"I Don't Know, Sir"
Ministers pleading ignorance of massive state failures is not good enough
Welcome to The Conservative Reader. Some exciting news this week: the Reader team are very pleased to announce that Andrew O’Brien will be joining us as a Co-Editor - you will have seen some of his editions of the Reader already this month.
Andrew is a former think tank director and Head of the Secretariat at the Independent Commission for Neighbourhoods. He posts on X here and his personal Substack is here.
We look forward to many more of his editions to come! Meanwhile, it’s me again this week - we hope you enjoy this weekend edition.
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Gavin
Towering Columns
For The Spectator Australia, Ian Acheson says the accidental release of a migrant sex offender is just the tip of the iceberg of the failing prison system.
Saying we need better software is a classic political panic answer to a systemic failure. The increasingly farcical failures of HM Prison Service speaks to a much worse malaise. Davies-Jones also boasted about dragging prison governors before the Lord Chancellor as if a bit more scolding would do the trick. True, the service is full of over promoted duds who ought not to be running baths let alone complex penal institutions. But it also has brilliant public servants who are tearing their hair out to try to keep crumbling jails upright. Kicking them until morale improves is not the answer.
When I heard that two more prisoners had been released in error, including migrant sex offender Ibrahim Kaddour-Cherif, who overstayed his visa and should have been deported, it was no surprise to me that it happened at HMP Wandsworth. This institution typifies the problems that prison governors grapple with every day across the country. Insufficient, poorly trained and inexperienced staff overwhelmed by need. Record levels of violence. Up to a third of front-line officers not available on a daily basis. Rocketing sickness absence due to stress. Overcrowding and a huge number of foreign national offenders. Broken or missing physical security and human security devastated by low morale.
This could have happened at any prison in the UK. We have record levels of drug misuse across the penal estate with drones hovering ‘like wasps’ over high security prisons. There are multiple instances of female officers involved in sexual misconduct with prisoners. The second suspected inmate-on-inmate homicide in a month occurred just yesterday at one of our highest security prisons. The dysfunction is endemic. In this environment, Lammy’s boasts from the despatch box about the ‘strongest checks ever’ after the release in error of Ethiopian sex offender Hadush Kebatu from HMP Chelmsford, failed spectacularly just 48 hours after they were imposed. The wonder is that prison service bosses even knew that they had lost another foreign national, with police informed six days later.
In The Times, Edward Lucas says universities have become dependent upon China and its surveillance state.
The universities’ cowardice and cupidity stems from a system created by past governments which told them to behave like businesses while adopting what in retrospect seems a culpably complacent attitude to the Chinese party-state. With research funding cut and tuition fees capped, recruiting overseas students became a financial lifeline. Mainland China’s size made it an irresistible market.
A watered-down syllabus and constrained classroom discussion cost academics their self-respect. But they harm students too, not least the 150,000 Chinese ones here in Britain. They have paid to study in a free country. But they live in a surveillance bubble, not least enforced by campus branches of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), which liaises closely with Chinese diplomatic missions abroad.
Research by Jérôme Doyon from Sciences Po in Paris shows that the CSSA offers its office-holders career-building opportunities. In return some cadres may have to inform on fellow students, or take part in protests, even unwillingly. He cites a London-based CSSA leader who said the embassy asks them to name students that take part in opposition protests, but who tries to remain “as vague as possible”. Snooping means that Chinese students who make controversial points in seminars risk penalties for wrong-speak. Oxford now anonymises essays dealing with China, in an attempt to protect students from the wrath they will incur by wrong-write. (Given the cyberskills of Chinese spies, this may not be foolproof; returning to pen-and-paper assignments might offer more protection).
In The Spectator, Ian Williams says China is ruthlessly manufacturing a rare earths crisis.
China’s rare earth controls go far further than any coercive measures it has taken before. Unlike the often petulant boycotts and bans that characterised past Chinese efforts at punishing countries or companies deemed to have caused offence, China has put in place a systematic licensing system that can be calibrated and targeted at will. It framed its rare earth controls as a matter of ‘national security’, a response to US restrictions on the sale of powerful chips used for artificial intelligence, but its sweeping nature and potential to bring western hi-tech industries to a standstill go far beyond anything imposed by America.
They were also well prepared; over recent months the authorities gathered detailed information about how rare earths are used in western supply chains and restrictions have reportedly been imposed on the ability of factories in the industry to shift equipment out of the country and on the international travel of their executives. The system may become a model for other areas where the West is dangerously dependent, from critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt, so essential to ‘green’ technology, to the tiny cellular modules that are the ‘gateway’ component for all connected devices, where China is intent on gaining a monopoly – and even pharmaceuticals, where antibiotics and other vital drugs rely on Chinese supply chains.
