Conspiracy - Theory or Fact?

After the Afghanistan revelations voters may question what else they aren't being told

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says secrecy has become an addictive default in our public life.

According to the former veterans minister and ex-soldier Johnny Mercer, there are still significant numbers of Afghan special forces, trained by the SAS and having served loyally alongside them, who have been abandoned to their fate. With Healey closing all remaining Afghan resettlement schemes on the grounds that our resources, hotel space and political patience are all exhausted, it seems unlikely these men and their families will ever receive the protection they were promised. Meanwhile, there is no evidence that the incompetence at the heart of the scandal has been addressed. It’s impossible to say if the Information Commissioner’s Office has done anything more than make the MoD promise not to do it again. Mercer has written tantalisingly in the Telegraph that the inadvertent leaker, whom he says he knows, was “just the end of the line” of a “hapless display of incompetence”. And if, as Healey said in parliament, this data breach is just “one of many data losses” related to Afghanistan, what about the others?

Most damningly, in a pointed aside in his final judgment, Mr Justice Chamberlain notes that the evidence presented to the court by Rimmer about the need for a superinjunction is “very different from those on which the superinjunction was sought and granted” and implies that someone might like to explore “which of this material was available to those who undertook the initial [MoD] assessments” (and why it wasn’t passed on earlier). He further muses on “whether the courts were, or are generally, right to accord such weight to assessments of this kind”. Or, as we might speculatively rephrase it: “Have I been had? And can I, a High Court judge, ever trust the British government again?”

What the case shows above all is that secrecy is addictive. It might start with good intentions and arguments. But once under cover of injunction, the temptation to drag heels, buy time and wriggle out of questions becomes irresistible. It takes both great moral fortitude and strong intuition to recognise when the damage limitation exercise has itself become the problem. As The Killers might say, it started out with a list; how did it end up like this? Or, as the song didn’t go: I’m afraid that answer is covered by the Official Secrets Act.

Also in The Times, Matthew Syed says property owners of his generation have benefited from a suite of policies that have inflated the housing market - with catastrophic consequences for younger people.

The consequences of this system have been myriad, but let us focus on the most salient. House prices have ripped, and more than 80 per cent of the growth in real per capita wealth over the past thirty years has come from the appreciation in property values. In London house prices are up 2,100 per cent, or 1,500 per cent more than wages, over four decades. Almost 60 per cent of the UK’s housing wealth is now owned by those over 60, with home ownership for the under-35s down to a mere 6 per cent. It perhaps goes without saying that as house prices and rent surged, those not on the property ladder (and I think particularly of those young people who do not stand to inherit any of this bonanza) were not just shut out but shafted. Moreover, the economic power associated with rising property wealth translated, quietly but decisively, into an unstoppable political force. This was used — often implicitly, sometimes ruthlessly — to thwart building in our back yards, thereby choking new housing supply in a nation crying out for it, and pushing our own prices yet higher. The government kept interest rates low and engaged in waves of quantitative easing for many dubious reasons, but let’s not deny that a central motive was that bidding up house prices is an electoral winner, not least because homeowners tend to vote in large numbers.

The property boom was also a potent if rarely mentioned force behind mass immigration, since those with homes, particularly the more expensive ones, wanted cheap labour to mow our lawns, clean our kitchens and fix our plumbing. Of course, these waves of newcomers had the additional “benefit” of adding to pent-up demand, putting more pressure on prices and rents, not to mention the stock of social housing, which had been hollowed out in the Thatcher years. Those not on the property ladder were screwed again, their aspirations and wages under siege.

Even now, I’m not sure that older generations have fully grasped the cultural and moral significance of what has unfolded. In a heartbreaking column in 2022 entitled “The young are in desperate need of optimism”, the Times columnist James Marriott told of how the hopes of his generation, many with student debt, had dissolved. “The prospect of squandering ever greater chunks of my monthly salary on a small room in a shared flat rarely fills me with cheerful thoughts,” he wrote. Another commentator, speaking, I sensed, for millions on social media, said: “It sometimes feels as if our own nation has been rigged against us.” The post noted that 40 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds live with their parents.

