Britain on the Brink
As civil unrest unfolds over illegal migration, the UK's enemies will only exploit its weakness
Towering Columns
For The Telegraph, Sam Ashworth-Hayes argues that some middle-class households may be better off claiming benefits.
If the Middle England parent receives a pay rise, they fall into the personal allowance withdrawal trap. A £10,000 pay rise translates into £3,800 of take-home pay. A third child will be a financial strain. The benefits household, meanwhile, have another child. While the two-child benefit cap is still binding, their housing entitlement rises. Renting privately, the value of their benefits claims between Child Benefit, PIP, Universal Credit and the rest shifts to £64,000 of tax-free income. Net of rent, they are closing in on £36,000. Renting socially, it passes £38,000 net.
Are these differences worth working two full-time jobs for? Arguably not.
The examples are not as absurd as they might sound: roughly a quarter of those claiming PIP for mixed anxiety and depressive disorders have managed to cash in maximum claims for all components of the benefits, as have about a fifth of those with non-specific back pain, or 60pc of those claiming for autism.
The idea of outsize Universal Credit payments isn’t outlandish either. There are 27,000 households across England and Wales with no disabled child, no carer entitlement and who don’t have a limited capacity for work and manage to claim more than £2,500 per month in Universal Credit, with the average claim worth £3,051 monthly. Zoom in on areas of London, and you can find hundreds of households with average claims of almost £4,800 per month.
On his Substack, Rian Chad Whitton says that despite increasing hours worked in power generation, electricity generation has fallen and prices continue to rise.
We all know the power sector has received a lot of attention from the British government. Decarbonisation has been one of the most significant policy priorities of successive Labour and Tory regimes this century. While clean sources now produce a majority of power, there have been other developments:
There are more hours of work being put into generation than ever, roughly five million hours a week versus just over three million in 2003.
The number of companies involved in electricity generation, transmission and trading has multiplied by fifteen from around 400 to nearly 6,000 between 2008 and 2024.
Investment doubled from £14 billion in 1997 to £28 billion in 2024.
Electricity prices for industry, between 2010 and 2024, have grown 200% in current prices and over 100% in real terms.
Electricity intensity (purchases as a share of GVA) for industry reached record highs in 2022 and 2023, despite low consumption.
Electricity purchases have grown from 22% of energy expenditure in 2003 to 42% in 2024.
Despite this:
Gross value added for the power sector has declined since 2003.
The amount of electricity generated has declined just under 30% from 400 terrawatt-hours in 2005 to 285 TWh in 2024.
Electrification, the process of electrifying residential and industrial heat and transport, has basically flatlined since 2008.
The term I think best describes these developments is ‘Febrile decay’ – an abundance of activity running in combination with decline, and actual material production and consumption declining…
…Unfortunately, decarbonising the power sector has not led to increased electrification. In fact, on an energy-supplied basis (measured in thousands of barrels of oil equivalent), electrification has basically stalled. This has not stopped the electricity share of energy spending from nearly doubling from 2003 to 2024. If you looked at Britain’s energy trends in 2004, you would be confident in electrification and therefore of harmonising decarbonisation with industrial growth. Instead, we have got more expensive electricity than ever, while our heating and transportation remain reliant on fuels.
For The Critic, Maurice Cousins says net zero has driven the inflation crisis.
Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians may have lost sight of material reality and the factors of production, but energy sets the price of everything. Farming runs on diesel, electricity, fertiliser and cold chains. When energy is expensive and volatile, the weekly supermarket shop becomes a gut punch. Westminster has refused to internalise this. Instead it congratulates itself on being a “climate leader” while treating the UK’s productive economy as an instrument of global emissions management, not domestic prosperity. We cannot lower living costs by making the inputs to life scarce.
The next turn of the screw is set to happen later this year when Labour publishes its methane reduction plan for UK farms. The Climate Change Committee’s pathway expects agriculture to cut its emissions from today’s ~47 MtCO₂e to 26.4 MtCO₂e by 2050. How? Release land from livestock, ‘nudge” people to lower their meat and dairy consumption, and repurpose farms into carbon sinks and sites for intermittent energy sources. All this comes at a time when all categories of meat prices have risen sharply in price: mince up ~70–90 per cent, sirloin/fillet up ~50 per cent.