Beijing’s economic policy under Xi is explicitly built around the twin goals of self-reliance in technology and building dependencies on China. As Xi himself told a meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission in 2020: ‘We must tighten international production chains’ dependence on China, forming powerful countermeasures and deterrent capabilities based on artificially cutting off supply to foreigners.’
Finally in The Spectator, Rory Hanrahan says mainland Britain is now experiencing the same kind of sectarianism that has divided Northern Ireland for decades.
In High Wycombe this April, Gaza solidarity groups released a video instructing Muslim voters on whom to back in local elections. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch condemned it as ‘evil Islamist sectarianism,’ a phrase that could have been lifted from the pages of a 1970s Belfast dispatch. Just as Republican apologists prioritised the North’s ‘oppression’ over local needs, voters were being effectively urged to sideline worldly issues. Ballots were cast not on civic merit, but tribal fealty – mirroring Ulster’s bloc voting, where identity, not ideas, dictated the tally. Moderates? Sidelined, their pleas for integrated debate dismissed as ‘Islamophobic’ or ‘Zionist.’ The result? A poison seeping into council chambers, turning local politics into imported feuds, much as Republican infiltrators once turned community halls into recruiting grounds.
It’s the same rot in the Green Party, once a haven for eco-dreamers, but now a vector for sectarian drift. It has been infiltrated just as Sinn Féin once wormed into Ulster’s voluntary groups via shared anti-imperialist networks. Their 2024 gains rode a wave of Muslim support fuelled by Gaza outrage, but by 2025, the fissures cracked wide. Councillor Mothin Ali, elected co-deputy leader in September, celebrated with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ It was a victory lap that former deputy Shahrar Ali branded a ‘toxic cocktail of Islamism,’ accusing the party of procedural abuse to entrench hardliners.
Leader Zack Polanski’s eco-populism has veered into anti-Israel fervour and gender skirmishes, exploiting the party’s openness. Environmentalism becomes a Trojan horse for identity politics, just as nationalism masked Republican thuggery in Ulster. The parallel? Extremes reward the ‘guns’ – here, the shrill outrage of protests and boycotts – while genuine moderates, like Shahrar Ali, are purged or silenced. As a result, the Greens are haemorrhaging core voters to this sectarian surge. It echoes how the SDLP withered as Sinn Féin’s gun-shadow loomed.
In The Telegraph, Allister Heath says the BBC’s bias is now beyond dispute.
One reason the Tories’ 14 years in office were a disaster is because they were wrongly terrified of the BBC. Convinced the corporation could make or break any government, they ensured the top 10 per cent of earners were hit at every Budget and dreamt up Leftist policies to pass the “BBC test”. It is in this context that the memo sent to the corporation’s board by internal whistleblower Michael Prescott, revealed by The Telegraph, should be read.
A Panorama documentary a week before the US elections spliced together two sections of a speech by Donald Trump on the day of the Capitol Hill riots. Trump, whom the BBC hates, was made to appear as if he were inciting supporters to go to Congress and “fight like hell”, when he was actually encouraging them to protest peacefully. Why hasn’t the BBC deployed its ludicrous “fact-checkers” against itself? The memo reveals BBC bosses were “dismissive” and defensive when academics accused it of rewriting history to promote a woke agenda, especially with regards to slavery, colonialism and the Irish famine. The BBC regularly behaves as a propaganda channel, a campaigning organisation for extreme views, not as a middle of the road, dispassionate news media for all of Britain.
Damningly, the report accuses BBC Arabic of deciding to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the Gaza war to “paint Israel as the aggressor”. Allegations against the Jewish state were “raced to air” without proper checks, as were Hamas’s made-up casualty figures, implying either incompetence or “a desire always to believe the worst about Israel”. It’s not just BBC Arabic, in my view: the corporation’s overall output has propagated incendiary libels against Israel for years, and especially since October 7. Given its influence and reach, this has played a central role in fuelling the return of anti-Semitism in Britain and around the world. It’s a shameful, foul betrayal.
In The New Statesman, Aaron Laffere makes the case for “Anglofuturism.”
