Britain's False Promise

The bright future that was once promised to Britain's youth is quickly fading away

Conservative Reader Meet Up

We are hosting the first Conservative Reader Meet Up at 6.30pm on the 21st May at The Ship & Shovel Pub in Trafalgar Square, London. If you’d like to come along to meet other Readers, share ideas about future content and discuss the issues of the day, do come along.

Towering Columns

For The Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs argues that London no longer offers a clear route to a better life for the young.

But now that dream has lost its sheen. The American dream is based on a promise that if you work hard, you’ll make it. The London variation promises those who are willing to put up with high rents, stress and crowds, the prize of better career opportunities and a more exciting life. But this compact is breaking down.

Londoners on higher wages used to have more disposable income than their fellow Britons to splash on fun and fine things. But surging rents have terminated this advantage. When housing costs are factored in, the average London household income is now estimated to be lower than that outside the capital.

A generation ago, settling down in London was a perfectly reasonable lifestyle choice. Things have changed. Almost 60 per cent owned their home in 1991; today that is down to around 45 per cent. Everything from expensive childcare to family-unfriendly homes is creating a hostile environment for those planning to settle down. Career prospects for strivers are dwindling. As AI slashes the graduate job market by a third, it is more difficult than ever to get one’s foot in the door.

In Conservative Home, Arthur Reynolds writes that higher taxes and costs for pubs risk cutting off a route into work and skills for many young people.

Both Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White grew up on council estates, and a number of young people who walked into our pub from humble beginnings have gone on to achieve great things. A lad who started washing dishes at 16 – incredibly shy and unsure where he wanted to go in life – is now the Head Chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant, attending glamorous award ceremonies and hanging out with the country’s best chefs.

I was studying for my A-Levels when he turned up, dreaming of university and the bright lights of the city: he’ll make more money as a great cook, and make more people happy, than I ever will tapping away behind a desk.

Another who began as a teenage waitress went on to become a hostess on luxury yachts – living a life many could only dream of. Some have travelled the world as private chefs, others have stayed local, using their skills to command good wages (many a chef earns more than their employers) and get on the property ladder. Without pubs, and the opportunities they offer, none of this could have happened. In their determination to squeeze every ounce of tax from them, Labour risks breaking an industry that offers a lifeline to thousands of young people who know the classroom isn’t for them.

In The Critic, Fred de Fossard argues that new rules raise risk creating a legacy of fewer jobs and homes for the young.

That is the sad reality of an overregulated economy: small and medium-sized businesses are squeezed out of existence, many unable to shoulder the burden of complying with new laws. Those who do remain in the market have to take a number of steps to reduce their risk. For example, if a landlord is unable to terminate a tenancy or increase the rent at the end of a contract, it is likely that the overall rate of rent will increase to mitigate this. There are already reports of prospective tenants being vetted for their character and financial circumstances before securing a room to rent. These are undoubtedly unpleasant things to go through, especially for young people at the start of their working lives. But if the law imposes huge new risks and costs on landlords, it should be expected that these costs are eventually passed onto tenants.

A flexible labour market and a flexible rental market are two fundamental components of a market economy. They are also vital for young people who want to start working and start building independent lives of their own. A meme has swept X called “Londonmaxxing” recently. In some respects, this is a charming online tribute to London as a place to live, to eat and drink, to innovate and to work. It has become especially popular among those who are bullish on London’s future AI economy. It is a nice idea. But if the people who make Londonmaxxing a reality cannot either find a job in the city or a room to rent, there will be nobody to max out what the city has to offer. The Employment Rights Act and the Renters Rights Act will erode the flexibility which makes economic activity and prosperity possible, and we will all pay the price. For some, the bill is arriving in their letterbox already.

For The Telegraph, James Johnson argues that Zack Polanski’s poor approval ratings set the Green Party up as a radical non-mainstream force.

But what if that is not the Green Party’s goal? A fall in mainstream support might not hurt Polanski if the real aim is to be an insurgent radical-Left party that can win, say, 50 seats. In fact, it may even help his cause. For there is a phalanx of radical-Left voters, making up around 15 per cent of the voting public, who will quite like what he says.

In a YouGov poll last year, Green voters were the least likely to favour custodial sentences for a number of crimes. For a criminal who attacks someone with a knife, they favoured a shorter prison sentence than any other party’s supporters.

The Greens’ position may also appeal to a significant number of British Muslim voters, one in four of whom in key population centres around the UK are planning to vote for the party at the next general election. One reason is their position on the conflict in Gaza, a bigger driver of vote for British Muslims than the economy.

A recent Policy Exchange poll with JL Partners found that one in four British Muslim voters had a positive view of Hamas. As many as four in 10 British Muslims believe the Jews have too much power in society, and almost half support banning all Israel-built technology from the National Health Service.

On Substack, Neil O’Brien argues that high asset prices mask weak public finances and that when conditions shift, the state will have less room to respond.

At Spring Statement Reeves got a £5bn windfall from assumptions about CGT increasing, which helped offset some of the extra spending she has announced since the Autumn.

Some of the growth is from Reeves’ own tax increases (like the family farm tax and family business tax) - and some from an assumption that the assets she is taxing will keep on going up, while frozen thresholds for IHT and stamp duty drag more and more into paying. (This is “fiscal drag.”)

