Nothing Seems to Change

After a period of political excitement, discourse seems to be returning to its default

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel argues Burnham’s philosophy of ‘Manchesterism’ risks ending up a vague political slogan unless backed by clear strategy.

With leadership fever gripping left-wing policy circles, however, this rather tedious, technical, business-friendly blueprint has become something different. A paper by two Burnham allies published by Mainstream, a Burnham-supporting group, makes some pretty wild claims for Manchesterism. It is, according to Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, “the practical proof of concept for the Productive State”, which shows why we should embrace “public control of essentials” such as “water and sewerage, energy networks and rail infrastructure, alongside social housing and social care”. Manchester doesn’t have public control of any of these sectors, but let’s not dwell on that.

Let’s assume they just mean that the buses show how the power sector could be run. The main argument is that when such assets are controlled privately, they are optimised for profit, but when they are controlled by the state they “align price with social and economic need”. This means that in “essential” sectors, public companies will always invest more productively than private ones. Well, that does happen sometimes. But at other times, state-owned companies are a complete disaster. How do you avoid the many duds?

To the extent that the report provides an answer, it’s to suggest that public corporations should be “insulated” from “Treasury pressure” and “ministerial direction” — but that they will be well run if they are accountable to “communities” and have “workers on boards”. These are ideas the managers of genuinely well-run public corporations, like Korea’s Kepco or the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, don’t seem to be especially interested in. As for what might go wrong, the words “trade union” oddly make no appearance. Neither, in the treatment of energy costs, does “net zero” get a look-in.

Writing for The Telegraph, Tom Tugendhat highlights the dangerous utopianism of Ed Miliband’s Net Zero ideology.

This socialist vision of utopia exists nowhere. Norway taps the gas fields we share and sells us the energy, and China builds new coal-fired power plants to help make the steel we’ve effectively forbidden to reduce carbon outputs.

Our real emissions have barely moved, they’ve just moved abroad. Poor Ed, he missed the economics lesson that, while taxes are territorial, carbon is global; so we’re paying with our jobs for higher carbon outputs from dirtier industries with lower employment standards overseas. I’m not sure he’s thought this through.Ed is still singing the Internationale, but all we can hear is Stalin’s “socialism in one country”. And it will fail again. You can’t separate economics from physics in just one country.

It is virtue by vice, squeezing the hope out of the economy with a policy based on all sacrifice and no salvation. The deeper tragedy is that he seems to believe the cold is good for us. Wear the hair shirt, he promises, and your sins are forgiven.

But now is our moment of greatest danger. With Sir Keir Starmer gone, Our Andy, the newly elected Mr Burnham, may offer Miliband an even plummer job as the price of his backing. Burnham may think it’s a price worth paying, but we can’t afford it.

Burnham is reported to have cooled on Miliband as a potential chancellor. Let’s hope that’s right. Otherwise, the man who froze our energy policy in the death zone would do the same to the whole economy. We can reverse the energy austerity with abundance, but we’d be left cleaning up Ed’s fiscal incontinence for generations. If Miliband became chancellor, we would all pay and our children would be left with the mess.

In The Telegraph, Fred de Fossard examines how harsh EU tech regulations should make Britons wary of arguments to rejoin the bloc.

While Europe tries to find ways to wean itself off its reliance on US tech giants, it should ask itself a few questions. First: what services do tech companies offer which European citizens enjoy using, and should they be prevented from doing so? For example, EU digital regulations have reduced the integration of services such as Google Maps and Google Flights creating a less seamless experience for many users.

Second: why are investors and entrepreneurs wary about building their own tech companies in Europe and wrestling with EU regulations? The EU’s economic model is failing. Mario Draghi, former European Central Bank president wrote a damning report on the EU’s economic competitiveness in 2024, warning that regulatory burdens were contributing to the relocation of businesses away from Europe. To date, the EU has done little to change course.