For UnHerd, Yanis Varoufakis says Rachel Reeves is simply dealing with the consequences of Britain’s broken “assetocracy”.

Following financialisation’s Waterloo in 2008, and its New Labour bailout at the expense of the rest of society, profligate austerity gave its place to George Osborne’s passive-aggressive austerity or, as he called it, the policy of “expansionary contraction”. Avoiding deep, Thatcherite cuts, Osborne engineered the slow-motion starvation of public services, devolved blaming (e.g., councils “choosing” to close day care facilities due to Whitehall funding cuts) and off-balance-sheet trickery (e.g., Private Finance Initiatives, which were ruinous for the public purse). Meanwhile, the Bank of England minted almost £895 million to keep the original Thatcher-Blair era asset bubbles inflated. Imagine how different things would have been now if, instead, Britain’s central bank had used this money to support the bonds of a new public investment bank that ploughed more than a trillion into new green technologies!

Osborne’s passive-aggressive austerity came to an end when the discontent it had caused played a key role in tilting the Brexit referendum in favour of Leave. It had to go. After period of stasis, under Theresa May, Boris Johnson was inspired by US Republican presidents: win a mandate on austerian promises to “starve the beast” (the voracious welfare state) but, immediately after, spend liberally on your pet projects while granting lucrative contracts and tax cuts to your rich mates. Alas, as Liz Truss was to discover painfully, this sham austerity requires a state that issues the world currency, not the pound.

And that’s how we got to Rachel Reeves’ touchingly delusional, social democratic austerity. In fact, its originator was Peer Steinbrück, the social democrat German finance minister who, in a parliamentary speech delivered in 2008, argued, as Reeves does now, that cutting expenditure to create fiscal space is essential for democracy — in order to preserve space for democratic choices. “Britain is a rich country. Its welfare state’s bankruptcy is a political choice.” Why do I call this delusional? Because, as Osborne and Steinbrück found out, and Reeves is now discovering, in societies with inflated asset prices and low productive investment, where massive money printing for the few has, for so long, walked side-by-side with austerity for the many, slushing social expenditure gives the Chancellor no new fiscal space at all. All that happens is that, like a deranged cat, the Chancellor ends up chasing his or her own tail.

In The Telegraph, Neil O’Brien says Britain is now a tyranny for the law-abiding while allowing anarchy for criminals.

Horrific knife crimes have become common. In July 2015, we passed a law saying adults convicted for a second time or more of carrying a knife must receive a minimum six-month prison sentence. But judges are ignoring it – four in ten are not jailed, despite the clear view of Parliament. Instead of fixing the problem, the BBC and others are promoting an absurd campaign to ban pointed kitchen knives, with celebrity endorsements from people like Idris Elba. That’s anarcho-tyranny in action: don’t jail criminals but take away granny’s cheese knife instead.

If you, a law-abiding person, want to open a bank account or invest money you will face layers of bureaucracy. God help you if you are self-employed. But if you want to set up a blatant money laundering operation like some of the candy stores of Oxford Street or open the 14th “Turkish Barber” in a tiny town, then HMRC will barely touch you.

I get my train ticket checked every day. But staff on the tube stand idly by while people jump over the ticket barriers. When Robert Jenrick made a film pointing this out, Transport for London (TFL) threatened to prosecute him for “filming illegally”. Recently, tube trains on the Bakerloo and Central lines have been covered in graffiti. Various groups have started cleaning off the graffiti. What has been the TFL’s response to this? They complained about people cleaning up the graffiti and then claimed they had put it there themselves. This is the instinct of anarcho-tyranny. Attack the law abiding and the victims, rather than deal with the problem; in two tier Britain, not all protests are equal.

For The Times, Trevor Phillips offers some solutions to stop the small boat crossings.