Call it what it is: using prices, planning and programme design to force behavioural change, then denouncing opponents as “weaponisers” when they point out the consequences. Voters are not being manipulated. They are experiencing more expensive energy, food and housing and drawing the obvious connection to choices made in Whitehall. As John Gray, the political philosopher, once put it: “‘Populism’ is a term used by centrist liberals to describe political blowback from the disruption of society produced by their policies.”
At CapX, Lawrence Newport says Britain’s economy cannot start growing again without radically overhauling judicial review.
[D]espite the Bully XL being behind the majority of deaths caused by dogs for three years running – and responsible for the highest increase in deaths caused by dogs ever recorded in Britain – a series of judicial reviews were immediately launched claiming the decision wasn’t rational, that it wasn’t legal, that it failed to produce an equality assessment and so on. These reviews cost over a quarter of a million pounds, and were not resolved until 2025 (in favour of the continued ban). In other words, even with an extremely wide ranging power, exercised by the minister under well publicised reasons, judicial review still piles on costs and dissuades governments from acting – indeed, I was told that the government was expressly concerned about judicial review so dragged their feet – allowing more people to die. This is what our system does.
In planning, the effects are widespread and dramatic. Judicial review has led to delay after delay as projects fight multiple legal battles, sometimes on extremely similar grounds. Projects increase in cost as armies of lawyers are hired to write thousands of pages to avoid as many challenges as possible, all for other armies of lawyers to pore over to find holes for yet more legal challenges. There is a reason, after all, that a road can cost £1.2 billion without a single spade in the ground. The suffering this causes reinforces itself as well. The more challenges, the more delays; the more delays, the more costs; the more costs, the more uncertainty – and the fewer companies who want to invest, as the timelines, expense and outcomes become ever more unclear. People die on unsafe roads, energy prices continue to skyrocket, life gets worse in Britain…
…That we have gotten to this state is all the more tragic as Britain does not have a codified constitution that places judicial review above Parliament. Indeed, Parliament is so powerful it is free to write laws that are exempt from any oversight of any court whatsoever. When ministers complain about judicial review, they are complaining about a problem they have the power to solve. They can make radical changes. The Westminster bubble will not like it, the lawyers will not be happy, the Civil Service will resist, but we may, as a result, be able to build a railway without facing a new judicial review every week, or to make decisions without fearing the reaction of the lawyers of the vegetable lobby, ready to throw hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ money to causes designed to delay vital projects across the country.
On ConservativeHome, Miriam Cates says the Online Safety Act has some upsides, particularly by introducing age verification for adult content.
Some conservatives seem to be under the impression that there is something fundamentally ‘British’ about unfettered ‘freedom of expression’, but nothing could be further from the truth. Britain has a long history of robust obscenity laws, and the distribution of hardcore pornography was completely illegal until the late 20th Century. Far from being some libertarian Wild West, this country has a proud tradition of prohibiting the distribution of violent, obscene and sexually explicit material. When it comes to introducing new regulations, of course conservatives should be suspicious of the motives of the government. But we should be equally cynical about the motives of powerful and wealthy industries in opposing that regulation.
…The sexual activity depicted in internet porn is shockingly degrading to women, propagating the idea that women’s bodies exist only for men’s pleasure and that male violence is normal and desirable. It is illegal to treat animals in the way that many women (and children) are treated in online pornography. Yet we have allowed it to proliferate; worse than that, we have not even tried to prevent young children from encountering real images of women and girls being raped, strangled, slapped, spat on, and tortured. The average age of first viewing is just 11 years old. By the age of 18, 70 per cent of British teenagers have viewed violent pornography…
…Right-wingers should not conflate the authoritarian instincts of some of our institutions with genuine and necessary attempts to protect children from the horrors of online pornography. Reclaiming our great British tradition of decency and dignity for all should be the goal of all conservatives – and it will be popular with the public too.
Wonky Thinking
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) published a new report by Charlie Edwards and Nate Seidenstein, finding that China is waging an unconventional war against the West by gaining control of critical infrastructure.
Russia is waging an unconventional war on Europe. Through its campaign of sabotage, vandalism, espionage and covert action, Russia’s aim has been to destabilise European governments, undermine public support for Ukraine by imposing social and economic costs on Europe, and weaken the collective ability of NATO and the European Union to respond to Russian aggression. This unconventional war began to escalate in 2022 in parallel to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While Russia has so far failed to achieve its primary aim, European capitals have struggled to respond to Russian sabotage operations and have found it challenging to agree a unified response, coordinate action, develop effective deterrence measures and impose sufficient costs on the Kremlin.
