A Britain That Builds
Remaking the nation is a civilisational challenge that demands imagination
Towering Columns
For The Telegraph, Robert Tombs takes a tour through English history to help define what makes English national identity.
England is one of the oldest continuous nations, arguably the prototype of the nation-state, defined by common institutions and broad participation in government – for example, by jury service, local office-holding and legal rights. Given its size and social mobility, its identity was a diverse one: Cornishmen were not the same as Londoners or Yorkshiremen, and yet they all recognised themselves as English. Englishness meant loyalty to a common monarch and a common Church, with Parliament and the common law as important national symbols. England ceased to be a nation-state in 1707, but it retained a sense of cultural identity and remained predominant within the Union.
These general observations might suggest a long period of fundamental continuity. Nevertheless, in other ways, English society, beliefs and manners changed profoundly and repeatedly. A 15th-century Englishman or woman would have struggled to accept post-Reformation society – some chose exile, ruin or death. Oliver Cromwell and Charles I would have been astounded and horrified by George III’s England, with its drinking, sexual libertinism and intellectual freedom. Samuel Johnson would have found the noisy, teeming, smoke-filled England of Dickens a nightmare. William Gladstone could not have comprehended Tony Blair’s Britain, with its religious indifference, lack of deference, permissive morality and intellectual frivolity…
…Always old and always new, England is – to paraphrase Roger Scruton, the philosopher – founded on a sense of place and a sense of belonging. I have argued before that we have a pressing interest and duty to incorporate those who have permanently settled here or who are born here of foreign parents. Many believe this is impossible. If they are right, we are in serious trouble. But I do not believe they are right, and in any case, counsels of despair are guaranteed to realise the worst predictions. We must act with what we have. But to succeed, we must end uncontrolled immigration and require integration as other countries – for example, Denmark – have begun to do.
At UnHerd, Louis Elton reflects on how the growth of government hubs has flowed from the embrace of progressive values by the technocratic elite.
As N.S. Lyons observes, before 1945 nations were moored in soil, faith, and kin — what Karl Popper derided as the “closed society”. After the catastrophe, those bonds began to be seen as a gateway to fascism. Theodor Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality” diagnosed loyalty to family or nation as pathology. Popper went further, branding the national community itself “anti-humanitarian propaganda”. The postwar settlement determined that the “strong gods” of belonging and faith were to be dismantled, replaced with the “weak gods” of openness, tolerance, doubt, and consumer comfort. This cultural transformation set the stage for the rise of the hub…
…But Brexit was a devastating blow. In search of sovereignty and border control, the spirit of the closed society returned. Voters had rejected the hub ideology of frictionless integration. In the years that followed, successive Tory Prime Ministers attempted to invoke “strong god” rhetoric. Theresa May scorned “citizens of nowhere”; the Rwanda policy aimed to shatter the postwar consensus. However, in practice things were different. The open society continued to prosper through none other than the hub. Theresa May doubled down on tech hubs. Boris Johnson followed with green energy, nuclear fusion, and hydrogen. Rishi Sunak sought to establish the UK as a global centre for AI safety and launched the Quantum Computing Innovation Hub.
This tension reveals a burning psychodrama at the heart of the British state’s self-conception. It wants to be a high-tech superpower without the pain of rebuilding its Victorian bureaucracy. It wants to make cuts to state services while sounding friendly and benign. And it wants to project global openness while addressing the concerns of an increasingly reactionary electorate. Rather than confront these paradoxes, Britain reaches for the soothing Potemkin policy of the hub. Time and again, leaders choose cuddly vagueness over the hard work of politics.
For The Telegraph, Rian Chad Whitton argues British steel has months left to live after decades of poor decision-making on energy and industrial policy.
Besides energy costs, steel and other sectors are being hammered by global overproduction, with Chinese state-owned enterprises and other Asian countries being the main culprits. While about 1.8 billion tonnes of steel is produced annually, current plants have a capacity of 2.4 billion tonnes, meaning 600 million tonnes of excess steel capacity. For context, in 2024, Britain’s steel output dropped 30 per cent from 2023 to just 4 million tonnes. Essentially, due to insufficient local demand, East Asian steel producers are dumping their goods on Western countries, who are in turn trying to export what they can to the most uncompetitive steel manufacturing locations, such as Britain. Combine this with the least competitive prices in the world, and it’s obvious why steelmaking can only survive for the foreseeable future as a government entity.
