A Call to the Future

Could a combination of technological optimism and enchanted traditionalism save Britain?

Towering columns

At UnHerd, Tom Ough considers what lessons the ascent of Sinofuturism can teach national revivalists in the West about how to build again.

To the extent that China remains a communist state rather than an autocracy sui generis, it is not of the proselytising variety. The USSR wanted to spread Communism around the world; the leading members of the CCP, according to Matthews, have little interest in such evangelism. “Their ideological position is one that’s based on the idea of distinctive civilisations with their own value histories. There’s a desire to displace the United States, but that, I think, is with a view to minimising external interference.” There is little evidence that Xi wants the Chinese flag to flutter over Western capitals, though an annexation of Taiwan would constitute an unpalatable overreach, and the march of China through our industry, property and universities constitutes an attempt at domination of a subtler kind.

And as America might discover in a war over Taiwan, hegemons tend not to come in pairs. The Thucydides trap is well-documented, and one emerging technology in particular might be the key to domination. It is not an uncommon view among AI researchers that the first country to develop artificial superintelligence will secure for themselves an indefinite global hegemony. This country’s sovereign AI, according to certain prognostications, will outthink its opponents at lightning speed, rendering those opponents harmless. Matthews envisages a slower takeoff of AI capability, and a more enduring bifurcation between American and Chinese systems. But the prospect of Chinese domination of AI, and of a world shaped by the CCP’s values above all others, ought to focus the mind.

There is much to deplore about modern China. But the West might, at the same time, examine its confidence and ambition. If it is to be the values of the Anglosphere, rather than those of the CCP, that define the next centuries, then we ought, pragmatically, to consider how it is that China has revitalised itself so effectively. We should not wish for a government that would displace 1.4 million people to build a dam, but nor should we wish for a government that allows individual Nimbys to block infrastructure that would benefit tens of millions. The Victorians had more centralised planning power than we do, and the result is that we still skulk around in the structures they left us. More fundamentally, they wanted to build things that would last. We need to rediscover those long-dormant muscle fibres.

At Engelsberg Ideas, Duncan Weldon explores how liberal democracies were better able to manage the pressures of total war during the twentieth century.

The question facing policymakers was how to keep up with this demand for men and munitions and how to achieve it without undermining other factors vital to victory. The whole issue was fraught with tough trade-offs. The competing powers needed to keep men fighting in the field, but also needed an adequate pool of workers to keep producing ever-growing volumes of munitions. They needed to devote enough resources to direct war fighting without causing the kind of shortages in the civilian economy that would eventually lead to economic collapse, even revolution. If economics is fundamentally the study of resource allocation, then total war is, at heart, a question of economics.

Unsurprisingly, the demands of total war saw a huge growth in the economic role and power of the state. By 1917 the British government, which before the conflict had had an exceptionally small economic footprint, had extended its borders considerably. Not only was conscription introduced, but the railways, shipping and mines found themselves under state control. By the end of the war, 85 per cent of food was being purchased by the ministry responsible, while the output of whole industries, such as chemicals, was requisitioned by the government. The Ministry of Munitions was directing vast swathes of national output. This new ministry, a wartime innovation, was, by the war’s end, employing two and half million workers and was probably the largest purchasing business and industrial employer in the world…

…The real trade-off was how to ensure that the armies at the front had the men and munitions they needed while also keeping the civilian economy afloat and avoiding the kinds of extreme deprivation that would undermine support for both the war effort and, potentially, the political regime itself. In both total wars, liberal, capitalist economies showed themselves to be extremely adaptable to its demands and capable of ramping up production of necessary munitions and supplies. In both conflicts, democratic, civilian-led governments showed themselves to be far better placed to handle the trade-offs between military needs and domestic stability.

At Works in Progress, Alex Chalmers exposes the outdated scientific theory behind burdensome nuclear regulation in the United States.

The combination of tougher radiation safety standards and new environmental rules caused the costs of nuclear power to spiral in this period. This can clearly be seen in individual projects. New radiation shielding, extra instrumentation, and the relocation of control systems to reduce exposure risk drove up materials bills. The amount of cabling required for a nuclear project in the US jumped from 670,000 yards to 1.3 million between 1973 and 1980, while cubic yards of concrete increased from 90,000 to 162,000. The number of man hours per kilowatt hour of energy generated surged from 9.6 in 1972 to 28.5 in 1980. The Sequoyah Nuclear Plant in Tennessee, scheduled for completion in 1973 at a cost of $300 million was completed for $1.7 billion in 1981, after 23 changes to structure or components were requested by the regulator.

