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It is impossible to read Emily Jones’ brilliant new book, The Disraeli Myth - The Making of a Conservative Tradition, without thinking about the other Great Leader, who spiritually dominates the Conservative Party today: Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps she will be the subject of Jones’ next book, completing a trilogy that started with her dissection of Edmund Burke and his elevation to the role as the ‘inventor’ of Modern Conservatism.

The parallels between Dizzy and Maggie come think and fast. Both have been subject to widely successful popular media, particularly film, where both have Oscar winning portrayals on celluloid. Both have had numerous successor organisations set up to popularise their memories. Both have had their speeches endlessly selectively quoted to provide ammunition in contemporary debates. If you want to learn more about how Disraeli was canonised in the years after his death, this book has you covered.

Despite these parallels, however, Jones’ book shows two to very different approaches to how the Conservative Party has sought to use these titanic figures for its own intellectual and political evolution.

Disraeli was used a rubric, to help guide the party through the development of mass democracy, industrialization and total war. There is no Disraelian model that can be rebuilt, but there are a set of ideas and concepts that can guide politicians for the future. Whether there was any intellectual consistency in Disraeli is something Jones’ handles evenhandedly, however, there are two pillars that seem to remain constant: reimagining traditional institutions to preserve them and concern for the welfare of the people. In any case, these are the pillars upon which One Nation Conservatism have been built, whether Disraeli intended them or not.

Like Thatcher, Disraeli was seen as a “visionary prophet” by many of his supporters. This meant that whilst Disraeli was mined for insight and examples of effective statesmanship, no one was seeking to recreate Disraeli’s government. In part, this was because Disraeli was seen as someone impossible to emulate, given his perceived unique gifts of foresight and literary genius, expertly documented by Jones. It was also because the Conservative Party was aware that the world had significantly changed, in part because of decisions that Disraeli had made to widen the electoral franchise and the new phase of great power competition.

Looking around Conservative Party Conference this week, speaking with members and listening to panels, Thatcher is not being used as a rubric, like Disraeli, but a template. This is an important distinction. Conservatives invoking her memory today are not asking for an evolution of Thatcher, but instead to recreate her time in office and, as we can see in this conference, even her approach to how to run an opposition. The fact that she went from opposition to government and won three elections is inarguable. The temptation to simply copy and paste her approach is seemingly irresistible. However, looking across to The Left, we can see how Labour has struggled to move away from its own Thatcher-figure, Blair, and how in the last election it ended up spending more time trying to recreate New Labour’s rise to power, than it did on focusing on the issues facing the country it was trying to govern.

Jones’ book is interesting because of the sheer variety of responses to Disraeli’s legacy that emerged from across the Conservative Party and even the emergent Labour Party, where Disraeli inspired Tory Socialism had numerous acolytes. Disraeli is a figure that all sides of politics have tried to own, even recent Labour Leaders. This is not a weakness of Disraeli, but a strength. If you want to rebuild a party, drawing on a legacy that even your opponents want to be associated with is not a bad start. The Disraeli Myth is particularly useful for a Conservative Party that needs a reminder of the rich tapestry of ideas, movements and literature that has made it adaptable and successful.

Thatcher’s legacy, by contrast, seems to have ossified into a set of policy prescriptions that leave little room for the imagination or adaption. There is no situation where a dose of a) cutting back the state; b) cutting regulation; or c) cutting taxes is not the appropriate response. The work that has been written about Thatcher tends to seek to either defend her policy choices or to call for their more thorough implementation today, rather using them as a platform to build upon.

To put it bluntly, Jones shows how the decades after the departure of Disraeli saw an intellectual flourishing of various strands of Conservatism that has rarely been surpassed. The decades after Thatcher have created an intellectual desert, where it seems nothing else can, or is permitted to, survive.

Reading Jones’ book in the run up to Conservative Party Conference, Disraeli is notable by his absence. Yet, you could argue that Disraeli is a better inspiration for the Conservative Party in its current state than Thatcher. Before Disraeli’s majority in 1874, the Conservatives (bar a few brief minority governments under Derby) had not secured a working majority in Parliament for twenty eight years. During this period in opposition he kept the Conservative Party alive and rebuilt it for a new era of politics, dominated by the growing influence of the middle and working classes. Disraeli had to build a new electoral coalition, exactly where the party now is. Thatcher, by contrast, picked up a Conservative Party that had only been in government a couple of years before hand and had governed for seventeen years out of the previous thirty one years since the end of the Second World War. Disraeli’s efforts to keep the Conservative flame alive and provide it a renewed purpose seems more relevant for our current situation.

Disraeli also, arguably, left a better electoral legacy. In the thirty six years since his departure as Prime Minister, the Conservatives, governed with a majority for sixteen years, winning three elections. Disraeli’s work even helped to facilitate a split in his opponents, with the Conservative’s embrace of social reform opening the door for Liberal Unionists. The Conservatives since 1990, by contrast, have only governed with a majority for eleven and a half years since Thatcher’s departure. Thatcher’s legacy has split the Conservative Party, with now both the Reform and Conservative parties claiming her mantle. The right has become divided, rather than expanded, as under Disraeli.

Both periods have, unfortunately, been book ended with crushing electoral defeats. However, in the case of the Conservatives in 1906, this was due to a genuine policy split (tariffs) and an impressive opposition (Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, Haldane, Lloyd-George and Churchill) rather than in 2024, where the party was thrown out through exhaustion and a generally agreed weak opposition. In the wake of its 1906 defeat, the party once again was able to turn to Disraeli to expand itself both politically and intellectually, to respond to the rise of the New Liberalism and the Labour Party offering a traditionalist and protectionist offering that was to dominate the inter-war years, marked as they were with great geopolitical and economic instability. Again, after the Second World War, the party successfully turned to Disraeli to appeal to a country that wanted social harmony and economic fairness after the sacrifices of two world wars and the rise of Communism.

Disraeli has inspired three ‘revivals’ of the party. Thatcher has yet to inspire one, although maybe this time she will succeed.

It is not lost on me that in writing this book review, I have simply become the latest to perpetuate the Disraeli Myth. Guilty as charged. I challenge anyone to read Disraeli’s speeches and not walk away electrified by the romantic power of conservatism.

However, there are some myths that are forces of good that inspire better action, like King Arthur and his Knights or Shakespeare’s Henry V. There are some myths that are forces of evil, such as those vile antisemitic tropes that have sadly become too much of a feature of our politics.

In reading Jones’ book on Disraeli, it is clear that Disraeli’s Myth has been a force for good, particularly for the Conservative Party. As important as the man himself, are the lessons that we can learn from the the dozens of politicians and writers Jones cites in the book, who used him as an intellectual quarry that helped evolve the Conservative Party. Kebbel, Milner, Gorst, F.E. Smith, Skelton and many more. We need a new generation of Disraeli interpreters if we want to survive and thrive.

Engaging with them, we can learn again on how great figures from our past can help us navigate the future, rather than become a millstone around our necks.

Andrew O’Brien, Co-Editor, The Conservative Reader

Andrew will be speaking at a fringe held by More in Common & UCL Policy Lab on Communitarianism and Conservatism at Monday 5 October (today), 18.15 to 19.15 at Executive Room 7, Birmingham ICC. No registration required.

Brief note:

One of our co-editors, Andrew O’Brien, will be speaking at a fringe held by More in Common & UCL Policy Lab on intellectually renewing Conservatism at Monday 5 October, 18.15 to 19.15pm at Executive Room 7, Birmingham ICC. No need to register. It would be great to see Conservative Readers there.

Towering Columns

In The Telegraph Tom Sharpe argues British naval presence in the Arctic must be increased to counter Russia’s shadow fleet of tankers.

Can we police the seas up there? No; it is Russia’s coast. But every one of these ships comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, mostly through the Barents and Norwegian Seas, past our allies and into our own backyard. The hulls going over the top in summer run the Channel in winter. All the world chokepoints are connected: Hormuz, Bab al-Mandeb, the Danish straits, Bering Strait, Malacca and the Panama are all one problem where the solution depends on how you are holding the globe to look at it.

What are our options? We should put the NSR regulars on the shadow fleet list, not just the Baltic ones – Bellona has published the names. We should lean on the flag states that keep appearing, starting with Oman: six of the tankers and two of the gas carriers were sailing under its flag. We should use port-state control and the insurers to squeeze the non-ice-class hulls before the ice season, not after. Share ice-zone tracking with the Nordics through the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) and Nato’s new Arctic Sentry.

The JEF already has the machinery. Nordic Warden, run from British naval headquarters in Northwood since January 2025, watches 22 areas from the Channel to the Baltic, and in Helsinki in March its leaders promised closer work on the shadow fleet. We should push that watch north into the Norwegian and Barents Seas, feed it satellite and patrol-aircraft data rather than ship-tracker AIS alone, and link it to Arctic Sentry.

Writing for The Times, Juliet Samuel highlights the inconsistency between Labour’s reindustrialisation rhetoric and their desire to cut British emissions.

