to remain in the UK.

This table summarises the estimated lifetime totals for migrants arriving in 2022/23.

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Podcast of the Week

Professor Dieter Helm discusses the reasons why our economy has struggled to grow in his latest podcast. Helm argues that Western economies, especially the UK, prioritise consumption over production, rely heavily on welfare spending, and maintain incentive systems that discourage work.

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Quick Links

The economy contracted by 0.1% in October.

The economy is smaller today than it was before the pandemic.

British taxpayers pay more income tax than French taxpayers.

Fewer than a quarter of grooming gang suspects were arrested last year.

Four in ten asylum seekers remain in Britain despite being rejected.

The First Sea Lord says Britain is close to losing the Atlantic to Russia.

The CBI says Rachel Reeves’ tax rises are driving up unemployment.

Experts say we cannot fight a war lasting longer than a few weeks.

China’s trade surplus with the rest of the world has passed $1 trillion.

The UK’s former Head of Nuclear Policy says our nuclear submarine fleet is ‘no longer fit for purpose’.

Towering Columns

On his Substack, Neil O’Brien unpacks Reeves's tangled Budget.

What a mess. No-one can recall a messier Budget. What was the underlying problem? I’ll tell you: they tried to be too clever by half. We now know that Reeves knew all along she wasn’t facing a big black hole. The OBR told her on 17 September that the downgrade in productivity forecasts was offset by tax rich growth and inflation. Despite that, the Treasury were happy to stoke the idea that there was a huge black hole that would mean that income tax rates would have to rise.

Why did they stoke this? Simple: they wanted, on Budget day, to be able to reveal “more-positive-than-expected numbers” and then announce that there would be no change in rates - a nice budget “rabbit”. Hurrah! It is hard to overstate how dishonest the government were. On 5 November, we now know that Reeves knew that the OBR were forecasting billions of headroom against the government’s fiscal rules…but she still went on TV with an unprecedented pre-budget to create the impression that big tax rises were coming because of a deterioration in the public finances.

At no point in the process did the OBR have the government missing its fiscal rules by the large margins the government were briefing journalists about. (Remember the black hole of 20 billion or even 30 billion they told journos about?)

Reeves even argued two weeks before the budget:

“It would, of course, be possible to stick with the manifesto commitments, but that would require things like deep cuts in capital spending.”

She said this, though she knew it wasn’t true…

…Why did they announce no rate increase beforehand? At some point someone in HMT panicked that markets might react badly to this last-minute surprise, and so reversed course - which really did spook the markets…What the Budget really does is not plug an imaginary black hole - but increase spending (mainly on welfare) and increase tax.

In The Telegraph, Gavin Rice says Britain’s finances will only stabilise if basic rate taxpayers share more of the burden.

The ultra-redistributive approach towards tax was pursued by the Conservatives for noble reasons – to protect modest earners from the impact of rising spending liabilities due to pensions, the NHS and the cost of the pandemic. It was achieved through the roll-out of the personal allowance and cuts to employees’ National Insurance. As a result, the average working household paid nearly £2,000 less tax on income in real terms in 2024 than in 2010. This provided some compensation for the lack of wage growth over the Tories’ 14 year term, and allowed the party to announce tax cuts for the majority while squeezing higher earners.

This incessant downwards pressure on the tax liability of basic ratepayers followed in the footsteps of Gordon Brown, who famously cut the rate to 20p while hiking taxes overall. The combined approach of taking ordinary people almost entirely out of tax was a kind of silent cross-party conspiracy. Liz Truss was wrong about almost everything – including wanting to cut the rate to 19p. But she was right about one thing: the “Resolution Foundation” approach to budgets, where every tax change must be even more progressive than the last, must end.

As tax experts Dan Neidle and Paul Johnson have noted, this squeezing of so-called higher earners is running out of road. The so-called “Henrys” – High Earning, Not Rich Yet – may just up sticks and leave, or choose to work less, given the incentive-destroying tax rates they face. The income distribution is already far too bunched, with the minimum wage rising to nearly 70 per cent of the median. What then is the incentive to work? Those earning £50-£150,000 are among the most productive in the economy. Why are we persecuting them? Broadening the tax base is not inconsistent with lowering the overall national tax burden. We need both.

For The Times, Juliet Samuel says Keir Starmer’s government is hamstrung by quangos and regulators it doesn’t control.

Ministers adopted their habitual pose of what the shrinks call “learned helplessness”, whereupon, realising they were going to have to explain themselves, they blamed the CPS and an obscure security official. The excuse was that the case’s collapse was the necessary result of Labour’s admirable respect for the sacred “independence” of legal process (this never quite explained the appearance of Labour’s mealy-mouthed manifesto language on China in the official government witness statement, but never mind).

Just as with the OBR, this denial of responsibility by ministers immediately triggered the release of an unprecedented series of “clarifying” letters from the agency concerned, which, with knife-like precision, used bureaucratic jargon to scrape the excrement directly on to ministers’ heads. Now we have the denouement, with a joint committee report on the debacle, concluding that they were all to blame, the bungling lawyers and the self-abnegating politicians forming an alliance of ineptitude in which the chief victim is national security.

One might wonder how it is that a government led by people whose main self-professed virtue was their worship of concepts like “civil service independence” and “the ministerial code” could find themselves not just in briefing wars but under direct fire by official letter from the very institutions they claim to treasure. Not even the nose-thumber-in-chief Boris Johnson managed to get into a direct scrap with the CPS, for goodness’ sake. As for the OBR, one of Reeves’s first acts was to pass legislation giving it formal power to publish its views on public finances regardless of Treasury directions, on the basis that this would make it harder for future, unscrupulous governments to fiddle the books. I suppose she would know. By their own standards, the government is guilty of undermining the “independence” of hallowed arm’s-length bodies. But the real crime is far greater: a failure to have any politics, to know what politics is for, to realise that the job of a leader is not merely to pay homage to bureaucracy but to renew and replenish the vitality of our institutions so we are fit to flourish in a new era.

Also in The Times, Simon French says energy inflation has devastating ripple effects through the economy.

One policy area stands out more than most. In the mid-2000s the UK had the same industrial electricity costs as the United States. At 3.8p/kWh the UK’s electricity costs were the same as the average of all the countries that are members of the International Energy Agency (IEA). Two decades on, this price has risen six-fold. UK electricity prices are now the highest in the IEA, and 2.5 times higher than US industry electricity prices. This permeates all parts of the economy from the hairdresser’s heating its salon, to the pub warming its bar area, to the manufacturer powering its machines. Hyperscalers are not going to bring their AI-fuelled activity to the UK given their huge appetite for energy. Almost every domestic price, at some stage in the production process, comes into contact with energy costs.

While some of this higher energy price — particularly since 2022 — has been the result of volatile gas prices associated with the Ukraine war, that commodity price has now reverted close to its pre-war level. Yet the prices facing business remain penally high. In November, Neso, the National Energy System Operator, released a discouraging report on the outlook for UK gas supply security. The UK is on track to supply just 3 per cent of its own peak gas demand by the winter of 2035, having supplied an average of 36 per cent over the last decade.

More maddening still is that the shortfall is being filled by Norwegian supply from the same geological area as the UK, or by more polluting and less secure imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) from countries such as the US and Qatar. It is hard to think of a more damaging policy for living standards, for inflation, for tax revenue and for growth than the UK’s approach to securing a stable supply of natural gas. This failure also enables alternative suppliers of energy to the UK to keep their prices elevated, rather than face the scrutiny of competition.

And in The Telegraph, Lord Frost says Keir Starmer’s unpopularity may cause Labour’s plan to harmonise with the EU to backfire.

Want to get rid of net zero? “Sorry Minister, you’ve signed a treaty with the EU on that.” Want to free up our food sector with GMs and novel foods? “Sorry Minister, the EU sets those rules.” Want to cut needless over-regulation of cars? “Sorry, Minister, we are following EU rules on this.” This is the current direction of travel. Every time we accept the EU’s laws we are making life more difficult for ourselves and limiting our own choices.

I wish I heard these arguments made more often and more assertively by the Conservatives and Reform. Yes, both parties say they will reverse the reset – though perhaps not more than that. But the argument is couched too much in political terms, an accusation that Labour are “betraying” Brexit and the voters.

I don’t think it helps to speak in those terms. Voters need to be reminded that we risk moving from being a nation where ministers can decide the country’s future and have real choices about economic policy, to one where they can’t and don’t. Voters need to understand that the zombie figure of the Brexit hit to growth of 4 per cent, 6 per cent, 8 per cent, whatever figure it is today, is nonsense, and why – a totally implausible number unless you think that Britain would have been growing nearly as fast as America in recent years. Without such proper, serious, discussion once again about the EU relationship, not about whether we want a “new partnership” but what the hard economic trade-offs are, the case for economic freedom and independence seems to me to risk going by default.

Finally in The Times, Emma Duncan says Reeves’s Budget only deepens the unfair social contract facing younger voters.

First, even before the 2008 financial crisis productivity growth slowed around the rich world. Outside America, whose fast-paced economy is supercharged by tech, real incomes haven’t increased much in recent years. Confidence in the future has evaporated: 79 per cent of parents in this country — the highest number among 36 countries surveyed other than France — think their children will be worse off than they are. Second, Britain stopped building enough houses. Nimbyism took hold, planning became increasingly restrictive, regulations raised the cost of construction and demand among foreigners for property in London surged. Housing became unaffordable for the young. Third, there was a series of economic shocks. The financial crisis meant the banks had to be refinanced; the pandemic led to another splurge of state cash; the Ukraine war drove up inflation and interest rates. The national debt ballooned from about a third of the value of the economy before the financial crisis to almost the entire value of it now. Since debt is a claim on the incomes of future generations, that’s a burden we’ve placed on our children.

It’s not just debt that is going to weigh heavily on the young. A lower birth rate means the old age dependency ratio — the number of pensioners per 1,000 working people — is due to rise from around 280 now to 341 in a couple of decades’ time. Some of those pensioners have enough private savings to finance their retirement, but the workers of the future will be paying the state pensions of the future. The government should have used the budget as an opportunity to mitigate these problems. However gloomy we may feel, in fiscal terms these are the relatively good times. We’re not in the middle of a crisis or a recession, and this week the government got an unexpected break from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which downgraded productivity less than had been anticipated while projecting higher tax revenues because of higher-than-expected earnings.

The government has used some of the bonus to provide itself with more headroom in case of future shocks, but a larger sum has gone on extra welfare spending, including £3 billion on lifting the two-child benefit cap. The state continues to favour the old over the young: the triple-lock on pensions is staying and the level at which student loans have to be repaid has been frozen, bringing more young people into that net.

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Wonky Thinking

Alex Chalmers published a report for the Centre for British Progress arguing for a major overhaul of UK defence procurement.

UK defence procurement routinely misses cost and schedule targets, leaving the armed forces without the equipment they need, when they need it. This is the product of five sins:

1. Overspecification – a bias towards bespoke, over-complex projects that take on unnecessary technical risk when simpler, proven options exist.

2. Inter-service rivalry – competition for prestige and budget between the services, driving duplicated capabilities and distorting investment decisions.

3. Short-termism and optimism bias – persistent underestimation of cost, time and risk, reinforced by annual cash limits and frequent churn in project leadership.

4. Weakening sovereign capability – a “feast and famine” pattern of orders and a failure to take a strategic approach to sovereignty that have hollowed out critical UK-based industrial capacity.

5. Slowness to innovate – procurement cycles and commercial rules that favour large primes and pilots over rapid adoption of software-driven, AI-enabled capabilities.

To tackle these five flaws, we should:

Overspecification – flip the default from bespoke design to proven kit:

• Require an “off-the-shelf test” for every major project, with bespoke development allowed only via explicit ministerial direction.

• Freeze requirements after nine months, with any later changes signed off by the Secretary of State and funded from the sponsoring Service’s own budget.

• Create a permanent “90-day fast lane” for buying trusted, unmodified NATO/allied equipment off the shelf.

Inter-service rivalry – strengthen the centre while pushing some power closer to the frontline:

• Extend the National Armaments Director’s (NAD) tenure to match major programme timelines, ensuring continuity and accountability.

• Establish an independent UK CAPE-style cost analysis unit to provide unbiased estimates of cost, risk and alternatives.

• Give the NAD a concept-stage veto on new programmes, overridable only by a public ministerial direction laid before Parliament.

• Publish a quarterly readiness ledger, signed by the NAD, to expose raids on spares and training used to balance in-year budgets.

• Increase brigade-level discretionary spending authority for off-the-shelf purchases that meet urgent operational needs.

Short-termism and optimism bias – align money, incentives and reality:

• Adopt P75 cost and schedule baselines for all projects over £20 million, with clearly ring-fenced contingency.

• Introduce automatic multi-year capital flexibility for the Equipment Plan so funding can move between years without constant Treasury approval.

• Keep Senior Responsible Owners in post for at least five years, with incentives linked to delivery rather than initial approval.

Weakening sovereign capability – use procurement to rebuild resilience where it matters:

• Disapply current social value criteria in defence, which add cost while doing little to strengthen strategically relevant UK capacity.

• Introduce a consistent UK prosperity weighting for selected categories, heavily favouring meaningful UK activity (employment, IP, supply chains, manufacturing and assembly).

• Professionalise defence procurement as a strategic supply-chain function, recruiting experienced commercial leaders and using combined government data to map and develop the UK defence-industrial base.

Slowness to innovate – create a real market for challenger defence technology:

• Make “time to first use” a core metric in business cases, with every project required to set and justify an explicit band for time to deployment.

• Focus accelerators on genuine start-ups, moving later-stage firms into mainstream procurement routes.

• Unbundle hardware and software in major contracts so specialist software companies can compete directly rather than through primes.

• Remove entry windows from framework contracts, moving to rolling, dynamic markets that new suppliers can join at any time.

