Towering Columns
In The Critic, Matthew Bowles argues that the expansion of home detention measures for convicts is a distraction from the issue of low prison capacity.
The downsides are obvious, and no one would choose to start from here. The long-term answer to our capacity crisis cannot be to discourage recalls. This risks undermining the whole premise of the licence system, which is that offenders live under the threat of renewed incarceration if they prove unworthy of the limited freedom afforded to them.
The only durable solution is increased prison capacity. The Government has pledged 14,000 new prison places across the prison estate by 2031, alongside more functioning electronic tagging and the faster deportation of foreign criminals. Innovative (or perhaps desperate) solutions are being put forward such as converting unused space, laundry rooms and storage space into cells, with Norris suggesting that this could create somewhere between (the admittedly large margin of) 200 and 900 extra spaces within prisons. But as a Prosperity Institute paper that is set to be released later this month by my colleague Alex Baker suggests, this is not nearly enough spaces, especially if non-custodial options continue to rest on the ultimate possibility of imprisonment for a breach in conditions. And by being content with laundry rooms, the Government is failing to think creatively enough about where additional short-to-medium-term capacity could be found.
Prison capacity will not be built overnight. We see constantly just how difficult it is for major infrastructure projects to get off the ground in Britain. Perhaps the French overcrowding method could be a short-fix. Maybe not. But whatever approach the Ministry of Justice choose, a prison sentence should mean something. Currently, the prisoners seem to be hearing all too often, “we would have kept you here longer, but unfortunately we ran out of cells.”
In The Telegraph, Tom Tugendhat argues Europe’s car industry is falling behind China’s EV dominance and needs urgent reform to remain competitive.
What Europe faces today is far more serious. There is a gap in systemic industrial competitiveness and current policies are not helping this situation.
Western workers once earned their higher wages by generating greater productivity. That difference has largely vanished now modern Chinese factories deploy the same or better robotics and automated machinery than their European counterparts. In a global market, carmakers cannot afford to pay European workers two to three times more per hour than employees doing comparable manufacturing jobs elsewhere.
Vehicles aren’t just another industry. They are the power train of the continent’s manufacturing sector, accounting for more than 6 per cent of EU employment, 7 per cent of GDP and the bulk of industrial research and trade surpluses. That engine is stalling as Chinese auto-makers are taking the oxygen of foreign export markets and even encroaching into the Europeans’ own showrooms.
In market after market, from the UK, where Chinese brands achieved a 19 per cent market share in early 2026, to the emerging economies across South East Asia and Latin America, European legacy firms are losing volume while European leaders are losing their way.
Writing for The Critic, Henry Hill argues that even increasing defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP may not be enough to fund Britain’s defence commitments.
This is the real lacuna in Badenoch’s defence pronouncement, viewed through the lens of actual defence policy. Her justification for the imperative of raising defence spending is a possible war with Russia. But a military geared towards war with Russia is a sort of military Britain has rarely maintained outside the exigencies of the World Wars: a large Army capable of meaningful operations in Eastern Europe, backed up by requisite armour and artillery, as well as all the unsexy logistical essentials such as the hundreds of railway cars needed to transport men and tanks to theatre at scale. (Britain’s last dedicated full-time railway formation, 79 Railway Squadron, was disbanded in 2012; rail capability was lost altogether when its successor, the Army Reserves 275 Railway Squadron, was disbanded in 2014.)
Personally, I think it’s dubious whether this country is actually prepared to maintain that sort of military, or to sustain the sort of casualties the US estimates would result from a high-intensity conventional conflict between peer militaries. But doing it properly on 3 per cent of GDP would also mean de-emphasising the Royal Navy and with it our ability to project force and police trade lanes, as well as confronting anew the choice between further attenuating the size of the fleet and abandoning expensive capabilities such as supercarriers and nuclear submarines.
Fortunately for the Conservatives, however, that isn’t the level on which the public debate on defence is conducted. The actual point of Badenoch’s announcement is to allow her to keep hammering the Government on the 3 per cent target, secure in the knowledge that the inevitable question (“Well, how would you do it?”) has something that at least looks like an answer. And this objective, at least, it attains.
In The Times, Tony Sewell argues for a more positive approach to thinking about Britain’s legacy in the Caribbean.
Charles needs to be bolder with these countries and make it clear that if they want to leave us then Britain holds no grudge. However, we don’t want to be framed as some kind of post-colonial power that is holding them down. In his after-dinner speech in Antigua he needs to highlight their national hero, the cricketer Sir Viv Richards. Remind Antiguans that our relationship is a complex one, where the legacy has helped Antigua in building such a great sporting leader.