Well, good riddance, you might say. The Hillhouse factory in Lancashire, which makes “forever chemicals”, is shutting down. It has been losing money, says AGC, the Japanese owner. The chemicals it makes are attracting regulatory attention. One of its longstanding inputs was banned in 2020 for being a carcinogen, but not before the plant had spent decades burning more than a hundred tonnes of the stuff into the air, contaminating everything nearby from duck eggs to allotment potatoes. Blood tests of several dozen locals show they have toxic levels of the chemical in their blood. Surely no one will miss this poison factory?

Except that the 190 people and 18 contractors who work there might miss it, plus their families, the factory’s suppliers, its customers and the local economy, in which it’s one of very few large employers. Perhaps even our chancellor, who has promised a “new age of industrialisation”, will miss it. Or the prime minister, who envisions “the re-industrialisation of the regions”.

Factory closures are awkward when you’re promising more industry. But the truth is having factories is awkward too, because every so often you find out they’ve been shedding ghastly substances into the area around them, the effects of which may not emerge for decades. Overall, our solution to such quandaries has been to drive this horrid activity offshore to somewhere far away, where we don’t have to think about it. But we are realising that while such a policy might move scandals like Hillhouse out of sight to foreign lands, it comes at a serious cost to our security and prosperity.

In The Critic, Charlie Cole examines the costs involved in the Afghan resettlement schemes set up in the wake of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Afghan resettlement schemes are projected to cost £5.7 billion by 2032-33. As of publication of the NAO report, the Government has already spent £3.1 billion.

Afghans resettled under any of these schemes are provided accommodation by the Government or local authority. While local authorities are not mandated to partake in any of the resettlement schemes, the overwhelming majority have, with 348 out of 361 local authorities partaking (as of the latest Home Office release).

Local authorities receive a generous £24,110 integration tariff per resettled Afghan, which is paid over a three-year period. There is also an education tariff of £5,130 per individual for those aged 5-18 and £2,965 for those aged 3-4. Local health providers also receive a £2,600 health tariff for each resettled individual. The NAO notes that the Home Office has “revised the tariffs over time to reduce costs and simplify the funding streams”, so it’s possible the above tariffs were even higher before.

The NAO notes that one of the difficulties in providing accommodation for resettled Afghans has been the larger family sizes. The average resettled Afghan household consists of 5.5 family members, with more than 10% of resettled Afghan households having 8 or more family members. The Telegraph reported that one Afghan national brought 22 family members to the UK.

In The Telegraph, David Frost concludes that Andy Burnham’s Labour Party will be one that promotes 1970s-style socialism.

Second, he dropped a big hint on Europe. Burnham claims we haven’t established a proper long-term relationship with the EU. Actually we have. It’s called independence. It’s what people voted for and what was eventually delivered, at great cost and effort. People like him have since spent all their time undermining it.

Now he promises to “lay out the options” for that future relationship – as if we didn’t know what they were already. Either this means nothing, and it was just what he had to say to keep his party happy – or, more likely, it is what it sounds like, a firm commitment to start undoing the referendum result. Danger, danger.

Put all this together and you get Burnham’s vision: a return to 1970s Britain. His “theory of growth” has nothing to do with actual growth. He summed it up himself: “our plan for public control is a plan for growth.” It is nothing of the kind. It’s a plan to ration what little growth an enfeebled economy can produce. His slogan says it all: “Hope again”. Hope is the currency politicians use when they have nothing else to offer. But people can’t pay with it at the supermarket checkout.

Rory Hanrahan, writing for The Telegraph, argues that Sinn Fein are targeting Orangemen to deflect from their own shortcomings.

Andy Burnham has said a border poll on Irish reunification is “off the table”. In the North, Deputy First Minister Emma Little Pengelly has refused to hand republicans the Stormont crisis they once relied on. Northern Ireland is, imperfectly, functioning. So the old narrative that the place is unreformable is harder to sell.

Electorally the pressure is visible. Sinn Féin is losing votes on the Left to the Trotskyist People Before Profit. It also suffered a significant reverse in the Dublin Central by-election in May by failing to take a seat in McDonald’s own constituency against a government that has been in office for years.

Meanwhile, the conservative but republican Aontú party continues to nibble from another direction, and republican dissidents have been gaining ground on the streets.

With all this in mind, Sinn Féin needs a distraction and a rallying point. So, it reached for its oldest trump card. A Garvaghy Road stand-off lets Sinn Féin present itself as the indispensable defender of nationalist communities. It also keeps the constitutional question raw.

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Wonky Thinking

Onward has published a new report on nuclear focusing on existing regulatory burdens, the potential benefits of a large expansion of domestic nuclear energy production, and recommendations to unlock such benefits. The conclusion of the report reads as below:

Nuclear power holds enormous potential for the UK.

It can deliver national energy security, drive economic competitiveness and help fight climate change. However, this potential will not be realised if the next series of nuclear projects falls prey to another round of cost and time overruns. Billions of pounds of public money is at stake, and public appetite for nuclear technology will be sorely tested by another high profile cost overrun.

There are reasons for optimism.

The British nuclear industry has been in a difficult position before, suffering from a number of troubled projects in the 1960s and 1970s. The industry was able to respond. The delivery model evolved, with greater responsibility placed with publicly owned utilities. Project execution improved and the UK built three new power stations at Heysham B, Torness and Sizewell B, delivered effectively in terms of both construction time and cost.

The Fingleton Review has highlighted the risk aversion, procedural complexity and poor incentives within the nuclear industry. The Review provides a blueprint for regulatory simplification and improved delivery, and the UK must adopt its recommendations in full. The next step is to ensure that a new generation of project leaders are able to take advantage of a new regulatory landscape and are rewarded for driving down costs and delivering on schedule.

Many of the UK’s difficulties are shared by other Western nations, as nuclear supply chains and delivery experience have eroded, due to a hiatus in new projects. If the UK can deliver a successful SMR project and replicate the same design time and time again, then Britain can once again lead the way in delivering clean and reliable power.

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Podcast of the Week

On Quite Right! Michael Gove and Madeleine Grant are joined by Jonathan Hinder, the Labour Member of Parliament for Pendle and Clitheroe who joins them to discuss a Blue Labour vision for Britain.

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Quick Links

Home Secretary to open refugee route for Afghans and those from the Gaza/West Bank

British judge pushes for more Pakistani judges in Britain

Urban youth riot across France, destroying properties and injuring innocents.

British and Danish forces undergo joint training in Faroe Islands.

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Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says that our foreign policy has become completely incoherent.

In John Healey, he appears to have picked a biddable chancellor. Healey, whose supposedly principled resignation over defence spending helped precipitate the coup that brought Burnham to power, now says we will have to wait for the spending review, at some unspecified date, to be told how Britain will meet its defence needs. This is a rather surprising turn after his resignation letter, in which he declared himself “certain” that the government should commit immediately to spending­ 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030, and said he would “not be able to accept” an investment plan that “falls well short” or is “backloaded”, because time is short. Military chiefs had warned earlier that defence needs an extra £28 billion, but even after Sir Keir Starmer gave it a little extra the defence investment plan on the books comes to £15 billion.

Aside from spending, British foreign and security policy continues to be a mess. We want to keep hold of the Falklands but we are desperate to give away Chagos. We want to sanction Israel but also need its intelligence and defence technology. We’ve talked a good game about fielding troops for a “coalition of the willing” in Ukraine while cancelling exercises and laying off reservists. We declare rock-solid support for allies on the eastern front with Russia while ignoring their pleas to allow the use of essential defensive weaponry such as landmines. We have “recognised” Palestine while declining to recognise where its borders are or who its government is.

We depend utterly on the goodwill of the “special relationship” while cutting US air force access to our bases. We are wasting precious Foreign Office time on a huge lobbying campaign to install a British judge on the International Court of Justice who supports the Chagos giveaway, even as the court threatens Britain with trillions in “climate reparations”. We lecture the world on carbon emissions while relying on gas shipped across the Atlantic instead of using our own. We talk of resilience while assuming benevolence.

On Substack, Martha Dacombe argues that rejoining the EU is not a strategy for preserving our AI strength in a world of great power competition.

Rather, a serious strategy for the UK, if it is going to accept the label of being a middle power, is to work towards maintaining a prioritised place under the American AI umbrella, not the Chinese one, due to the wider military and geopolitical risks this carries. This will be hard to negotiate and renegotiate over time, and we should be under no illusions that Washington will not drive a hard bargain.

Though we have many strengths, there are currently real weaknesses in our position. We cannot make advanced chips. We cannot build a frontier model at the current scale through domestic capital. Instead, what we do have is talent (and the ability to attract the most talented people globally), a serious research base, capital markets that still function, a legal system the world trusts, and a common language of technological development. We can develop relationships with countries where we are weaker and where they have significant technological strengths across the AI stack. This will mean working with the South Koreans, Taiwanese, Dutch and Norwegians. Access to the frontier, and the technologies at it, will be critical, and Britain should not cling to historical alliances when considering how it should act.