• Sponsor security clearances and provide central secure facilities for early-stage firms to break the current “no clearance, no work” trap.

• Allow initial batch production outside standard competition rules, within defined caps, to test promising technology at scale.

• Enforce the 10% ringfence for novel technologies, with published criteria and transparent reporting on how funds are used.

• Permit upfront, in-full payment for selected contracts to enable start-ups to build factories and scale operations in Britain.

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Podcast of the Week

On Monetary Matters, Michael Pettis discusses China’s “involution trap”. Pettis describes how for decades the global economy has relied on China suppressing domestic consumption to create manufacturing trade surpluses, and why the US trade deficit is only growing.

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Quick Links

The Chancellor was accused of forcing the head of the OBR to resign, after the watchdog accidentally published its analysis of the Budget in advance.

The political editor of the BBC accused the Chancellor of misleading the public in the run-up to the Budget…

…while she also stands accused of misleading the Cabinet over the existence of a fiscal black hole.

A leaked policy document showed Labour planned to use a private member’s bill with government support to legalise assisted suicide while it was still in Opposition.

The global S&P manufacturing index was at a 14-month high…

…but global construction showed its steepest fall in more than five years.

The Institute of Directors’ Economic Confidence index hit record lows.

Business leaders said they will have to cut jobs and investment after the Chancellor’s property tax raid.

Tax changes introduced in the Budget may threaten employee ownership.

The West Midlands Police gave evidence to Parliament, accusing Dutch police of altering their evidence relating to Maccabi Tel Aviv in response to political pressure…

…and the Government’s anti-Semitism adviser said the force tailored evidence to secure a ban.

The Department for Education awarded the Islamic Finance Committee £174,000 to explore a “Sharia-compliant” model of student finance.

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says Reeves has fallen back on pumping the economy with welfare spending, abandoning any real commitment to growth.

The main governing principle of this budget, aside from its wholesale and unnecessary surrender to Labour’s back benches, was supposedly fiscal responsibility. But even this rests upon a sleight of hand. While the extra welfare spending flows out of the national coffers immediately, the tax rises come in slowly. Modest cuts to departmental spending, such as they are, are supposed to happen right at the end of the parliament. So we’re meant to believe that Reeves is going to borrow more now, then go back to austerity right before the next election. And even if these measures do go ahead, the OBR says there’s only a 59 per cent chance she’ll meet her fiscal targets — but, to channel Chris Morris, there’s only a 10 per cent chance of that.

In Reeves’s first budget, one could argue that it was politically wise for her to come into office with a big bang of spending for the NHS, neutralising that issue at least temporarily. You could perhaps argue that, even though she immediately and brazenly broke her manifesto promise not to raise national insurance, she was at least putting half the proceeds into public investment, a serious down payment on that new economic model she talked about in Washington.

But with her second attempt, there can be no illusions. The vision of a left-wing government that deploys state power to build faster, incentivise innovation, revive our industrial base, secure our supply chains and protect jobs by uprating Britain’s competitiveness never came to anything more than a single speech. The sum total of Labour’s real vision for the country is higher taxes for bigger handouts.

On Substack, Andrew O’Brien declares we are now in the age of Insecuronomics, with the Budget making Britain reliant on borrowing record sums from overseas.

More worrying is how we are paying for all of this spending. In the short-term we are not really paying for it at all. Our trade deficit is going to be wider at the end of the Parliament than it was at the beginning. We export less than we import. In 2024, we spent £50bn more on imports than we did in exports in 2024. So that’s £50bn heading out the door. By 2030, we will be spending £79bn more on imports than we did in exports. The gap between what imports and exports will increase by 45% over the Parliament.

So far, so bad. But it gets worse. In 2024, we needed to borrow £171bn to pay for the UK’s borrowing, nearly all was the government’s debt. However, higher household and corporate saving could cover most (64%) of our borrowing needs. By 2030, however, although the government need for finance has come down, households and corporates in the UK are now having to borrow from overseas too. Every part of our economy will be going cap in hand to the rest of the world. From 2025 to 2030, the UK is going to need to borrow £667bn from our friends (and not so friends) from overseas.

This borrowing is not free. Our homes, our businesses, our utilities and our future tax revenue (through gilts) are promised in return. The return from these things is what our friends from abroad are interested in. From 2025 to 2030, £372bn is going to leave the UK through higher dividends, debt payments and sales of assets. This is over three and half times the levels of the last Parliament. Our current account balance is going be 1.5% of GDP higher in 2030 than it was in 2024. If we didn’t do this, inflation would skyrocket, making the energy price spike look like a tea party.

In The Telegraph, Allister Heath says the Budget marked the end of property-owning democracy and a victory for socialism.

This is the final death of Thatcherism, of the British dream, of the idea that ordinary people, through hard work, can climb the property ladder: Reeves is the most anti-capitalist and anti-aspiration Chancellor since Denis Healey. She will destroy incentives to extend or refurbish high-end properties – woe betide anybody whose home rises too much in value – cripple the top of the property market and chase away yet more successful people from the UK.

Many on the radical Left believe they are entitled to confiscate privately owned assets, for any reason, and are finally getting their way. They believe that it is “unfair” people don’t pay more tax if they own an expensive home. But why should anybody pay any tax on their property at all, other than a basic fee for local services? It’s legally theirs, so they should not have to hand over any money to keep hold of it. In a conservative and capitalist society, property is a foundational, natural right, not a privilege. Where are the human rights lawyers when we need them?

The logical extension of Reeves’ property tax grab is that the state will eventually start to expropriate a percentage of bank accounts and pension pots too, at least those deemed “too large”.

Reeves is violating every principle of just taxation. Wealth taxes are “dry”, a disaster for the asset-rich but cash-poor, such as pensioners who bought their home decades ago and have accidentally become paper millionaires. To avoid such people having to sell family homes to pay her abhorrent levy, and the accompanying PR nightmare, Reeves is likely to introduce another sinister innovation. She may allow her tax to be “rolled up” and paid when pensioners die, or when they choose to sell their home. This sets another terrible precedent: the Chancellor no longer needs to consider affordability when determining tax. She can simply punish people as harshly as she wishes, and then collect the cash when they die. Her new tax – a toxic mix of two hated levies, council tax and IHT – is equivalent to detonating a time bomb under Middle England.

Socialism is back, and the property-owning democracy is out. Labour has declared war on social mobility, on petit bourgeois values, on the consumer society and on conservative Britain. Starmer and Reeves’s mission was to keep Labour MPs on side. They are about to find out that the rest of the country has no time for their deranged, embittered class warfare.

In UnHerd, Yuan Yi Zhu says financial pressures are now driving the call to abolish trial by jury, a foundation of the British legal system.

It would be one thing if, having decided that the jury was an institution not adapted to modern conditions, the Justice Secretary made the principled decision to abolish it. This view is not without supporters. Lord Bramwell, one of the most distinguished jurists of the Victorian period, once said that, “If juries had to give reasons for their verdict, trial by jury would not last five years.” In fact, it is a crime in England to disclose the deliberations of a jury, which to cynics only confirms the truth of Bramwell’s quip.

But this is Britain in 2025. Lammy needs to abolish juries because there is no money for the legal system, which means that courtrooms sit empty while criminal trials are scheduled for the next decade.

Juries are expensive and time-consuming; hiring judges is also expensive, but they aren’t messy like juries. They won’t collapse trials by going home and looking up the defendant online. They won’t acquit people who throw monuments into a river or people who post threatening things online about asylum seekers. For a Prime Minister who thinks ID cards are a sure vote winner, abolishing juries must seem like a quite clever thing to try.

In The Financial Times, Martin Wolf makes the case that this Budget has stored up risks for the future, wasting an opportunity to use Labour’s large parliamentary majority to reform the economy.

Strikingly, as the OBR notes, the forecast for public sector net borrowing is also worse now than it was in March for every year, apart from 2030 — not surprisingly, the year when targets bite. As the OBR also notes, the Budget delivers a frontloaded increase in spending of £9bn and a backloaded increase in taxes of £26bn. This is sweetness today and sourness tomorrow. That must reflect panic over the unhappiness of the Parliamentary Labour party. Will Reeves’ measures at least be enough to avoid any possibility of further need to raise taxes or slash spending? Possibly not. The OBR concludes that “the probability of meeting the fiscal mandate is 59 per cent, up from 54 per cent in March” — safer, but hardly safe.

What about the measures themselves? They are exactly as expected. Out of a net fiscal adjustment of £22.9bn for 2030-31, £12.7bn comes from freezes in personal tax thresholds, £2.6bn from national insurance contributions on salary-sacrifice schemes, £2.2bn from increases in income taxes on property, savings and dividends and so on and so forth. This sort of scattershot approach is what chancellors do who have no sense of what a good tax system would look like, or lack the courage to attempt radical reforms but desperately need to raise revenue. It was entirely predictable. But how ministers can say with a straight face that using inflation to raise effective tax rates in an arbitrary way is protecting “working people” from higher tax is beyond me.

What is depressing is that a government with a huge majority dares to do so little to transform economic prospects. It is easy to imagine far more irresponsible budgets than this. But the OBR is right that it will not have any positive effect on growth or the efficiency of the tax system. Moreover, it leaves a risky fiscal position, with persistently high debt and already high interest rates. The government could have done better. Indeed, it should have done better.

In The Spectator, James Kirkup says we will see fewer people in work at the end of the parliament than at the beginning.

Work is good. Work generates wealth, makes people happier and, maybe, delivers salvation. The Protestant work ethic is much disputed among sociologists and economic historians, but most people accept that some level of work is both necessary and desirable. This makes it all the more troubling that, buried in the OBR data under the Budget, are signposts to a future Britain where fewer people work at all – and where those who do are working less.

The Office for Budget Responsibility says the labour force participation rate is forecast to fall ever so slightly, from 63.5 per cent in 2024 to 63.4 per cent in 2029. A tenth of a percentage point over five years is not huge. But thinking about the economic future, does anyone think that Britain needs the share of the population that’s not working to be rising?

And the OBR’s footnotes tell a sobering story: participation is falling because Britain is ageing and getting sicker. Long-term sickness keeps rising and is pushing up incapacity benefit caseloads. This is not the country becoming more efficient and so able to make do with fewer workers; it’s a nation quietly becoming less able to work.

In UnHerd, Henry Hill says the flight of young professionals is masking the UK’s ongoing high levels of immigration.

But the overall numbers are still very high. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), just under 900,000 people immigrated to Britain in the year after last year’s election. The reason the net figure looks so comparably reasonable is due to emigration.

This poses problems, however. Firstly, a substantial share of current emigration involves EU citizens who arrived in the UK before Brexit. This is a trend that will eventually run its course, which is why the watchdog actually predicts net migration to start rising again by 2029. Secondly, another slice of emigrants are British nationals leaving the country; in the latest figures, this is about 250,000 people.

Some of this will be natural and untroubling. But to the extent it represents productive people leaving the country, for example high earners driven away by raised taxes or young professionals such as doctors seeking better opportunities overseas, it is a poor indicator of national health to which more attention should be paid.

Likewise, it means that cutting net immigration by itself will not, and should not, allay the concerns of voters concerned about integration and the pace of cultural change. If Britain imported one million new people every year but waved goodbye to one million Britons, net immigration would be zero. Yet the pace of change would be double what it would be if all the Brits stayed here and net immigration was one million.

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Wonky Thinking

Guido Fawkes provides a comprehensive list of Think Tank responses to what it calls the “Binfire Budget”.

Britain Remade’s Sam Richards said: “The shambles surrounding the launch of this miserable Budget should not distract from the Government’s abject failure to deliver their number one priority: economic growth.”

The Centre for Social Justice blasted the “Buckeroo Budget”, with policy director Joe Shalam saying: “A government with a majority of 169 has set out a Budget penned by its backbenchers. But throwing money at the problem, paid for by a squeeze on the workers and savers of middle England, will eventually cause a kick.”

Onward’s director Simon Clarke said: “Today’s Budget compounds the damage inflicted a year ago: slower growth and lower productivity alongside higher taxes and more welfare spending.”

The Institute of Directors‘ Anna Leach said: “This Budget does not substantively change the UK’s growth outlook. Public spending is higher, and business investment even lower than before. The scaling back of National Insurance relief on pension contributions – even while the government has launched its Pension Commission – will undermine retirement savings and the very investment pools that we need, as well as heaping further costs on employment.”

In a guest post for Eric Kaufmann’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science, Robin Young analyses the economic effects of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies and their impact on the economy. Young argues that they have significantly contributed to the reduction in growth since the financial crisis.

Over the past 15 years, the UK’s economic performance has sharply declined. Between 1960 and 2010, UK GDP per worker (productivity) grew by an average of 2% annually, but since 2010 it has fallen to less than 0.7% annually. Two major recessions marked this period: the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which took 5½ years for activity to return to pre-GFC levels; and the 2020 pandemic, which triggered a steep V-shaped recession.

These events mark the beginning of each recession, but the decline in trend growth requires further explanation. Other factors, beyond the UK’s dependence on financial services, include demographic issues, a shift towards an IT era, Brexit, and specific microeconomic challenges. Nevertheless, many of these are longstanding, gradual issues, some of which predate the GFC. Notably, the rise of the DEI complex occurred shortly after the start of the GFC, and the pandemic coincided with a more intense surge of DEI advocacy following George Floyd’s death in May 2020.

Disentangling the macroeconomic effects of these events is challenging, considering that expenditure on DEI programmes is minor compared to the size of the UK economy. However, the impact of the DEI complex extends beyond spending on DEI initiatives, subtly but significantly affecting potential growth through increased regulation, bureaucratic oversight, and a misallocation of resources. Additionally, there is little evidence supporting a ‘diversity dividend’ in terms of improved corporate productivity, performance, or profitability.