By 1980 the previous decade’s regulatory changes had driven a 176 percent increase in plant cost. New safety rules had resulted in greater complexity, in turn driving up the materials bill and engineering costs. The number of regulatory guides began to climb, and projects would take longer to complete, resulting in higher financing costs. A 1979 Congressional Budget Office study found that a one-month delay in the construction of a new reactor would cost an extra $44 million (in 2025 terms), with half this total coming from interest. The Public Service Company of New Hampshire, the builders of the prospective Seabrook Station went bankrupt in 1988, after regulatory delays resulted in one unit being completed 14 years after its construction permit was issued and the other being cancelled.

It is not surprising that a 1982 Department for Energy report found that utilities companies with a huge percentage of their electricity generated by nuclear power tended to have lower bond ratings, even after controlling for earnings and state regulatory quality. The notorious Three Mile Island accident in 1979, when a reactor in Pennsylvania released radioactive gases and iodine into the environment after a partial meltdown, would worsen the political backlash against nuclear energy. No credible research has found evidence that the accident impacted the health of anyone in the surrounding area. However, the regulatory damage had already been done.

The Spectator reflects on how younger generations, represented by the meme of thirty-year-old Nick, are being squeezed by boomer largesse and mass migration.

With his austerity-phobic backbenchers spooked by the local elections, Keir Starmer wants to restore eligibility for the winter fuel allowance for most pensioners and remove the two-child benefit limit. On the hunt for disillusioned Labour voters, Nigel Farage has gone further, aiming to scrap the cap and restore the allowance in full, at an estimated annual cost of £5 billion. This on top of the £80 billion the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests his plan to raise the threshold for paying income tax to £20,000 could require.

How will all this be paid for? Public debt is already at 96 per cent of GDP; the IMF has indicated that there is ‘limited space’ for Labour to meet these demands with further borrowing. Rachel Reeves has almost certainly already lost her fiscal headroom and is on course to break her pledges not to raise income tax, national insurance or corporation tax. Farage has suggested Reform can save up to £350 billion over five years from scrapping migrant hotels, quangos, net zero and diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives. Binning a few Whitehall Pride flags is unlikely, however, to plug the budget black hole his plans would create…

…Two years ago, the Centre for Policy Studies crunched the numbers. In 1909, when the state pension was introduced, over-65s accounted for 5 per cent of the population. By 2072, that figure will be 27 per cent. The cost of pensions, adult social care and NHS spending on the elderly will more than double to 21 per cent of GDP over the next 50 years. Yet the number of potential workers per pensioner will shrink – from 3.3 in 2022 to 1.9 by 2072. Unless economic growth averages 2.9 per cent over the next 50 years – well above the norm of the past two decades– higher spending with fewer contributors means ever higher taxes for Nick.

At UnHerd, Aris Roussinos believes King Charles should apply his radical vision of re-enchantment to Britain.

The nadir, for traditionalists, came during Charles’ own annus horribilis of 1997, when “a ‘New Labour’ government under Tony Blair had come in, with a mission to destroy tradition wherever it was found — in the House of Lords, in rural sports, in organisations such as the Boy Scouts — and rebrand Britain as a young country, under the banner of Cool Britannia.” We live today with the consequences of Blair’s worldview, which increasingly looks as outdated socially — and as rejected by the British people — as its architectural manifestations. As Aslet notes, Charles “had often been right on the big things, making the correct judgement call years before the rest of the world had caught onto them”…

…Excessively focused on defusing republican sentiment on the Left — now rapidly becoming a historical irrelevance, across our shared civilisation, due to its self-destroying adherence to nonsensical Utopian schemes — the King’s retinue have, it seems, neglected to assuage the growing anger on the politically far more vital Right. It is an anger born of disappointment, even betrayal, more than anything: rather than being an influential voice against the dysfunction of modern Britain, Charles is seen to be captured by it, even celebrating it. There is an old Eastern European saying, which squares the revolutionary anger of the peasantry with their love for their distant monarch, that “the king has bad advisors”: Charles may do well to reflect on it. Much of the King’s appeal has always been his removal from the mood of the times: yet he must be careful the angry mood does not sweep him and his dynasty away.

In Viscri, Charles found an escape from the modern UK. It is hard to blame him, yet it is Britain and its people he should devote himself to first. Instead of hiding from the UK’s dysfunction, surely he should find the courage to challenge it once again. Transylvania’s folk culture is ancient, vibrant and worth preserving from the homogenising pressures of a crass and ugly modernity, yet so is the culture of his own folk. This “most precious and fragile diversity”, as the King phrases it, is buckling under a worldview that has “suck[ed] out the character, charm and spiritual meaning from every pore of our human experience”. What Charles has achieved in Transylvania is magical, yet it is hard not to leave Viscri with something approaching envy. Don’t his people deserve some of this magic too?

