Nation building at home

Britain should reject elite delusions and recognise the state's shortcomings if progress is to be made

Towering columns

At UnHerd, Aris Roussinos considers how Donald Trump’s techno-optimist vision of national renewal could be replicated in Britain.

The conversion of Westminster’s neoliberal think tanks to immigration restrictionist, free-market developmentalism — a kind of institutional Powellism — is one marker of this ideological shift, yet it also highlights a lacuna in the thinking of the British Right and of the Westminster state generally: the post-industrial Northern aspect of British discontent. Just as it was the Red Wall which carried the Brexit vote, defining the nation’s current political course, so were the summer riots — as striking a marker of volatile popular discontent as can be imagined — overwhelmingly a Northern English phenomenon. The anti-riot rallies in the regime heartland of Walthamstow were notably absent in northern England, just as the grooming gang scandal is itself a product of Westminster’s willed neglect of what was once the country’s engine of modernity, now sinking into a level of peripheral torpor and anomie as grim and politically destabilising as early 20th-century Ireland.

Rather than resolving Britain’s national dysfunction, a programme of regeneration that does not place as much emphasis as Trump’s does on rebuilding Rust Belt industrial capacity and prosperity as on tax and planning reforms risks widening regional equalities, dragging the fissiparous pressures already threatening the state within the Celtic periphery into England itself. The North’s decline bears out Nairn’s 1981 prediction that “the metropolitan heartland complex will become ever more of a service-zone to international capital”, while “the industries and populations of the Northern river valleys will eventually be shut down or sold off”: the result, in Anderson’s reckoning, is that “the nexus” — the British state — “is bound to dissolve, in one way or another”.

Rather than conquering Mars, then, the first goal of Right-wing Progressivism is simply dragging Britain to the developmental level of a functioning northwest European country, building and nation-building as if for the first time. Like its etymological derivations from Afrofuturism and Archeofuturism, Anglofuturism’s focus on Lee Kuan Yew is inherently post-imperial, a kind of Third World developmentalism for the only part of the British empire to never win its self-realisation from the ruins of Whitehall misgovernance. In the quest for national progress, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore broke off the shackles of a sclerotic post-imperial state, and prospered. Surely this is the Anglo-ness of Anglofuturism: not a nostalgic imperial Britishness but an inward-looking programme of national regeneration.

For The Spectator, Gavin Rice claims that growth is the necessary condition for broader prosperity but it must also be shaped towards the right objectives.

Any student of politics knows that market-driven growth allows us all to become richer without taking from each other – a phenomenon relatively new in human history, dating perhaps only to the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of public markets around a century before. A rising tide raises all boats, as the economist Milton Friedman and politician Keith Joseph argued, alleviating the need for redistribution. When growth stalls, the socialist claim that we become better off by taking from the rich suddenly becomes true – a dangerous position for any capitalist democracy.

But growth is a necessary, not sufficient, condition for an economy to thrive. It also matters where it is, and who it benefits. The last Conservative government rightly identified the gap in output and living standards between North and South as an existential challenge for Britain, with the UK one of the most regionally unequal countries in the developed world. In some areas, real wages have actually gone backwards, and there are pockets of the country that seem semi-permanently poorer than 15 years ago, stuck in a depressed equilibrium caused by deindustrialisation. It should be etched into the mind of every MP that only three UK regions – London, the South East and East of England – contribute more in tax than they do in public spending. For anyone on the right complaining about the size of the state, fixing the economic performance of Britain beyond the greater South East is, alongside our doom-spiral demographics, the only show in town.

So it’s vital that growth not only exists, but that it is properly spread. If it’s cripplingly uneven, governments simply have to redistribute after the fact through welfare and subsidies, driving up taxes and spending, undermining solidarity and the coherence of the nation state. Arguments that the state should have no role in shaping markets to ensure they deliver for the whole country become moot, as the bill for failure will arrive later in the form of higher social spending. Secondly, growth must be targeted at the creation of high-quality, well-paid employment. To some economists this is heresy: labour is a cost, after all, and those highly sought-after gains in productivity should actually kill off jobs, not create more of them. Except that the long history of automation has shown precisely the opposite. From Ludd onwards, technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed.

For the Financial Times, John Thornhill explains why DeepSeek’s success should force us to recognise China’s growing ability to innovate.