If optimism about what people can do for their country only comes from the right, some blame must lie with progressives who surrendered that ground. The proposals we feature on our podcast are often radical. Guests such as Joe Hill, Policy Director at public services think tank Re:State, Curtis Yarvin – the philosopher credited with providing the intellectual ballast for the current Trump administration – and Santi Ruiz, of the Institute for Progress, gave prescriptions for reform that would make many progressives blush in their ambition. But crucially, each grounded their proposals in the basic belief that Britain’s central priority should be to achieve strategic autonomy, state capacity, and economic growth. None of that is irreducibly right-wing.
Some are discomfited by our podcast’s unabashed belief in Britain’s manifest destiny. Nothing definitional in Anglofuturism demands you agree with the proposals we have featured, or that you share our mytho-Britannic vision of the future. But to us, it’s no mystery why presenting the ideas of tomorrow alongside the iconography of our present day, doing so in a way that makes British people feel proud of their history as much as of the days to come, provides a natural rallying point for those eager to get on with the unfinished business of the future. That some Anglofuturists are not natural allies of the left is undeniable, but secondary to the urgency of our situation. Progressives are already yielding territory to the right on anaemic wage growth, working-class communities, and patriotism. If they yield the future too, more’s the pity.
We are not, as some believe, nostalgic for a Britain that was once great. Anglofuturism asks only that Britain remembers to want greatness. This simple ambition has fallen out of fashion for too many on the left. As Matt Clifford, chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, put it at a Looking for Growth rally in London, “Whatever you care about, whatever your vision for this country, it will be much easier to achieve it if we make the UK rich again.” An Anglofuturism with redistributive characteristics, one in which co-operatives own and carry out asteroid mining, or a renewed state builds advanced infrastructure in concert with trade unions, is sorely missing from the political left’s imagination.
Wonky Thinking
On his blog, Professor Dieter Helm argues that British energy is now neither home-grown, secure nor cheap.
It is now all but impossible to claim that the great “world leadership” on climate change is producing “cheap energy”. What Britain has demonstrated to the world is how to pursue a territorial carbon production target in a way that produces amongst the highest prices in the world. Britain has therefore provided a great example of how not to do it, and no other country will be looking to it to see how to replicate this.
Believers in cheaper power should next ask why the costs and prices are so high. It is not hard to find out. Britain now needs twice the capacity of generation and twice the grid capacity to produce the same output, in addition to a host of batteries, and pumped storage, plus lots and lots of imports. Even by 2030, on the government’s trajectory, 35GW of gas is needed to run 5% of the time.
How could any rational objective person conclude that this is cheap? The answer is the old device: change the question to get the pre-conceived answer you want to get. This goes as follows. Let’s concentrate not on the system costs that determine the price, but on the marginal costs of wind and solar. It’s now easy: the marginal costs are close to zero. Then jump to the conclusion that, since gas has marginal costs, and wind and solar do not, wind and solar are therefore cheaper and the bills are going to come down accordingly.
Add a number of assumptions about “S” curves for new technologies and falling costs of solar panels (though not now wind turbines), and it looks even better.
It is a very “good thing” that the price of a solar panel made in China is coming down, but it makes almost no difference to the system costs of adding more and more intermittent solar onto the system in a country not blessed with the sorts of sunshine experienced in North Africa, the Middle East and the tropics. Lots of solar may indeed be cheaper in the “sun belt”. Sadly, in this respect Britain is not one of these lucky countries.
When it comes to wind, the story is worse. Unlike solar panels, wind turbines are not getting cheaper anymore. Though production costs may be falling in China and elsewhere, the cost of capital is the key variable and the bids in Britain in AR7 are heading north not south. The current AR7 round has brought a sobering reality to the “always getting cheaper” path.
What makes the wind story much worse is the location of the new wind farms. Lots of these are in Scotland, and Scotland does not have much demand for electricity. The electricity produced by these wind farms is surplus to Scottish requirements, so the output needs to be transported south to England. That means more transmission lines. To see how uneconomic it has been to locate all this offshore wind in Scotland, consider the implications. At the moment, that wind is constrained off for up to 40% of the time. It generates between say 40% and 50% of the time and then, when it does, it gets constrained off for up to 40% of the time. During these periods, the electricity is useless. We pay for it, but don’t use it.
Do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. Offshore Scottish wind requires a contract for differences (CfD) of, say, £110–£120/MWh. Add to this the costs of the extra transmission that is needed specifically for this extra wind, and add in the back-up costs in gas, which are made much more costly because it is mostly on standby. How could this be a sensible economic thing to do? The conclusion is that the wrong capacity is being built in the wrong places because the wind farm developers do not face the full costs of the intermittency they cause and because of their distance from the market.
All this is before the additional environmental costs of building lots and lots of high-voltage transmission lines through some of the most iconic landscapes in Britain.