Richards has always spoken with immense affection and loyalty about his time at Somerset County Cricket Club, where he played from 1974 to 1986. For him, Somerset was not just another county; it was a home away from home where he felt truly accepted and valued. Reflecting on his return to Taunton for special events and tributes, Richards has often stated that he considers his time there as the foundation of his professional life in England.
In his speech, Charles should stop being defensive and play a few Richards-style cover drives. This is not to disrespect the great people of Antigua but for once he could talk about how Britain was crucial in shaping Caribbean culture.
The King could refer to how he read the works of Rex Nettleford, CLR James, Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris. They all speak to the idea that the Caribbean is a mixture of the African rhythm and European melody. The process of creolisation recovered many aspects of African identity but what made it successful was the ability to produce a new version of culturally British people, set adrift in the Caribbean Sea.
Sam Ashworth-Hayes writes in The Telegraph about the true fiscal cost of the post-Covid Boriswave of migration.
Looked at from this angle, the scale of the Boriswave appears less like a way for the Treasury to bolster the economy, and more like an exercise in hidden borrowing. The benefits land in the five-year Office for Budget Responsibility forecast window, flattering the short-term outlook. The costs – healthcare, pensions, social care – arrive decades into the future, giving the Government breathing space against its fiscal targets.
In the long run, however, the country is left significantly poorer. On current projections, and unless something changes, roughly 1.6 million people in the Boriswave will be given Indefinite Leave to Remain. Add up their lifetime contributions through tax, and net out the amount they receive, and the total cost will spiral into the hundreds of billions.
Worse still, these numbers may actually be optimistic. Analysis from the Migration Advisory Committee has found that migrants on lower wages, and migrants from poorer countries, are more likely to stay in Britain than those in good jobs.
Frustratingly, these figures also show us that things could have been better: the top 30pc of skilled workers by earnings contribute over 70pc of the total fiscal benefit from that group. A genuinely selective system that let in a tiny fraction of the Boriswave would have given us all the benefits we were told existed with almost none of the downside. Rather than forking out hundreds of billions of pounds, we would have ended up with the ledgers in the black.
The good news is that it is not too late to undo our mistakes. The view of pro-migration activists in British politics appears to be that they only need to get lucky once: change the facts on the ground, and the debate is changed. Once a group of migrants makes its way into Britain, all subsequent focus is on whether to admit the next group, not whether the previous wave should be undone. This is an assumption we can no longer afford.
In The Times, James Kirkup argues that the hyper-localisation of politics has led Members of Parliament to neglect wider national governance.
Is there a connection between MPs more assiduously tending to their growing mailbags and a seeming disconnection from the wider public? The risk of spending so much time on casework is that it activates the normal human heuristic of anchoring. Our perceptions are always coloured by our recent experience. If you spend your day talking to people who hate cats, you’ll be more likely to think that Britain is a nation of cat-haters. And if your working week is heavy with people angry about their energy bills, you might underestimate public willingness to pay more to address climate change.
Privately, some Labour people fret that their MPs’ focus on caseloads in which benefits claimants are over-represented makes it harder for them to see the welfare system, and its costs, in the wider national context. Last year, just as Labour MPs were voting against welfare reform, the British Social Attitudes poll — the gold standard of public opinion — was reporting that public willingness to pay to fund welfare payments was at an all-time low.
The mailbag can fuel confirmation bias, too. In the words of Kowol and Toye in the Historical Journal: “The sifting process was useful because it helped MPs find real voter opinions they could cite in public — often in support of views that they already held.”
No column about the role of MPs is complete without the obligatory quote from Edmund Burke and his address to the electors of Bristol, which established the largely imaginary ideal of parliamentarians as Athenian guardians, loftily weighing the national interest without regard for local trivia. We should be pleased that MPs give such good service to their constituents, but also hope that that they pay heed to an updated form of Burke’s wisdom: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your email demanding help with your planning application for your kitchen extension or your application for PIP.”
Writing for The Telegraph, Andrew Sabisky makes the case that the effects of Net Zero on Britain’s economy will be felt for a long time - even if it gets scrapped.
On the electricity front things are no better. Never have policymakers remained so resolutely committed to ensuring maximum pain for their people. Germany’s nuclear plants remain shut. Britain remains firmly wedded to such an expansive grid upgrade that, even in a world where wholesale power prices went to zero, fixed costs will be so high that consumer costs would not even budge. The costs of the high-voltage transmission network alone are, in current prices, set to rise from £3.4bn in 2013 to a forecast £12.3bn in 2030.