That’s why Reeves will be keeping her fingers crossed for increases in asset prices - if anything happens to them her numbers will start to unravel in a big way. This is a kind of “fiscal fragility”.

This isn’t just inflation - these taxes are also increasing as a share of GDP. Stamp duties have long been about 0.5% of GDP, but are going up about half that again to 0.77%. Having been in a range of 0.15 to 0.25% GDP over recent decades inheritance tax is forecast to increase to 0.40%. The three taxes taken together will have gone up by about three quarters of a percent of GDP from 2024 to 2030/31.

For The Telegraph, Guy Dampier argues the current framing of migration understates its impact and this misleads the public.

Critics have raised concerns. Freezing out the courts won’t necessarily prevent them from challenging these measures, which could cause delays even if Parliament exercises its sovereignty. To remove the numbers promised requires a tenfold increase in the detention estate and very little operational friction. In many cases those who arrive illegally destroy their identity documentation, making it hard to work out where they are from. Even when we know, their home countries may refuse to take them back.

These are not insurmountable problems, however. Visa sanctions will encourage recalcitrant countries to take back their nationals. Those whose origin cannot be identified can still be removed to a third-party country, the threat of which may be enough to encourage them to leave or seek a voluntary return, as many have done in the United States. Building more detention estate rapidly is perfectly feasible when the NHS was able to build a 4,000-bed Nightingale Hospital in just nine days.

Such a large volume of removals will upset some, as mass deportations have in the USA. It has to be remembered, however, that this is a necessity. If it were not for mass breaches of our borders, then mass deportations would not be necessary. Any politician unwilling to do so is in effect saying that they will condone illegal arrivals, as well as the costs and crime that go with that. Only a rigorous response will create a deterrent capable of ending mass attempts to enter the country illegally.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel argues that we should copy the Gulf states in their approach towards Islamism.

I reject the dissolution of my tradition and I reject Brenton’s suggestion. Instead, I suggest, given that Islam is now an enduring feature of British civic society, we ought to study the way modern, functional, Muslim countries stamp out its pathological variants. The governments of Morocco, the UAE and Jordan, for example, all deploy some combination of mosque and imam licensing, theological guidelines and sermon vetting. The UAE, which no longer funds students coming to Britain because of the risk of campus radicalisation, even regulates donations and study sessions.

You might ask how such practices are consistent with hard-won British freedom of religion. Manifestly, they are not. The tussle between state and religion in Islamic countries has not generated the same settlement as in Christian countries and there is no reason why we should have expected it to.

We have to develop a new way of policing ideology in our country, one that is more sophisticated and interventionist, which roots out, and where possible, deports, promoters of strife and the networks that enable them, yet which preserves as many of our liberal norms as possible. As a minimum first step, we should urgently stop importing and naturalising people who harbour ideologies we don’t want.

Wonky Thinking

Policy Exchange has published a new report which examines the new emerging trend in British politics of ‘Islamopopulism’. JL Partners polling surveyed over 1,000 British Muslims and found differing views from the rest of Britain’s population on issues like gender segregation, Gaza, and the presence of dogs in public spaces.

In addition to populist movements of the right and left, Britain faces a growing populist movement among its four million Muslims. This highvoting faith group, once 80 per cent Labour, is turning in far greater numbers to alternative candidates across a range of parties who are willing to issue a communal appeal. Among Muslim voters of Asian origin, Labour’s vote share dropped by 28 percentage points between the 2019 and 2024 general elections – a remarkable fall in five years1 – and, as our polling shows, is set to fall further. Four independent candidates were elected to Parliament in 2024. Others missed out only narrowly. Many hundreds more are standing at this month’s local council elections.

While less secular and more communal “independent” candidates are the movement’s most prominent standard-bearers, Islamopopulism is also finding a home in the Green Party and Your Party. And two new, interlinked national bodies, The Muslim Vote (TMV) and Vote Palestine, have arrived on the scene. These seek to direct Muslim voters to the candidates most able to “punish,” in TMV’s words, Labour and the Conservatives. At the recent Gorton byelection, in a seat nearly 30 per cent Muslim, TMV backed the Greens and no independent Muslim candidate stood. The Greens won with a significant Muslim vote.

Policy Exchange’s programme is dedicated to understanding Islamopopulism: its goals, its methods and from where it draws its supporters. Such scrutiny has hitherto been turned upon right- and leftpopulism, but to a much lesser degree on Islamopopulism. What does Islamopopulism want? How far does it fit the classic populist template? How much does it reflect the actual views of British Muslims? Are the independent candidates really independent, or are they working together? Is TMV a “Muslim Momentum,” a central organising body akin to the Jeremy Corbyn fan club? What links has the movement to Islamism and other movements hostile to democratic values? What are the issues, values and policies they are seeking to advance, and how far do they align with the views of the majority in this country?’

Podcast of the Week

In The Spectator’s Quite Right! podcast, Michael Gove and Madeleine Grant discuss the increasing normalisation of antisemitism in Britain, and how populist forces on the left of British politics seek to exploit this for their own gain.

Quick Links

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