So why bother? Why not just import primary steel or finished products? Of course, there is the fact that 50,000 work in the basic metal making business, and are generally located in the North and Midlands, areas where if they go, there are not better paying jobs elsewhere. There are only so many government departments that can be moved out of London to compensate for deindustrialisation. Besides the immediate impact of lost jobs, there are hundreds of secondary steel manufacturers who rely on the large primary steel sites for orders. For example, while British Steel Scunthorpe produces millions of tonnes per year, it makes around 10,000 tonnes of high-purity billet iron, which is used to make high-end alloys for military equipment. Sheffield Forgemasters, nationalised in 2021, is a key supplier of components to the military.
Ultimately, the steel sector’s sorry state is down to choices made decades ago. Our leaders were simultaneously optimistic about net zero being good for growth and cavalier about one or two plants going under. Now, the political penalty for letting the whole steel industry go under is unbearable, and we are twisting ourselves into a pretzel trying to insulate producers from our exceptional energy costs.
On The Greater London Project’s Substack, Alexander Fitzgerald discusses his experience of founding a factory in the nation’s capital.
We have all the fundamentals to be successful at manufacturing here in the UK. A huge head start in critical industries such as defence and aerospace. A globally competitive software engineering market. Great universities. Formula 1. The materials are all there. Now we just need to process them in the right way, and Isembard is how we want to bring those together.
I see us as building the AWS (Amazon Web Services) of critical industry manufacturing. In the old world, before AWS, companies used to have to run their own servers. That was incredibly inefficient. Centralising compute capacity in datacentres, allowing customers to draw down on what they need when they need it, has revolutionised software. Manufacturing today is in that same state - it’s decentralised, a sector made up of lots and lots of small machine shops. It makes sense to centralise manufacturing capacity. That is what we are building across the country. Factories which can be used directly by customers, with automated pipelines to get the products they need…
…The problem is largely due to three things. Ambition, talent and success. For ambitious people you need ambitious companies to join. But companies targeting an increase in earrings per share of 20 basis points a quarter is not ambitious, or worthwhile calling for the best and the brightest. Colonising the moon is. Second, the greatest talent moves to the greatest problems and finds other talent to work with. There is a change going on. The most talented people are choosing quests with more worthwhile aims than their predecessors did. And finally, success. There’s no point being ambitious without actually achieving anything.
For The Times, Daniel Finkelstein believes Labour’s rush to raise taxes represents a major breach of its election promises that will not be forgotten.
Labour ran for office saying repeatedly that their plans were “about prosperity, not higher taxes”. At its manifesto launch Angela Rayner announced that “we can’t tax our way to growth” and was followed by Richard Walker, the executive chair of Iceland, who announced that he had switched to Labour because they were now the friend of business. To which Rachel Reeves added that “we don’t have a tax-and-spend manifesto. We have a growth plan.”…
…The tax and spending position of the country was completely obvious last summer. Ruling out tax rises meant staying on the course the Tories were on. To do that in any serious way, it would be necessary to reduce what the state does. Eventually Labour’s growth plan (whatever that is) might arrive to save the day, but until then there would be tough spending settlements. Given the scope of this country’s public service commitments and the pressures of demographic change, staying on this course required welfare reform.
So Starmer’s position on CGT and other taxes was, in effect, a commitment to welfare reform. Ideally one sufficient to allow a reduction in the tax burden on businesses in order to assist the growth plan. Had Labour acknowledged that its internal politics made it impossible to do this, even with a landslide, I do not believe that they would have won that landslide. So as we talk about the tax-raising budget to come we should not think of it as inevitable. It would be a gross breach of promise. It was what Labour were elected not to do, what they told us all that they would not do.
On their Substack, Boom analyses the impact of no-kids zones on fertility rates and family life in South Korea.
South Korea, the lowest birth rate country in the world, is facing depopulation. The government is spending significant sums of money on child subsidies in an attempt to make it easier for citizens to become parents. But in South Korea…children are a very small constituency. The share of the population that is aged under 14 is declining, and the share of those in middle age is increasing. Many of the people in that age group do not have children, aren’t sure if they want them, and may like the idea of eating cheesecake without any wailing toddlers nearby. For all the criticism that some businesses get online, 61.9% of South Koreans said they support No-Kids Zones in 2023.
