Protecting Our Way of Life

From terrorism on our streets to economic decline we are struggling to keep our culture alive

Conservative Reader Meet Up

We are hosting the first Conservative Reader Meet Up at 6.30pm on the 21st May at The Ship & Shovel Pub in Trafalgar Square, London. If you’d like to come along to meet other Readers, share ideas about future content and discuss the issues of the day, do come along.

Towering Columns

On Substack, Neil O’Brien writes about how radicalisation of our campuses is shaping growing levels of political violence.

What’s really happening is that these universities are being pushed around by militant staff and students. For example, UCL’s branch of the University and College Union passed a motion calling for “intifada until victory” shortly after the Hamas attacks. UCL’s “Director of equality, inclusion, and culture”, Addeel Khan, is a trustee of Save One Life UK, a charity under investigation for links to Hamas.

What does this culture mean in the real world?

Zahra Farooque, who graduated from UCL in 2021, was charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage, and violent disorder for targeting an arms factory. UCL neuroscience student Mohammed Nasser was arrested after allegedly assaulting a pro-Israel demonstrator in Brighton. Qesser Zuhrah, 20, was studying social sciences at UCL before being arrested over alleged offences linked to the activities of Palestine Action. These problems have been going on for a long time. In 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had run the Islamic Society at UCL, attempted to detonate explosives on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Nor is it confined to UCL. The Office for Students reported 70 cases of Islamist radicalisation cases in higher education institutions which were escalated to Prevent officers in the 2023-24 academic year. This represented a 75% increase on the previous year.

For The Telegraph, Jonathan Goldstein says that we must summon the courage to tackle home grown radicals.

A country’s strength rests on shared standards – on a clear sense of what is acceptable and what is not, and on the confidence to enforce those boundaries consistently. When those standards begin to blur, the consequences extend far beyond any one group.

They extend, too, to how Britain is seen from the outside. Reputation is not built on rhetoric but on lived reality. When countries such as the United Arab Emirates begin to question whether it is safe to send their students here, it should give us pause. When businesses and investors start to factor social instability into their decisions, it becomes an economic issue as much as a social one.

We should be clear: this is not about inflaming division or assigning collective blame. It is about recognising that radicalisation, in any form, cannot be ignored simply because it is uncomfortable to address. The longer we defer that conversation, the more entrenched the problem becomes.

In The Times, Sebastian Payne documents the growing political extremism and antisemitism in the arts and culture.

On Monday, a new report was launched in parliament by Freedom in the Arts, a campaign group, to tackle “the new boycott crisis”. It states that 77 per cent of the almost 200 artists surveyed have either directly experienced or witnessed boycott-related activity.

Their research argues that there was a problem before the October 7 terror attacks on Israel, but it has ramped up significantly since. Something has gone badly wrong in the arts sector, it says, with an ecology based on talent, artistic judgment and meritocracy replaced by one of fear, and informal or direct sanctions.

Freedom in the Arts argues that artists are being targeted not for their political beliefs but simply for their identity, with Jewish artists facing “wave of boycotts”. It notes that many have been “accused of Nazism, Zionism or moral complicity [in Israel’s conduct] simply by virtue of their heritage”, something that would be lambasted as discriminatory were it another ethnic group. The most disturbing thing is the perniciously quiet way that this censorship is happening: those who do not voice correct right-on views are treated as “suspect”; cancellations happen behind closed doors without any process; and boycotts gather rapidly online. And then there is self-censorship, those artists who decline to publicly say anything heterodox because it risks disrupting their careers. A previous survey by the campaign group showed over half of nearly 500 artists said they did not feel they could speak freely on social and political issues.

Meanwhile, for The Times, Richard Morrison highlights the loss of arts and culture for local communities.

Kent is not the first council to venture down the slippery path of flogging its family silver to make ends meet. In 2013 the London borough of Croydon auctioned off its collection of Chinese ceramics for £8 million. The following year, in a notorious deal, Northampton borough council sold a 4,000-year-old Egyptian statue to a private buyer for £15.8 million, even though it had been donated to the council expressly so it could be displayed in public. More recently Hertfordshire, Derbyshire and Cambridgeshire have also sold hundreds of artworks.

But until now the vast majority of local authorities have shown an admirable resolve to uphold the principle that their collections, often donated by people who wanted everyone to enjoy their art, should be sources of civic pride, not financial assets to be flogged when times get tough. That civilised view is now under attack. Two years ago the Taxpayers’ Alliance published a paper asserting that the UK’s local authorities possess, between them, nearly two million artworks valued at £1.5 billion. As only 28 per cent of this hoard is on public display at any time, the Alliance argued, councils facing huge financial pressures should “assess what they do and do not need to hold on to”. In other words, they should turn paintings languishing in dusty storerooms into hard cash and use that to pay for essential services…

The works in storage may be valued at a certain figure for insurance purposes, but that doesn’t mean they will fetch this price if sold in a desperate dash for cash. There are horrible stories that suggest some local authorities (including Kent) may have bundled together dozens of fine prints or paintings and auctioned them all for a few hundred quid…although local authorities are technically the owners of these artworks, they are really holding them in trust for their communities, and especially for generations yet to come. In Maidstone, for instance, the art students and schoolchildren of the future will no longer be inspired by the very tangible link to Gormley that Two Stones provided for so many years.