Third, in a world where concerns about political censorship have become a major point of diplomatic tension, with the US showing a renewed emphasis on defending values such as freedom of expression in allied countries not seen since the Cold War, is the online suppression of contentious or controversial speech worth the political risk?

These questions cut to the heart of the issue: consumer welfare, economic competitiveness and civilisational vitality. This should be a warning to anyone in Britain about the reality of the EU in 2026. One hopes the bloc might wake itself from its regulatory slumber and embrace innovation, free speech and the rule of law, but that seems a long way off.

In Conservative Home, Lee Rotherham argues that current estimates for shortfalls in defence spending are likely to be extremely conservative.

£70.3 billion is not the figure that’s needed to properly overmatch the adversary and have a good chance of winning the conflict from the off. Nor does it address enduring issues around long term procurement which will have to wait for another paper; nor obviously cover decision-making processes within Whitehall comitology which merely push problems round in circles; nor consider any of the optionals beyond the critical shortfalls that still add real value. I do make a couple of exceptions relating to defence diplomacy and strategic influencing that can help plug some gaps immediately while the ordered kit comes online. But overwhelmingly this is not a fancy Christmas wish list but rather a desert survival packing list.

In our paper we consider the five great and terrible scenarios of our times: Homeland Defence; East of Suez; South of Suez, the Russian threat; and the China menace. The relative importance of these areas for the nation today, and the role the UK would play as these scenarios develop, can and does need to be a matter of political and considerably wider social debate. Acknowledging them to be interconnected does though allow us to tease out which assets are already overcommitted. As the Defence Select Committee has itself noted, in a conflict a given platform can only be in one place at one time, even when it is multi-roled across just the single theatre as opposed to five.

From missile defence and deterrence to plugging the surface fleet shortfall; from cyber defence to Field Army having some actual field artillery to support it; from minesweepers to regenerating a functional expeditionary capability; these are the astonishing gaps that we now need to fill. The details in the paper are for budget managers and strategic analysts to argue over. What’s needed immediately though is the admission that the £28 billion assessed shortfall that got leaked by an MoD insider is only the politest of British understatements in terms of where we need to be at. Because right now we are in a world where General Sanders, the former Chief of the General Staff, as recently as last year said the UK needed to accept that war with Putin by 2030 was a “realistic possibility”.

That, in official MoD parlance, puts war with Russia in the 40-50 per cent probability range. Perhaps more people in charge of budgets should be aware of the stakes now in play.

Robert Jenrick writes for The Telegraph about the prospect of the next Chancellor of the Exchequer being even more radical than Rachel Reeves.

For whatever Reeves was, her successor is likely to be worse. In a sense, I’m not as worried about who Andy Burnham appoints to replace her. Though I confess I would relish the prospect of shadowing Ed Miliband. The (yet further) damage which I expect is about to be inflicted upon us is a consequence not of personality, but psephology.

The next chancellor will be whoever Burnham needs to hold his coalition together, and that coalition means satisfying his Labour members and the band of Green campaigners to their Left. It all points one way: tax more, spend more, borrow more.

Reeves at least pretended to believe in fiscal rules. Burnham recently admitted he didn’t even know what they are and his allies are demanding he loosens them once again. It would be an extraordinary gamble.

We already carry the highest borrowing costs in the G7 and the heaviest tax burden since the war. There is no headroom left that Reeves has not already spent. Reeves might have laden the camel, but Burnham is gambling on piling on more.

To my mind, a decision that big requires a new mandate, only possible by calling a general election.

Burnham will be risking it all without a mandate, and will be implementing a programme that no manifesto contained. In truth, I’m surprised that Reform is the only party calling for the public to get a say on this with a general election.

Because the decision to borrow and tax even more will make the next chancellor far more consequential than Reeves.

In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith looks into why Keir Starmer’s popularity plummeted so dramatically from the point at which he was elected.