IISS has created the most comprehensive open-source database of suspected and confirmed Russian sabotage operations targeting Europe. The data reveals Russian sabotage has been aimed at Europe’s critical infrastructure, is decentralised and, despite European security and intelligence officials raising the alarm, is largely unaffected by NATO, EU and member state responses to date. Russia has exploited gaps in legal systems through its ‘gig economy’ approach, enabling it to avoid attribution and responsibility. Since 2022 and the expulsion of hundreds of its intelligence officers from European capitals, Russia has been highly effective in its online recruitment of third-country nationals to circumvent European counter-intelligence measures. While the tactic has proven successful in terms of reach and volume, enabling operations at scale, the key challenge facing the Russian intelligence services has been the quality of the proxies, who are often poorly trained or ill-equipped, making their activities prone to detection, disruption or failure.
Russia’s military doctrine deeply integrates Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) sabotage within gibridnaya voyna (hybrid warfare). Europe’s critical infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to sabotage because it is in such a poor state following decades of deferred maintenance and a lack of investment from national governments and the private sector. Russia has targeted critical infrastructure to generate direct strategic gain in its war in Ukraine and as part of its broader conflict with the West. While some initiatives, such as the Baltic Sentry NATO maritime operation in the Baltic Sea, have been somewhat effective, the lack of budget and resources has kept NATO and the EU from adopting a long-term and sustained response. Furthermore, it is unclear, faced with competing national security priorities, how committed European capitals are to deterring Russia’s unconventional war on Europe.
New polling for Onward by Merlin Strategy found that younger voters trust social media more than newspapers, but that online platforms also act as aggregators for more traditional media.
Onward and Merlin Strategy polling finds that 18-34 year olds trust social media more than newspapers and that newspapers have net negative trust among all age groups.
We also find that young people engage much more with news and through a much wider variety of sources than older generations. When asked how often they used certain sources to get the news, 18-34 year olds reported higher overall usage than older age groups for every source, including GB News and the Daily Mail, based on those who said they used each source at least monthly….
…It is clear that the way we engage with news is changing. While young people are increasingly turning to social media for news updates, this shift hasn’t sidelined traditional outlets. In fact, it may be boosting engagement, as young people increasingly access these sources through platforms like Instagram and X, which act as de facto news aggregators. This also exposes them to a wider range of perspectives, likely leading to greater trust in social media, through which they access a range of perspectives, than in traditional newspapers.
Additionally, although younger generations access more news overall, certain sources are frequented more by older generations. 51% of those aged 55 and over still use the BBC daily, and more 35–54-year-olds rely on Facebook for news each day than 18–34s. YouTube, TikTok, X / Twitter, and Instagram, however, are heading up the digital frontiers of news for younger generations with nearly a third using them daily to get their news.
Podcast of the Week
On the Works in Progress podcast, Sam Bowman and The Economist’s Wall Street Editor, Mike Bird, discuss the economics of land, including why banks prefer to lend against property.
Quick Links
The Home Secretary will fight the High Court’s ruling to shut down the Bell migrant hotel in Essex.
Cumulative inflation for food products as been 37% in the 5 years to June 2025.
There were a record 111,000 asylum applications in the last year.
Government officials believe China is behind a swathe of private school acquisitions, with more than 30 schools in the hands of Chinese investors as of last year.
The Chinese government rebuffed UK government requests to explain “greyed out” areas of its London embassy as “inappropriate”.
Britain’s third largest steelworks fell into insolvency.
Climate activists called Shut the System have begun a “period of sustained sabotage” against banks and insurance firms.
The UK Space Agency will be scrapped in a bid to cut costs.
A factory in Hartlepool will close after the Government awarded a carbon capture and storage manufacturing contract to France and Greece.
Prosecutions for hate speech on social media have hit a new record.
Belief in God has tripled among 18-24 year-olds in the last 4 years.
New polling showed 30-39 year-olds most open to voting Conservative are more likely to be “YIMBY” in their view of development.
The head of security at HMP Wandsworth was linked to organised crime, it was revealed.
The US immigrant population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s.
There are reports that Palestinian asylum seekers have begun arriving in the UK.
The US has frozen the “Five Eyes” powers out of updates on the Russia-Ukraine peace talks.