The stereotypical image of China abroad may still be that of a state-subsidised, capital-intensive manufacturing economy that excels at churning out impressive low-cost hardware, such as smartphones, solar panels and electric vehicles. But, in truth, China long ago emerged as a global software superpower, outstripping the west in ecommerce and digital financial services, and it has invested massively in AI, too.

DeepSeek’s emergence confounds many of the outworn prejudices about Chinese innovation, although it is far from a typical Chinese company. It certainly invalidates the old saw that while the US innovates, China imitates and Europe regulates. In several ways, DeepSeek resembles a bootstrapped Silicon Valley start-up, even if it was not founded in a garage. Launched in 2023, the company has the same high-flown ambition as OpenAI and Google DeepMind to attain human-level AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI). But its founder Liang Wenfeng runs one of China’s leading hedge funds, meaning the company has not had to raise external financing…

…DeepSeek’s focused approach has enabled it to develop a compelling reasoning model without the need for extraordinary computing power and seemingly at a fraction of the cost of its US competitors. As with other Chinese apps, US politicians have been quick to raise security and privacy concerns about DeepSeek. And OpenAI has even accused the Chinese company of possible breaches of intellectual property rights. Given the cases against OpenAI for infringing others’ copyright, though, that might strike some as rich.

For The Times, Trevor Phillips believes we should be clear about how decades of demographic change have reshaped British society and culture.

In 2007, I was asked by Gordon Brown to investigate a spate of gruesome stabbings in the capital involving teenage and pre-teenage boys, mostly black. I suspect no one else would take on the task. Admissions to A&E departments in London had doubled to nearly a thousand. The killing of Damilola Taylor had made international news; the hunting down of Kodjo Yenga in a shopping centre by a gang, the oldest of whom was 16, did not make much news but was more typical than Damilola’s death.

What most startled me was the preponderance of children born into families who had fled African war zones, mostly Somalia, Ethiopia and Congo. I wrote privately to Brown recommending a programme of psychotherapeutic interventions because “many of the young men have grown up inured to a level of violence unthinkable to most British people — boys who have seen family members maimed, raped or murdered in front of their eyes”.

Axel Rudakubana was born here; it is not obvious why he should have inherited any trauma. But something is going wrong and some minority communities are at the heart of it. It is estimated by lawyers that 75 per cent of those standing trial for homicide at the Old Bailey every year are from a black background, many from war-torn territories. We cannot and should not ignore the evidence before our eyes.

For the Telegraph, Guy Dampier reflects on what steps Britain can take to get illegal migration under control.

It is a sobering thought that every Londoner will walk past several illegal immigrants every single day, given that they make up one in 12 of people in our capital city. Britain already has the most illegal immigrants in Europe, according to a study by the MIrreM project, which measured illegal immigration across Europe. That means that our weak GDP per capita and limp productivity is actually worse than we thought and may even be in decline. That also explains some of the increased pressure seen on public services and the increasingly brutal competition in the rental market. Perhaps not coincidentally, London rents have soared over the last few years.

As illegal immigrants do not pay taxes and are often willing to live in squalor that would not be acceptable to British workers, they can undercut the labour market and degrade the housing market. Campaigners also claim that as many as 50,000 social homes in London could now be subject to fraud like this. Although the small boat crossings have captured the debate, most illegal immigrants came to Britain legally and then overstayed. Under Tony Blair, exit checks were abandoned, which meant that although we knew who had entered the country, there was no way of being sure who had left. That allowed the population of illegal immigrants to boom…

…During his first term, Trump faced major obstacles in his effort to control immigration. The speed and scale of this early blitz suggests that he intends to overwhelm the lawfare he knows to expect. Many Western Right-wing parties will be watching, including those in Britain, who are looking for a successful example to emulate. They face a tougher challenge though, as there are more legal obstacles in their way, especially the ECHR. Trump’s willingness to withdraw from international treaties and bodies which don’t benefit the USA could encourage others to reclaim their sovereignty as well.

For The Spectator, Sam Bidwell takes a look at the vast data desert that exists in Britain around migration and population growth.

The problem of population undercounting isn’t new, but it has worsened in recent years, largely because of unusually high post-Brexit migration (both legal and illegal). The surge of non-EU migrants after the end of the Covid lockdowns – the so-called ‘Boriswave’ – represented such a radical increase in numbers that statisticians have struggled to keep up. The ONS’s estimate for net migration in 2022 alone has been revised upwards three times, from an initial figure of 606,000 to 872,000…

…What’s to blame for the country’s data deficiency? Officially, stretched resources are at fault, and this is partially true. The ONS faces the mammoth task of collecting, recording and reporting hundreds of different datasets each year. From time to time, efficiencies will need to be made. None of this will have been helped by the ONS’s relocation in 2006, when around a thousand jobs were transferred to Newport. This early example of ‘levelling up’ has made it difficult for our national statistical body to recruit top talent: as many as nine in ten staff members did not follow their jobs to Wales, while a grand total of seven senior civil servants chose to make the move.