Rejoining should not be flung about as an answer to the complex and fast-moving problems posed by the current AI age. Success for Britain will mean building incredible companies that capture value across the AI stack — therefore, tying ourselves to a continent defined by a lack of said companies is an error.

In The Critic, Philip Cunliffe questions whether Britain is getting value from our alliances anymore.

Boosted by powerful allies, deep state bureaucrats gain more sway within our own political system, to the extent that they even feel empowered to set the agenda independently of elected officials. Witness the recent speech by the director-general of MI5, Ken McCallum, in which he demanded greater coordination across academia, the security services and the public in favour — pointedly — of defending national security. But what if our national interests no longer conform to the model of national security promoted by MI5?

Whatever the wisdom of Andy Burnham’s cynical calculations over targeting the West Bank settlements, it is very clear that we should not be in any position where we allow intelligence-sharing and national security to be at loggerheads with our national interest. Instead of merely defending the legacy structures of national security, we should be thinking about how we reassert national interest in a transformed world order.

With that in mind, do we have any national interests at stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? How does an alliance with Israel or indeed Palestine, further Britain’s interests? These are the questions we should be asking. Instead of cultivating dependence on foreign intelligence agencies, we should be re-evaluating our national interests in a world order that demands more self-sufficiency — self-sufficiency that should apply to our intelligence agencies as much as the economy, or critical raw materials.

For The Spectator, Eliot Wilson warns that our influence in NATO is diminishing due to a lack of investment in defence.

Money buys influence because it represents both hard-power capability and intent. The UK for decades enjoyed enormous influence in Nato. Partly this was the legacy of our having persisted throughout the Second World War – we were a combatant from 3 September 1939 to 2 September 1945 – and of our status as a founding member of the alliance in 1949; partly it was because our armed forces were often very good. But Britain also put its money where its mouth was. At its peak, the British Army of the Rhine numbered 80,000 soldiers and 800 main battle tanks; our defence expenditure did not fall below 4 per cent of GDP until the end of the Cold War.

Our clout in Nato is waning. We still, by convention, provide the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, currently Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, and host the headquarters of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) at Imjin Barracks in Gloucester. In the event of a conflict, we are committed to providing two warfighting divisions, the 1st (UK) Division and 3rd (UK) Division to Nato’s overall land forces. No one believes we could generate those formations at full strength in a remotely helpful timeframe.

Sir Keir Starmer preened himself over his ‘Coalition of the Willing’ for an undefined role in Ukraine which never emerged. His successor would struggle even to construct that kind of paper tiger. We are failing to keep up with our Nato allies on defence spending, and, worse, we are still in denial about that failure.

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Wonky Thinking

The Centre for Policy Studies has published the latest analysis of patents filed within the United Kingdom and found that patent filing has declined significantly since the 1990s despite patent issuing rising in the rest of the world. The analysis concludes that the government needs to boost the attractiveness of the UK for businesses to grow, not just spend money on R&D. Key findings include:

• The average number of patents filed annually with the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has declined from roughly 29,000 in 1990s to 21,000 post-2010, even as filings in South Korea, the United States, Singapore and China have multiplied several times over

• In 2000, the UK produced 727 patent applications per million people. Today, that figure has fallen to 677, a 7% decline

• Despite world-class universities and a strong science base, Britain produces fewer patents per person than most major economies, including France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States

• Foreign inventors now file 61% fewer patents in Britain than in 1980 — a sign that global firms no longer see the UK as a key market to protect innovation

• Technology-related patents have remained virtually flat for two decades, even as global filings have surged

• The UK has fallen out of the world’s top five in the Global Innovation Index for the first time in over a decade

The report concludes:

If firms do not see Britain as a competitive place to build, test and scale, no amount of top-down government planning will change that. Businesses may simply find it easier to develop, test or commercialise elsewhere.

In conclusion, before announcing yet another strategy or fund, the Government should ask a more fundamental question: what conditions make firms choose to innovate or perform commercial R&D in Britain at all? A genuine science and technology superpower cannot be built by public spending alone. It requires an economy where businesses see long-term value in creating, protecting and commercialising their innovations on British soil. Until policymakers confront these underlying conditions, every new strategy risks repeating the same pattern: ambitious targets, generous incentives, and disappointing results.

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Podcast of the Week

On WARZONES, James Glancy and Tom Sharpe discuss Russia’s naval threat to Britain’s undersea cables as well as the situation in the Falklands and what we can do, if anything, to protect the islands from renewed Argentinian aggression.

OUTPOST

Why Britain Is One Cut From Disaster

This week, James Glancy is joined by Tom Sharpe on WARZONES to discuss Russia’s naval threat to Britain’s undersea cables - the lines that carry most of the country’s data, banking and communications, with little redundancy and little protection…

Listen now

13 days ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Outpost

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Quick Links

781 migrants entered the country by small boats on a single day, the highest all year.

Whitehall warns that TalkTalk collapse could threaten national security.

Donald Trump has killed off the Chagos Deal, officials admit.

Prime Minister announces new National Centre for Information Defence.

New research finds our trade deficit in food has doubled over the past decade.

Chinese imports are reportedly sustaining Houthi rebels.

Writing for The Critic, Andrew Orlowski argues against what he labels a ‘doomsday cult’, instead claiming that artificial intelligence poses relatively little risk to humanity.

Stopping a runaway computer software programme is easy as pulling the plug from the wall. A killer AI would need to be able build and harvest its own power sources and resist a military attack. Such a machine is not feasible at present, or for a very long time.

So why would so much money be devoted to what is an absurd, but admittedly compelling science fiction story?

Khalif believes that existential risk, which the EAs abbreviate to x-risk, is “a regulatory capture mechanism”. The EAs co-opt the language to elbow aside incumbent experts and well established safety practices, and advance their own power base, something she has observed in both nuclear and AI regulation. The gambit “places AI technologists as arbiters of life or death”.

Eschatological narratives like catastrophic climate change and AI going rogue and killing us all both inspire extreme reactions, inducing a kind of mental episode. Sam Altman’s home has been attacked by EA doomers, some EAs went on hunger strike outside Google’s London HQ, and it has even spawned a vegan murder cult. Mostly nonbinary, and describing themselves as “vegan anarchotranshumanists”, the Zizians emerged from rationalist and EA circles, and murdered six people before being arrested.

Both preoccupations fundamentally appeal to narcissism. You alone are blessed with an insight: you alone can see the end of the world. Others can’t, and so the urge to share the prophecy is overwhelming. AI doom has been the more persuasive with our political and media elites, for whom faith in AI is a deeply high status opinion. This is not just because they lack the technical grounding to assess such claims independently, but because they desperately want to believe in the prospect of an overwhelmingly powerful AI. They paint the ghost into the machine.

In The Telegraph, Tom Sharpe argues that recent developments in Yemen put the world at risk, but Britain can positively influence the situation.

As for us, HMS Diamond performed excellently in the Red Sea against the Houthis. Her sister ship HMS Dragon – now in the region – could do the same. With Hormuz in stalemate but still deemed too high a risk for crewed ships to enter, Dragon could usefully head to the Bab-el-Mandeb and work alongside the Aspides warships.

Much will depend on what she is currently doing – she has been working with the French carrier group rather than the Americans – and on whether she needs to protect RFA Lyme Bay, mothership for the UK’s nascent mine-hunting drone force. The last open reporting had Dragon in Mombasa on Aug 11-12, RFA Lyme Bay likewise, so my guess would be they are currently in the Gulf of Oman or the wider Indian Ocean. Dragon could be in the Red Sea in a few days. It’s good to have options – something navies can do much better when at sea and fully worked up.

The real indicator to watch is the same one as in July. If this is about to seriously escalate, one of the two US carriers will start steaming west. Given the stalemate in Hormuz, resuming strikes on Houthi launch positions might well be seen in Washington as an achievable win as the midterms approach.

Perim, then, is a small island of minor tactical importance in a narrow chokepoint. What its capture represents though is a pattern: one of escalation and continued chokepoint challenges – a trend I’d suggest we are only in the early stages of. All the world’s navies need to adjust accordingly, not just rely on the US.

In Conservative Home, Blake Stephenson MP argues for a more detail-oriented approach to reducing legal migration.

That is why I am concerned by Government proposals to replace supervised, in-person English language testing for visa applicants with a remote model. Industry experts have raised significant concerns about the potential for fraud and abuse. If safeguards are weakened, organised criminal networks will inevitably look for ways to exploit the system.

Good immigration policy requires attention to detail. The effectiveness of border control is determined not only by what happens at the frontier but also by the integrity of the processes that operate long before someone arrives in the UK. Visa rules, identity checks, language testing, compliance monitoring, and enforcement all form part of the same ecosystem. Weakness in one area eventually creates pressure elsewhere.

There are no simple solutions to the challenges facing our immigration system. Anyone who claims otherwise is offering false comfort. But there are principles that should guide reform: fairness, transparency, effective enforcement and a clear commitment to the national interest.