At Compact, Nathan Pinkoski delves into the rich and complex legacy of Alasdair MacIntyre for modern postliberalism.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre distinguished practices from institutions. Practices are the sites where human beings discover the good internal to a practice that helps achieve the human good. I learn to play chess well by mastering the strategies required to win the game; these are goods internal to the practice. Institutions are the sites where goods external to the practice, such as money, prestige, and power, are used and achieved. These external goods and the institutions arranged around them are certainly useful; someone might incentivize me to play chess well by offering me prizes. Institutions are needed to sustain practices across time. But MacIntyre stresses that though institutions can be confused with the human good, they are not the human good.

It is difficult, if not often impossible to have such practice-based communities and institutions today, MacIntyre argues. We don’t know how to achieve the human good anymore. To keep the chess analogy, we now live in a world where we lack agreement on what the rules of the game are. Worse, those of us who think that we know what the rules of chess are and the strategies required to win it really have no idea. Imagine that half a generation is convinced that all the pieces move the same way, and the other half think that the only opening move permitted in chess is 1. e4 e5. This only begins to convey the catastrophic scale of what has been lost in our moral discourse, and the intractable character of our moral disagreements…

…But After Virtue remained MacIntyre’s most powerful, most jarring book, perhaps because it was the ultimate anti-therapeutic text. The thesis, that we’re dumber than we think we are because we’ve lost more than we realize, is destabilizing. It’s all the more so in a world where conservative certainties of God, nation, and family and progressive certainties of History have fallen away. Yet MacIntyre’s project was never just about destruction. It was an effort to build a new practice of intellectual and moral inquiry, a new paradigm or tradition to better understand the world and change it for the better. But a paradigm, even a correct one, is not guaranteed success. It may remain on the periphery. And as it develops, its practitioners may also come to disagree, dividing into competing camps or schools, each claiming not only interpretative fidelity to the master and his core theses, but also a better capacity to meet new challenges.

Wonky thinking

Policy Exchange has published Revisiting the British Origins of the European Convention on Human Rights by legal academics Dr Conor Casey and Dr Yuan Yi Zhu. While elite opinions continue to argue that the ECHR is a uniquely British and Churchillian legacy, the authors reject these claims. They argue that the twenty-first-century ECHR is significantly different from the legal text adopted after WWII.

As early as 2009, Peter Oborne and Jesse Norman argued that the ECHR was “Churchill’s legacy” and “an impeccably Conservative document”. This argument formed part of their “Conservative case for the Human Rights Act”, in a pamphlet that helped to advance a pro-ECHR/HRA campaign sponsored by the NGO Liberty. The report was accompanied by a preface by Shami Chakrabarti (as she then was), the-then director of Liberty, in which she said that the ECHR “largely originated from British common law traditions and it was largely drafted by British conservative lawyers”, an approach that has since then been taken up by other pro-ECHR pressure groups. The Council of Europe takes a similar approach, maintaining a mini-website emphasising Churchill’s links with the institution. Even the left-wing journalist Paul Mason, no friend of conservatism, felt moved to claim that “[t]he government’s attack on the Human Rights Act is a betrayal of those Conservatives who helped create it” while the academic Francesca Klug, an erstwhile collaborator of Sir Keir Starmer, has nicknamed the ECHR “Churchill’s charter.”…

…It is only fair to note that some sceptics about continued membership of the ECHR also invoke the memory of the dead, such as when Robert Jenrick suggested that Churchill would have been “appalled” at abusive use of the ECHR by illegal immigrants. But this is unusual: in modern British discourse, the idea that the ECHR was the brainchild of Churchill and of British lawyers seems close to being accepted by many, including many who should know better, as a historical fact, and it forms a cornerstone of the political campaign in favour of Britain’s continued membership of the ECHR.

Of course, the ECHR which the United Kingdom signed in 1950 is very different to the ECHR as it exists today: the former explicitly allowed for the death penalty (subsequently superseded by Protocol No. 13) and had no provision for individual petition to a pan-European court unless the state party allowed for such access (which was made mandatory by Protocol No. 11). In addition, the Convention’s drafters did not contemplate judicially invented doctrines such as the “living instrument”, which have, since the mid-late 1970s been aggressively deployed to remake European human rights law, departing sharply, and often quite openly, from the terms agreed in 1950. Even if it were the case that Churchill was one of the architects of the ECHR 1950, as Sir Keir Starmer has asserted, it would scarcely follow that the UK should remain in the ECHR 2025, in view of the radical change across the last 75 years and the responsibility that each successive generation of Britons has for constitutional self-government.