Perhaps nuclear is getting cheaper? Sadly, not so. It costs more than £10 billion per gigawatt to bring on new nuclear in Britain – perhaps the most expensive new nuclear in the world. The costs of Hinkley and now Sizewell will be with customers for the next 20–30 years or more, and they are not cost-competitive with gas.
Perhaps these are all transitionary, inevitable pains of the transition to net zero? Not so, for the government is doling out contracts that cement in costs to well beyond 2040. It has made it all but inevitable that the future costs of energy in Britain are going to stay high and remain amongst the highest in the developed world. The decisions made today are baking in a future energy system with contracts that fix the prices for decades to come. The government is making it even worse: the offshore CfDs in AR7 now have a 20-year duration, rather than 15 years. Just to state the obvious: this means that the prices struck now by DESNZ will be the prices still prevailing in 2045.
That leaves the fall-back argument for the Secretary of State: however costly it might be, it will be cheaper than relying on gas. Yet even this is not true, for the obvious reason that, far from phasing out gas in the 2030s, Britain is going to need to use a lot of gas, and the amount used may actually be higher than otherwise would have been the case, and because of rapid exit from North Sea gas production, it will increasingly include high-cost, high-polluting liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The gas story has not received the ministerial attention it ought to have done. Instead of simply assuming a phase-out, it would be wise to look at the demand for electricity and the increasing importance of firm power. Though much of it may be exaggerated hype, there can be little doubt that the coming of AI and data centres pushes up the demand for electricity. This demand is critically dependent on firm power, 24/7, which is what wind and solar do not provide. What data centres and AI are looking for in Britain (and in the US and elsewhere) is baseload power, and in the absence of nuclear any time soon, they turn towards self-generation and gas. Elsewhere, so great is the demand for gas to generate electricity for data centres that it is starting to cause difficulties for other electricity users. Texas is the stand-out example. It is beginning to ration off the development of shale gas production for lack of power.
It is very doubtful that the forecasts of doubling of electricity demand in Britain over the next 20–25 years will materialise. The very high prices will dampen this demand growth, and the hype about AI is probably overdone. Nevertheless, the question remains: what will generate the electricity, sufficient to replicate all the existing system? It is unlikely to be solar in Britain, and it is hard to imagine it could be wind. So that leaves nuclear, and Britain is on an exit path from nuclear, to be topped up by Hinkley and Sizewell in due course, joining the only existing nuclear power station likely to be still going in the 2030s: Sizewell B. At best, this gives 7–8GW of nuclear power. Not enough to bridge the gap – more a replacement of what has been closed. SMRs (small modular reactors) might come to the rescue, but not until the end of the 2030s and probably later.
Britain has got out of coal, so that is not an option. All roads therefore lead to gas. Gas is the major energy for heating as well as for supporting electricity. The idea that the electricity system is going to carry all the extra AI and data centres, plus the heating load, and large industrial demands of steel and other energy-intensive industries and do this with wind and solar is an assumption the believers make. They should take a closer look and explain how all this works with a phase-out of gas in the 2030s. It won’t and it probably can’t.
The net result is that, not only does Britain have amongst the highest-cost electricity in the world, but this is being baked in beyond 2040. It will be a big drag on economic growth. Indeed, it already is. Britain is not going to have cheap energy any time soon – unless there is radical policy action.
Podcast of the Week
Looking for Growth hosted Make or Break, its largest conference yet. Its high profile line-up of speakers focused on breaking Britain’s political deadlock, achieving growth and regime change.
And Nick Timothy MP spoke to anti-Israel protestors in Birmingham at Villa Park, where Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned following a political campaign.
Quick Links
Justice Secretary David Lammy was unable five times to answer a question in the Commons on whether any more dangerous criminals have been released accidentally.
The released Algerian sex offender was arrested, having been released on Wednesday.
And a second prisoner, also accidentally released, turned himself in.
Just 19 new flats were sold in London in May, reflecting a wider property demand slowdown.
A UCL professor spoke out criticising China’s influence on UK higher education.
And China waged a campaign of intimidation at Sheffield Hallam University to stop research into human rights, according to documents shown to the BBC.
Half a million recent international graduates have remained in the UK following their studies.
Right-wing British voters are more hawkish on immigration than US Trump supporters, a survey found.
Those on median and higher incomes have experienced almost zero wage growth over the last five years, with incomes falling for the highest decile.
Top 10% earners in the UK are now poorer than their equivalents in the rest of the Anglosphere, having been the third top earners internationally in 2000.