As Parliament debates the Immigration and Asylum Bill, we must look beyond the immediate headlines and address the wider weaknesses that continue to undermine public confidence. The objective should not simply be to respond to today’s pressures, but to build an immigration system that is sustainable, trusted and fit for the decades ahead.

Writing for The Critic, James Price argues against Rory Stewart’s position on the rape gangs scandal.

More substantively, the grooming gangs did not stop 10 years ago. It is still happening today. Even Starmer’s administration, who had to be dragged into acquiescing to a national review, trumpeted tens of millions of pounds for extra enforcement, and boasted about thousands of annual arrests.

Similarly, Rory repeatedly mentioned Birmingham, as if this were the only place in Britain where such abuse had happened. The reality is that there have been proven cases of such abuse happening in over 50 towns and cities across the UK. I’m sure readers of The Critic will know all this already, but Stewart clearly doesn’t know or doesn’t care, because the issue is too low status for him to read about.

But even this patrician insouciance for such awful crimes notwithstanding, the scales have fallen from my eyes. Stewart is just not nearly as bright as he thinks he is. I’m sure several years of talking to Alastair Campbell would lead anyone to believe that they were vastly more intelligent than others, but it has turned Stewart into a dolt. For example, he intones at one point that Britain should take just 0.2% of its population every year in asylum seekers. He has chosen this because, I assume, it sounds like a small number to those who still treat him as a serious guy.

But that’s about 138,000 people, over three times the 42,394 actually granted protection last year in our already absurdly abused system. In fact, it’s comfortably more than the 86,000 who applied at all. I wonder if Stewart could open his Afghan rolodex to Home Office so it could start actively recruiting more rural farmers to fill his quota?

Writing for The Telegraph, Liam Halligan makes the case that Andy Burnham’s premiership will be remembered to his ideological loyalty rather than his loyalty to Britain.

One part of the British state which has been on the ball when it comes to the UK’s fiscal weakness is the House of Lords. Two years ago, the Lords economic affairs committee, then chaired by Lord Bridges, published a report on our national debt: It’s Time for Tough Decisions. Last week, Bridges led a Lords debate reiterating the same – which is worth reading in full.

Lord Hill, a Conservative, pointed out that during the 1980s, the governments he advised “developed policies that were coherent”, rather than obsessing over opinion polls and endless focus groups. These days, he says, governments of all stripes yield to “a giant lobbying system” demanding “ever more spending”.

Lords Burns, a former Treasury permanent secretary closely involved with policymaking during the 1976 crisis and for two decades after, remarked that during tough periods, “decisive action was eventually taken, even though it involved difficult and often unpopular decisions”.

Burnham seems incapable of taking tough decisions. He’s a decent communicator and has a talent for political campaigning. But he isn’t the determined, tough-minded leader that Britain so desperately needs.

Future historians may note that his speech at Labour party conference later this month will be 50 years to the day since Britain’s 1976 IMF bailout was launched.

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Wonky Thinking

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has released their Green Budget 2026, with one chapter examining the effectiveness of disability benefit, and how to reform it to make savings for the taxpayer.

Key Findings

1. The share of 16- to 64-year-olds claiming disability benefits increased from 5.5% in August 2019 to 8.2% in August 2025. There have been large increases across all ages and health conditions, with the fastest proportional increases for claims relating to mental health, learning and neurodevelopmental conditions and claims from younger adults.

2. Rising numbers of people claiming disability benefits has pushed costs up. Spending on working-age disability benefits has risen in real terms from £14 billion in 2019–20 to £25 billion in 2025–26. This, combined with rising spending on other health-related benefits, is the main reason that total benefit spending on working-age adults and children rose from 4.3% of GDP in 2019–20 to 4.7% of GDP in 2025–26 (from £127 billion to £148 billion in today’s prices). This puts total working-age benefit spending as a share of GDP around the level it was at in 2015–16. Working-age disability benefits now make up a much greater share of total benefit spending on working-age adults and children – 21% now, up from 11% in 2015–16. Official forecasts suggest working-age disability benefit spending will rise further to £34 billion in 2030–31 (1.0% of GDP and 26% of non-pensioner benefit spending).

3. PIP claimants are more likely to report struggling to afford essentials than both disabled people who do not claim PIP and non-disabled people. 51% of PIP claimants are in ‘material deprivation’ (meaning they report being unable to afford five or more basic essentials out of a list of 21 items), higher than the share of people with disabilities who do not claim PIP (33%) and much higher than the same figure for people without disabilities (15%). Those who claim PIP tend to have lower household incomes than those without disabilities, which explains part of the difference, but substantial gaps remain even when comparing households with the same incomes. One reason for this could be that people with disabilities have higher living costs. These gaps in material deprivation provide one rationale for benefits that provide additional income to people with disabilities.

4. PIP claimants are also more likely to report low life satisfaction than both disabled people who do not claim PIP and non-disabled people. 26% of PIP claimants report low levels of life satisfaction, compared with 16% of disabled people not claiming PIP and 4% of people without disabilities. Again, gaps remain when comparing people with similar levels of income. This could be driven by disabled people having higher living costs, or because of other impacts of having a disability on well-being. Another reason that governments may want to provide additional support to disabled people is to improve their well-being. If this is the government’s priority, it should look to provide the most cost-effective support to improve well-being for disabled people. This could be providing cash in some instances, but it also may be providing in-kind support such as therapy, which has been shown to improve well-being for people with mental health issues.

5. PIP currently gives the same amount of money to people with very different levels of assessed disability. PIP assessments assign ‘points’ to applicants, based upon the number and severity of difficulties they have with daily living activities and with mobility. To get the highest daily living component of PIP (currently worth £5,960 per year), claimants need to score 12 or more points. 53% of claimants reach this threshold, and 26% of claimants get 16 points or more and 5% get at least 31 points – yet these claimants all receive the same benefit amount. There is a case for tying support more closely to the degree of disability. If done using the current PIP assessment, this would particularly benefit younger claimants and claimants with learning disabilities or cerebral palsy, who are particularly likely to score a very high number of points.

6. Currently, assessors award PIP based on an assessment of the applicant’s difficulties doing certain tasks. One potential reform would be to also require specific medical diagnoses to qualify. This would introduce an extra, potentially more objective, check on the disability of the claimant. However, requiring any medical diagnosis would only have a modest impact on the number of people who are eligible because 85% of PIP claimants already report having a medical diagnosis and 69% report having multiple diagnoses for different conditions – and these figures would likely rise if PIP receipt required a diagnosis. Alternatively, the government could restrict PIP eligibility to just a subset of medical diagnoses, which would deliver bigger savings, at the cost of more people losing access to PIP. Making PIP conditional on medical diagnoses could remove some of the subjectivity of the current assessment, although medical diagnoses also often require some subjective judgement. It would also put additional costs on both applicants and the health system and may push more people to seek private diagnoses for health conditions.

7. Another commonly discussed option is for PIP to treat mental and physical health conditions differently, perhaps substantially reducing entitlements for the former. Administrative data show that 45% of existing PIP claimants have, when assessed, a mental health condition or a learning or neurodevelopmental condition listed as their main disabling condition. One way of restricting access to PIP for those with mental health conditions would be to require that claimants have a physical health diagnosis. This would significantly reduce the cost of PIP. However, these savings are both uncertain and likely far smaller than that 45% headline might suggest, for two reasons. First, two-thirds of claimants with a diagnosis for a mental health, learning or neurodevelopmental condition (irrespective of whether it is the ‘main’ condition) also report a physical health diagnosis. Second, more claimants would likely obtain a physical diagnosis if it was a requirement for PIP receipt. If the government wanted to make bigger savings, it could restrict access only to those with certain physical health diagnoses.

8. The government could reduce the generosity of the disability benefit system specifically for young people, perhaps if it considers any negative effects of receiving these benefits to be larger for those who have a whole working life ahead of them. There are 689,000 people under 30 who claim PIP (20% of the total working-age PIP caseload), accounting for £5.5 billion per year in spending. However, young PIP recipients are disproportionately likely to have the most severe disabilities; 12% of 16- to 19-year-old recipients receive at least 31 points in the PIP daily living assessment, compared with 5% among all PIP recipients. If policymakers wanted to keep providing PIP for young people with more severe disabilities (proxied as those who get the highest possible award) while removing it for others, the impact on the caseload and spending would fall to 327,000 and £2.2 billion respectively, before accounting for any behavioural responses.

9. One unusual feature of PIP relative to other benefits is that it is not means-tested, so high-income households can claim it. If the main goal of the benefit is to reduce inequalities arising from disability, there is a good case for keeping PIP as a non-means-tested benefit. Alternatively, if greater weight is placed on ensuring that disabled people can obtain a minimum standard of living, there is a stronger argument for means-testing PIP – something recently proposed by Reform UK, though the Timms Review has indicated it will recommend keeping PIP non-means-tested. Means-testing PIP, by integrating it into universal credit, would deliver a saving of £8.2 billion (33% of PIP spending) if claimant behaviour did not respond to the change. However, in reality, the saving will be somewhat smaller due to behavioural responses. In response to the change, more people would claim universal credit in order to keep their PIP, and fewer people would work as the reform would weaken work incentives.