But most importantly, much of this popular historical narrative about British involvement in the creation of the ECHR is simply wrong. The story of Britain’s participation in the development of the ECHR is far more complex, and far more equivocal, than the simplistic narrative propounded by its supporters suggests. While it is true that British lawyers and officials had a considerable influence in its drafting, they sought to keep the Convention to a limited document that would guarantee basic and already-existing rights against the threats of totalitarianism, instead of the open-ended “living instrument” that exists today.

Moreover, there was significant opposition within the British government of the time—a Labour government, rather than a Conservative one, as many have suggested or now wrongly assume—many of whose members feared that the Convention would limit British sovereignty, harm the common law tradition of law and government, and would hinder the Labour Party’s ability to carry out its economic agenda. And while it is true that Churchill did give his rhetorical support for the project, he did so in vague terms, never clarifying whether he thought Britain should in the end be part of the European project embodied by the ECHR. Strikingly, he demonstrated a total lack of interest in the Convention when he returned to power, with the government that he led opposing the acceptance of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights…

…While British actors did have considerable influence over the shape of the Convention, their ambition was to create a human rights instrument that would act as a safeguard against regression to tyranny and oppression. The way in which the Convention system has developed today, particularly the very prominent role of the European Court of Human Rights and its dynamic living instrument approach to interpretation, is utterly inconsistent with any reasonable account of what those British officials and lawyers involved in its drafting thought they were creating. The dynamic approach of the ECtHR and the intrusiveness of its jurisprudence into what were once viewed as purely domestic matters, was simply never dreamt back at the time of ratification. The record of Britain’s involvement in the ECHR’s creation gives strong reason to think that if “politicians then been able to foresee this intrusiveness then it is most improbable that the convention would ever had been ratified”.

For Sky News, Ed Conway charts the decline of Leicester’s textile industry following the “sweatshop” scandal and the arrival of Chinese fast fashion.

Book of the week

This week we recommend A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson. It is the definitive biography of a leader who allowed a mid-ranking European power to recover from the devastation of war and occupation, play a leading role in international affairs, and restore a sense of national pride and institutional stability. The life of de Gaulle is an example from which Britain and other Western nations can still draw inspiration.

As France shrinks de Gaulle seems to grow. If, then, de Gaulle is now widely viewed as ‘the last great Frenchman’, where does his greatness lie? Was he, as many have argued, a great visionary? François Furet, one of those many left-wing intellectuals so viscerally hostile to de Gaulle, wrote in 1963: ‘What characterizes de Gaulle is not his ability to predict the future, it is his extraordinary capacity to be deceived by history yet to adapt to it. What makes him a great politician is not his strategy, it is his tactics.’ A similar line was adopted by Jean-François Revel, another liberal critic of de Gaulle, who wrote an excoriating pamphlet in 1959 deflating Gaullist triumphalism through a sarcastic dissection of the pomposities of de Gaulle’s rhetoric. Thirty years later (1989), with de Gaulle long dead, Revel reissued his pamphlet with an introduction that was only partially repentant. He was now ready to accept that – as a man of action – de Gaulle was someone of a stature that France had rarely experienced in her history (he was implicitly comparing him to the temporizing Mitterrand). But contrary to the ambient hagiography, he still clung to the view that de Gaulle ‘did not particularly understand the great problems of his era despite his reputation for being in advance of his time’. Revel viewed him as a man of the late nineteenth century, obsessed with the nation state, underestimating the importance of ideology and in particular the power of totalitarian Communism. This remark seems in retrospect an ironic hostage to fortune since a year later the Soviet bloc had entirely disintegrated and the Cold War was a thing of the past. De Gaulle seems to have made that particular call more successfully than Revel.

Does that make de Gaulle a visionary? A comment sometimes made about de Gaulle is that it was never entirely clear if he was the man of the day-before-yesterday or the man of the day-after-tomorrow. Debray’s book in 1990 had no doubt that he was the latter. It is indeed astonishing how often de Gaulle was proved right. In the 1930s, his prediction about the future course of the Battle of France was more accurate than that of the French high command. Everything he did after June 1940 was built around his correct judgement that the Battle of France was only the start of a world war in which the Axis powers would be defeated. In the 1960s, commentators scoffed when he predicted the collapse of the Bretton Woods system but a few years later this had come to pass. For all the clumsiness of his remarks about Israel, his predictions about the corroding consequences for Israel of the occupation of the Palestinian territories seem prophetic. He was proved right about the Vietnam War – about America’s inability to win it, about the future different varieties of Asian ‘Communism’, about the eventual conflict between China and Vietnam.