Ultimately, the failure to collect accurate population data is also a product of deliberate decision-making. When time and money are limited, bodies such as the ONS must decide which datasets they want to keep publishing, and which they want to discontinue. And when potentially controversial migration datasets happen to fall out of publication, ministers are unlikely to clamour for their return. Collecting more accurate data on the population at large risks exposing the scale of our national failure on migration, and would force the government to confront the fact that so many British businesses now rely on illegal immigrant labour.

Wonky thinking

The Productivity Institute released its Regional Productivity Agenda, providing a guide to the productivity performance of English regions and devolved nations. The authors found that the gap between London and the Southeast and other regions has grown, as has the gap between London and other major cities like Manchester and Birmingham. The report suggests how the regional dimension of productivity can be addressed by scaling up local government.

From the perspective of boosting productivity growth, two leading principles are key to an effective policy agenda. The first is the need for an integrated agenda of pro-productivity policies, which may be referred to as “joining up”. For some time now TPI has promoted the idea of policy coordination for pro-productivity policies at both the national and the regional level. At the national level this involves the integration of policies regarding investment, innovation, skills, trade and FDI, etc.. The current Labour government has particularly focused on reviving an industrial strategy. This effort is supported by the establishment of an Industrial Strategy Council within the Department of Business and Trade (DBT), in conjunction with the broader initiatives of HM Treasury (HMT), and aims to integrate this strategy into the government's overall growth mission.

At the regional level, the UK, particularly England, faces large challenges in implementing effective pro-productivity policies across various areas such as skills, innovation, trade, investment, competition, transport, and housing. This is partly due to the absence of an effective intermediate policy-making layer between the national and local levels. Policies like spatial planning, housing and infrastructure investment typically require a strong policy presence at this level of governance. There is often a lack of knowledge and control to effectively implement such policies at the central level. Conversely, at the local level, managing both negative and positive externalities is challenging without coordination at a higher spatial level. To support a place-based approach to economic development and growth, the Labour government also tasked all twelve current mayors of combined authorities (CAs) with developing Local Growth Plans for their areas. These plans demonstrate how each CA will contribute to the national mission and ensure that economic growth is inclusive and benefits all regions.

To capitalise fully on the opportunities of a joined up productivity agenda, local authority powers need to be scaled up to intermediate levels of government. At present, the UK lacks sufficient policy coordination and devolved decision-making mechanisms to effectively develop and scale up pro-productivity policies at the regional level. Previous attempts to establish effective intermediate levels of government, such as the Regional Development Agencies under the Blair government and the Local Enterprise Partnerships under the Coalition and Conservative governments, have had mixed success. The most recent White Paper on Devolution provides guidance on how to deepen and expand devolution across England to enhance local growth and development. However, the current focus remains on the essential task of building capacity and institutions, rather than directly addressing the growth and productivity agenda itself.

Much hope is placed on expanding and empowering CAs in England to reignite growth at the regional level. Building on the 2022 Levelling Up White Paper from the Johnson government, the new Labour government aims to sustain momentum to accelerate growth especially through Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs) in metropolitan areas like the Greater London Authority, Greater Manchester CA, Liverpool City Region CA, North East CA, and West Midlands CA. While the devolved nations have their own governments with broader powers than local authorities, they also have city region and growth deals, which typically function as partnerships rather than having their own administrations.

It is too early to determine whether the new devolution strategy, which is largely built around the MCA model, will successfully reignite regional productivity growth. Despite efforts by subsequent governments, the devolution map for England still resembles a patchwork, often driven more by political considerations than economic ones. Additionally, the economic size of the MCAs still seems relatively small compared to city regions in other countries. Currently the greatest need for the MCAs is to tailor policies and initiatives to better meet local needs and priorities. This means they should be empowered to translate the national industrial strategy into effective local investment and growth plans. This needs to be combined with ample authority and sufficient funding to implement the skills, innovation, and infrastructure agendas, supported by significant authority to coordinate the planning process.