New research by the Centre for Clean Energy Innovation in the United States found that electricity demand for AI is rising rapidly and that without action the US could end up accidently killing its AI industry. The research recommends energy companies and tech businesses working together to shift AI energy demand to off-peak periods without damaging their businesses.

When change was slow, regulators and utilities could cope quite easily. But now change needs to be very fast. Utilities want to serve the new demand but are cautious about building out large new facilities without guarantees that demand will in fact be there when they come onstream in 5–10 years. After all, Google just announced that the energy cost per text query fell by 93 percent in 2024 alone; maybe all that demand will just never happen. And regulators are wary of adding huge new costs to the existing rate base, especially as costs come before the revenues do, thereby adding risk. Electricity prices are driven by multiple factors on both the supply and demand sides, and data center demand is only one variable among many; the drivers of electricity demand are in fact incredibly complex. But without new capacity, adding huge new demand to the grid will have inevitable consequences when supply is constrained in the short term (next 5–10 years): either prices go up, energy allocations move from existing consumers to new ones, or both.

Simply opening the door to new demand would be normal for most markets. Prices would go up for a bit, new supply would come online, a new competitive equilibrium would emerge. And in theory, that would work for electricity as well. Perhaps it should—but it doesn’t. Regulators are not prepared to let new entrants disrupt existing supply, as they are responsible for keeping prices stable as best they can, and are generally risk averse. The price of electricity has already been a sore point for politicians, and while AI companies have plenty of high-level friends, public perspectives are less positive. At the same time, environmentalists and other long-term foes of AI and innovation more broadly see this as an opportunity, and have pressured regulators to deny data center requests.1

But strangling AI by accident via electricity shortages is not smart, and won’t work—it simply hands advantages to other countries and encourages U.S.-based companies to go offshore where their energy needs will be met.

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Book of the Week

In Breakneck, Dan Wang documents China’s megabuilding projects and how the US stopped investing in its infrastructure. Wang says the battle between China and America over the coming decades pits the “lawyerly society” against the “engineering state”.

We are now in an era where the two countries regard each other with suspicion, and often animosity. Like China, the United States is able to move fast and break people, dealing tremendous brutality at home and abroad when it feels threatened. A paramount question of our times is whether hostility between China and the United States can stay at a manageable simmer. Because it if boils over, they will devastate not only each other but also the world.

The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble. The starkest contrast between the two countries is the competition that will define the twenty-first century: an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction. That’s the big idea behind this book. It’s time for a new lens to understand the two superpowers: China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.

Breakneck is the story of the Chinese state that yanked its people into modernity - an action rightfully envied by much of the world - using means that ran roughshod over many - an approach rightfully disdained by much of the world. It is also a reminder that the United States once knew the virtues of speed and ambitious construction. Traversing dazzling metropolises and gigantic factories, Breakneck will illuminate the astounding progress and the dark underbelly of the engineering state. The lawyerly society has virtues, too, to teach China. Each superpower offers a vision of how the other can be better, if only their leaders and peoples care to take more than a fleeting glance.

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Quick Links

Labour u-turned on rights promised in its flagship employment bill.

Leaked documents from The Home Office show more than 53,000 illegal migrants are missing.

Freezing tax thresholds will hit higher rate taxpayers by £600 per year but additional rate taxpayers by £390.

But British basic rate taxpayers are still among the least taxed in the developed world.

Over 100,000 British nationals under the age of 35 have left the country.

Changes to the two-child welfare cap will disproportionately benefit migrants.

The Justice Secretary has proposed scrapping jury trials except for alleged rapists and killers.

House prices will rise but transactions will fall over the Parliament after the Budget.

Towering Columns

For The Spectator, Ross Clark questions whether the Covid Inquiry has asked most important questions.

The inquiry has made good theatre, but has failed to answer the questions which most needed to be asked. What we should have had is an inquiry led by scientists (not those who had been involved in advising the government, obviously) which asked the real pertinent scientific questions which might help prevent a future pandemic or given us a more reasoned response – rather like the air disaster investigations which have steadily made air travel one of the safest forms of transport there is. The inquiry has at least asked whether lockdowns were worth it – even if the answers are unsatisfactory. But these are the issues which still need to be addressed, and which it doesn’t look as if Baroness Hallet and her team are going to bother with.

Where did the virus come from? This should have been at the heart of the inquiry and yet has been brushed aside. When Michael Gove (now editor of this magazine) raised the issue in the inquiry the response of the KC was that didn’t want to get into that. Why on Earth not? If the virus came from mixing of animals in a live market, we need to know so that the world can handle animals differently in future. If, as many now feel is more likely, it originated in a lab leak of a virus created in ‘gain-of-function’ research, that would have serious implications for the conduct of such research in future – including the question of whether it should even be allowed. It would be the most expensive accident in history.

Why was so much faith put into modelling which turned out to be wrong? Lady Hallet made the claim that 23,000 lives could have been saved had lockdown been imposed a week earlier in March 2020. She treated this – which came from Professor Neil Ferguson and his Imperial College team – as scientific fact rather than speculative and contentious modelling that it was. We can never know what would have happened had lockdown been introduced a week earlier, but when Imperial College’s modelling was able to be measured against reality, it was found wanting. In December 2021, Fergusson’s team modelled what would happen if the then new omicron variant was allowed to run through the population without a fourth lockdown, or similar such measures. Its worst-case scenario was 5,000 deaths a day in January 2022. But no lockdown was called – and there was no big wave of deaths. How much should we rely on modelling, and can it be improved? That is a question Baroness Hallett has ducked entirely.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says Shabana Mahmood’s asylum plan will not be enough to secure Britain’s borders.

Mahmood is also promising to change how our courts apply Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the provision on “private and family life” whose purpose was to stop states spying on their own citizens but which is now used to argue that an asylum seeker who has spent years appealing against deportation should get to stay because he has a close bond with his ex who kicked him out last year. This sort of reform has been tried before, in the 2014 Immigration Act and in the Nationality and Borders Act of 2022 (the latter, naturally, opposed by Labour). Each time the new law makes a bit of headway and then asylum tribunals and courts go back to inventing new rights that expand upon Strasbourg case law, making the problem even worse.

So it will be with any new legislation Mahmood manages to pass (and based on abortive welfare reform, passing it is not a given). The same thing will happen with her attempt to allow for only narrow exemptions (the word “exception” appears five times in 25 pages). “Exceptional” protections designed for children or “the vulnerable” will be quickly expanded and applied to people with “anxiety” or “trauma”, to parents, grandparents and so on. This is because nothing Mahmood is proposing will change the defective “human rights” legal culture that got us into this mess.

Despite these huge risks to her plan, the home secretary nonetheless finds it necessary to give a sop to the inverse utopianists who dominate her party in the form of more “safe legal routes” into Britain for the world’s refugees. She’s proposing to invent three new ways to claim asylum, which she claims will be strictly capped and introduced slowly. Does anyone want to predict how that is going to go? Even before ministers have shored up the castle walls, they’re thinking of ways to blast new holes in them. At the heart of Mahmood’s attempt to fix the problem of illegal migration is an unresolvable lie, repeated several times throughout her policy document because it’s what Labour lawyers need to hear: “The UK will always remain a place where those who are truly fleeing danger can find safety.” The problem is that it won’t — it can’t — because there are simply too many needy people in the world for Britain to take in.

And in The Critic, Chris Bayliss says her plan will simply formalise existing illegal access routes.

The government’s proposals split out asylum seekers into two categories — “core protection’” and “work and study”. Those who remain in core protection will face a far longer wait of 20 years before they can apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) and will face rolling re-assessments every 30 months as to whether their home country and circumstances mean that they are still eligible for asylum. However, the government makes it clear that it will expect most refugees to opt into the work and study track, under which they will be eligible to apply for ILR after the same waiting period of 10 years as a regular migrant, and will be free to work and study as the name suggests. They will also be entitled to apply for family reunion visas.

As any fool can see, this regularises and formalises the existing settlement, under which arriving illegally in the UK and seeking asylum is the most straightforward way into Britain for those who lack the skills or credentials to find sponsorship or obtain a visa. Furthermore, such arrivals will still be able to obtain British nationality for themselves and their descendents for all and ever after, and will become just as British and you or me.

Additionally, she has announced provisions for “safe and legal routes” for refugees wishing to apply for asylum without landing in the country illegally, including a community sponsorship pathway, a route for skilled refugees, and a pathway for students who have become “displaced” during the course of their studies. But as ever, the rubber dinghy option is still available for all of those who do not pass muster via one or the other of these channels, and following that, the “work and study” track, and ILR after ten years.

On his Substack, Rory Hanrahan says removing illegal migrants will not stop home-grown sectarian politics.

George Galloway did not win Rochdale because a few hundred Albanian criminals rioted outside a Holiday Inn in Manchester. He won because enough British-born Muslim voters decided that Gaza mattered more than bin collections, more than schools, more than anything happening on their own streets – and that a sectarian firebrand was the best vehicle for their anger. The same pattern now holds or threatens to hold in Blackburn, Bradford, Dewsbury, Oldham, Birmingham Perry Barr, Leicester South, and twenty-odd other seats where demographic weight guarantees that imported grievances can out-muscle domestic ones. Yesterday’s crackdown will, at best, deport a few hundred foreign-born offenders who were stupid enough to get caught on camera throwing bricks or chanting the wrong slogan. It will do precisely nothing about the tens of thousands of British-passported citizens who share their worldview and vote accordingly. Lifetime visa bans are all very well when the people you’re trying to deter already have a British passport, were born in the NHS, and have no intention of ever leaving.

This is the sepsis I warned about in the Spectator last month: once politics becomes a census of identity rather than a contest of ideas, moderation dies. Northern Ireland proved it. Lebanon proved it. The Balkans proved it. Large parts of the West Midlands and West Yorkshire are now proving it. Labour’s package is tough theatre, but it is still theatre. Real prevention would mean asking why so many second- and third-generation immigrants vote for candidates who openly despise the country that educated them, housed them, and gave them the vote. It would mean admitting that multiculturalism without integration is just slow-motion partition. It would mean confronting the voting blocs rather than just the rioters on the fringes of those blocs. None of that is on the table. Instead we get the comforting ritual of deportation flights and tougher rhetoric – the modern equivalent of internment without trial. It feels decisive. It changes nothing fundamental.

My father spent years trying to kill British soldiers because he believed the cause was bigger than any one man. He spent the rest of his life trying to stop younger men making the same evil mistake. He learned the hard way that you don’t cure tribal politics by removing a few extremists; you cure it by making tribal politics electorally suicidal. Until a British government is prepared to say that – out loud, without apology, and without fear of the human-rights industry – yesterday’s announcements are just another dose of antibiotics for a cancer that has already metastasised. Raise a pint to the moderates. There are fewer of them every year.

In the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh says Labour were always going to be this bad - and will only get worse.

What can be said [Rachel Reeves’s] her defence? That she is braver than her leader. There were warnings about Starmer’s character in opposition. He let others stand up to Jeremy Corbyn, whom he served in shadow cabinet. He let others fight woke dogma, until the tide turned against it. Even now, he makes liberal use of human shields. Notice that every crisis for Starmer quickly becomes a conversation about his underlings. His then chief of staff Sue Gray used to be the problem. Now it is her successor Morgan McSweeney. What rotten luck the prime minister has with recruitment. The British are having to relearn a lesson that Theresa May should have fixed in their minds forever. Don’t assume that uncharismatic people have hidden depths. Being boring does not make someone a “technocrat”. One can be dull and inept.

If Starmer is both, how can things get worse? Look at his challengers.

This is how the coming years are likely to play out. Whenever Starmer is in trouble, Andy Burnham will say something nebulously crowd-pleasing and flash those sad eyes at Labour members. (A part of me wants the Greater Manchester mayor to become prime minister, just to see him run a national budget.) Angela Rayner will offer a similar northern-left alternative. Both have prestige in a middle-class and southern party that is touchy about its estrangement from the industrial regions. To survive this dissent, Starmer will tilt left. Or the left will topple him. Even if a relative right-ist such as Wes Streeting or Shabana Mahmood becomes leader, the internal logic of this government is now towards more fiscal concessions and less public sector reform, barring a 1976-style shock in which markets force Labour’s hand. The central event of the government so far was Starmer’s retreat from welfare reform last summer. It established the precedent that backbenchers and grassroots can morally blackmail him.

Look at their influence. As unemployment rises, a sensible prime minister would ditch his plans for more red tape on hiring. But he can’t, in case the unions ditch him. In a stagnant economy, the government should pursue growth at all costs. The priority of its MPs is to increase child benefit claims. All of this and more was foreseeable. Starmer exorcised the hard left but the soft left are more numerous and not much less deluded. If you trusted these people to unleash Britain’s economic potential, I don’t know what to say to you.

For UnHerd, Jonathan Sumption relays the history of English free speech, and itemises its legitimate exceptions.

Let’s start with the legal restrictions which I suggest we should accept. The Online Safety Act, which was passed in 2023, is a complex and in some ways clumsily drafted piece of legislation, which hits many targets that were not intended. However, its principal purpose is to require providers of online content to have age verification checks so as to control access by children to manipulative or corrupting material such as pornography or material advocating suicide or self-harm. I have pointed out that the concept of freedom of expression involves treating adults as capable of discernment and of intelligently ordering their lives. The same assumptions cannot apply to children, who are by definition in a state of developing but incomplete maturity, and who do not have the full range of liberties available to adults. It is fair to regard the manipulation of children’s sensibilities as closely analogous to the coercion from which we seek to protect adults.

