Towering Columns
In The Telegraph, Tom Harris warns that Burnham has put the Union in danger by linking border polls in Scotland and Northern Ireland together.
And if the GFA [Good Friday Agreement] is applicable to Scotland, why were Scots not informed of this before now? Why were Scottish trade unions and political parties not invited to take part in the construction of the GFA if the final document was to be used to shape any future constitutional agreement here as well as in Belfast?
Most egregiously, Burnham is likely only to have been informed of another crucial element of the GFA in the last 24 hours as his officials scurried around trying to limit the damage of their boss’s generosity to nationalism. It stipulates that once a border poll in Northern Ireland is held – and lost – then subsequent polls must be held every seven years until a positive decision is made by voters on both sides of the border in favour of a united Ireland. Is this another aspect of the GFA that Burnham reckons also applies to Scotland? Our reinvigorated nationalist friends will certainly hope so.
Whatever Sir Keir Starmer’s faults, he would never have made this scale of blunder when it came to the territorial integrity of the UK. He would have spent far longer reading the detail of the GFA and less time reading the lyrics sheet of his favourite Smiths album.
The future of the UK and Scotland’s democratically hard-won place in it is more important than any one political party’s future electoral fortunes.
For UnHerd, David Littlefair attacks the idea that the government’s new ‘Class Unit’ will address the real needs of working class people.
Will working-class voters buy into the idea that “social class” can be solved by being granted a protected diversity status? It’s not hard to wonder what someone like Ramsay MacDonald might think of such a measure; “class” was once the entire reason a Labour politician got out of bed in the morning.
But it speaks also to the mindset of the modern political class: that more unity can be created if more people can be given permission to be recognised as “in need” by their betters. The Labour of old knew that working-class people didn’t want this politics of pity: they wanted a politics of dignity. They built institutions, friendly societies, social insurance schemes, working men’s clubs and trade unions as a living demonstration of their ability to stand on their own feet, not reliant on other people to decide whether they can be given a leg up for the sake of meeting a quota.
Clearly, the working class of deindustrialised Britain will need to wait for anything that would mimic the gigantic leaps of change that Labour once provided: homes where there were once slums, work where there was once unemployment, an NHS where there was once sickness, a welfare state where there was once desperation. A New Jerusalem. In the meantime, the white working class can celebrate their induction into the world of DEI. One more flower in the bouquet.
Writing for Engelsberg Ideas, Michael Lucchese argues that conservatism needs to avoid AI slop and draw on a more serious literary culture.
The intellectual reaction against this liberal revolution was broad and multi-faceted, but underpinned by common principles. ‘In urging the need for a complete Conservative philosophy,’ Hadjiyiannis writes, the emerging conservative modernists ‘were hoping to rally Tories around philosophical principles that were as strong and cohesive as the ones that they found on the “Radical” side’. They believed that the chief conflict of their time was a battle of ideas, and their primary function as partisan intellectuals was to puncture the ideologies of the left. Approaching this task from a variety of backgrounds, they were all especially critical of the individualism and hopes for inexorable social progress they believed endemic to the liberalism remaking Britain. Conservative modernists, according to Hadjiyiannis, denounced such liberal notions as fallacies ‘based on an inaccurate interpretation of human nature and an erroneous understanding of history’. Instead, they hoped to reconstruct society around the authority of tradition and the objective morality of natural law…
In that sense, one of the most important lessons of the conservative modernists is the importance of responsibility and sacrifice. Hulme himself died in the trenches in 1917, and others in his cohort bore scars physical and spiritual that would never heal. While some came to question the wisdom of the war itself, all essentially affirmed the importance of fighting for the ideals they inherited. ‘The writings of the conservative modernists studied in this book repeatedly return to duty and sacrifice,’ Hadjiyiannis concludes. ‘Whether demanded of the writer, the reader, the ruler, or the citizen, all of the conservative modernisms we have investigated – distinct and contradictory as they may be – elevate duty and sacrifice to higher values required for the correct function of literature and society.’ Ultimately, what these men sought to conserve was a sense of objective morality.
It is perhaps these high aims that are missed most on the right today. Instead of defending high culture and seeking new ways to articulate old truths, the dominant populism of right and left alike plays into vulgarity and power politics. Anglo-American politics today cries out for something different, something better – and perhaps a party of renewal can take some inspiration from Hadjiyiannis’s conservative modernists.
In The Times, William Hague says that rebuilding state capacity is foundational to renewing conservatism and defeating the far-right.
