Reckoning with Our Failures
Falling social standards, lack of competence, collapsing industry and unrealistic promises
Towering Columns
On Substack, Nick Timothy argues that Britain has become a society without shame leaving us too weak to protect our way of life.
“Our generation has witnessed new concentrations of power – in huge new tech companies, for example, and as the responsibilities and powers of the state have grown. These concentrations of power have developed as our ability to scrutinise and challenge have become weaker. Social media is in some ways incredibly empowering, and offers communities of citizens and activists the means to come together and organise. But the fragmentation of the media – and the collapse in revenues for the traditional media, affecting for example budgets for investigative journalism – means powerful people are often allowed to evade scrutiny for longer.
The intellectual fashions of our time have also led to a widespread rejection of restraint. Late-stage liberalism has tended to see any laws, institutions, norms, moral codes or obligations to others as restrictions on our right to self-expression and self-fulfilment. Marketing straplines like, “because I’m worth it” are popular manifestations of the ideas of an age that say achievement is personal, and those who have succeeded owe little or nothing to others. This is the extreme logic of social mobility – a good thing in itself – when it is untethered by any sense of the common good.
Other fashions have subordinated personal responsibility to wider structural forces that supposedly dictate what we are able to achieve. Militant identity politics – that often hold that our racial identities, gender identities, and other intersecting identities determine our life chances – remove any respect for the idea that we are responsible for the things we do. This, together with the progressive’s belief that they are always “on the right side of history”, goes some way to explain the shamelessness and hypocrisy of those on the Left who fail to live by their apparently high moral standards.”
In The Critic, Lord Goodman says that Conservatives must confront the loss of their reputation for competence if they want to rebuild.
“But one can easily become so bewildered amidst the maze of Tory factions as to lose one’s sense of place, direction and proportion. The evidence is unambiguous. It wasn’t Cameron who wrecked the Conservatives. Nor was it Brexit. Nor even immigration. It wasn’t “levelling up”. Nor was it failing to level up. It wasn’t abandoning one group of Remainery votes to embrace Leaveish ones. Or even hesitant attempts to move the other way. It was the most extensive plague since Spanish Flu, the most devastating war in Europe since 1945, the personal and political failures of Johnson … and, perhaps above all, Liz Truss and her mini-Budget. If it was such a great achievement, why did she sack the Chancellor who delivered it?
The most elemental case for the Tories for at least the last century has been that their hearts may not always be in the right place but their heads usually are: that, when the chips are down, they are the people least likely to damage your lives and livelihood, and most likely to protect the property on which social order and economic freedom depend. Lose that reputation, and you lose everything.
It took the Conservatives the best part of 20 years to recover from the tax rises that followed Black Wednesday under John Major. How long will it take them this time round — if recovery happens at all — with Reform knocking at the door?”
On Substack, Rian Chad Whitton documents our once competitive British motor industry and its recent sharp decline.
“While we do have battery-manufacturing capacity ready to come online, we are very far off from where we need to be if we want our car industry to be about as large in 2040 as it is in 2024. Chinese penetration into the British EV [Electric Vehicle] market is growing because we are one of the few markets that have not imposed tariffs. This makes our EV purchases cheaper, but it raises questions about the viability of British EV manufacturing.
The British motor industry was globally competitive for much of the twentieth century. After falling far behind other countries, it accepted foreign ownership and optimised for exports, resulting in a significant trade deficit for the industry. This succeeded during the late twentieth and early twentieth century, but it has been a partial reprieve. Global demand for cars is slowing, and the modern preference for EVs places Britain in a poor position. We lack cheap energy or a proper planning system to build battery factories quickly, and have less capacity to accept low profit margins than Chinese, East Asian, or European firms.
On the one hand, we will not interfere with the market through protective tariffs or prioritising domestic manufacturers. But we will interfere by subsidising purchases of certain types of vehicles (Battery Electric Vehicles - BEVs) that we currently don’t make in bulk. I don’t have immediate remedies for the industry’s future. Still, we could at least get rid of arbitrary targets and let BEVs gain market share based on consumer choices.”
In UnHerd, Mary Harrington writes about the need to demolish the dead hand of managerialism that has made it impossible to run Britain.
“Further north, Donald Trump is currently taking a bulldozer literally to the White House, and also figuratively to American institutional norms, also in the name of renewal. And in sharp contrast to the anaemic British managerial approach, both these leaders appear to be trying to solve the “red tape” problem by exiting the procedural paradigm altogether, in favour of one based on personal authority. Perhaps the most hotly contested such battlefield has been Trump’s programme of deporting undocumented migrants. His haters accuse him, generally accurately, of ignoring established procedure and just deporting people without redress. His supporters, meanwhile, point out (also accurately) that with an estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the USA, giving each of these individuals his or her procedurally mandated day in court would cumulatively take so long that Trump, who promised mass deportations to his voters and has a maximum of three years left in office, is forced to choose between betraying his election promise and taking a bulldozer to the rules.
In other words: Trump faces a thicket of procedure not dissimilar to the one that confronts schools, prisons, and other public-sector organisations here in Britain — just on a still bigger scale. His solution, though, isn’t helpless surrender to entropy. Instead, he seems to be trying a controlled managerial demolition, legitimised by his personal charisma, such as it is.
Will it make America great again? There exists, it’s fair to say, a range of views on this. Nor is personal authority necessarily any guarantee of competence: those executing Trump’s political programme have already made their own cock-ups, enthusiastically documented by his haters. And yet it’s probably also fair to say that some in Britain are now watching bulldozers tear through White House walls, and ICE tear through unworkable immigration procedures, and wondering what we could do in Britain if only we tore up the rulebook.”