In The Telegraph, Robert Buckland argues that threats against our elected representatives is warping our political debate.

For generations, when it comes to our relationship with our elected representatives, we in Britain have taken pride in what many other countries regard as an unusually direct and personal link. MPs continue to hold open constituency surgeries, walk our streets without escorts, cultivating the impression that politics in the United Kingdom is accessible. Yet that settlement is now increasingly under strain.

This week, the deteriorating situation was brought into stark relief by the disclosure by Nigel Farage MP, Reform leader, that continuing and serious threats to his safety led to his acceptance before the 2024 election of a private donation to cover the costs of his own security. Assaults by milkshake might seem amusing to some, but the reality for Mr Farage and many others is that this is the tip of a very large and frightening iceberg.

Not only does his own security dilemma call into question how we protect MPs other than the most senior government ministers, but it asks fundamental questions about how public life itself functions, who chooses to enter politics, and how democracy at all levels is experienced by voters. As large parts of Britain go to the polls in devolved and local elections next week, and campaigns and candidates actively seek election, this question is even more topical.

In Conservative Home, Katie Lam argues that we are failing to protect those that serve to protect us.

The previous Government legislated to put a stop to these prosecutions. This Government plans to repeal those protections, and throw open the doors for a whole new wave of lawfare. They are so determined to do this, they have even made it one of only two bills carried over from this Parliamentary session to the next. They insist that this is necessary, because the protections put in place by the last Government are not compliant with the Human Rights Act, or our obligations to the ECHR.

But if protecting our veterans from vexatious prosecution really isn’t compatible with ECHR membership, this only strengthens the case for leaving the ECHR altogether.

The action taken by our security forces in Northern Ireland was necessary, in order to keep us safe. The same is true of the action taken by those who are currently serving across the world. Their ability to take that action relies on the knowledge that, if they have acted according to instructions given to them by the British Government, then the British Government will give them full support in future. It is, in other words, a relationship which relies on trust.

The Government’s plan to repeal the Legacy And Reconciliation Act totally undermines that trust. So it is no surprise that, as a result, many currently-serving SAS soldiers are resigning. Who can blame them? When they can’t even rely on the support of their own Government, and may face decades of legal harassment in future, why would they take the kind of risks that they’re being asked to take?

For The New Statesman, Andrew O’Brien writes that we have given up trying to pay for our standard of living.

The Sterling Crisis and IMF Loan of 1976 are perhaps the most misunderstood economic events in recent British history. Columnists and politicians love to reference them, particularly in reference to the current Iran crisis and our own beleaguered Labour government. But they barely understand the events they’re describing. The point is not that our current crisis is the same as then, despite some passing similarities. In fact, in many ways, the current crisis is worse than 1976.

The reason why is simple. We cannot afford our current standard of living. We do not produce enough of what we want – or enough of what the rest of the world wants – to pay for the things we cannot produce ourselves. Add on top of that a global economic crisis, like the US-Iran war, and the economy begins to buckle. As the world scrambles to secure fuel supplies, food, fertilisers, plastics and other essentials in its wake, we will struggle to secure our own supply. Even if we do so, we will have to sell off more of our businesses, our property, our future tax revenue to pick up the bill.

We have allowed ourselves to get into this position by forgetting the iron law of international economics: every country must pay its way. Ensuring this was the goal of politicians like Jim Callaghan and Healey. This is what maintaining our balance of payments meant in practice. It is the very heart of what it means to deal with the cost of living. And it has been forgotten by our current political class.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel argues that the right needs to stop relying on outdated theory and embrace national economic renewal.

The question is, when a third of the world’s goods are produced by an economy run on the basis of “Marxist-Confucianism”, can you actually claim to be operating according to the natural laws of the free market? Or are you in fact just participating in the role of global “capitalist” chump — a “non-player character”, as the video game wonks put it — in some weird power struggle of sub-regional Communist Party officials with production targets to hit…

But beyond its practical consequences, the ultra-liberal analysis also has limited explanatory power. An honest reading of economic history disproves the absolutist theory that the state is always bad at picking and developing winners. Nuclear power, mass vaccine production, space shuttle development, semiconductors, solar panels, car-making: all have relied at different points upon the might of government research, subsidy or procurement to grow. And in all sorts of cases, strategic government support has led to the emergence of genuinely competitive companies that end up trouncing global rivals. That’s before you even enter into the debate about how various savings and fiscal policies favour or hinder particular industries.