Starmer believed in the system. He also believed in the people who had been favoured by the system. It should have been obvious to all sentient observers that giving Peter Mandelson a significant position would be catastrophic. His deep connections to Jeffrey Epstein were hardly the stuff of obscure conspiratorialism. They had been reported on by the Guardian. But while outsiders, like Jeremy Corbyn, could be shanked in the back, Peter Mandelson was the consummate establishmentarian. What could go wrong?

Starmer seemed to have no opinions of his own when it came to moral and epistemic issues. Britain was becoming an “island of strangers” until it abruptly wasn’t. Women could have penises until they suddenly couldn’t. Freedom of movement was going to return until it definitely wasn’t. A man can change his mind, of course, but Starmer never explained how he had changed his mind. He barely seemed to have a mind.

We can’t avoid a vibes-based discussion here because the fact is that Starmer’s vibes have been historically bad. He seems stiff and humourless — the sort of man who says that his guilty pleasure (his guilty pleasure) is a pint with friends — but there is a broader issue here. In an era where Britain should have been trying to avoid a fate of managed decline, Starmer seemed like a man who actively embraced it. So, he did odd things like trying to pay Mauritius to accept the Chagos Islands. But he also had the grim and awkward manner of someone brought in to manage a once great football team that, having been relegated from the Premiership, was now structurally destined to collapse through the leagues. Britain, to him, seemed to be Leicester City with an army — barely — attached.

Wonky Thinking

A new report written by Dr. Gerard Lyons for the Centre for Policy Studies looks into Britain’s economic performance relative to Europe. According to the report, where Britain’s performance looks weaker is largely due to domestic policies rather than a result of being outside of the bloc, and that moving closer to the EU would serve to hinder rather than enhance Britain’s economic performance.

Our economic problems are certainly legion: an investment shortfall, expensive energy, a planning system that vastly inflates the cost of building homes and infrastructure, an inability to curb inflation that has fed a cost-of-living crisis and an ill-conceived desire to tackle rising prices through intervention in supermarkets and elsewhere, poorly structured and burdensome taxes, a broken immigration system, retrograde public sector productivity, regional imbalances, high and deteriorating rates of economic inactivity and a poor debt position with out-of-control public spending. There are also structural headwinds such as our ageing population and low fertility rates. Since incentives are fundamental to economic growth, it is concerning that many are now badly misaligned.

Yet many of these challenges, like low investment, predated our entry into the EU. Most were not addressed while we were members. And solving them now requires an economic vision, clear strategy and policy actions from Westminster and Whitehall that would take us in a different direction (of the kind outlined in my 2025 CPS paper ‘Breaking the Cycle’).

Of course, the UK needs a sensible working relationship with the EU, just as it does with other major economies or regions. But that should not mean a reset that ties Britain’s hands on domestic policy such as regulation. Nor should cooperation be one-sided. The UK has allowed EU citizens to use eGates at its airports, yet access for British citizens has been partial and uneven. That may reflect weak UK negotiation, but it also points to a deeper problem: the EU has too often treated partnership with Britain as something to be rationed, not reciprocated.

Indeed, we have recently seen how Brexit freedoms can be taken advantage of, though it was not acknowledged as such. In response to cost-of-living pressures, the Chancellor recently decided to cut tariffs on food imports, a welcome move that the CPS has previously called for. This is just one reminder of the policy scope available outside of the EU, which was always one of the key arguments for Brexit.

Pursuing closer regulatory alignment with the EU now would threaten the areas of future economic growth where the UK is now well placed and where we have seen successes that would not have been possible inside the EU, including but not limited to AI and the City.

Podcast of the Week

On Triggernometry, Ed Husain discusses the origins of Islamism in the West and how the Muslim Brotherhood promotes such ideas and modes of operating.

Quick Links

For the third day in a row, the hottest June temperature in Britain has been recorded.

Simon Case calls for Burnham to hold an early General Election.

100% tariff threatened by US over new EU technology tax.

Defence Investment Plan sees £1bn boost from Keir Starmer.

Shabana Mahmood to introduce Ukrainian-style refugee sponsorship scheme.

Iran strikes by US resume after cargo ship attack.