Like most people who have studied migration closely for any length of time, I am sceptical about the specifics of the Starmer-Macron deal. It takes a special kind of optimism to suppose that a risk lower than one in ten of being returned to France will discourage anyone who has braved the Mediterranean crossing from Morocco or Libya or trekked through the Balkans. The French president is correct when he chides us that no matter how tough his gendarmerie is on the beaches of Calais, as long as we maintain a lax internal labour market, illegal migrants will be drawn to the UK, where they can find work in the grey economy. The Starmer team does get this. The home secretary promises raids on takeaway delivery riders; not so much smashing the gangs as trashing the bikes. But that’s nowhere near enough.

There are three steps that I think would make an immediate difference and prove to be serious deterrents. First, introduce digital ID cards, as proposed by the former MI6 boss Sir Alex Younger, and make it mandatory for them to be produced on demand by all employees, users of public services, including the NHS, educational institutions and local councils.

Second, as proposed by the MPI, Britain and France need to set up a series of hubs inside France to manage the demand from those who want to apply for asylum. The Safe Mobility Offices in Latin America have successfully diverted many would-be migrants to other countries in the region where their skills and energy are needed and well-rewarded.

Third, place a tax on remittances. The real incentive for most migrants is the opportunity to earn money and send it back home. In fact, for many that is the point of the passage. The sums are enormous. Since 2000 the real value of money sent abroad from the UK has climbed from £6 billion to £9 billion. Perhaps instead of withdrawing benefits from disabled or elderly people the chancellor might think of filling that black hole through a 20p levy on the billions sent to India, Nigeria or America.

There are millionaires whining about the prospect of a minimal wealth tax. I’m willing to bet that most immigrants won’t even think about leaving the country. Like my parents I reckon they’ll just ask their bosses to give them another shift and work a little harder for the country that has given them a crack at a better life.

On his Substack, pollster James Kanagasooriam says AI may be about to effect a “collar flip”, with blue collar workers enjoying greater security from automation than those working in the knowledge economy.

There’s also the side to consider of this “collar-flip”. What of blue-collar Britain? Might we in the future speak of the job stability of being a physio, carpenter and plumber for our sons and daughters where we once spoke of the stability of being a doctor, lawyer or accountant? Automation analysis suggests that it is the skills of the body and hands which robots will come for last. Writer Henry Hill reminded me that this echoed a sentiment in Frank Herbert’s Dune when he wrote (fictionally) of a future where Robots wrote poetry, but humans worked with their hands.

If you look at the top 10 constituencies where automation risk is lowest 8 are currently forecast as Reform holds or gains. Areas like Boston, Great Grimsby, Stoke Central, Hull, Tipton all voted heavily for Leave, and currently tilt Farage strongly. In fact broadly outside areas which have a high ethnic minority population the Reform vote tracks low automation risk almost exactly. When you look at the job occupation risk analysis it’s even clearer. The Government’s own analysis suggests that the top 5 safest jobs in the UK include roofers, construction workers, plasters, steel erectors and sports players. That’s a group of people you can be sure today that would tilt Reform. Might our understanding of the left behind need updating?

We don’t talk enough about secure blue collar Britain, but it is a political sub-culture that Reform has tapped into deeply. Outside London and the South East talk of a housing crisis is less existential than London based papers make out. Young non-grads unencumbered by student debt working in regular businesses that actually make money - not poorly paid London start-ups - are still described as blue collar. Economist Thomas Piketty was alive to better terminology. Piketty’s thesis broadly stated the less money you had for the highest level of qualification - think the penniless post grad - would likely be left wing. He called this group the “Brahmin Left”. And of people the opposite - high income and low levels of formal education - he called the “Merchant Right”. Increasingly it was the latter group that was the prime mover in right wing politics across the west.

Wonky Thinking

The Jobs Foundation published Jobs and Energy: The effect of high energy costs on the UK jobs market, by Rian Chad Whitton. Industrial energy costs are crippling the UK economy and policy choices are making this worse, he argues.