One can find other examples of de Gaulle’s often startling lucidity about the future. For example, he predicted in a conversation with Peyrefitte in 1964 that Yugoslavia would not last: ‘For that there needs to be a Yugoslav nation. There isn’t. There are just bits of wood stuck together with a piece of string. That piece of string is Tito. When he is no longer there, the bits will fall apart.’ In another conversation in the same year he was equally prophetic about the future of Iraq: ‘The Sunnis with the Shias and the Kurds. These are countries destined to be divided because they contain altogether different peoples who do not have the same religion, the same past.’ One might also mention his uncannily accurate prediction after the assassination of Kennedy that his widow Jacqueline would end her days married to a Greek shipowner. When reminded of this by Malraux in their last ‘conversation’ de Gaulle remarked – or so Malraux says – ‘Did I really say that? I would rather have thought that she might marry Sartre. Or you.’…

…But de Gaulle’s most lasting achievement was not so much in the field of foreign policy as in the establishment of the constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958. The constitution has been amended several times and operates in many respects differently from de Gaulle’s intentions – but it is still in essence the regime that he created through his way of exercising power between 1958 and 1969. The constitution has been amended several times and operates in many respects differently from de Gaulle’s intentions – but it is still in essence the regime that he created between 1958 and 1969. The constitution certainly has dysfunctional characteristics, of which the concentration of power in the hands of the Presidency is the most obvious. In fact, as has been shown in earlier chapters, the working of the Constitution did not exactly turn out as de Gaulle, even less Debré, had expected. They were partly working to counteract the lack of a stable party system in France and the absences of stable parliamentary majorities. De Gaulle had dreamt of being a ‘unamimiste’ leader above party, with the power, if necessary to act effectively in the absence of parliamentary support. What he had not predicted was that he would end up with a parliamentary majority supporting him. This had the effect of magnifying the power that the constitution gave him. It is certainly true that in the Fifth Republic, the relative downgrading of the role of parliament, causing a lack of effective counterweights to executive power, and the closing off of legitimate channels of political opposition, have led to periodic outbreaks of direct popular protest – from the events of May 68 right up to the recent crisis of the gilets jaunes. There have thus been recurrent calls for the need for a Sixth Republic to produce a greater balance between legislative and executive branches.

Just as the early twentieth century historian Alphonse Aulard famously remarked ‘how beautiful the Republic was under the Empire’ so the defects of the Fourth become blurred in memory as we live with the defects of the Fifth. But one should not overlook the complete discredit into which the Fourth Republic had fallen among the entire political class when de Gaulle took power – which is one reason why figures like Mollet, Pflimlin and Pinay were ready to sit in his first government. One of the key provisions of the new constitution – Article 49–3 – that allowed the government to force a vote of confidence in order to pass a piece of controversial legislation – had already been part of a constitutional revision proposal drafted, but never voted, by Gaillard’s government in January 1958. And although it is true that the Third and Fourth Republics offered more parliamentary channels to express dissent, these did not prevent the violent protests of February 1934 or the kind of jacquerie represented by Poujadism in 1956. The truth is that no political system is without flaws, and perfect constitutions only exist in the fantasies of constitutionalists. All things considered, one might judge that France has not been badly served by the Fifth Republic over the last 60 years.

Whatever one’s judgement of the constitution, the Gaullist achievement was not so much to have produced the perfect constitution as to have created a general, if not universal, consensus, for the first time in 150 years, around the nature of France’s political institutions.

Quick links

Immigration is the top issue for British women, ahead of the economy and health.

Russia is ramping up its military presence along the 833-mile-long border with Finland.

Polling shows that 67% of Britons would support mandatory chemical castration for the most serious sex offenders.

Capital Gains Tax revenue has fallen by 10% as wealth leaves the country.

Around £20 million has been spent on NHS trans surgery for two biological men a day.

Almost 60 different studied pronatal policy interventions confirmed that increasing per-child benefits by 4% of GDP per capita consistently increases births by 1%.

Denmark is raising the official retirement age to 70 by 2040.

Data shows major swings towards the Republicans in the majority of counties during the 2024 presidential election.

An interactive map shows where hundreds of drug offences are taking place on the London Underground.

Lightning activity declined by between 3% and 5.8% during the pandemic.