A renewal of conservative thought should be inspired by its greatest thinkers and leaders. It should aim for a broad sharing of prosperity that would be applauded by Disraeli, an ideal of active citizenship consistent with Tocqueville, a commitment to future generations that would meet with the approval of Burke, an unflinching insistence on the unity of democracies that would be natural to Churchill, a faith in incentives and ownership that would be familiar to Thatcher and an optimism about technology and growth that could have been voiced by Reagan.
At the core of it should be the urgent need for a capable and effective state. Where the left think government should do more, and the populist, revolutionary right that it should command harder, the conservative answer should be that government should do fewer things but actually succeed at them. Housing is of critical importance. If we believe in families, fairness between generations and people enjoying a stake in the nation’s success, we must take the powers to ensure that new housing is available for a new generation to own.
Defence is a clear-cut issue, where left-wing leaders are failing, so far, to find the budgets, and populist leaders often see little value in alliances. The democratic control of immigration is essential and urgent. A conservative attitude insists on more effective restrictions and integration. But it embraces the talents of many immigrant families. It rejects ethnonationalism and the proposition that most domestic failures are caused by foreigners.
In Conservative Home, Peter Franklin says that Conservatives must put cutting spending ahead of offering tax cuts.
In 2004, Oliver Letwin (then Shadow Chancellor) opened a speech with the words “our green and pleasant land is in in the red“. I may, or may not, have had something to do with that line, but I do definitely remember that the big concern at the time was over household debt, not the national debt (which had yet to breach the £500 billion barrier).
Well, folks, we’re about to crash through the three trillion pound barrier (a trillion being a thousand billions). Is it any wonder, then, that the bond markets — who don’t owe anyone a living — are charging us a growing risk premium on our teetering debt-pile?
The money men are extra jittery because there’s no end in sight to Donald Trump’s war with Iran or to Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. For all the talk of fossil fuels being more reliable than clean energy, two of the bottlenecks through which the former must flow — the Strait of Hormuz and the Russian gas pipeline network have been choked-off — and a third, the Red Sea route, is under threat.
The oil and gas supply crunch threatens further waves of inflation, with knock-on consequences for the cost-of-living and government finances across the West. Even if the geopolitical omnicrisis subsides, the AI revolution will continue — together with its gargantuan appetite for debt. For governments, the age of unlimited credit is over.
Wonky Thinking
New research by the Resolution Foundation, Second wind, has investigated whether the green energy transition is creating the economic growth and job opportunities that its advocates have claimed looking in depth at Aberdeen and Grimsby. The report has found:
We find that in both cases the reality is running behind the rhetoric. This is not for want of potential, or for a lack of policy initiatives. Instead, the Government’s largely ‘place-blind’ approach to net zero opportunity is too passive in its attempt to deliver jobs and growth. Looking ahead, a more hands-on approach is needed. In Aberdeen this means dealing with a sequencing problem that could see the oil workforce further disband before lower-carbon jobs materialise; and in Grimsby it means scaling up and concentrating green industries so that they form an anchor for the local economy.
Key summary
Aberdeen’s oil-driven living standards boom has largely unwound following a collapse in prices around a decade ago. The earnings premium compared with the rest of the UK is down by three-quarters; payrolled employment has fallen by 8 per cent; and household incomes fell below the UK average in 2020 for the first time since 2003.
The pattern of North Sea oil output driving higher employment in Aberdeen has broken, with periods in which production increased now seemingly associated with falling numbers of jobs. New green industries have failed to plug the gap. Indeed, a 2010 target of 28,000 offshore wind jobs in Scotland by 2020 was missed by 80 per cent.
Grimsby plays an outsized role in operating Britain’s offshore wind fleet, and the electricity sector has delivered 78 per cent of growth in output in the area since 2018. But that has not delivered the transformative benefits of an ‘anchor’ industry, accounting for just 1 per cent of local jobs and 8 per cent of output.
Podcast of the Week
On Quite Right! Francis Fukuyama analyses trends in conservative thought in America with Michael Gove. He argues that the American right abandoned traditional conservative ideas in favour of a hollow popularism that threatens to undermine the values it claims to believe in.
Quick Links
Home office insider claims that only 1% of asylum requests are genuine.
UK domestic production has fallen by 0.5% over the past three months.
Tatler has created a ‘new Bayeux Tapestry’ for modern Britain.
The third largest taxpayer has left the UK to return to Greece.
The cost of building new transmission cables in the UK has doubled.