1. The UK has among the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world. The UK’s electricity prices for industrial users are among the highest in the OECD - 46% above the average of 24 developed economies and over 100% higher than those paid by similar EU users. Large-scale British manufacturers face electricity costs that are more than double those of their European counterparts, and up to four times higher than in the U.S. or China. This is not simply due to fuel costs: a complex system of levies, network charges, and subsidies has pushed industrial power bills to unsustainable levels. In 2023, global energy costs rose to consume 17% of GDP, the highest level since the 1980s oil crises, with the UK among the worst affected of advanced economies.

2. Energy intensive industries are shrinking or closing. The UK’s industrial core is rapidly eroding. Sectors with high energy demands - chemicals, steel, glass, cement, aluminium, paper, and fertilisers - are contracting sharply. Between 2021 and 2024, chemical output fell by 40%. British steel production has collapsed from 12 million tonnes in 2013 to just 4 million in 2024. Aluminium and paper mills have shut, and fertiliser plants have scaled back or closed entirely. These are not fringe sectors: they provide high-wage, high-productivity employment and underpin vital supply chains. Their decline translates directly into job losses, skills erosion, and diminished national self-sufficiency.

3. Policy has compounded the problem. Rather than mitigating global energy volatility, UK policy has amplified it. A web of levies - Climate Change Levy, Contracts for Difference, Renewable Obligation Certificates, and the Capacity Market - has inflated costs for producers and consumers alike. In some cases, these levies account for over 25% of an energy bill. These policies often hit the poorest hardest, acting as a form of regressive taxation with little industrial upside.

4. Regional disparities are deepening. High energy costs are not evenly felt. They are intensifying regional inequality by accelerating industrial decline in places already struggling. The 25 parliamentary constituencies most reliant on energy-intensive industries include Scunthorpe, Alloa and Grangemouth, Port Talbot, and Aberafan Maesteg. These communities have suffered recent closures and job losses, with few alternative employment options. Many are in politically sensitive “red wall” areas. Their economic fragility makes them especially vulnerable to policy missteps, and any further decline could have both economic and electoral consequences.

5. Future industries are also at risk. The energy crisis is not only a threat to legacy industries. It imperils the UK’s prospects in emerging sectors. Electric vehicle manufacturing, battery production, and AI data centres all rely on large-scale, affordable electricity. Without competitive energy pricing, Britain risks missing out on investment in next-generation technologies. While other countries are attracting gigafactories and supercomputing clusters, the UK has fallen behind. High energy prices are effectively vetoing growth in the very sectors most vital to long-term prosperity12 million tonnes in 2013 to just 4 million in 2024. Aluminium and paper mills have shut, and fertiliser plants have scaled back or closed entirely. These are not fringe sectors: they provide high-wage, high-productivity employment and underpin vital supply chains. Their decline translates directly into job losses, skills erosion, and diminished national self-sufficiency.

On his Substack, Neil O’Brien examines internal migration, family separation and Balkanisation within the UK.

In this post I have been looking mainly at the level of the local authority. But if we zoomed in further, we would see sorting at the neighbourhood level too - for age, ethnicity and education, compounding these trends.

I think these trends towards sorting matter for three reasons.

1. Disconnection within families.

A report from Onward found that between 2001 and 2020 the proportion of older parents (those aged 55 and over) living within 15 minutes of an adult child fell by 16%, (45% to 38%). The trend for people to sort into older places and for the age gaps to grow is one factor driving this.

As that report notes: “The effects of this variation on the quality of people’s relationships are considerable. Those living close to their family are much more likely to see them regularly: older parents are six times more likely to see their adult child daily if they live within half an hour of each other than if they live further away”.

The family WhatsApp group can’t substitute for proximity. This in turn has huge implications for the care of older people in our (ageing) society, and the use of paid-for social care.

2. Churn and lower trust

The UK model is lots of higher education and lots moving away from home for three years. That has obvious costs in terms of the large debts which so many young people now run up. But it also creates churn, with wider effects.