Of course, policymakers will argue they have no choice: having subsidised the construction of so many offshore wind farms in remote locations via the lavish Renewables Obligation and Contracts for Difference schemes, their only apparent choice is between paying exorbitant constraint costs or paying for the grid to expand to connect these farms to the regions where most of us live.
Once again, this Morton’s Fork is downstream of yet another policy failure: consumers should never have been on the hook for wind-farm curtailment when they were already paying subsidies for construction and generation and, of course, the ongoing maintenance of the transmission and distribution networks.
The mess is so total and complete that it would be advisable for future British Right-wing governments, despite their commitment to saner energy policies, not to promise any major immediate consumer relief on energy bills. Fixing this will take decades. Britain, like much of Europe, has got itself in such a horrible mess that there is simply no easy way out.
In Spiked, Maurice Cousins analyses the links between Britain’s energy and defence policies.
For people living in Britain and Europe, this should be deeply concerning. If the United States, the so-called arsenal of democracy, is already struggling to replenish critical munitions while confronting lesser adversaries like Iran, then the implications for a prolonged conflict with a peer competitor like China should be blindingly obvious.
The problem is even more acute in Europe. Unlike the United States, we enter this period of renewed great-power competition with some of the highest energy prices in the developed world and a much-diminished industrial base. Decades of poor policymaking have hollowed out foundational sectors such as virgin steel, chemicals and refining, all of which provide essential inputs into sustained military operations in is a good example. There is a tendency among politicians and in the media to treat refinery closures as manageable because cars can be electrified and planes can eventually use sustainable aviation fuel. But military demand is very different. F-35s, tanks, ships and logistics fleets still depend overwhelmingly on conventional fuels. Domestic refining capacity cannot easily be substituted in a crisis.
As Dev Sanyal, chief executive of VaroPreem, whose refineries supply a tenth of Europe’s road fuels, told the Financial Times last week: ‘The reality is when you start thinking about F-35 jets and Leopard tanks they don’t run on hydrogen, they run on conventional energy.’ It is a similar argument to the one I made in the Telegraph in April.
Unfortunately, the national conversation about rearmament is still framed far too narrowly around defence budgets, procurement and headline spending commitments. Those things are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Rearmament ultimately requires reindustrialisation. For Britain and Europe, that means confronting the policies driving structurally high energy prices – in particular, the climate agenda that is eroding the competitiveness of energy-intensive industry.
Wonky Thinking
This week, Policy Exchange published “The Special Air Service in Northern Ireland”, which analyses SAS involvement in Operation Banner in Northern Ireland and how its operations were scrutinised at the time.
The British Armed Forces were deployed in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 2007 in response to the Northern Ireland Troubles. This deployment – Operation Banner – was the longest continuous deployment in British military history. Between 1976 and the end of Operation Banner in 2007, the Special Air Service (SAS) was deployed in Northern Ireland in aid of the civil power, under strict rules of engagement, and primarily against the Provisional IRA, a well-armed and lethal terrorist organisation that was responsible for the majority of terrorist incidents throughout the conflict. Drawing on original interviews with over a dozen SAS veterans – the first account of its kind – this paper shows the important contribution the unit made to Operation Banner by degrading the IRA’s capacity to kill, restoring order in areas where the IRA had operated with near-impunity, and helping convince the republican movement that armed violence could not succeed.
Yet those who served in the SAS in Northern Ireland, and other veterans too, now face renewed investigation, inquest, and possible prosecution in their old age. This is profoundly unjust to them, as well as damaging to the morale and future capability of special forces now. This paper explains how and why it has come to this and what should now be done about it. The central problem is that the UK Government has uncritically accepted the authority of an ill-conceived body of judge-made human rights law. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (the Strasbourg Court) has misread Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), a misreading which has then been applied retroactively to the conduct of the SAS, and others, decades earlier. While this approach to the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles should be firmly rejected, it is alas an approach that is set to be entrenched by the Government’s new Northern Ireland Troubles Bill.
Podcast of the Week
On the New Statesman podcast, Anoosh Chakelian is joined by Ailbhe Rea and Tom McTague to discuss Andy Burnham’s first Prime Minister’s Questions and how he fared against Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch.
Quick Links
Javier Milei threatens Britain with sanctions on Falklands oil fields.
PM to approve new gasfield in North Sea.
Met Police Chief claims criminals are being let loose on streets.
China influencing data centre debate in US.