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Podcast of the Week

Outpost Studios have released a podcast with Colin Brazier examining the legacy of the September 11th attacks, and how the West is still largely unwilling to confront the ideology behind the attacks.

OUTPOST

The Lie We Told Ourselves About 9/11

This week, Colin reflects on the lessons the West still hasn't learned 25 years since 9/11 - chief among them is an unwillingness to reckon honestly with Islamism, the ideology capable of driving educated, comfortable men to commit the unthinkable…

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a month ago · 106 likes · 16 comments · Outpost

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Labour planning to tax holiday homes.

Tom Watson, former Labour Deputy Leader gets new gig at Palantir.

Nato commander warns Burnham about Army training cuts.

Data centre demand behind manufacturing boom in Northern Ireland.

Towering Columns

In The Telegraph, Tom Harris warns that Burnham has put the Union in danger by linking border polls in Scotland and Northern Ireland together.

And if the GFA [Good Friday Agreement] is applicable to Scotland, why were Scots not informed of this before now? Why were Scottish trade unions and political parties not invited to take part in the construction of the GFA if the final document was to be used to shape any future constitutional agreement here as well as in Belfast?

Most egregiously, Burnham is likely only to have been informed of another crucial element of the GFA in the last 24 hours as his officials scurried around trying to limit the damage of their boss’s generosity to nationalism. It stipulates that once a border poll in Northern Ireland is held – and lost – then subsequent polls must be held every seven years until a positive decision is made by voters on both sides of the border in favour of a united Ireland. Is this another aspect of the GFA that Burnham reckons also applies to Scotland? Our reinvigorated nationalist friends will certainly hope so.

Whatever Sir Keir Starmer’s faults, he would never have made this scale of blunder when it came to the territorial integrity of the UK. He would have spent far longer reading the detail of the GFA and less time reading the lyrics sheet of his favourite Smiths album.

The future of the UK and Scotland’s democratically hard-won place in it is more important than any one political party’s future electoral fortunes.

For UnHerd, David Littlefair attacks the idea that the government’s new ‘Class Unit’ will address the real needs of working class people.

Will working-class voters buy into the idea that “social class” can be solved by being granted a protected diversity status? It’s not hard to wonder what someone like Ramsay MacDonald might think of such a measure; “class” was once the entire reason a Labour politician got out of bed in the morning.

But it speaks also to the mindset of the modern political class: that more unity can be created if more people can be given permission to be recognised as “in need” by their betters. The Labour of old knew that working-class people didn’t want this politics of pity: they wanted a politics of dignity. They built institutions, friendly societies, social insurance schemes, working men’s clubs and trade unions as a living demonstration of their ability to stand on their own feet, not reliant on other people to decide whether they can be given a leg up for the sake of meeting a quota.

Clearly, the working class of deindustrialised Britain will need to wait for anything that would mimic the gigantic leaps of change that Labour once provided: homes where there were once slums, work where there was once unemployment, an NHS where there was once sickness, a welfare state where there was once desperation. A New Jerusalem. In the meantime, the white working class can celebrate their induction into the world of DEI. One more flower in the bouquet.

Writing for Engelsberg Ideas, Michael Lucchese argues that conservatism needs to avoid AI slop and draw on a more serious literary culture.

The intellectual reaction against this liberal revolution was broad and multi-faceted, but underpinned by common principles. ‘In urging the need for a complete Conservative philosophy,’ Hadjiyiannis writes, the emerging conservative modernists ‘were hoping to rally Tories around philosophical principles that were as strong and cohesive as the ones that they found on the “Radical” side’. They believed that the chief conflict of their time was a battle of ideas, and their primary function as partisan intellectuals was to puncture the ideologies of the left. Approaching this task from a variety of backgrounds, they were all especially critical of the individualism and hopes for inexorable social progress they believed endemic to the liberalism remaking Britain. Conservative modernists, according to Hadjiyiannis, denounced such liberal notions as fallacies ‘based on an inaccurate interpretation of human nature and an erroneous understanding of history’. Instead, they hoped to reconstruct society around the authority of tradition and the objective morality of natural law…

In that sense, one of the most important lessons of the conservative modernists is the importance of responsibility and sacrifice. Hulme himself died in the trenches in 1917, and others in his cohort bore scars physical and spiritual that would never heal. While some came to question the wisdom of the war itself, all essentially affirmed the importance of fighting for the ideals they inherited. ‘The writings of the conservative modernists studied in this book repeatedly return to duty and sacrifice,’ Hadjiyiannis concludes. ‘Whether demanded of the writer, the reader, the ruler, or the citizen, all of the conservative modernisms we have investigated – distinct and contradictory as they may be – elevate duty and sacrifice to higher values required for the correct function of literature and society.’ Ultimately, what these men sought to conserve was a sense of objective morality.

It is perhaps these high aims that are missed most on the right today. Instead of defending high culture and seeking new ways to articulate old truths, the dominant populism of right and left alike plays into vulgarity and power politics. Anglo-American politics today cries out for something different, something better – and perhaps a party of renewal can take some inspiration from Hadjiyiannis’s conservative modernists.

In The Times, William Hague says that rebuilding state capacity is foundational to renewing conservatism and defeating the far-right.

A renewal of conservative thought should be inspired by its greatest thinkers and leaders. It should aim for a broad sharing of prosperity that would be applauded by Disraeli, an ideal of active citizenship consistent with Tocqueville, a commitment to future generations that would meet with the approval of Burke, an unflinching insistence on the unity of democracies that would be natural to Churchill, a faith in incentives and ownership that would be familiar to Thatcher and an optimism about technology and growth that could have been voiced by Reagan.

At the core of it should be the urgent need for a capable and effective state. Where the left think government should do more, and the populist, revolutionary right that it should command harder, the conservative answer should be that government should do fewer things but actually succeed at them. Housing is of critical importance. If we believe in families, fairness between generations and people enjoying a stake in the nation’s success, we must take the powers to ensure that new housing is available for a new generation to own.

Defence is a clear-cut issue, where left-wing leaders are failing, so far, to find the budgets, and populist leaders often see little value in alliances. The democratic control of immigration is essential and urgent. A conservative attitude insists on more effective restrictions and integration. But it embraces the talents of many immigrant families. It rejects ethnonationalism and the proposition that most domestic failures are caused by foreigners.

In Conservative Home, Peter Franklin says that Conservatives must put cutting spending ahead of offering tax cuts.

In 2004, Oliver Letwin (then Shadow Chancellor) opened a speech with the words “our green and pleasant land is in in the red“. I may, or may not, have had something to do with that line, but I do definitely remember that the big concern at the time was over household debt, not the national debt (which had yet to breach the £500 billion barrier).

Well, folks, we’re about to crash through the three trillion pound barrier (a trillion being a thousand billions). Is it any wonder, then, that the bond markets — who don’t owe anyone a living — are charging us a growing risk premium on our teetering debt-pile?

The money men are extra jittery because there’s no end in sight to Donald Trump’s war with Iran or to Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. For all the talk of fossil fuels being more reliable than clean energy, two of the bottlenecks through which the former must flow — the Strait of Hormuz and the Russian gas pipeline network have been choked-off — and a third, the Red Sea route, is under threat.

The oil and gas supply crunch threatens further waves of inflation, with knock-on consequences for the cost-of-living and government finances across the West. Even if the geopolitical omnicrisis subsides, the AI revolution will continue — together with its gargantuan appetite for debt. For governments, the age of unlimited credit is over.

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Wonky Thinking

New research by the Resolution Foundation, Second wind, has investigated whether the green energy transition is creating the economic growth and job opportunities that its advocates have claimed looking in depth at Aberdeen and Grimsby. The report has found:

We find that in both cases the reality is running behind the rhetoric. This is not for want of potential, or for a lack of policy initiatives. Instead, the Government’s largely ‘place-blind’ approach to net zero opportunity is too passive in its attempt to deliver jobs and growth. Looking ahead, a more hands-on approach is needed. In Aberdeen this means dealing with a sequencing problem that could see the oil workforce further disband before lower-carbon jobs materialise; and in Grimsby it means scaling up and concentrating green industries so that they form an anchor for the local economy.

Key summary

• Aberdeen’s oil-driven living standards boom has largely unwound following a collapse in prices around a decade ago. The earnings premium compared with the rest of the UK is down by three-quarters; payrolled employment has fallen by 8 per cent; and household incomes fell below the UK average in 2020 for the first time since 2003.

• The pattern of North Sea oil output driving higher employment in Aberdeen has broken, with periods in which production increased now seemingly associated with falling numbers of jobs. New green industries have failed to plug the gap. Indeed, a 2010 target of 28,000 offshore wind jobs in Scotland by 2020 was missed by 80 per cent.

• Grimsby plays an outsized role in operating Britain’s offshore wind fleet, and the electricity sector has delivered 78 per cent of growth in output in the area since 2018. But that has not delivered the transformative benefits of an ‘anchor’ industry, accounting for just 1 per cent of local jobs and 8 per cent of output.