Next, there are laws which regulate the way in which our right of free speech is exercised, rather than the content of our speech. These too are, in principle, acceptable. For example, you cannot picket abortion clinics within 150 metres of their doors or buy advertising time for political causes on television. The law restricts the picketing of abortion clinics because it harasses women at an emotionally difficult time of their lives, but you can still protest against abortion in ways that do not amount to harassment: you can stand with your placards 160 metres away, demonstrate in Trafalgar Square, write articles in the press, publish podcasts on YouTube, distribute leaflets, and so on. The law forbids political advertising on television in order to provide some limit on the power of big money to buy influence over political debate in a democracy. However, you can still do party political broadcasts, put up posters on billboards, take advertising space in newspapers, or hold political rallies. These restrictions are not directed against the content of any spoken or written statement. There is no infringement of the right to freedom of expression simply because there are some places where you cannot speak. A notice saying “Silence” in a courtroom, church or library is not an infringement of free speech.

My final example is more controversial. It is about the laws relating to defamation and privacy. The law of libel and slander allows people to claim damages from those who have told lies about them. The law of privacy allows those whose privacy has been invaded without any justification in the public interest to claim damages from the intruder. There are legitimate concerns about the granting of injunctions, especially in privacy cases, but I see no reason why the law should not, after proper investigation, correct the financial consequences of lies and intrusions into our private lives by awarding compensation for the damage which these things can cause. I do not regard that as censorship. It simply adjusts as between private individuals the financial consequences of free speech…

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Wonky Thinking

Civitas and the Classical Liberal Education Network (CLEN) published Renewing Classical Liberal Education: What it is and its history. Authors Briar Lipson and Daniel Dieppe show how and why, despite significant progress over the past 15 years, children are still cheated by a reductive “teaching to the test” approach to schooling instead of exploring deeper questions about human flourishing.

Classical liberal education is the grounding of a child into a lifelong adventure through ideas and ideals, that they might enter, through the gradual cultivation of wisdom, style and virtue, into the fullness of humanity, ‘the good life’ as we might call it.

The tradition through which Western civilisation preserved and enriched its inheritance for 2,500 years, this education for freedom develops a person’s conscience, so that she might judge beauty and truthfulness, discern what is right and just, make the wise choice when it is not obvious.

However, three developments in culture have eroded the kind of schooling designed for personal freedom and conscience. These are:

• The advance of scientific materialism which, while necessary to science’s empirical and measurable definition of truth, now increasingly displaces humane study (the original purpose of the humanities).

• The rejection of past authorities.

• The provision of mass education by the state with implications for, amongst other things, teacher-student relationships, accountability, and the purpose ascribed to schooling.

Today, the consequences of these developments are so expansive that it is widely assumed by educators, policymakers and parents, and even more widely communicated to children, that the purpose of schooling is preparation for work; schools exist now to boost incomes and gross domestic product (GDP).

Since 2010, approaches to schooling that de-emphasised past authorities have been directly challenged and undermined in England by an evidence and knowledge-rich revolution. Relatedly, in reading, science and maths, England’s 15-year-olds now outperform their peers in almost all other Western countries. This is a meaningful achievement. It could herald the renewal of classical liberal education. Yet so far, unmoored from their rich tradition and rowing in siloed isolation against the tide of scientific materialist, statist and utilitarian ideas, the ability of even the most forthright liberal educators to re-orient schooling has been limited. It is still perfectly possible to pass through school, including with flying colours, having never picked up a work of classical literature, having never considered the nature of truth, without the basics of Western chronology, with not one line of poetry committed to memory. Modern schooling has become a gateway to riches but not our full humanity.

This report charts the history of classical liberal education, of its rise and fall, and what has now replaced it. Next will come a collection of case studies about bastions and green shoots of liberal learning, as well as recommendations for parents, educators and policymakers, for the renewal of classical liberal education in the UK, for the humane benefit of all.

For Onward, Chris Worrall models the impact of mass migration on UK housing costs in Denmark’s Dagger: Zero inflows to piece the housing heartache. He forecasts a cumulative +2-3% impact on prices due to immigration levels between now and 2029.

This report provides a comprehensive, forward-looking assessment of how net migration levels will influence house prices and rents in England and Wales (E&W) through the 2025–2029 parliamentary term. Drawing on global and UK peer-reviewed research, it models two scenarios: a high-migration case (≥400,000 UK net annually, skewed low-skilled with real income drags from energy costs and net-zero policies) and a zero-net-migration case (Denmark-style, with productivity gains from reindustrialization and cheaper energy).

Key assumptions incorporate September 2025 data: E&W dwelling stock 27.3 million (up from 27.1 million mid-2024, with 201,000 completions to Q2 2025); net migration year-ending June 2025 at 250,000 (down from 2023 peaks); natural population change mildly positive early but declining to negative by 2029 per ONS projections; annual supply growth at 0.8%. Income effects are factored via elasticities (0.6 median), with high migration depressing wages -0.5% annually and real incomes -1% (energy cap at £1,755/year, 50% above pre-crisis); zero migration boosting real incomes +1% via +0.5% productivity and energy relief.

Results: High migration yields +2.0–3.0% cumulative price rise and +1.7–2.5% rents (modest due to supply and drags); zero migration -1.0–1.8% prices and -0.8–1.5% rents (cushioned by income gains). Supply constraints amplify urban pressures. Policy must balance migration with housing delivery to mitigate affordability risks, leveraging reindustrialization for sustainable growth.

1) Introduction

The UK’s housing market faces persistent affordability challenges, exacerbated by population dynamics and supply inelasticity. As of September 2025, E&W house prices stand at £290,000 average (up 2.5% year-on-year), while rents have surged 7.8% to £1,235/month, outpacing wage growth at 4.2%. Net migration, which accounted for 90% of UK population growth in 2024, remains a pivotal driver – year-ending June 2025 net at 250,000, down from 745,000 in 2023 but still above historical norms due to student and work visas.

This research synthesizes peer-reviewed evidence to project impacts through 2029 under constrained supply (0.8% annual net additions). It contrasts a continuation of high migration (≥400,000 net, per government baselines) with a restrictive Denmark-style zero-net target, overlaying current trends like declining natural change and income effects from energy prices/productivity.

Forward projections are critical: ONS estimates UK population reaching 70 million by 2026, driven by migration amid natural stagnation. Without intervention, imbalances could widen inequality, with low-income renters hit hardest. This analysis employs causal elasticities from studies like Saiz (2007) and MAC (2018), adjusted for UK specifics, to deliver actionable insights for policymakers and investors.

2) Literature Review: Global and UK Evidence on Immigration, Incomes, and Housing

Peer-reviewed research underscores immigration’s demand-side pressure on housing, modulated by incomes and supply. Globally, a 1% population increase from immigration raises rents 0.6-1.2% and prices 1-2% (Saiz 2007, Journal of Urban Economics; Ottaviano & Peri 2007, Journal of the European Economic Association), with effects 2-3x larger in inelastic markets (e.g. UK’s planning constraints, supply elasticity 0.5-0.7 vs. US 1.5).

US studies highlight short-term spikes fading via native mobility: Monras (2020, American Economic Review) finds low-skilled inflows reduce rents 0.5-1% long-run due to out-migration, but +1% short-run. Research on “white flight” – the out-migration of white residents in response to non-white immigration – further explains these dynamics. Boustan (2010) estimates that white flight accounted for about 20% of postwar suburbanization in US cities during the ‘Black Great Migration’, redistributing demand and mitigating urban housing pressures.

More recently, Pan (2024) documents similar patterns of white families leaving affluent California suburbs as Asian immigrants arrived, linked to school competition, which stabilizes local prices through reduced net demand. These mobility patterns contribute to persistent segregated housing, where ethnic enclaves form and influence rents and values over time.

For instance, Saiz and Wachter (2011) analyse how Hispanic immigration growth led to increased segregation in US metro areas from 1970 to 2000, resulting in divergent price trajectories: rising values in white suburbs (+5-10% premium) and slower rent growth in immigrant-heavy neighbourhoods (0.5-1% annual dampening), perpetuating affordability gaps across racial lines.

Canada and Australia show stronger persistence: Akbari & Aydede (2012, Regional Science and Urban Economics) estimate 0.8-1.2% price rises per 1% inflow in Toronto/Vancouver, driven by high-skilled immigrants; Stillman & Maré (2008, Economic Record) 0.9-1.1% in Sydney, amplified by urban concentration. European evidence aligns: Sanchis-Guarner (2017, LSE) reports 3.3% price and 1% rent increases per 1pp immigration rate in Spain, with +24% indirect amplification from native co-location. Gonzalez & Ortega (2013, Journal of Urban Economics) confirm 2% short-term prices in Spain; Mussa et al. (2017, Switzerland) null overall but +0.5% in high-flow areas.

UK-specific: MAC (2018) attributes 1% national price rise per 1pp population growth, 2-3x in the South East; Whitehead et al. (2011) links 20-30% of 1990s-2000s growth to migration. Sá (2015, Economic Journal) finds local -1.6% prices per 1% low-skilled inflow due to high-income native flight (0.85% outflow), but national net positive. Meta-analyses (Card 2009) affirm median 1% elasticity, higher for rents (quicker adjustment).

Shor-term spikes happen after an influx of immigrants (especially lower skilled workers) move into a city or neighbourhood; housing demand shoots up fast. More people mean more competition for rentals or homes, so prices and rents jump quickly. The reason natives (long-time residents) often pack up and move to nearby cheaper areas. This “out-migration” frees up housing supply, balancing things out and cooling price and rental growth. The initial jump does not last forever, as it eases off over time.

In short, immigration causes a quick housing squeeze, but locals relocating to avoid the crunch eventually spreads out the pressure. This makes things more affordable again, but at what cost. It is like a crowded party, new guests arrive and it is packed, but some of the old-timers slip out the back door, so everyone gets more space.

Incomes refine this: Housing demand elasticity 0.5-1.0 to income (DiPasquale & Wheaton 1996, Journal of Urban Economics). Immigration’s wage effects: -0.5–2% for low-skilled natives short-term (Dustmann et al. 2013, UK; Monras 2015, US) – dampen via reduced affordability, stabilising rent-to-income ratios (Card 2005, Journal of Economic Literature).

In layman, immigration adds demand pressure by hurting low-skilled natives’ wallets (through higher housing costs), which leaves them with less to spend on housing. Perversely, it statistically takes the edge off the affordability crunch. It is not a fix. Prices still rise a bit, but it in effect prevents overheating. A native squeeze for market ease. But over time, say 3-5 years, people adjust (better jobs or moving to cheaper locations), and things balance out.

If wages rose instead (from skilled immigration), it would still turn housing into a bidding war where low-skilled natives would lose ground the fastest. They would end up renting worse places further out, commuting longer, all the while feeling the pinch. Skilled immigration might supercharge the economy through improved GDP, but it comes with costs if policymakers do not build more homes fast. Otherwise, it is a rough ride for those at the bottom.

Yet although skilled immigration may exacerbate housing pressures for low-skilled natives – sparking a bidding war that pushes them to distant, subpar rentals and longer commutes – research shows it does not stoke anti-immigrant attitudes. Instead, it cools nationalist voting intention by 0.34 standard deviations per 3.1% population rise, namely through economic optimism. This is in stark contrast with low-skilled inflows that ignite fears over jobs and welfare, amplifying it by 0.73 standard deviations per 6.1% rise (Moriconi et al. 2019).

Skill complementarities refer to the economic synergy where immigrants’ skills – particularly high skilled ones like engineers or managers – complement rather than compete with native workers. It allows low-skilled natives to specialise in routine or manual tasks while immigrants drive innovation and oversight, ultimately lifting overall wages and productivity across the labour market. This dynamic, as detailed in Peri and Sparber’s 2009 study in the Review of Economics and Statistics, generates modest but positive wage gains of 0.2-0.5% for natives through task reallocation, with no significant displacement for low-skilled groups.

Similarly, Lewis & Peri 2015 handbook chapter quantifies productivity boosts of +1-2% from such inflows, as immigrants fill knowledge gaps that expand firm output and create spillover jobs. However, these benefits can be muted by countervailing fiscal drags, such as increased taxes to fund public services for newcomers (some of which never become net contributors), or external shocks like energy price hikes that erode real incomes by -0.5-1%, which mute demand elasticity through curbed household spending power.

On the other hand, homeownership acts as a natural hedge, converting price appreciation into wealth effects equivalent to 6–8% of rental income (Ottaviano & Peri, 2007). This enables homeowners to offset affordability strains through equity extraction or psychological resilience, though this exacerbates intergenerational dives as renters – often low-skilled natives – bear the brunt without such buffers.

Recent UK trends: Post-Brexit, low-skilled skew depresses semi-skilled wages -0.5% (Dustmann et al.); net-zero policies add between £500-£800/capita tax burden, hitting real incomes amid 50% higher energy costs. Reindustrialization could boost productivity +0.5–1% (NIESR 2025), echoing Denmark’s wage stability under tight controls.

Synthesis: Base 1% elasticity adjusted +20-50% for constraints, -25-50% for wage drags. This informs scenario modelling, emphasizing targeted migration for balanced growth.

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Podcast of the Week

On The Brink podcast, Nick Timothy MP says growing Islamist extremism is going unchallenged in Britain.

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Quick Links

The first report of the Covid Inquiry found the government did “too little, too late”, but also that faster action on the border and testing could have averted lockdowns altogether.

The former leader of Reform UK in Wales, Nathan Gill, was sentenced to over 10 years in prison for spreading Russian propaganda for cash.

Inflation fell from 3.8% to 3.6%.

The UK will abolish its “de minimis” rule for cheap imports.

The Chancellor accused her critics of “mansplaining”.

Foreign national offenders in UK prisons cost the taxpayer £643 million a year, a report found - up 51% on 2019.

China’s investment in companies and infrastructure has given it access to military-grade UK technology, an investigation found.

ExxonMobil announced the closure of its plastics refinery at Mossmorran, meaning 400 job losses and the UK no longer manufacturing ethylene for the first time.