In The Times, Rachel Sylvester investigates how new AI technology can improve policing, through techniques such as facial recognition, sifting through data, and targeting suspects, by improving efficiency in the use of police time, and holds potential for the future. Police productivity is already being held back by outdated technology and needs to catch up with the latest methods.

There are 43 police forces in England and Wales, each with multiple disconnected databases. The police national computer is 50 years old and woefully inadequate. The so-called “common platform” for the criminal courts has been beset by technical difficulties, with cases suddenly dropping off the system and hearings starting late because judges or barristers cannot log on. The impact on productivity is staggering, but dysfunctional IT is also disastrous for public safety.

New AI tools can build the links and help investigators trawl through otherwise inaccessible mountains of data. In West Mercia the police are trialling a system called Dragon Slayer, which uses AI to sift through huge downloads of material and highlight conversations that indicate paedophile grooming behaviour. Avon and Somerset police are testing an AI tool known as Söze, named after the criminal mastermind Keyser Söze in the Kevin Spacey film The Usual Suspects, which officers say can do 81 years of detective work in 30 hours, analysing megabytes of data including video footage, financial transactions, social media posts and emails simultaneously. According to Paul Taylor, the national police chief scientific adviser, the next step could be on-the-spot DNA analysis, allowing officers to use a Covid-style swab and equipment similar to an espresso machine to identify potential suspects without having to send samples to a forensics lab. “Technology is democratising our ability to do specialist tasks,” he says.

There are potential applications for prisons too. Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is looking at how AI could be used to tackle violence in overcrowded jails by monitoring and predicting prisoners’ behaviour. She is also considering whether new technology could be deployed to create virtual prisons, with more criminals punished in the community under house arrest.

The potential efficiency gains from automation are huge. Several forces have introduced an AI tool to redact personal data in documents before they are sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The College of Policing estimates this software would save about 7.5 million policing hours a year, equivalent to more than 4,000 full-time officers, if it were adopted nationwide. Technology can also allow the police to communicate better with victims. In Kent, the constabulary created a rapid video response for domestic violence. Instead of taking almost 33 hours on average to respond in person to a non-urgent call, an officer could speak to the victim within minutes using a secure link. The pilot saw a 50 per cent increase in arrests and an 11 per cent increase in victim satisfaction.

The Norfolk force has introduced a similar system and is also now piloting an AI tool that transcribes the victim statement, suggests questions to the officer, then fills in the forms needed to create a case file. It has doubled the number of cases the 12-strong domestic abuse team is able to deal with every day. It is a long way from Dixon of Dock Green but Alex Murray, director of threat leadership at the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for AI, says embracing technology is “not only desirable, it’s necessary”. As he puts it: “If we decide to slow down here we will lose the battle against crime and serious organised crime. The opportunities are huge but to a certain extent we’re just catching up.”

Book of the week

We recommend The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain As a Great Nation by Correlli Barnett. The author explains how British decline was brought about by elite misgovernance and moralism, putting welfarism ahead of industrial efficiency, technological innovation, military capability, and state capacity. It resonated with the New Right during the 1970s and is finding a new audience once again.

While in 1940–1 Winston Churchill and the nation at large were fighting for sheer survival in the face of Nazi Germany’s then victorious power, members of the British cultural élite had begun to busy themselves with design studies for a ‘New Jerusalem’ to be built in Britain after the war was won. Selfish greed, the moral legacy of Victorian capitalism, would give way to Christian community, motivating men to work hard for the good of all. In this community the citizen would be cushioned against the stab of poverty by full employment, welfare grants and pensions – all provided by a beneficent state – from infancy to the end of earthly life. Universal free health care in elegant modern hospitals and in health centres on the Swedish model would replace grim and run-down Victorian infirmaries and the ragged safety-netting of existing free medical services. The physical as well as the moral legacy of Victorian capitalism would be removed by slum clearance on the grand scale, and by transferring population from overcrowded conurbations to apartments standing in wide green spaces. Here was a vision of a garden-city society filled with happy, healthy children, smiling mothers, bustling workers, serene elderly souls in a golden twilight of state pensions; all living in houses furnished in Gordon Russell’s simple good taste, and, having been equally well educated in a reformed education system, all busy in cultural pursuits other than dog racing or going to the pictures.