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Podcast of the Week

On Quite Right! Francis Fukuyama analyses trends in conservative thought in America with Michael Gove. He argues that the American right abandoned traditional conservative ideas in favour of a hollow popularism that threatens to undermine the values it claims to believe in.

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Home office insider claims that only 1% of asylum requests are genuine.

UK domestic production has fallen by 0.5% over the past three months.

Tatler has created a ‘new Bayeux Tapestry’ for modern Britain.

The third largest taxpayer has left the UK to return to Greece.

The cost of building new transmission cables in the UK has doubled.

Towering Columns

In The Critic, Matthew Bowles argues that the expansion of home detention measures for convicts is a distraction from the issue of low prison capacity.

The downsides are obvious, and no one would choose to start from here. The long-term answer to our capacity crisis cannot be to discourage recalls. This risks undermining the whole premise of the licence system, which is that offenders live under the threat of renewed incarceration if they prove unworthy of the limited freedom afforded to them.

The only durable solution is increased prison capacity. The Government has pledged 14,000 new prison places across the prison estate by 2031, alongside more functioning electronic tagging and the faster deportation of foreign criminals. Innovative (or perhaps desperate) solutions are being put forward such as converting unused space, laundry rooms and storage space into cells, with Norris suggesting that this could create somewhere between (the admittedly large margin of) 200 and 900 extra spaces within prisons. But as a Prosperity Institute paper that is set to be released later this month by my colleague Alex Baker suggests, this is not nearly enough spaces, especially if non-custodial options continue to rest on the ultimate possibility of imprisonment for a breach in conditions. And by being content with laundry rooms, the Government is failing to think creatively enough about where additional short-to-medium-term capacity could be found.

Prison capacity will not be built overnight. We see constantly just how difficult it is for major infrastructure projects to get off the ground in Britain. Perhaps the French overcrowding method could be a short-fix. Maybe not. But whatever approach the Ministry of Justice choose, a prison sentence should mean something. Currently, the prisoners seem to be hearing all too often, “we would have kept you here longer, but unfortunately we ran out of cells.”

In The Telegraph, Tom Tugendhat argues Europe’s car industry is falling behind China’s EV dominance and needs urgent reform to remain competitive.

What Europe faces today is far more serious. There is a gap in systemic industrial competitiveness and current policies are not helping this situation.

Western workers once earned their higher wages by generating greater productivity. That difference has largely vanished now modern Chinese factories deploy the same or better robotics and automated machinery than their European counterparts. In a global market, carmakers cannot afford to pay European workers two to three times more per hour than employees doing comparable manufacturing jobs elsewhere.

Vehicles aren’t just another industry. They are the power train of the continent’s manufacturing sector, accounting for more than 6 per cent of EU employment, 7 per cent of GDP and the bulk of industrial research and trade surpluses. That engine is stalling as Chinese auto-makers are taking the oxygen of foreign export markets and even encroaching into the Europeans’ own showrooms.

In market after market, from the UK, where Chinese brands achieved a 19 per cent market share in early 2026, to the emerging economies across South East Asia and Latin America, European legacy firms are losing volume while European leaders are losing their way.

Writing for The Critic, Henry Hill argues that even increasing defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP may not be enough to fund Britain’s defence commitments.

This is the real lacuna in Badenoch’s defence pronouncement, viewed through the lens of actual defence policy. Her justification for the imperative of raising defence spending is a possible war with Russia. But a military geared towards war with Russia is a sort of military Britain has rarely maintained outside the exigencies of the World Wars: a large Army capable of meaningful operations in Eastern Europe, backed up by requisite armour and artillery, as well as all the unsexy logistical essentials such as the hundreds of railway cars needed to transport men and tanks to theatre at scale. (Britain’s last dedicated full-time railway formation, 79 Railway Squadron, was disbanded in 2012; rail capability was lost altogether when its successor, the Army Reserves 275 Railway Squadron, was disbanded in 2014.)

Personally, I think it’s dubious whether this country is actually prepared to maintain that sort of military, or to sustain the sort of casualties the US estimates would result from a high-intensity conventional conflict between peer militaries. But doing it properly on 3 per cent of GDP would also mean de-emphasising the Royal Navy and with it our ability to project force and police trade lanes, as well as confronting anew the choice between further attenuating the size of the fleet and abandoning expensive capabilities such as supercarriers and nuclear submarines.

Fortunately for the Conservatives, however, that isn’t the level on which the public debate on defence is conducted. The actual point of Badenoch’s announcement is to allow her to keep hammering the Government on the 3 per cent target, secure in the knowledge that the inevitable question (“Well, how would you do it?”) has something that at least looks like an answer. And this objective, at least, it attains.

In The Times, Tony Sewell argues for a more positive approach to thinking about Britain’s legacy in the Caribbean.

Charles needs to be bolder with these countries and make it clear that if they want to leave us then Britain holds no grudge. However, we don’t want to be framed as some kind of post-colonial power that is holding them down. In his after-dinner speech in Antigua he needs to highlight their national hero, the cricketer Sir Viv Richards. Remind Antiguans that our relationship is a complex one, where the legacy has helped Antigua in building such a great sporting leader.

Richards has always spoken with immense affection and loyalty about his time at Somerset County Cricket Club, where he played from 1974 to 1986. For him, Somerset was not just another county; it was a home away from home where he felt truly accepted and valued. Reflecting on his return to Taunton for special events and tributes, Richards has often stated that he considers his time there as the foundation of his professional life in England.

In his speech, Charles should stop being defensive and play a few Richards-style cover drives. This is not to disrespect the great people of Antigua but for once he could talk about how Britain was crucial in shaping Caribbean culture.

The King could refer to how he read the works of Rex Nettleford, CLR James, Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris. They all speak to the idea that the Caribbean is a mixture of the African rhythm and European melody. The process of creolisation recovered many aspects of African identity but what made it successful was the ability to produce a new version of culturally British people, set adrift in the Caribbean Sea.

Sam Ashworth-Hayes writes in The Telegraph about the true fiscal cost of the post-Covid Boriswave of migration.

Looked at from this angle, the scale of the Boriswave appears less like a way for the Treasury to bolster the economy, and more like an exercise in hidden borrowing. The benefits land in the five-year Office for Budget Responsibility forecast window, flattering the short-term outlook. The costs – healthcare, pensions, social care – arrive decades into the future, giving the Government breathing space against its fiscal targets.

In the long run, however, the country is left significantly poorer. On current projections, and unless something changes, roughly 1.6 million people in the Boriswave will be given Indefinite Leave to Remain. Add up their lifetime contributions through tax, and net out the amount they receive, and the total cost will spiral into the hundreds of billions.

Worse still, these numbers may actually be optimistic. Analysis from the Migration Advisory Committee has found that migrants on lower wages, and migrants from poorer countries, are more likely to stay in Britain than those in good jobs.

Frustratingly, these figures also show us that things could have been better: the top 30pc of skilled workers by earnings contribute over 70pc of the total fiscal benefit from that group. A genuinely selective system that let in a tiny fraction of the Boriswave would have given us all the benefits we were told existed with almost none of the downside. Rather than forking out hundreds of billions of pounds, we would have ended up with the ledgers in the black.

The good news is that it is not too late to undo our mistakes. The view of pro-migration activists in British politics appears to be that they only need to get lucky once: change the facts on the ground, and the debate is changed. Once a group of migrants makes its way into Britain, all subsequent focus is on whether to admit the next group, not whether the previous wave should be undone. This is an assumption we can no longer afford.

In The Times, James Kirkup argues that the hyper-localisation of politics has led Members of Parliament to neglect wider national governance.

Is there a connection between MPs more assiduously tending to their growing mailbags and a seeming disconnection from the wider public? The risk of spending so much time on casework is that it activates the normal human heuristic of anchoring. Our perceptions are always coloured by our recent experience. If you spend your day talking to people who hate cats, you’ll be more likely to think that Britain is a nation of cat-haters. And if your working week is heavy with people angry about their energy bills, you might underestimate public willingness to pay more to address climate change.

Privately, some Labour people fret that their MPs’ focus on caseloads in which benefits claimants are over-represented makes it harder for them to see the welfare system, and its costs, in the wider national context. Last year, just as Labour MPs were voting against welfare reform, the British Social Attitudes poll — the gold standard of public opinion — was reporting that public willingness to pay to fund welfare payments was at an all-time low.

The mailbag can fuel confirmation bias, too. In the words of Kowol and Toye in the Historical Journal: “The sifting process was useful because it helped MPs find real voter opinions they could cite in public — often in support of views that they already held.”

No column about the role of MPs is complete without the obligatory quote from Edmund Burke and his address to the electors of Bristol, which established the largely imaginary ideal of parliamentarians as Athenian guardians, loftily weighing the national interest without regard for local trivia. We should be pleased that MPs give such good service to their constituents, but also hope that that they pay heed to an updated form of Burke’s wisdom: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your email demanding help with your planning application for your kitchen extension or your application for PIP.”