Average UK taxpayers pay much less income tax than in comparable economies while taxes on higher earners are among the steepest, making Britain the most progressive tax system in the developed world.

The Supreme Court found Christian-only Religious Education in Northern Ireland to be in breach of human rights laws.

Oxford and Cambridge were found to be on a list of 7 institutions to have links with China’s top defence universities.

Most voters say they would actively vote against either Labour or Reform, depending on their previous voting history.

Kensington and Chelsea Council seized 1,000 dangerously parked or dumped e-bikes.

An Afghan national admitted raping a 12 year-old girl.

Despite Britain’s fiscal crunch, Labour MPs wrote to the Chancellor demanding more spending on foreign aid.

Towering Columns

Mary Hartington at UnHerd says a liberal elite has undermined the concept of objective truth and is killing the BBC - but we will mourn its passing.

There is, in other words, nowhere to stand that isn’t someone else’s fake news. Pity the poor Beeb: when you can now search up 10 conspiratorial interpretations of every factual report, from every conceivable angle, in the time it takes to boil the kettle, how long is anyone going to go on believing in impartiality as such? You can be sure that any effort to “correct” the perceived existing Left-liberal BBC bias would simply elicit fresh accusations of “fake news” and “bias” from somewhere else. Under the circumstances, I don’t entirely blame Davie for throwing in the towel.

More than one thing can be true simultaneously. It is surely true that many will be delighted by the opportunity these events have afforded, to put the boot into the BBC. It’s surely also true that the institution’s well-documented middle-class staffing skew exposes its employees to the blind spots and groupthink of that social milieu, and that this is often visible in editorial decisions. But it’s also true that comparatively speaking, the BBC is fighting a heroic last stand for neutrality, against perhaps insuperable odds, and has arguably already held out longer than any of its commercial counterparts. It also held out longer than such utopian digital enterprises as Wikipedia.

As well as noting its lapses into bias, then, we might also acknowledge how very much worse this already is, almost everywhere else. But this is faint praise. “It’s not as woke as Wikipedia” may not be enough to save the BBC, as an institution, from the sucking void of Choose Your Own Reality. If it isn’t, then flawed and middle-class and sometimes irritatingly sanctimonious as it is, I suspect we will all come to regret its passing.

For The Times, Juliet Samuel highlights the damage being done to family businesses, which form the backbone of the British economy.

Britain’s anguished farmers may have grabbed the headlines, but the quiet damage wreaked upon far more economically significant family businesses has occurred mostly under the radar. The budget drew them into inheritance tax, subjecting any business assets worth more than £1 million to a charge of 20 per cent. The dividend payment needed to allow any heir to pay up will itself be taxed at 40 per cent, so the effective tax rate is more like 33 per cent. And most companies aren’t sitting on cash like that; they’ll either have to set aside money over five to ten years, take on debt or sell assets.

Naturally, the Treasury has little idea how many, who or where these businesses are. HMRC data from 2021 suggests about 500 estates a year were eligible to pay. Over a 30-year generation, this amounts to 15,000 firms, which, excluding “micro” companies, is probably about one in ten of all small and medium-sized companies. Only about one in ten survive more than 20 years, so this undoubtedly captures a very large portion of Britain’s longest-lasting, decent-sized businesses. And for their pains, the exchequer will bag less than £500 million a year, under 0.18 per cent of the annual welfare bill.

Some firms will be able to restructure to avoid the tax. But this involves expense, risk and complexity and many don’t yet have a chosen heir lined up to make it work. In the meantime, investment plans are on ice. The more an owner grows the business, after all, the bigger the liability he’s building up for his children. So what do you think all these businesses are doing? Sitting still and waiting to see what happens. Should it really be a surprise that this week’s data showed unemployment at a five-year high?

The country’s political elites have fallen for the lies of socialism, writes Miriam Cates in Conservative Home.

Britain is once again the sick man of Europe, because we have once again fallen for the lies of socialism. Since 1997, even conservatives have been seduced by socialist ideas about ‘fairness’ and equality. During the last parliament, the Conservative government repeatedly demonstrated its socialist sympathies, from boasts about how much money was being spent, to the nationalisation of childcare, the billions poured into the NHS, the freezing of tax thresholds so that many ordinary workers lose half their incomes, and the decision to borrow (or rob) £400bn from future generations during Covid. Boris Johnson even promised that the state would ‘wrap its arms around you.’ For the last two decades at least, socialism has been winning the battle of ideas.

More than anything, the attitude of the Conservative Party to the state pension shows how effectively socialist thinking has infiltrated the right of British politics. When the state pension was first introduced in 1908, it was ring fenced for the very poor, and only payable from the age of 70. Given that life expectancy was around 50 years old in Edwardian times, only a fraction of the population lived long enough to claim it. In contrast, the state pension in 2025 is UBI for the retired, paid for by current taxpayers and distributed to everyone of pensionable age regardless of their income, or the amount of tax contributions made during working life. Thanks to the triple lock, the state pension has risen 14 per cent more than average earnings since 2011, another blow to the conservative principle of fairness.

Socialising the costs of old age – while leaving the private family to bear all the costs of raising children – has undermined perhaps the most important of all human relationships between effort and reward. There is no longer any personal economic benefit at all for producing the next generation, so why not rely on the children of others to pay the costs of your retirement? Yet even conservatives continue to defend this model, claiming that people shouldn’t have children unless they ‘can afford it’, at the same time defending the high-tax socialist pension system that is making people too poor to reproduce the next generation of taxpayers.

In The Critic, Maurice Cousins says a delusional elite committed to net zero are destroying the country’s prosperity from within.

Two centuries ago, a Frenchman understood something that Britain appears to have forgotten. In 1824, the young engineer Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics, wrote that the destruction of Britain’s navy would be less fatal than the loss of her steam engines, for to lose them would be to “dry up her sources of wealth, ruin all on which her prosperity depends, in short annihilate that colossal power.” Carnot grasped that Britain’s strength lay not in its fleets or armies but in its command of energy. France, still nursing the wounds of defeat, recognised that to destroy Britain’s engines would be to destroy Britain itself.

Today, no foreign power needs to lift a finger. We are doing the work ourselves, dismantling our energy system not through invasion but through the slow internal corrosion of reason, policy and will. Where Carnot imagined Britain’s enemies attacking her steam power from without, we have invited the same assault from within. The nation that once powered the world is unlearning the very logic of power. The consequence is not only economic decline but the erosion of national purpose.

A country that cannot power itself cannot govern itself. That logic still holds. As Rachel Reeves searches for a way to ease the cost-of-living crisis, revive productivity, restore growth and repair the public finances in the upcoming Budget, she must begin by bringing reason back to Britain’s energy policy. None of those objectives can be realised while energy remains costly and insecure. But to do that she will ultimately need to defeat the enemy within.

In The Times, Sebastian Payne argues that the Resolution Foundation think tank has warped and infiltrated Whitehall, discouraging economic dynamism and harming growth.

Before the last election it seemed the Tony Blair Institute may have the greatest sway over Labour government policy. Yet look at who is in government and it shows Queen Anne’s Gate is where power really lies. As well as Bell, Rachel Reeves recently appointed Emily Fry, an alumnus of the RF, to her council of economic advisors. Baroness Shafik, the prime minister’s chief economic advisor, chaired the foundation’s “Economy 2030” inquiry that proposed introducing road duty for electric vehicles, national insurance on rental income and scrapping agricultural property relief. If those ideas sound familiar it is because they’re all either being enacted or under consideration by the Treasury.

What is sorely needed is a counter to the RF to make the strident case for growth and innovation. Just as Thatcher argued at the dispatch box, the only way out of our economic morass is to accept that none of us will get better off unless the rich are allowed to lead the way. There was a populist fever after the financial crisis to bash the bankers and the wealthy, but continuing to do so means we will never regain any economic momentum.

The culmination of the RF worldview will be the budget, which Bell is playing a key role in shaping. Instead of curbing public spending to reduce the burden on taxpayers it will levy tax rises large and small. Take the foundation’s latest wheeze: raising income tax by 2p and cutting national insurance by the same amount. It’s a clever-clever idea to get the chancellor off the hook for breaking her promise to voters, but is another example of keeping us stagnated. As we may soon find out, the result of merely carving up the pie in a different way is just more decline.

Also in The Critic, Sebastian Milbank argues that our leaders have turned their back Britain’s maritime heritage because it does not fit into their narrow vision of the future.

Britain either spends excessively on extravagant grand projects or gives up on a thing entirely. HS2 was overengineered and overdesigned, with the result that we have taken twice as long to build something half the length it should be for many times what it should have cost. France and Spain built nationwide high speed rail networks in the time that it took Britain to build a single line. Like a manic depressive, after the heights of overspending, we immediately revert to the slump of underinvestment. The neglect of coastal communities and industries belongs strongly to the depressive phase. Anything that isn’t a glittering success, such as our ports and dwindling fishing industry, is deemed an irrelevant sideshow. When Keir Starmer sat down with EU negotiators in May and signed away our fishing rights for another 12 years, he was indulging in a familiar and fatal prejudice.

In this neo-Whigish worldview, industries like fishing belong to the past, doomed to be supplanted by coding or public relations. But as many jobs in services and technology are being automated by AI, and as hospitality, agriculture and tourism boom worldwide (but comparatively less so here), these assumptions look dangerously naive. In fact, the irreducible, unquantifiable and irreplaceable aspects of human life may turn out to be the most AI-proof, economically sustainable and important. What people will always desire and value will always make economic sense, and will always bring prosperity to the nation that can sustain and produce them.

Giving pride and purpose back to some of our poorest communities would restore more than a few jobs. It would recreate a lost identity, resurrect a dying culture and bring life back to the areas that most desperately need it. A visionary government would restore our hearts of oak, and steer Britain back to maritime glory.

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Wonky Thinking

The OECD’s International Migration Outlook 2025 has found that global migration levels have remained high, over 15% higher than in 2019. Levels have remained elevated due to significant increases in humanitarian migration and asylum seeking. There are now 160m foreign-born people living in OECD countries, 11.5% of the population, up from 9.1% in 2014. The OECD found that immigrant workers are disproportionately employed in lower-paying firms and sectors, a gap that persists despite some immigrants moving into higher paid work.

New linked employer-employee panel data for 15 OECD countries between 2000 and 2019 show that immigrants at entry in the labour market earn 34% less than native‑born workers of the same age and sex. Two-thirds of this gap is due to immigrants working in lower-paying sectors and firms.

The immigrant earnings gap decreases by about one‑third in the first five years in the host country, and by about half in the first ten years. This is partly driven by immigrants moving to higher-paying sectors and firms.

Policies that target barriers to job mobility should feature more prominently in the integration policy toolkit. This includes providing information on job search, career counselling and the development of professional networks, but also improving local transportation and access to affordable housing, among others.

Think tanks from the Centre for Policy Studies to Labour Together have come together to argue for a series of pro-growth tax policies ahead of the Budget, from reforming property taxes to merging National Insurance and Income Tax.

While the signatories have different visions for a perfect tax system, we all agree that a tax system that moves in the direction of these reforms would be preferable to the one we have now. Each package could be implemented independently, and each would improve incentives and contribute to economic growth.

The reform packages are each presented as revenue neutral combinations. Collectively we take no view as to the appropriate size of the state, and the goal of these proposals is not to either increase or decrease total tax take. What these proposals do is highlight that for any total level of revenue, it is possible to make the system fairer, less distortive, and more supportive of growth.

Most importantly, we hope that these proposals illustrate that – whatever the precise detail – there is strong support among tax experts from across the political spectrum for a more rational and effective system of taxation, and strong agreement as to the nature of the necessary reforms.

In the British Economy Monitor, Andrew O’Brien shows that the UK’s trade imbalances are really holding back the economy as GDP growth slows to zero.

Governments need to stop focusing on quarter to quarter figures and start thinking longer term. It might actually help them politically given that sluggish growth appears likely for some time anyway. Why?

There is a slowdown in global service trade growth. From 2005 to 2014, global service exports were growing at 7.8% per year. In the years 2015 to 2024 this has slowed to 6.6%. This matters for us because our exports are heavily weighted towards services. The composition is also changing. Financial services are no longer the dominant global service export. The UK is still second in the world for financial service exports, however for telecommunications, computer and information services (digital) we are fifth. Germany and the Netherlands are also not that far behind us on digital exports, there is a scenario in which one or both take over us in the near future.

We are also fishing in a much smaller pond. The global trade in goods has grown by $14 trillion since 2005, nearly three times as much as the global trade in services which has grown by $4.7 trillion. If the UK had maintained its market share in global goods exports since 2005 (3.2% in 2005 v 2% today) it would be worth over $200bn in additional exports in 2024. In cash terms in 2024, the economy would be around £235bn bigger than it is today and the Chancellor would have around £80bn in additional tax revenues. This would be worth around £4,000 per person.

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Podcast of the Week

Policy Exchange hosted philosopher John Gray to discuss the future of progressivism. Gray warned that the West will become more susceptible to “hyper-progressivism”, personified by figures such as New York Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani. This trend will be driven by a discontented graduate class that is economically trapped, having to seeking work in major cities that it cannot afford to live in. You can watch the event back online:

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Quick Links

The UK economy contracted by 0.1% in September and grew at 0% in August.

Former heads of the British Army call for an end to lawfare on British soldiers.

The hacking of Jaguar Land Rover caused the fall in UK GDP.

UK unemployment has risen to its highest level in four years.

The UK energy intensive sector lost 8% of its workforce in 2024.

More than 1m people paid the highest rate of income tax last year.

Asylum seekers are to be offered £100 a week to leave hotels.

Net Zero targets mean that Britain is missing out on a crash in gas prices.

Andrew is a former think tank director and Head of the Secretariat at the Independent Commission for Neighbourhoods. He posts on X here and his personal Substack is here.