No-Kids Zones should be understood as an outcome of South Korea’s ultra-low birth rates. They are a clear signal of the fact that the preferences of parents and children matter less as there are fewer and fewer of them, even as South Korean policymakers strain to make it easier to have children. No-Kids Zones are probably now a minor contributing factor to South Korea’s low birth rates in two ways.
First, they mean that South Koreans are less likely to see young families in their daily lives. That risks making the prospect of having a family of one’s own feel remote. As we covered in The Baby Meme, there is a social aspect to fertility. By seeing other people’s children and understanding how parenthood fits into their lives, we are inspired to think about whether it might fit into ours. Second, No Kids-Zones raise the cost of parenthood. A young South Korean man or woman is aware that there are many restaurants and cafés, perhaps places they currently enjoy, that they will rarely be able to go to for many years if they do indeed become parents.
Wonky Thinking
Onward has published Statejacket by Caroline Elsom. The report details the extent of Britain’s fiscal crisis at the national and local levels, and examines how state functions can be delivered differently and more effectively.
The growing headline figures for individual departments masks the reality that the ministers are not directly in control of this spending. A convenient way to get around a political problem is for ministers to put distance between themselves and the final decision. Creating an arms-length body brings some protection for ministers by replacing their direct decisions with process. Re:State’s (formerly Reform think tank) recent report, Quangocracy, sets out the series of “wrong” reasons that mean ministers are strongly incentivised to set up ever more bodies to take on difficult or “stuck” challenges, especially after a crisis.
The result is that over 60% of day-to-day spending now happens through arms-length bodies. Promises of a “bonfire of the quangos” or the Prime Minister’s new pledge to trim down the “flabby” state are easy rhetoric, but difficult in practice. In the last decade alone, the number of central government public bodies has increased from 474 to 603 (excluding those in the devolved nations). In its first six months in office, the new Labour Government had announced plans to create 18 new quangos…
…Unchecked quangos can end up operating as stakeholders themselves, employing public affairs teams to lobby the government for expensive, unrealistic or interest-driven policies. This leads to nonsensical situations like two separate quangos each using taxpayers’ money to argue with each other, rather than the Government taking a unified position on the policy trade-off at hand. For example, the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board advocates for expanding Britain’s meat and dairy industry while the Climate Change Committee recommends a radical reduction in meat and dairy consumption to meet net zero by 2050.
The Office for the Pay Review Bodies – a quango – sets the parameters for a £100 billion public sector pay bill. Pay review bodies are notionally independent panels set up with the intention of providing the government with advice on how much to pay public sector workers. However, several of the pay review bodies have terms of reference that neither include a responsibility for setting pay in a way that improves public services nor in a way that is broadly comparable to pay in similar jobs. The value of pay review bodies as a useful arbiter between government and the unions has therefore been steadily eroded by the government having to repeatedly override unaffordable recommendations, fuelling deep distrust of the process by politicised unions.
The state has engineered a system whereby ministers end up in public fights with the very bodies that were meant to solve a difficult issue on their behalf. While setting up a quango may send a helpful signal about “taking the politics out” of a serious issue, rationalising their number or their functions then comes at immense political expense. But the long term cost of not taking control of the decisions that attract such a large portion of government spending is even greater. And ministers will still face the blame for bad decisions quangos make along the way while the bodies claim the credit for any improvement.
The Niskanen Center has published Varieties of Abundance by Steve Teles. The paper provides a breakdown of the different ideological factions in the United States that are focused on technological progress, supply-side reform, and state capacity.
How can Abundance be one thing, but also many? At its base, Abundance is best understood as having one central aspiration that requires tackling two interlocking challenges. The aspiration is to escape from a political economy defined by artificial scarcity, to create a world in which we solve problems primarily by unlocking supply. This vision is not inherently hostile to redistribution—my version certainly is not, and in fact, I think a strong system of social insurance is essential to an abundant future. But what makes it Abundance is an obsession with reducing zero-sum conflicts by creating more—more energy, more housing, more high-quality schools, more scientific discovery, more world-leading firms, and more, cheaper healthcare. Abundance seeks to create a surplus rather than divvy up a shrinking pie.