Writing for The Telegraph, Andrew Sabisky makes the case that the effects of Net Zero on Britain’s economy will be felt for a long time - even if it gets scrapped.

On the electricity front things are no better. Never have policymakers remained so resolutely committed to ensuring maximum pain for their people. Germany’s nuclear plants remain shut. Britain remains firmly wedded to such an expansive grid upgrade that, even in a world where wholesale power prices went to zero, fixed costs will be so high that consumer costs would not even budge. The costs of the high-voltage transmission network alone are, in current prices, set to rise from £3.4bn in 2013 to a forecast £12.3bn in 2030.

Of course, policymakers will argue they have no choice: having subsidised the construction of so many offshore wind farms in remote locations via the lavish Renewables Obligation and Contracts for Difference schemes, their only apparent choice is between paying exorbitant constraint costs or paying for the grid to expand to connect these farms to the regions where most of us live.

Once again, this Morton’s Fork is downstream of yet another policy failure: consumers should never have been on the hook for wind-farm curtailment when they were already paying subsidies for construction and generation and, of course, the ongoing maintenance of the transmission and distribution networks.

The mess is so total and complete that it would be advisable for future British Right-wing governments, despite their commitment to saner energy policies, not to promise any major immediate consumer relief on energy bills. Fixing this will take decades. Britain, like much of Europe, has got itself in such a horrible mess that there is simply no easy way out.

In Spiked, Maurice Cousins analyses the links between Britain’s energy and defence policies.

For people living in Britain and Europe, this should be deeply concerning. If the United States, the so-called arsenal of democracy, is already struggling to replenish critical munitions while confronting lesser adversaries like Iran, then the implications for a prolonged conflict with a peer competitor like China should be blindingly obvious.

The problem is even more acute in Europe. Unlike the United States, we enter this period of renewed great-power competition with some of the highest energy prices in the developed world and a much-diminished industrial base. Decades of poor policymaking have hollowed out foundational sectors such as virgin steel, chemicals and refining, all of which provide essential inputs into sustained military operations in is a good example. There is a tendency among politicians and in the media to treat refinery closures as manageable because cars can be electrified and planes can eventually use sustainable aviation fuel. But military demand is very different. F-35s, tanks, ships and logistics fleets still depend overwhelmingly on conventional fuels. Domestic refining capacity cannot easily be substituted in a crisis.

As Dev Sanyal, chief executive of VaroPreem, whose refineries supply a tenth of Europe’s road fuels, told the Financial Times last week: ‘The reality is when you start thinking about F-35 jets and Leopard tanks they don’t run on hydrogen, they run on conventional energy.’ It is a similar argument to the one I made in the Telegraph in April.

Unfortunately, the national conversation about rearmament is still framed far too narrowly around defence budgets, procurement and headline spending commitments. Those things are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Rearmament ultimately requires reindustrialisation. For Britain and Europe, that means confronting the policies driving structurally high energy prices – in particular, the climate agenda that is eroding the competitiveness of energy-intensive industry.

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Wonky Thinking

This week, Policy Exchange published “The Special Air Service in Northern Ireland”, which analyses SAS involvement in Operation Banner in Northern Ireland and how its operations were scrutinised at the time.

The British Armed Forces were deployed in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 2007 in response to the Northern Ireland Troubles. This deployment – Operation Banner – was the longest continuous deployment in British military history. Between 1976 and the end of Operation Banner in 2007, the Special Air Service (SAS) was deployed in Northern Ireland in aid of the civil power, under strict rules of engagement, and primarily against the Provisional IRA, a well-armed and lethal terrorist organisation that was responsible for the majority of terrorist incidents throughout the conflict. Drawing on original interviews with over a dozen SAS veterans – the first account of its kind – this paper shows the important contribution the unit made to Operation Banner by degrading the IRA’s capacity to kill, restoring order in areas where the IRA had operated with near-impunity, and helping convince the republican movement that armed violence could not succeed.

Yet those who served in the SAS in Northern Ireland, and other veterans too, now face renewed investigation, inquest, and possible prosecution in their old age. This is profoundly unjust to them, as well as damaging to the morale and future capability of special forces now. This paper explains how and why it has come to this and what should now be done about it. The central problem is that the UK Government has uncritically accepted the authority of an ill-conceived body of judge-made human rights law. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (the Strasbourg Court) has misread Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), a misreading which has then been applied retroactively to the conduct of the SAS, and others, decades earlier. While this approach to the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles should be firmly rejected, it is alas an approach that is set to be entrenched by the Government’s new Northern Ireland Troubles Bill.

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Podcast of the Week

On the New Statesman podcast, Anoosh Chakelian is joined by Ailbhe Rea and Tom McTague to discuss Andy Burnham’s first Prime Minister’s Questions and how he fared against Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch.

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Quick Links

Javier Milei threatens Britain with sanctions on Falklands oil fields.

PM to approve new gasfield in North Sea.

Met Police Chief claims criminals are being let loose on streets.

China influencing data centre debate in US.

Towering Columns

In The Telegraph, Daniel Hannan says that Donald Trump’s erratic economic and foreign policies are undermining global conservatism.

Trump is single-handedly destroying global conservatism. The parties that have traditionally been pro-American are tainted by association, however much they distance themselves from him personally.

The most extreme example was Canada where, prior to his annexation threats, the Conservatives were 20 per cent ahead in the polls. Then came the demands that Canada become a US state, demands backed by trade sanctions. Trump apologists sometimes suggest that the whole “51st state” shtick is just a bit of banter, but that is not how it was or is seen by our Canadian allies. Trump tore up the USMCA trade deal – the deal he had insisted on negotiating to put in the place of NAFTA, the deal he had hailed as “the fairest, most balanced and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law” – in order to apply tariffs to Canadian exports.

The impact on Canada’s Tories, the pro-American party, the party that had decried Pierre Trudeau’s shameful flirtation with Cuba, was catastrophic. It did not matter that their leader, the outstanding Pierre Poilievre, was proposing a more rational response to the threat, namely energy abundance and economic resilience. A people under siege do not think rationally. They draw together against the aggressor. They rally to the incumbent.

For The Times, James Kanagasooriam analyses how the Democrats and Republicans are converging on a left-populism that attacks economic and political elites.

How did American politics end up in an arms race towards left-flavoured economic populism? I think it’s because the key question is increasingly about where power lies. There’s a growing consensus that America is governed by a tight web of coastal elites drawn from finance and tech, and voters don’t like it.

Nothing symbolises this mistrust better than the revelations around Jeffrey Epstein, succour to populist claims that America is run by those who don’t have its best interests at heart. Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator for Georgia, has talked of the “Epstein class”. When we polled this loaded term with the definition of “a ruling class for the ultra-rich who play by a different set of rules”, 49 per cent of Americans thought the term and the description fair versus 28 per cent who thought not. All voter groups except hardcore Republicans showed similar levels of agreement. So it’s no surprise that Ossoff is edging up in polling for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The other angle of elite mistrust is growing scepticism about AI companies, their founders and the vast temples they are erecting — data centres. All have suffered a reputational backlash in the past couple of years, akin to the way banks were tarnished by the financial crisis. Voters obviously worry about bread-and-butter matters too. Our latest polling puts net approval of the Trump administration’s handling of inflation at minus 47 per cent. The maverick economist Marvin Barth, whose career stretches from onetime Alaskan fisherman to the Federal Reserve and US Treasury, thinks these two factors are intertwined, arguing that the Epstein revelations have worsened the perceptions of inflation among Republican voters.

In UnHerd, Jonny Ball warns against those who think that they can simply ‘Chinamaxx’ the country through copying its technocratic authoritarianism.

Besides, if Stalin’s despotism was incomparably more brutal than contemporary China, the latter’s naked authoritarianism is eclipsed in the minds of many by the dazzling growth rates, the TikTok-promoted public infrastructure, all a mirror-image of Western decline and crumbling prestige. What’s more, it’s all delivered by a Politburo of staid, practical Marxist engineers, themselves about as distinct from the average Western Leftist in habitus, manner and thought-pattern as is possible to imagine. The weed-smoking children of the provincial bourgeoisie may have chanted “Mao! Mao! Mao Tse-Tung!” back in the Sixties. But China is now a model not for ultra-Left utopianism, but for its technocratic, pragmatic refinement of a state-managed market system.

When the Left held the reins of authority within the Labour Party during the Corbyn-era proper — between 2015 and 2019 — explicit political alignment with “socialism with Chinese characteristics” might have been tempered by widespread concerns over the plight of the Uyghurs. That particular issue seems to have abated as an international concern. The Left’s enthusiasm for the Chinese model might also have been dampened by the status of the rising giant as the workshop of the capitalist world, a giant FDI magnet producing iPhone headsets for an insatiable Western consumer market. But China has changed and so has our unsteady geopolitical era. The CCP’s “Made In China 2025” plan, initiated in 2015, fired the starting gun on a decade of overhaul for the manufacturing sector. Since then, the country has shifted from producing Western-designed goods in low-waged, low-productivity factories to promoting domestic innovation and industrial automation in high-growth, high-tech sectors. What’s more, the mask of American global power has been removed: with Trump in the White House, Washington’s empire, it’s finally clear, sustains itself not for the spread of democracy, human rights or individual liberty, but for the protection of its own extractive rights. Given all this, the old, neat categorisation of a benign Western hegemon versus a malign “revisionist power” in Beijing becomes far harder to rationalise.