We look forward to many more of his editions to come! Meanwhile, it’s me again this week - we hope you enjoy this weekend edition.

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Gavin

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Towering Columns

For The Spectator Australia, Ian Acheson says the accidental release of a migrant sex offender is just the tip of the iceberg of the failing prison system.

Saying we need better software is a classic political panic answer to a systemic failure. The increasingly farcical failures of HM Prison Service speaks to a much worse malaise. Davies-Jones also boasted about dragging prison governors before the Lord Chancellor as if a bit more scolding would do the trick. True, the service is full of over promoted duds who ought not to be running baths let alone complex penal institutions. But it also has brilliant public servants who are tearing their hair out to try to keep crumbling jails upright. Kicking them until morale improves is not the answer.

When I heard that two more prisoners had been released in error, including migrant sex offender Ibrahim Kaddour-Cherif, who overstayed his visa and should have been deported, it was no surprise to me that it happened at HMP Wandsworth. This institution typifies the problems that prison governors grapple with every day across the country. Insufficient, poorly trained and inexperienced staff overwhelmed by need. Record levels of violence. Up to a third of front-line officers not available on a daily basis. Rocketing sickness absence due to stress. Overcrowding and a huge number of foreign national offenders. Broken or missing physical security and human security devastated by low morale.

This could have happened at any prison in the UK. We have record levels of drug misuse across the penal estate with drones hovering ‘like wasps’ over high security prisons. There are multiple instances of female officers involved in sexual misconduct with prisoners. The second suspected inmate-on-inmate homicide in a month occurred just yesterday at one of our highest security prisons. The dysfunction is endemic. In this environment, Lammy’s boasts from the despatch box about the ‘strongest checks ever’ after the release in error of Ethiopian sex offender Hadush Kebatu from HMP Chelmsford, failed spectacularly just 48 hours after they were imposed. The wonder is that prison service bosses even knew that they had lost another foreign national, with police informed six days later.

In The Times, Edward Lucas says universities have become dependent upon China and its surveillance state.

The universities’ cowardice and cupidity stems from a system created by past governments which told them to behave like businesses while adopting what in retrospect seems a culpably complacent attitude to the Chinese party-state. With research funding cut and tuition fees capped, recruiting overseas students became a financial lifeline. Mainland China’s size made it an irresistible market.

A watered-down syllabus and constrained classroom discussion cost academics their self-respect. But they harm students too, not least the 150,000 Chinese ones here in Britain. They have paid to study in a free country. But they live in a surveillance bubble, not least enforced by campus branches of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), which liaises closely with Chinese diplomatic missions abroad.

Research by Jérôme Doyon from Sciences Po in Paris shows that the CSSA offers its office-holders career-building opportunities. In return some cadres may have to inform on fellow students, or take part in protests, even unwillingly. He cites a London-based CSSA leader who said the embassy asks them to name students that take part in opposition protests, but who tries to remain “as vague as possible”. Snooping means that Chinese students who make controversial points in seminars risk penalties for wrong-speak. Oxford now anonymises essays dealing with China, in an attempt to protect students from the wrath they will incur by wrong-write. (Given the cyberskills of Chinese spies, this may not be foolproof; returning to pen-and-paper assignments might offer more protection).

In The Spectator, Ian Williams says China is ruthlessly manufacturing a rare earths crisis.

China’s rare earth controls go far further than any coercive measures it has taken before. Unlike the often petulant boycotts and bans that characterised past Chinese efforts at punishing countries or companies deemed to have caused offence, China has put in place a systematic licensing system that can be calibrated and targeted at will. It framed its rare earth controls as a matter of ‘national security’, a response to US restrictions on the sale of powerful chips used for artificial intelligence, but its sweeping nature and potential to bring western hi-tech industries to a standstill go far beyond anything imposed by America.

They were also well prepared; over recent months the authorities gathered detailed information about how rare earths are used in western supply chains and restrictions have reportedly been imposed on the ability of factories in the industry to shift equipment out of the country and on the international travel of their executives. The system may become a model for other areas where the West is dangerously dependent, from critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt, so essential to ‘green’ technology, to the tiny cellular modules that are the ‘gateway’ component for all connected devices, where China is intent on gaining a monopoly – and even pharmaceuticals, where antibiotics and other vital drugs rely on Chinese supply chains.

Beijing’s economic policy under Xi is explicitly built around the twin goals of self-reliance in technology and building dependencies on China. As Xi himself told a meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission in 2020: ‘We must tighten international production chains’ dependence on China, forming powerful countermeasures and deterrent capabilities based on artificially cutting off supply to foreigners.’

Finally in The Spectator, Rory Hanrahan says mainland Britain is now experiencing the same kind of sectarianism that has divided Northern Ireland for decades.

In High Wycombe this April, Gaza solidarity groups released a video instructing Muslim voters on whom to back in local elections. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch condemned it as ‘evil Islamist sectarianism,’ a phrase that could have been lifted from the pages of a 1970s Belfast dispatch. Just as Republican apologists prioritised the North’s ‘oppression’ over local needs, voters were being effectively urged to sideline worldly issues. Ballots were cast not on civic merit, but tribal fealty – mirroring Ulster’s bloc voting, where identity, not ideas, dictated the tally. Moderates? Sidelined, their pleas for integrated debate dismissed as ‘Islamophobic’ or ‘Zionist.’ The result? A poison seeping into council chambers, turning local politics into imported feuds, much as Republican infiltrators once turned community halls into recruiting grounds.

It’s the same rot in the Green Party, once a haven for eco-dreamers, but now a vector for sectarian drift. It has been infiltrated just as Sinn Féin once wormed into Ulster’s voluntary groups via shared anti-imperialist networks. Their 2024 gains rode a wave of Muslim support fuelled by Gaza outrage, but by 2025, the fissures cracked wide. Councillor Mothin Ali, elected co-deputy leader in September, celebrated with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ It was a victory lap that former deputy Shahrar Ali branded a ‘toxic cocktail of Islamism,’ accusing the party of procedural abuse to entrench hardliners.

Leader Zack Polanski’s eco-populism has veered into anti-Israel fervour and gender skirmishes, exploiting the party’s openness. Environmentalism becomes a Trojan horse for identity politics, just as nationalism masked Republican thuggery in Ulster. The parallel? Extremes reward the ‘guns’ – here, the shrill outrage of protests and boycotts – while genuine moderates, like Shahrar Ali, are purged or silenced. As a result, the Greens are haemorrhaging core voters to this sectarian surge. It echoes how the SDLP withered as Sinn Féin’s gun-shadow loomed.

In The Telegraph, Allister Heath says the BBC’s bias is now beyond dispute.

One reason the Tories’ 14 years in office were a disaster is because they were wrongly terrified of the BBC. Convinced the corporation could make or break any government, they ensured the top 10 per cent of earners were hit at every Budget and dreamt up Leftist policies to pass the “BBC test”. It is in this context that the memo sent to the corporation’s board by internal whistleblower Michael Prescott, revealed by The Telegraph, should be read.

A Panorama documentary a week before the US elections spliced together two sections of a speech by Donald Trump on the day of the Capitol Hill riots. Trump, whom the BBC hates, was made to appear as if he were inciting supporters to go to Congress and “fight like hell”, when he was actually encouraging them to protest peacefully. Why hasn’t the BBC deployed its ludicrous “fact-checkers” against itself? The memo reveals BBC bosses were “dismissive” and defensive when academics accused it of rewriting history to promote a woke agenda, especially with regards to slavery, colonialism and the Irish famine. The BBC regularly behaves as a propaganda channel, a campaigning organisation for extreme views, not as a middle of the road, dispassionate news media for all of Britain.

Damningly, the report accuses BBC Arabic of deciding to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the Gaza war to “paint Israel as the aggressor”. Allegations against the Jewish state were “raced to air” without proper checks, as were Hamas’s made-up casualty figures, implying either incompetence or “a desire always to believe the worst about Israel”. It’s not just BBC Arabic, in my view: the corporation’s overall output has propagated incendiary libels against Israel for years, and especially since October 7. Given its influence and reach, this has played a central role in fuelling the return of anti-Semitism in Britain and around the world. It’s a shameful, foul betrayal.

In The New Statesman, Aaron Laffere makes the case for “Anglofuturism.”

If optimism about what people can do for their country only comes from the right, some blame must lie with progressives who surrendered that ground. The proposals we feature on our podcast are often radical. Guests such as Joe Hill, Policy Director at public services think tank Re:State, Curtis Yarvin – the philosopher credited with providing the intellectual ballast for the current Trump administration – and Santi Ruiz, of the Institute for Progress, gave prescriptions for reform that would make many progressives blush in their ambition. But crucially, each grounded their proposals in the basic belief that Britain’s central priority should be to achieve strategic autonomy, state capacity, and economic growth. None of that is irreducibly right-wing.

Some are discomfited by our podcast’s unabashed belief in Britain’s manifest destiny. Nothing definitional in Anglofuturism demands you agree with the proposals we have featured, or that you share our mytho-Britannic vision of the future. But to us, it’s no mystery why presenting the ideas of tomorrow alongside the iconography of our present day, doing so in a way that makes British people feel proud of their history as much as of the days to come, provides a natural rallying point for those eager to get on with the unfinished business of the future. That some Anglofuturists are not natural allies of the left is undeniable, but secondary to the urgency of our situation. Progressives are already yielding territory to the right on anaemic wage growth, working-class communities, and patriotism. If they yield the future too, more’s the pity.

We are not, as some believe, nostalgic for a Britain that was once great. Anglofuturism asks only that Britain remembers to want greatness. This simple ambition has fallen out of fashion for too many on the left. As Matt Clifford, chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, put it at a Looking for Growth rally in London, “Whatever you care about, whatever your vision for this country, it will be much easier to achieve it if we make the UK rich again.” An Anglofuturism with redistributive characteristics, one in which co-operatives own and carry out asteroid mining, or a renewed state builds advanced infrastructure in concert with trade unions, is sorely missing from the political left’s imagination.

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Wonky Thinking

On his blog, Professor Dieter Helm argues that British energy is now neither home-grown, secure nor cheap.

It is now all but impossible to claim that the great “world leadership” on climate change is producing “cheap energy”. What Britain has demonstrated to the world is how to pursue a territorial carbon production target in a way that produces amongst the highest prices in the world. Britain has therefore provided a great example of how not to do it, and no other country will be looking to it to see how to replicate this.

Believers in cheaper power should next ask why the costs and prices are so high. It is not hard to find out. Britain now needs twice the capacity of generation and twice the grid capacity to produce the same output, in addition to a host of batteries, and pumped storage, plus lots and lots of imports. Even by 2030, on the government’s trajectory, 35GW of gas is needed to run 5% of the time.

How could any rational objective person conclude that this is cheap? The answer is the old device: change the question to get the pre-conceived answer you want to get. This goes as follows. Let’s concentrate not on the system costs that determine the price, but on the marginal costs of wind and solar. It’s now easy: the marginal costs are close to zero. Then jump to the conclusion that, since gas has marginal costs, and wind and solar do not, wind and solar are therefore cheaper and the bills are going to come down accordingly.

Add a number of assumptions about “S” curves for new technologies and falling costs of solar panels (though not now wind turbines), and it looks even better.

It is a very “good thing” that the price of a solar panel made in China is coming down, but it makes almost no difference to the system costs of adding more and more intermittent solar onto the system in a country not blessed with the sorts of sunshine experienced in North Africa, the Middle East and the tropics. Lots of solar may indeed be cheaper in the “sun belt”. Sadly, in this respect Britain is not one of these lucky countries.

When it comes to wind, the story is worse. Unlike solar panels, wind turbines are not getting cheaper anymore. Though production costs may be falling in China and elsewhere, the cost of capital is the key variable and the bids in Britain in AR7 are heading north not south. The current AR7 round has brought a sobering reality to the “always getting cheaper” path.

What makes the wind story much worse is the location of the new wind farms. Lots of these are in Scotland, and Scotland does not have much demand for electricity. The electricity produced by these wind farms is surplus to Scottish requirements, so the output needs to be transported south to England. That means more transmission lines. To see how uneconomic it has been to locate all this offshore wind in Scotland, consider the implications. At the moment, that wind is constrained off for up to 40% of the time. It generates between say 40% and 50% of the time and then, when it does, it gets constrained off for up to 40% of the time. During these periods, the electricity is useless. We pay for it, but don’t use it.

Do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. Offshore Scottish wind requires a contract for differences (CfD) of, say, £110–£120/MWh. Add to this the costs of the extra transmission that is needed specifically for this extra wind, and add in the back-up costs in gas, which are made much more costly because it is mostly on standby. How could this be a sensible economic thing to do? The conclusion is that the wrong capacity is being built in the wrong places because the wind farm developers do not face the full costs of the intermittency they cause and because of their distance from the market.

All this is before the additional environmental costs of building lots and lots of high-voltage transmission lines through some of the most iconic landscapes in Britain.

Perhaps nuclear is getting cheaper? Sadly, not so. It costs more than £10 billion per gigawatt to bring on new nuclear in Britain – perhaps the most expensive new nuclear in the world. The costs of Hinkley and now Sizewell will be with customers for the next 20–30 years or more, and they are not cost-competitive with gas.

Perhaps these are all transitionary, inevitable pains of the transition to net zero? Not so, for the government is doling out contracts that cement in costs to well beyond 2040. It has made it all but inevitable that the future costs of energy in Britain are going to stay high and remain amongst the highest in the developed world. The decisions made today are baking in a future energy system with contracts that fix the prices for decades to come. The government is making it even worse: the offshore CfDs in AR7 now have a 20-year duration, rather than 15 years. Just to state the obvious: this means that the prices struck now by DESNZ will be the prices still prevailing in 2045.