Churn and transience have political consequences. There is clear evidence that neighbourhood trust is higher the longer people have been in a neighbourhood. That same Onward report notes that:

an adult living in the same neighbourhood for over 30 years is… 15 percentage points more likely to believe that many of their neighbours can be trusted (50%) compared to someone who has been resident in the area for less than five years (35%).

I am of course not anti-mobility. Moving to opportunity is part of a healthy society. But in the UK we see surprisingly little sign of overall movement towards places where wages are higher, and that three quarters of of the local authorities that gain students, lose people overall. A lot of cities are churning but not attracting people in the long term.

3. Political balkanisation

This is maybe the biggest effect, and so I end where I started this piece.

Trends in the online world are certainly balkanising us. Once upon a time we might have read different newspapers, but at least we watched the same TV. About 37% of people in the UK watched the 1977 Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show. Today people have sorted themselves onto different platforms based on their views (Bluesky vs X.com) and even where they are on the same platforms, algo-driven spirals emerge where people are fed more of the same things they watch. If we watch TV at all, it’s on demand, and we get our news in many languages. Social media allows very immersive communities to emerge which can radicalise people in different directions and for different causes. People end up living in different information universes where the other tribe can do no right, while “we” can do no wrong.

There’s nothing so new about that - new forms of media allow people to form themselves into groups and drive change in new ways. Guttenberg invented moveable type, and boom, you had the Reformation and the Peasant War. As the man said, there are many such cases⁴. But the extent is greater than ever.

So if the same sorting happens in the real world too, then you start to compound these problems - you are less likely to be meeting people from outside your filter bubble offline. You have communities of rural oldies and young urban grads not mingling or meeting up. People start to say things like: “I don’t know anyone who voted for X”

And there is precedent for this - Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort looked at how Americans were moving in such a way as to sort people into like minded communities. This had already had political consequences when he wrote in 2009 that:

“People with college degrees were relatively evenly spread across the nation's cities in 1970. Thirty years later, college graduates had congregated in particular cities… In 1976, only about a quarter of America's voters lived in a county a presidential candidate won by a landslide margin. By 2004, it was nearly half.”

Bill Clinton (no less) urged people to read the book and take steps to counter polarisation, but alas, the US only seems to have slid into hyper polarisation since.

Could the UK go the same way? Could that happen here?

Well, you be the judge.

Quick Links

Up to 100,000 Afghans could claim asylum in the UK under human rights laws after the MoD data breach.

Inflation unexpectedly spiked to 3.6%.

The former Chief of the General Staff said Britain must “prepare for war” with Russia within five years.

A man who called for Muslims in Rotherham to “boycott” the police received an MBE.

Sir Trevor Phillips, who chaired the Equality and Human Rights Commission, warned the Government’s proposed “Islamophobia” definition will curtail free speech.

The Attorney-General, Lord Hermer, changed legal risk guidance for lawyers advising the Government and civil servants, encouraging them to anticipate court challenge or international law clashes in advance.

The UK has lost 178,000 payrolled jobs since June 2024.

Ministers are to cut domestic nurse training, increasing the NHS’s reliance on immigration.

The BBC apologised after failing to disclose that the presenter of its Gaza documentary was the son of a Hamas minister.

London is only building 1/20 of the 88,000 homes per year needed.

53% of voters say people with anxiety and depression should not be able to claim disability benefits.

Africa is the only continent with an above-replacement fertility rate.

Peter Mandelson, the ambassador to Washington DC, said there was a “kernel of truth” in everything President Trump says.

There are more than 2,000 schools where over half the pupils do not speak English as a first language.

Parts of the UK are now worse off than the poorest parts of Slovenia and Lithuania.

The Government announced a scheme to give £700 million in handouts for electric vehicles.

16,000 pupils have left private schools since the Government imposed VAT on fees.

Israeli forces launched an air strike on Gaza’s only Catholic church, prompting international backlash.