But the case against Chinamaxxing doesn’t depend on any of this. China’s successes are very real, but they are not directly replicable across all of time and space. Jacques was right that China would develop sui generis, but the conditions that made that development possible were sui generis, too: a vast supply of surplus rural labour; a young, growing population; an open American consumer market; and a steady process of globalisation driving inward investment. There may be lessons for how the CCP has managed that particular historical moment, but not for how to manage a medium-sized, open market economy that is dependent on services, with a centuries-long tradition of liberal individualism, an anarchic political culture, entrenched property rights, and habeas corpus.

For The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh writes that Trump’s war in Iran has destroyed the idea that the MAGA movement has a grand global strategy.

In fact, Asian democracies, even those with which the US has mutual-defence treaties, are left in constant doubt about his commitment to them. Last week, Trump asked the Pentagon to cut short a series of military drills with South Korea. The reason for this snub, which will have emboldened China and the communist part of the peninsula? “My very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea”. Thus spake the Metternich of South Ocean Boulevard.

There is no through-line here, no grand plan. Trump doesn’t stint Ukraine in order to free up resources for the Indo-Pacific. He stints Ukraine because he feels like it. He acts out of personal chemistry, commercial self-interest, a few life-long beliefs and, yes, strategy. The last of these elements just tends to be overstated in the mix. (Though not by himself. The last person to go on about a Trump geostrategy is Trump, who is candid about his personal approach.)

So who is left of the Trumpsplainers? Who, even after Iran, squints to see order in the bedlam? There is Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, whose rationalisation of his boss’s random doings is creative, as a man who is always spotting faces in clouds is creative. For example, what Asian democracies regard as on-off US support Colby describes as “flexible realism”, which is the kind of think-tank jargon that could cover any conceivable policy at all. But he is staff. Staff have to abase themselves. The question is how people with no career at stake — Trumpsplainers are often in finance and tech — came to see Trump as someone of underrated strategic genius.

In The American Conservative, Fred de Fossard argues that the country’s open door migration policies have been bad for both Britain and migrants.

The campaigners for permanent settlement have highlighted the poor working conditions in the care sector. Indeed, the visa is so badly designed that many people moved to Britain to work in care homes that did not exist. Evidently, exploitation in this route exists, and the Guardian provided examples of workers living in sheds, feeling like indentured servants to exploitative employers. But even those workers seem to be far keener on achieving permanent settlement instead of returning home.

This points to a fundamental truth about modern migration from the Third World to rich countries, which puts questions around post-colonial resentment, welfare tourism and overall fiscal contributions in the shade. Life, living standards, and opportunity are simply so much better in Western countries than in the developing world. Even a life of borderline destitution in the UK provides someone with more opportunity in countries like India or Nigeria—the two largest sources of legal migration in recent years—and the ease of international travel has made this a much more attainable prospect for people the world over.

Just because migration offers the individual migrant opportunity for a better life does not mean that the people of the target country have any obligation to provide it. A migration policy based on the notion that immigration is a form of reparation for colonialism is not a recipe for a happy or prosperous society. Milton Friedman was correct that welfare states and open borders cannot coexist, but one should go further and state explicitly that Britain’s immigration policy must operate to the benefit of the British people. Any grants of citizenship should be made on the basis of a migrant’s proven potential contribution to the country and likelihood of assimilation to the British way of life and wider British family. A nation clearer about its intent and interest in the welfare of the British people above all would ultimately attract fewer people intending on exploiting its welfare state and, conversely, likely become more appealing to those who might wish to play a real and positive part in Britain’s future story.

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Wonky Thinking

Last week, Onward published “Firm Foundations: The case for cheap and reliable power”, the latest in its series of papers on reforming the country’s energy system and bringing the costs of energy down. The report lays out the business case for shifting away from a reliance on renewables to building the energy system around nuclear and gas.

Onward have commissioned an independent study to quantify the full system costs of continuing with the current policy direction, versus cost savings that can be achieved by taking a new approach. It models a power system that prioritises firm generation capacity, responding to demand, rather than forcing consumers to react to the vagaries of the British weather. This plan includes a diversified mix of nuclear, renewables and gas generation, which builds a much cheaper power system that can be used to electrify and decarbonise more of the economy.

The savings are substantial. The alternative policy pathway saves £320 billion between 2030 and 2050, and reduces system costs by 20% in 2040 versus “business as usual”. Savings are made across four major areas:

• £137 billion in network spending, thanks to a higher utilisation firm power system with supply located closer to demand

• £94 billion from lower wholesale prices, thanks to the removal of carbon taxes

• £67 billion in lower spend on balancing and ancillary services

• £22 billion across generation subsidies and the Capacity Market

Realising savings of this scale requires a shift away from the current central planning model, to a system that allocates the costs of intermittent generation to the causative generators, rather than sending a bill to the end consumer. This paper sets out an alternative policy pathway, to build a power system that allows consumers to access affordable electricity when they need it, cutting bills and increasing economic growth. In turn, cheap electricity can drive the adoption of electric vehicles and heat pumps, via consumer preference, and not state mandates. This is a win-win, for growth and the climate.

On Substack, Neil O’Brien digs into new IFS data on graduate earnings and finds that nearly a third of graduates are experiencing negative returns (36% for men, 25% for women), with earnings after graduating closely linked to prior attainment at GCSE and A-Level, calling further into question the policy of mass expansion of higher education.

The series of papers on graduate returns which the IFS have produced are superb - and hats off to them for their work. The finding that university was not worth it from an economic point of view for nearly a third of 2007 graduates is very striking. It should lead to a change in policy. In fact, it has already influenced the Conservative pledge to re-introduce number controls on higher education, and use the savings to fund more high quality apprenticeships and the abolition of of real interest rates on Plan 2 student loans.

But there are good reasons to think this may be an underestimate of the problem. The graduate premium had continued to decline since 2007, and as the IFS turn to later cohorts, they will need to figure out what to do with people with lower prior attainment who are now going to university. We can see that some of the apparent earnings premium is not higher hourly productivity, but more hours being worked - and that female graduates are more likely to be working more hours due to lower/later childbearing.

The further dramatic expansion of mass higher education in the 2010s was justified by analysis of average graduate earnings premiums which now look very crude and misleading. As the analysis gets better we see more nuance - but overall, the picture is looking worse and worse.

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Podcast of the Week

On The Ezra Klein Show, Klein talks with Brad Setser about the second ‘China Shock’. The first shock was caused by a massive expansion of Chinese industrial output in low-value areas of global manufacturing. The second shock is the emergence of China as a manufacturer at the technology frontier and pushing Western economies out of production in the key industries of the future.

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Quick Links

43% of Britons now say that migration has been mostly bad for the country, up ten points in ten years.

Nearly twice as many adults back building new homes where they live than oppose it.

Dodgy care homes were allowed to issue 100,000 migrant work visas.

1,800 people in Japan moved a 360 tonnes castle.

Investors sold off assets in record numbers ahead of Labour’s planned tax rises last year.

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcast of the Week

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

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Quick Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcast of the Week

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

OUTPOST

Can the Tories be saved?

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

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2 months ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · Outpost and Michael Murphy

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

Conservatives to end social housing provision for foreigners.

Trump turns to executive orders to limit birthright citizenship.

NHS downplays concerns over rise of cousin marriage in Britain.

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcast of the Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcast of the Week

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

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

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

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

Communist China attacks the government for nationalising British Steel.

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

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

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

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Addicting’ algorithms prompt EU to threaten action against Meta

Police released Algerian found guilty of attempted rape

Bank of England warn interest rates may rise

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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Podcast of the Week

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

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

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

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

House prices have fallen again in June.

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

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

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcast of the Week

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

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Quick Links

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

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

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

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

Shabana Mahmood to introduce Ukrainian-style refugee sponsorship scheme.

Iran strikes by US resume after cargo ship attack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcast of the Week

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

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Quick Links

Train collision between Bedford and Luton causes dozens of casualties.

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

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

Moscow oil refinery hit during Ukrainian drone attack.

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcast of the Week

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

Generative Futures

David Edgerton on Historical Analogies, Technology, and AI

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

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

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Quick Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcast of the Week

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

OUTPOST

The Generation Delusion (Full episode)

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

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5 months ago · 3 likes · Outpost

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Quick Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towering Columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wonky Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Small-c conservative common-sense.

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

• Restoring authority to elected politicians.

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

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

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

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

2. Market-friendly, national social democracy.

• A national business preference in public procurement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcasts of the Week

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

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Quick Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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