That leaves the fall-back argument for the Secretary of State: however costly it might be, it will be cheaper than relying on gas. Yet even this is not true, for the obvious reason that, far from phasing out gas in the 2030s, Britain is going to need to use a lot of gas, and the amount used may actually be higher than otherwise would have been the case, and because of rapid exit from North Sea gas production, it will increasingly include high-cost, high-polluting liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The gas story has not received the ministerial attention it ought to have done. Instead of simply assuming a phase-out, it would be wise to look at the demand for electricity and the increasing importance of firm power. Though much of it may be exaggerated hype, there can be little doubt that the coming of AI and data centres pushes up the demand for electricity. This demand is critically dependent on firm power, 24/7, which is what wind and solar do not provide. What data centres and AI are looking for in Britain (and in the US and elsewhere) is baseload power, and in the absence of nuclear any time soon, they turn towards self-generation and gas. Elsewhere, so great is the demand for gas to generate electricity for data centres that it is starting to cause difficulties for other electricity users. Texas is the stand-out example. It is beginning to ration off the development of shale gas production for lack of power.

It is very doubtful that the forecasts of doubling of electricity demand in Britain over the next 20–25 years will materialise. The very high prices will dampen this demand growth, and the hype about AI is probably overdone. Nevertheless, the question remains: what will generate the electricity, sufficient to replicate all the existing system? It is unlikely to be solar in Britain, and it is hard to imagine it could be wind. So that leaves nuclear, and Britain is on an exit path from nuclear, to be topped up by Hinkley and Sizewell in due course, joining the only existing nuclear power station likely to be still going in the 2030s: Sizewell B. At best, this gives 7–8GW of nuclear power. Not enough to bridge the gap – more a replacement of what has been closed. SMRs (small modular reactors) might come to the rescue, but not until the end of the 2030s and probably later.

Britain has got out of coal, so that is not an option. All roads therefore lead to gas. Gas is the major energy for heating as well as for supporting electricity. The idea that the electricity system is going to carry all the extra AI and data centres, plus the heating load, and large industrial demands of steel and other energy-intensive industries and do this with wind and solar is an assumption the believers make. They should take a closer look and explain how all this works with a phase-out of gas in the 2030s. It won’t and it probably can’t.

The net result is that, not only does Britain have amongst the highest-cost electricity in the world, but this is being baked in beyond 2040. It will be a big drag on economic growth. Indeed, it already is. Britain is not going to have cheap energy any time soon – unless there is radical policy action.

Podcast of the Week

Looking for Growth hosted Make or Break, its largest conference yet. Its high profile line-up of speakers focused on breaking Britain’s political deadlock, achieving growth and regime change.

And Nick Timothy MP spoke to anti-Israel protestors in Birmingham at Villa Park, where Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned following a political campaign.

View the video here.

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Quick Links

Justice Secretary David Lammy was unable five times to answer a question in the Commons on whether any more dangerous criminals have been released accidentally.

The released Algerian sex offender was arrested, having been released on Wednesday.

And a second prisoner, also accidentally released, turned himself in.

Just 19 new flats were sold in London in May, reflecting a wider property demand slowdown.

A UCL professor spoke out criticising China’s influence on UK higher education.

And China waged a campaign of intimidation at Sheffield Hallam University to stop research into human rights, according to documents shown to the BBC.

Half a million recent international graduates have remained in the UK following their studies.

Right-wing British voters are more hawkish on immigration than US Trump supporters, a survey found.

Those on median and higher incomes have experienced almost zero wage growth over the last five years, with incomes falling for the highest decile.

Top 10% earners in the UK are now poorer than their equivalents in the rest of the Anglosphere, having been the third top earners internationally in 2000.

Towering Columns

On Substack, Nick Timothy argues that Britain has become a society without shame leaving us too weak to protect our way of life.

“Our generation has witnessed new concentrations of power – in huge new tech companies, for example, and as the responsibilities and powers of the state have grown. These concentrations of power have developed as our ability to scrutinise and challenge have become weaker. Social media is in some ways incredibly empowering, and offers communities of citizens and activists the means to come together and organise. But the fragmentation of the media – and the collapse in revenues for the traditional media, affecting for example budgets for investigative journalism – means powerful people are often allowed to evade scrutiny for longer.

The intellectual fashions of our time have also led to a widespread rejection of restraint. Late-stage liberalism has tended to see any laws, institutions, norms, moral codes or obligations to others as restrictions on our right to self-expression and self-fulfilment. Marketing straplines like, “because I’m worth it” are popular manifestations of the ideas of an age that say achievement is personal, and those who have succeeded owe little or nothing to others. This is the extreme logic of social mobility – a good thing in itself – when it is untethered by any sense of the common good.

Other fashions have subordinated personal responsibility to wider structural forces that supposedly dictate what we are able to achieve. Militant identity politics – that often hold that our racial identities, gender identities, and other intersecting identities determine our life chances – remove any respect for the idea that we are responsible for the things we do. This, together with the progressive’s belief that they are always “on the right side of history”, goes some way to explain the shamelessness and hypocrisy of those on the Left who fail to live by their apparently high moral standards.”

In The Critic, Lord Goodman says that Conservatives must confront the loss of their reputation for competence if they want to rebuild.

“But one can easily become so bewildered amidst the maze of Tory factions as to lose one’s sense of place, direction and proportion. The evidence is unambiguous. It wasn’t Cameron who wrecked the Conservatives. Nor was it Brexit. Nor even immigration. It wasn’t “levelling up”. Nor was it failing to level up. It wasn’t abandoning one group of Remainery votes to embrace Leaveish ones. Or even hesitant attempts to move the other way. It was the most extensive plague since Spanish Flu, the most devastating war in Europe since 1945, the personal and political failures of Johnson … and, perhaps above all, Liz Truss and her mini-Budget. If it was such a great achievement, why did she sack the Chancellor who delivered it?

The most elemental case for the Tories for at least the last century has been that their hearts may not always be in the right place but their heads usually are: that, when the chips are down, they are the people least likely to damage your lives and livelihood, and most likely to protect the property on which social order and economic freedom depend. Lose that reputation, and you lose everything.

It took the Conservatives the best part of 20 years to recover from the tax rises that followed Black Wednesday under John Major. How long will it take them this time round — if recovery happens at all — with Reform knocking at the door?”

On Substack, Rian Chad Whitton documents our once competitive British motor industry and its recent sharp decline.

“While we do have battery-manufacturing capacity ready to come online, we are very far off from where we need to be if we want our car industry to be about as large in 2040 as it is in 2024. Chinese penetration into the British EV [Electric Vehicle] market is growing because we are one of the few markets that have not imposed tariffs. This makes our EV purchases cheaper, but it raises questions about the viability of British EV manufacturing.

The British motor industry was globally competitive for much of the twentieth century. After falling far behind other countries, it accepted foreign ownership and optimised for exports, resulting in a significant trade deficit for the industry. This succeeded during the late twentieth and early twentieth century, but it has been a partial reprieve. Global demand for cars is slowing, and the modern preference for EVs places Britain in a poor position. We lack cheap energy or a proper planning system to build battery factories quickly, and have less capacity to accept low profit margins than Chinese, East Asian, or European firms.

On the one hand, we will not interfere with the market through protective tariffs or prioritising domestic manufacturers. But we will interfere by subsidising purchases of certain types of vehicles (Battery Electric Vehicles - BEVs) that we currently don’t make in bulk. I don’t have immediate remedies for the industry’s future. Still, we could at least get rid of arbitrary targets and let BEVs gain market share based on consumer choices.”

In UnHerd, Mary Harrington writes about the need to demolish the dead hand of managerialism that has made it impossible to run Britain.

“Further north, Donald Trump is currently taking a bulldozer literally to the White House, and also figuratively to American institutional norms, also in the name of renewal. And in sharp contrast to the anaemic British managerial approach, both these leaders appear to be trying to solve the “red tape” problem by exiting the procedural paradigm altogether, in favour of one based on personal authority. Perhaps the most hotly contested such battlefield has been Trump’s programme of deporting undocumented migrants. His haters accuse him, generally accurately, of ignoring established procedure and just deporting people without redress. His supporters, meanwhile, point out (also accurately) that with an estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the USA, giving each of these individuals his or her procedurally mandated day in court would cumulatively take so long that Trump, who promised mass deportations to his voters and has a maximum of three years left in office, is forced to choose between betraying his election promise and taking a bulldozer to the rules.

In other words: Trump faces a thicket of procedure not dissimilar to the one that confronts schools, prisons, and other public-sector organisations here in Britain — just on a still bigger scale. His solution, though, isn’t helpless surrender to entropy. Instead, he seems to be trying a controlled managerial demolition, legitimised by his personal charisma, such as it is.

Will it make America great again? There exists, it’s fair to say, a range of views on this. Nor is personal authority necessarily any guarantee of competence: those executing Trump’s political programme have already made their own cock-ups, enthusiastically documented by his haters. And yet it’s probably also fair to say that some in Britain are now watching bulldozers tear through White House walls, and ICE tear through unworkable immigration procedures, and wondering what we could do in Britain if only we tore up the rulebook.”

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Wonky Thinking

The Tony Blair Institute calls for the 2030 Clean Power mission to be dropped and a focus on generating abundant cheap electricity through whatever form.

“The government must therefore focus on what matters most – for growth, for consumers and for the climate: reducing the cost of electricity in a renewables-based system and creating the conditions for the full electrification of the economy. The immediate task is not squeezing out the final emissions in the power sector but delivering electricity that is both cheap and clean, so it becomes the obvious alternative to fossil fuels for households, transport and industry alike.

Doing so requires reform of the Clean Power 2030 mission. Launched in the middle of the gas crisis and in a low-interest environment, it was right for its time, but circumstances have changed. The UK now needs more than a decarbonisation plan. It needs a full-spectrum energy strategy built on growth, resilience and abundant clean electricity. This means prioritising cost, flexibility and long-term stability – the real building blocks of electrification – not just short-term emissions cuts.

If Britain gets this right, the prize is enormous – both for the climate and the economy. Cheaper, clean electricity would cut emissions while lowering bills in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. It would attract new industries, such as AI data centres, to locate in Britain. It would accelerate electrification across households, transport and industry, raising efficiency and boosting productivity. And by proving that decarbonisation can be done affordably, Britain could lead abroad as well as at home – exporting not only clean technologies but also a model for others to follow.”

Net Zero Watch has launched a new campaign to get the government to cancel the AR7 renewables auction which could lock in higher energy prices for decades to come.

“According to the International Energy Agency, the UK now has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, and energy industry leaders have told Parliament that even if gas were free by 2030, electricity bills would still remain high due to the soaring costs of the system itself.

The Tony Blair Institute has called on ministers to “recalibrate” the CP30 mission. Oxford University’s Professor Sir Dieter Helm, the respected energy economist who in 2017 led an independent review on behalf of the govenrment into the cost of energy, has said the UK’s current trajectory “poses serious risks to the UK economy” and will “lock in permanently high costs for British energy”. The economist behind Ed Miliband’s pledge to cut bills by £300 has cast doubt on whether any savings can now be delivered.

Rather than address the root causes, as promised in their manifesto, Ministers are reportedly considering shifting billions of pounds in policy and system costs into general taxation - hiding the bill rather than reducing it. Families would still pay, just through higher taxes and more borrowing. This is not what voters endorsed.”

Economics Editor at The Spectator, Michael Simmons, explains how Britain has lost control over its official statistics and policy makers are flying blind.

“While the quality of data is a big source of frustration, ‘the patchwork of data systems across government and the way civil servants present data’ is a bigger issue, explains one official. ‘Literally the prime minister doesn’t know the real numbers, it’s often just concealed from them,’ George Osborne revealed. In one Whitehall basement, vital pensions data still sits on magnetic tape – readable but not updateable. The system is so decrepit that information on one of the state’s biggest liabilities has been ‘basically unusable’ for years.

When data is lost, there is the potential for dire consequences. An HMRC data feed which powers Universal Credit payments is so error-prone as many as one in four in-work claimants could have been underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all, according to figures seen by The Spectator. Officially, the government says there is an error rate of less than 1 per cent. Some insiders tell me they suspect people may have been wrongfully prosecuted for benefit fraud, in what could turn out to be a scandal equivalent to the Post Office’s if action isn’t taken.

Immigration statistics are in a similar state of chaos. Britain cannot say how many people live here: in England alone, GPs register five million more patients than the ONS says are alive. Depending on the definition – ‘foreign nationals’ or ‘born overseas’ – foreigners are either more or less likely than natives to commit crime. Which is it? Nobody knows. Collecting data on visa overstays has proved so difficult that the Home Office ‘just gave up’, a former special adviser tells me. I asked one senior Reform figure if they were worried that the quality of population data would make it difficult to implement their policies in government. ‘Frankly, we’re fucking terrified. We’ve got a Heath Robinson system when we should have Tron,’ he said.”

The new English ‘Index of Multiple Deprivation’ has been published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The index was last updated in 2019 and has found deprivation continues to be concentrated in the deindustrialised North and coastal communities. Headline findings were:

• The most deprived neighbourhood in England according to the IMD25 is to the east of the Jaywick & St Osyth area of Clacton-on-Sea in Tendring.

• Seven neighbourhoods in Blackpool rank amongst the top 10 most deprived in England according to the IMD25.

• Overall, 82% of neighbourhoods that are in the most deprived decile according to the IMD25 were also the most deprived according to the IMD19.

• Deprivation is dispersed across England - 65% of Local Authority Districts contain at least one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in England.

• Middlesbrough, Birmingham, Hartlepool, Kingston upon Hull and Manchester are the Local Authority Districts with the highest proportions of neighbourhoods among the most deprived in England.