Unfortunately, neither the Tories nor Reform are close to formulating a coherent world view. Reform is throwing out sporadic promises of nationalisation, but policymaking is still stuck at the stage of working out who owns the keys to the whisky cabinet. The Tories are doing some work on fiscal and energy policy, but have neither the attention span nor the cash to expand beyond that. If this work doesn’t happen, we’ll just end up with contradictions and truisms about the extraordinary innovative power of markets. But a right-wing programme for the economy needs to incorporate the way things actually happen, not the way the old theories say they should. There is, in short, more than one way to boil a pot.

Wonky Thinking

The Prosperity Institute has published a new paper with a draft bill on repealing the Human Rights Act and returning to the traditional constitutional settlement with accountability located in Parliament rather than the courts.

We envisage two primary effects of withdrawing from the Convention and repealing the HRA 1998. One is that public authorities will be able to discharge their functions in ways that are presently unlawful because they are incompatible with the Convention rights. Two is that there will be a significant reduction in the grounds upon which individuals and corporations can challenge the exercise of state power.

The result is that it would become easier for public authorities to take many decisions, to take them quickly, and they would face a lower probability of judicial scrutiny. This would extend the capacity of those public authorities to take positive, or at least popular, decisions in a timely fashion. It would, however, also expand the scope for them to make significant, perhaps grave, mistakes. Some of those mistakes would not be easily susceptible to ex ante or ex post judicial inquiry without the HRA 1998 in place.

Were our Bill to be enacted, the United Kingdom would return to something closer to its historic, Diceyan constitution in which there are no limits on Westminster’s parliamentary authority. In such a constitution, the political accountability mechanisms of Parliament take on decisive importance. The capacity and willingness of parliamentarians to question, probe, expose, deny, censor, and direct the executive, its agents, and the wider emanations of the state would become the central protection against excessive and authoritarian government.

We are presenting this Bill for two reasons. The first is to raise public understanding that withdrawal from the Convention, and repeal of the HRA 1998, is not a purely mechanistic process and involves significant policy choices.

The second is that the policy ambitions of Labour, Reform UK, and the Conservatives, particularly their commitments to improve deportation rates of those individuals deemed ineligible for asylum or humanitarian protection in the UK, will continue to be difficult to achieve for so long as the HRA 1998 remains on the statute book.

The Social Democratic Party has published a new Green Paper calling for the return of an investment state. This would shift spending on social security towards building new homes, energy infrastructure and return to the post-war levels of public investment. The paper argues that this would significantly increase living standards and boost productivity.

Prior to the mid-1970s, British government spending on public investment roughly equalled that spent on entitlements and cash transfers to households, with each item constituting 6% of GDP. However, in the subsequent fifty years, successive British governments have averaged just 1.7% of GDP per annum on public investment, and 10.2% on entitlements.

This reallocation of government spending – what we call the shift to the entitlement state - has caused a long-term, secular reduction in British productivity growth. The cost of this long-term fall in productivity growth has been momentous. We estimate that British output per hour in 2024 would have been 90% larger had this shift not taken place, representing an increase in 2024’s Gross Value Added (GVA) from £2,500bn to £4,900bn.

We argue for a reallocation of government spending towards a pattern that better resembles pre-1975 levels: at 6% of GDP per annum on public investment, and 6% on entitlements.

To avoid the patterns of economic mismanagement that derailed the pre-1975 system, we propose the creation of an overall body for national economic development called the Department of Economic Planning (DEP). The DEP will pursue targeted five-year plans that use public investment to resolve supply-side constraints facing the British economy and create the conditions for long-term growth, such as infrastructure investment, housing, and industrial coordination.

We name this new mode of economic management the investment state.

To achieve the investment state, we will need to realise a significant reduction in current entitlement spending. To achieve this, we propose a ten-year “taper” period which will see spending on the state pension reduce by £4.9bn per annum, disability and incapacity benefit by £3.8bn per annum, and housing benefits by £3.7bn per annum.

To illustrate the power of the investment state at resolving structural crises in the British economy, we present three five-year plans by the DEP focused on housebuilding. Using half of the proposed entitlement savings, we detail a plan to expand national housebuilding capacity to build 4.3mn additional homes within fifteen years.

In total, we project that the higher productivity growth achieved under the investment state will increase national income significantly over a thirty-year period. By 2055, it will increase national income by nearly fifty percent – from £3,040bn under the current trend to £4,440bn.

Podcasts of the Week

In The Spectator’s Reality Check podcast, Michael Simmons and John Power discuss the Green Party’s policy on drugs and have decriminalisation could lead to a rise in drug deaths and create broader social problems.

Chris Bayliss, Henry Hill, and Nigel Biggar discuss on The Critic Show the questionable historic justifications for the Church of England - and Britain more widely - to pay reparations for actions of the past and what it means for modern Britain.

The Reparations Game (FULL EPISODE)

Quick Links

The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre has raised the national threat level to Severe.

The Act of Union came into effect today, 319 years ago.

Total government spending on course to be 60% of GDP by 2073.

The number of Channel boat crossings has reached 70,000 since the General Election.

Investigation has found multiple instances of antisemitism in local election candidates.

Canadian Armed Forces platoons with over 80% non-Canadians descend into infighting.