How do you get that bigger pie? All varieties of Abundance believe the path goes through two chief obstacles. The first is the problem of asymmetric power between concentrated incumbent interests and diffuse challengers. Yesterday’s winners, whether they are homeowners seeking to block new housing or doctors using licensing to prevent competition, have a strong incentive to organize to obstruct new entrants by gaming the rules to their advantage. When enough of these interests have captured the laws that govern the economy, the consequence is the seeming paradox of slowing growth and increasing inequality.
Abundance advocates seek to intervene in this toxic cycle of economic decline by changing the rules to favor market entrants over incumbents, to empower builders, whether public or private, over blockers. They also try to create new forms of participation that mobilize those who would benefit from a societal surplus. In doing so, they take inspiration from the YIMBY movement, which cracked what seemed like an impossible collective action problem by organizing those in favor of new housing over the NIMBY interests that social scientists were certain would always dominate politics.
The second challenge Abundance advocates agree on is helping the government regain its ability to manage complex tasks competently and decisively. This problem of diminished “state capacity” is both a cause and an effect of the power asymmetries identified above. Government tends to be captured by concentrated interests that weaken its ability to act in the public interest, and a feckless government encourages the accumulation of such interests. Critically, capture can occur from the outside as well as the inside: Bureaucrats can act as a concentrated interest obstructing the common weal. Abundance thus views government from the point of view of the consumers of its services, rather than through the interests of its producers. It is not anti-statist, but it draws its emotional energy from the various ways government fails to deliver for precisely those citizens who most need high-quality public services, and who most benefit from an economy that is constantly delivering more innovation and opportunity.
State capacity may mean more civil servants with higher status and pay. It might mean fewer, complemented more effectively by technology and increased authority. But it always means a state that has developed the routines, reputations, and organizational culture that allow it to do complex things, to coordinate challenging tasks quickly and effectively. All versions of abundance recognize the need to “deregulate government,” by giving agencies the discretion to use expert judgment rather than trying to control them through procedural constraints.
The counterintuitive insight that unites Abundants is that to achieve big goals, bureaucracy requires fewer procedural constraints. An effective state requires a certain level of bureaucratic autonomy, which is the space that state actors have to create capacities and organizational culture, and perpetuate them over time to generate performance-based authority. Rather than constraining states through a morass of procedure, abundance advocates typically seek to authorize it through the regular, predictable achievement of results. Rather than being captured by government’s own labor force, state capacity requires an ability to create a high level of esprit de corps and a ruthless focus on effectiveness. This model still leaves bureaucracy vulnerable to capture by internal or external forces—but a needlessly procedural approach virtually guarantees it.
To a greater or lesser degree, all forms of abundance aspire to attenuating zero-sum conflict by fighting rent-seeking and building state capacity, creating a state that responds creatively and effectively to broad public goals rather than concentrated interests. But that leaves an enormous scope for conflict, as the idea becomes syncretic with other pre-existing ideologies and conceptions of what society hopes to get more of.
Podcast of the Week
Oren Cass and Noah Smith debate the future of American industry and the role of tariffs and free markets in reindustrialising the United States.
Quick Links
Eight in ten Britons believe the UK is in a bad state. Only 1% believe Britain is in a “very good” state.
Over the past four years, the number of sexual offence convictions of foreign nationals has increased by 62%.
The United States has achieved negative net migration since January 2025.
Student visas accounted for 45% of all UK entry visas issued last year, making them the single largest route for legal migration.
Headline crime increased by 7% to 9.4 million incidents in the year ending March 2025…
…and violent crime in London has doubled since 2014, from 12,500 incidents per month to 24,500.
Fiyaz Mughal, founder of Tell Mama, said the Government’s proposals for a formal Islamophobia definition could create a “blasphemy law by the back door”.
New survey shows 57% of Britons say immigration is one of the most important issues facing the country.
The total fertility rate in England and Wales has dropped to a new record low of 1.41 children per woman.
The European Union recorded fewer births in 2024 than the United States for the first time ever, despite having an extra 120 million inhabitants.