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Book of the Week

Bijan Omrani’s God is an Englishman tells the story of Christianity’s contribution to the development of Englishness and how its decline is the biggest cultural shock since the formation of the nation over a thousand years ago.

“Christianity is dying in England. In this generation, the religion that as defined the spiritual life, identity and culture of the country since its origins as a unified state in the tenth century has come into its death agony. The statistics tell a stark and unambiguous story. The 2017 Social Attitudes Survey found that 53% of British adults had no religious affiliation, up from 48% in 2015, and 31% in 1983. Of 18-24 year olds, almost three in four said that they had no religion, and only 3% described themselves as Anglican. The 2021 census found that only 46.2% people in England and Wales identified themselves as Christians, down from 59.3% ten years previously. Regular Sunday church attendance has fallen from 1.2m in 1987 to 685,000 in 2023. Between 2000 and 2024, 641 churches were closed and between 2016 and 2021, 278 parishes were amalgamated. Recent projections suggest that, at current rates, Christian church congregations will vanish by the 2060s.

The death of Christianity in England represents a change far more profound than anything like Brexit. The British membership of the European Union and its predecessors lasted for a little short of 50 years, and its practical effect for the most part was confined to trade, commerce and the movement of people. The presence of Christianity, by contrast, reaches back to before the emergence of England as a country, and has been a lodestar in the development of nearly every facet of English life - its language, law, literature, calendar, spirituality, the every existence of the nation itself.”

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Quick Links

A British citizen was knifed to death by Afghan asylum seeker.

The Public Accounts Committee has found billions of pounds squandered on asylum hotels.

The Chinese Government has bought up £190bn in British assets.

A Palestine rights group is seeking to prosecute UK citizens who fought for Israel.

The Chancellor is contemplating breaking her promise to not raise taxes.

More than 10,000 non-UK citizens are in UK prisons.

UK housebuilders have said that Labour will miss its 1.5m new homes target.

The King has stripped the title of prince from Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

Towering Columns

In The New Statesman John Gray attacks the fantasy of post-liberalism and impossibility of social integration.

If a Reform-led government collapses under the weight of its empty promises, trust in democratic politics will be damaged irreparably. More extreme forces like those that manifested themselves in the mass demonstration orchestrated by Tommy Robinson in London last month will grow in strength. Riven by ethnic and sectarian divisions and insurgent movements of the far left and right, Britain could fast become a failed state.

In these conditions, post-liberal fantasies of cultural restoration are a distraction. In any realistically imaginable future, this country will continue to encompass a variety of faiths and values. Not only in Europe but throughout the world, the age of large-scale migration is over. But there can be no going back to the monocultural nationhood of the past. The issue is not how to integrate minorities into an overarching culture, but how ways of life that will remain divergent can cohabit in some sort of modus vivendi.

The way forward is to constrain communities rather than to entrench them. Everyone should be subject to a rule of law enforced equally on all. Nobody should be denied freedom to exit their community or subjected to coercion by other communities. The tyranny of minorities in stifling free expression should be firmly resisted. Individual liberty must be reasserted against the invasive claims of collective identity. But can the political will be summoned to bring about such a radical change in direction?

In response on his Substack, Andrew O’Brien, says that Gray’s vision of a strong state without an integrated social order is a mirage.

Uncharacteristically for Gray, I think he is both overoptimistic and universalising in his approach. He is overoptimistic because he thinks that a Hobbesian Leviathan is possible without the integral community, hoping that fear of disorder will prevent disorder. Human history and amour propre show the human capacity to ignore the risk of violence. He is universalising because he is too expansive in his view of liberalism, failing to see that what he is interested in is preserving not a catholic liberalism for all times and places, but a particular form of liberalism – a British liberalism.

Gray is important because various liberals of different strands on left and right are starting to coalesce around the same idea. Ironically, his ideas in practical terms lead to the sort of security state that he critiques in his article. Reasserting “individual liberty…against the invasive claims of collective identity” without integrated communities requires the sort of security apparatus that Gray rejects…

The economic, social and political order are intricately connected. Without integral communities, Gray’s only hope is for a Leviathan who is the Wizard of Oz, an entity that can maintain order through smoke and mirrors. However, as in the film, history tells us that Toto will eventually pull away the curtain.

For UnHerd, Aris Roussinos discusses the violent politics gripping Ireland in the wake of public unrest over asylum seekers.

Fearing a riot, the Irish authorities yesterday evening shut down the Luas tram line from central Dublin to the suburban village of Saggart, southwest of the city centre. It didn’t work. Many hundreds — perhaps a thousand — angry protestors had gathered outside the gates of the Citywest IPAS (asylum) centre, hurling missiles and abuse at the Gardai public order unit blocking them from forcing their way up the long and wooded drive to the hotel. The day before, an African asylum seeker had been charged with the sexual assault of a 10-year old Irish girl on the grounds of the Citywest centre, a 2,500-bed hotel recently acquired at vast expense by the Irish government, against fierce local opposition in the 4,500-strong community. The suspect, who needed an Arabic translator, was issued with a deportation order this spring and hadn’t yet been removed; the victim, in the care of Ireland’s scandal-hit Tusla child protection agency, found her chaotic personal circumstances publicised by the state in a manner many on social media saw as tantamount to victim-blaming. Outside the IPAS centre, the toxic combination had fired up both locals and protestors from across the country, who now had very little time for Ireland’s main political parties, or the police forces standing between them and the hotel they wished to storm…

There was a sense in the immediate wake of the crime, at least on social media, that this might be a turning point for Ireland. Coming in the middle of a disastrous presidential contest, where the Fianna Fáil half of the government coalition had been humiliated by its top-down insistence on a weak candidate it was forced to withdraw, and the Fine Gael half of the coalition is stuck with an uninspiring candidate of its own, there is a mood that Irish politics is at an impasse. Even Sinn Féin, clawing back a poll lead from the coalition’s current turmoil, felt compelled to issue statements of alarm and concern at the state’s evident, multiple failures in the assault case.

The old order looks increasingly exhausted, but its heavy hand on state media, in a country whose cosy political relationship with the press makes the BBC look like anti-establishment mavericks, has helped suppress the populist upsurge currently reshaping the rest of the Western world. The position of the predicted winner of the election, the Republican socialist Catherine Connolly, is that Ireland’s borders are nowhere near open enough. Marginalised electorally (not least due to its own propensity towards crankish internal feuding), and effectively banned from the airwaves, Ireland’s anti-immigration Right is politically a non-entity. The result is that the country’s only current outlet for anti-immigration politics is the street.

In The Times, Fiyaz Mughal spotlights the extremist preachers fuelling sectarian divisions in Birmingham.

The context is segregation and disengagement. The picture painted by Birmingham’s politicians is one of a multicultural melting pot where everyone gets along. In areas such as Sparkbrook, it is possible to live largely within one foreign language, culture and religion, rarely mixing beyond it. This social insulation may not create extremism, but it certainly provides shelter. Integration initiatives are underfunded, while political leaders avoid confronting the ideological drivers of radicalisation for fear of causing upset.

The decision to ban Maccabi supporters is not a one-off misjudgment, but a symptom of a deeper drift: an official reluctance to face Islamist intimidation directly. Countering extremism means defending pluralism and standing firm against those who shout the loudest. The test now is whether civic and religious leaders have the courage to meet that challenge.

For UnHerd, Mary Harrington documents how the Epstein scandal is just another example of the libertinism corrupting the West.

For Epstein’s network simply took the training-wheels off a moral outlook that has come, by degrees, to govern the entire modern West: one that does not simply reject but actively seeks to desecrate the older, Christian value-system, in pursuit of a morality of power, violence, and individual desire.

One of the earliest and frankest exponents of this spirit of negation was also, and not by coincidence, also a trailblazer in the literature of ritual sexual abuse: the Marquis de Sade. Justine (1791), written during one of his numerous stints in prison for sexual crimes, details the suffering and eventual death of Thérèse, a homeless 12-year-old orphan girl, who keeps trying to be virtuous but receiving only violence, cruelty, and sexual torture at the hands of everyone she turns to for help. The message, exhaustively hammered home by de Sade’s characters through lengthy interspersed passages of philosophical debate, is that the world is fundamentally godless and amoral, and there exists no governing force save power, violence, and untrammelled individual desire.

It is, in the precise sense, a satanic worldview. Justine was banned by Napoleon, and did not appear in English translation until the 20th century. But especially since the Sixties, de Sade’s radical libertinism and rejection of all moral constraints has come, by degrees, to appear almost ordinary. So much so that, in recent decades, it’s begun to look as though at least some segments of contemporary society view Justine less as a provocation than as an instruction manual.

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Wonky Thinking

A new Policy Exchange report, Beyond our Means, outlines a series of measures that could get UK public spending down quickly by 2030 including freezing the state pension, reforming the NHS and reversing unaffordable increases in childcare and free-school meal eligibility.

At about 100% of GDP, public debt is inordinately high and is set to rise a good deal further. Debt interest alone accounts for about three quarters of the government’s budget deficit. And at close to 45% of GDP, the share of government spending in GDP is close to a post-war high, which in turn leads to levels of taxation that are stifling economic growth.

These high levels of taxation can only be reduced by significantly reducing public spending.

This report proposes a series of measures that would reduce public spending by £115 billion per annum by 2030, or 3.2% of GDP which, if implemented, would reduce public spending as a share of GDP to just over 40%. This in turn would lead to reduced borrowing rates and a reduction in debt interest payments, creating a virtuous circle.

Ballot of the Sexes, a new report by Onward, finds a widening gender divide in international politics. The report analyses data from the USA, Germany, Portugal, South Korea and the UK and finds that a growing digital divide is making it harder to build broad electoral coalitions.

One cause of the gender divide may be that men and women, particularly those in Generation COVID who spent much of their time in the pandemic in digital communities, increasingly inhabit parallel online spaces which reinforce radically different worldviews. At the same time, these are far from being conventional echo chambers; social media algorithms actively promote provocative counter-views, likely further entrenching division through provoking outrage and hardening beliefs, rather than insulating users against opposing ideas.

The antidote to this polarisation may lie in the formula that has made those only a few years older more likely to vote for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives: prosperity. Those who are wealthier, married, and feel they are doing better in life are more likely to vote for one of the big three mainstream parties. While this might only be a temporary fix, as Reform’s vote share only continues to rise after the age of 35, it represents one of the few remaining roads to recovery for Britain’s traditional parties.

If Generation Z continues to be let down by the political mainstream and fails to reach key life milestones by the age millennials are now, political parties will have to adapt to a more volatile and gender polarised political environment if they are to survive.

Re-joining the EU is not the answer to the country’s growth challenge, finds a new report for the Centre for Policy Studies. The report calls for the UK to make maximum use of the competences that have returned to Westminster to boost GDP per capita.

Addressing the UK’s growth problem is paramount and should underpin virtually every other priority when it comes to public policy. However, contrary to recent clamour, re-joining the EU, its Single Market (SM) or Customs Union (CU) will not provide a solution to Britain’s growth challenge, and should not be part of any pro-growth strategy. The Government needs to have the confidence to stand its ground on remaining outside of EU institutions…

Debates around re-joining the SM or CU overstate how good they have been for the UK in the past, and do not properly address the economic (let alone political) trade-offs re-joining either or both. It is particularly telling that the initial narrative of economic catastrophe upon leaving the EU has now become that of a ‘slow puncture’.

Questionable statistics – including the oft-quoted (and often misunderstood) claim that our economy will be 4% smaller in 15 years’ time than if we had stayed in the EU – are distracting policymakers from the UK’s genuine economic challenges, which are deep-rooted and have little to do with the EU…

The inability of British politicians (not least in the last Conservative governments) to articulate a coherent vision and deliver a properly thought-out post-Brexit economic policy has allowed figures vehemently opposed to Brexit to define the debate and helped to create an economically damaging narrative about the UK on the global stage.

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Book of the Week

George Owers new book The Rage of Party tells the story of the emergence of party politics in England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries and shows how this divide is still influencing our politics today.

“The Whig victory during the ‘Rage of Party’ helped to unleash all manner of structural forces, economic and political, that continue to shape us and our politics. But whatever else it was, Whig versus Tory was also a culture war, and one fought in terms as vitriolic, and rooted as much in conflicting senses of identity, as any social media spat in the twenty-first century. This legacy still shapes us, not least because the divide upon which it was based most fundamentally, between the Church of England and Dissent, continued to form one of the most fundamental cultural and social dividing lines in British politics until the early twentieth century. Although that divide has now faded with the secularisation and the precipitous decline of all Christian denominations, culture is ‘sticky’: its imprints endure for centuries. The fading of its original religious framework doesn’t mean that the attitude this divide produced have disappeared. Anyone who listened to both Remainers and Leavers express their astonishment that anyone would have considered voting for the other side during the Brexit referendum - a classic conflict between Tory nationalism and Whig cosmopolitanism - was hearing an audible echo of that historical culture war play itself out 300 years later.”

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Podcast of the Week

At Policy Exchange this week Nick Timothy MP gave a major speech on the need to defend free speech and avoid undermining the pluralism that has been at the core of British politics for generations. Watch below:

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Quick Links

Plaid Cymru won the Caerphilly Welsh Parliament by-election.

The Home Secretary said the Home Office is not fit for purpose after the release of a scathing review by Nick Timothy, the MP and former Home Office adviser.

Survivors of rape gangs called for the government’s Safeguarding Minister to resign over concerns about a national inquiry.

An NHS Doctor accused of glorifying Hamas wore No.7 necklace to trial.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission attacked the government’s proposed Islamophobia definition.

HM Treasury opposed efforts to protect a UK tech company from Chinese infiltration.

The Oxford Union is facing a financial crisis over the Charlie Kirk scandal.

The UK’s economy per capita is just 3% larger than Poland if London is excluded.

The Prime Minister’s commitment to speed up Chinese Embassy decision could be illegal.