Ironically this vision emanated from the same kind of people, indeed in some cases the very same people, whose earlier utopian vision of a world saved from conflict through disarmament and the League of Nations had done so much to bring about Britain’s desperate plight in 1940–1, by persuading British governments in the 1920s unilaterally to disarm, so rendering Britain helpless in the face of aggression in the 1930s, and by even then delaying her eventual rearmament by their passionate opposition. For New Jerusalemers and 1 pre-war ‘moralising internationalists’ alike were drawn from the Labour and Liberal parties, from the small-‘l’ liberal intelligentsia and, garlic in the salad flavouring the whole, from the religious with a social mission – what may be collectively termed the ‘enlightened’ Establishment. And New Jerusalemism and moralising internationalism were alternative expressions of the same belief that the evils besetting man could be banished by the creation of an ideal society founded on justice, virtue and good feelings. Whereas the ‘enlightened’ Establishment had evangelised this belief in the form of moralising internationalism so successfully before the war as to determine the broad aims, and cramp the choices, of British total strategy, it now proceeded no less successfully to render a similar service, in the form of New Jerusalemism, with regard to the purposes and priorities of British domestic policy after the war. The ‘enlightened’ Establishment had been a hundred years and more in the making, its ancestry beginning with (to put it in stud-book form) romanticism out of emotion by idealism…

…Thus in the midst of a twentieth-century total war the spirit of the early-nineteenth-century romantic movement blazed up again in Britain, and in its rays a renewed moral fervour brightly glowed like the gospel in stained glass. Yet the cultural descent of the ‘enlightened’ Establishment implied negative common factors of hardly less importance than the positive. In the first place not one of the leading New Jerusalemers was an engineer, an industrialist or a trade unionist; not one of them had ever had experience of running any kind of operation in the real world in which Britain competed commercially in peacetime and fought for very life in wartime, unless running a political party or a church or editing a newspaper be counted as such. Products of the closed loop of British élite education and culture, not so much men of straw as men of paper, the members of the ‘enlightened’ Establishment were no better equipped to design a working New Jerusalem for this real world than Adolf Hitler, another kind of romantic fantasist, was equipped to run a real war. And in the second place it followed from this that they were almost all middle-class, even in the Labour Party. New Jerusalem was their own vision, not the spontaneous effusion of the nation at large; it was their highminded gift which 31 they proceeded successfully to press on the British people between 1940 and 1945, with far-reaching effects on Britain’s postwar chances as an industrial power struggling for survival and prosperity…

…So it came to pass that a romantic vision a century and a half in the making had at last found incarnation in the committed programme of a British government with a crushing majority in Parliament. Yet the cost of realising this programme was to fall not on the richest country in the world, not on that Victorian and Edwardian Britain in which the vision first had gleamed and which had made the New Jerusalemers what they were, but on a country with a ruined export trade, heavily in debt to its bankers (the Sterling Area Commonwealth countries and the United States), and with huge and inescapable continuing burdens with regard to the war with Japan. Yet the wartime promoters of New Jerusalem had pursued their vision in the face of economic realities perfectly well known to them – on the best romantic principle that sense must bend to feeling, and facts to faith.

Quick links

According to the ONS, the UK population will increase to 72.5 million by 2032 because of mass migration.

Polling shows that most Britons support Donald Trump’s policies, including 58% who agree with declaring an emergency at the Channel and beginning deportations.

Dependant migrants let in by the last government will cost the UK £35bn by 2028.

Rental demand has been pushed up by migration, causing prices to rise by 11%.

More than 50 relatives of asylum seekers are joining them every day in Britain.

A CBI survey found that 22% of businesses expect their output to decline between now and April.

Shoplifting reached an all-time high with 20 million incidents last year.

More than one-third of Nvidia chips, worth around $40bn, was exported to China last year with Singapore used as a backdoor.

Beijing's New AI Industry Development Action Plan will invest $ 137 billion towards its AI industry over the next five years…

…while the European Union passed its AI Act to regulate artificial intelligence.

The world’s largest military command centre is being built in Beijing…

…and Chinese R&D spending has passed $469 billion.

Three-quarters of the public supports banning social media for under-16s.

Judges blocked major North Sea oil and gas projects.

In 2004, £1 bought 27 kWh but last year it only bought 3.5 kWh.

China set a new record in fusion power generation with its ‘artificial sun’.

The population of China is projected to decline by 72% by 2100 due to a declining fertility rate.

Chinese television started the Lunar New Year with a parade of dancing Unitree robots…

…and the first American-made supersonic jet broke the sound barrier.

Games Workshop has sparked manufacturing growth in the East Midlands ‘lead belt’.