Wonky Thinking
The Tony Blair Institute calls for the 2030 Clean Power mission to be dropped and a focus on generating abundant cheap electricity through whatever form.
“The government must therefore focus on what matters most – for growth, for consumers and for the climate: reducing the cost of electricity in a renewables-based system and creating the conditions for the full electrification of the economy. The immediate task is not squeezing out the final emissions in the power sector but delivering electricity that is both cheap and clean, so it becomes the obvious alternative to fossil fuels for households, transport and industry alike.
Doing so requires reform of the Clean Power 2030 mission. Launched in the middle of the gas crisis and in a low-interest environment, it was right for its time, but circumstances have changed. The UK now needs more than a decarbonisation plan. It needs a full-spectrum energy strategy built on growth, resilience and abundant clean electricity. This means prioritising cost, flexibility and long-term stability – the real building blocks of electrification – not just short-term emissions cuts.
If Britain gets this right, the prize is enormous – both for the climate and the economy. Cheaper, clean electricity would cut emissions while lowering bills in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. It would attract new industries, such as AI data centres, to locate in Britain. It would accelerate electrification across households, transport and industry, raising efficiency and boosting productivity. And by proving that decarbonisation can be done affordably, Britain could lead abroad as well as at home – exporting not only clean technologies but also a model for others to follow.”
Net Zero Watch has launched a new campaign to get the government to cancel the AR7 renewables auction which could lock in higher energy prices for decades to come.
“According to the International Energy Agency, the UK now has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, and energy industry leaders have told Parliament that even if gas were free by 2030, electricity bills would still remain high due to the soaring costs of the system itself.
The Tony Blair Institute has called on ministers to “recalibrate” the CP30 mission. Oxford University’s Professor Sir Dieter Helm, the respected energy economist who in 2017 led an independent review on behalf of the govenrment into the cost of energy, has said the UK’s current trajectory “poses serious risks to the UK economy” and will “lock in permanently high costs for British energy”. The economist behind Ed Miliband’s pledge to cut bills by £300 has cast doubt on whether any savings can now be delivered.
Rather than address the root causes, as promised in their manifesto, Ministers are reportedly considering shifting billions of pounds in policy and system costs into general taxation - hiding the bill rather than reducing it. Families would still pay, just through higher taxes and more borrowing. This is not what voters endorsed.”
Economics Editor at The Spectator, Michael Simmons, explains how Britain has lost control over its official statistics and policy makers are flying blind.
“While the quality of data is a big source of frustration, ‘the patchwork of data systems across government and the way civil servants present data’ is a bigger issue, explains one official. ‘Literally the prime minister doesn’t know the real numbers, it’s often just concealed from them,’ George Osborne revealed. In one Whitehall basement, vital pensions data still sits on magnetic tape – readable but not updateable. The system is so decrepit that information on one of the state’s biggest liabilities has been ‘basically unusable’ for years.
When data is lost, there is the potential for dire consequences. An HMRC data feed which powers Universal Credit payments is so error-prone as many as one in four in-work claimants could have been underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all, according to figures seen by The Spectator. Officially, the government says there is an error rate of less than 1 per cent. Some insiders tell me they suspect people may have been wrongfully prosecuted for benefit fraud, in what could turn out to be a scandal equivalent to the Post Office’s if action isn’t taken.
Immigration statistics are in a similar state of chaos. Britain cannot say how many people live here: in England alone, GPs register five million more patients than the ONS says are alive. Depending on the definition – ‘foreign nationals’ or ‘born overseas’ – foreigners are either more or less likely than natives to commit crime. Which is it? Nobody knows. Collecting data on visa overstays has proved so difficult that the Home Office ‘just gave up’, a former special adviser tells me. I asked one senior Reform figure if they were worried that the quality of population data would make it difficult to implement their policies in government. ‘Frankly, we’re fucking terrified. We’ve got a Heath Robinson system when we should have Tron,’ he said.”
The new English ‘Index of Multiple Deprivation’ has been published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The index was last updated in 2019 and has found deprivation continues to be concentrated in the deindustrialised North and coastal communities. Headline findings were:
The most deprived neighbourhood in England according to the IMD25 is to the east of the Jaywick & St Osyth area of Clacton-on-Sea in Tendring.
Seven neighbourhoods in Blackpool rank amongst the top 10 most deprived in England according to the IMD25.
Overall, 82% of neighbourhoods that are in the most deprived decile according to the IMD25 were also the most deprived according to the IMD19.
Deprivation is dispersed across England - 65% of Local Authority Districts contain at least one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in England.
Middlesbrough, Birmingham, Hartlepool, Kingston upon Hull and Manchester are the Local Authority Districts with the highest proportions of neighbourhoods among the most deprived in England.
Book of the Week
Bijan Omrani’s God is an Englishman tells the story of Christianity’s contribution to the development of Englishness and how its decline is the biggest cultural shock since the formation of the nation over a thousand years ago.
“Christianity is dying in England. In this generation, the religion that as defined the spiritual life, identity and culture of the country since its origins as a unified state in the tenth century has come into its death agony. The statistics tell a stark and unambiguous story. The 2017 Social Attitudes Survey found that 53% of British adults had no religious affiliation, up from 48% in 2015, and 31% in 1983. Of 18-24 year olds, almost three in four said that they had no religion, and only 3% described themselves as Anglican. The 2021 census found that only 46.2% people in England and Wales identified themselves as Christians, down from 59.3% ten years previously. Regular Sunday church attendance has fallen from 1.2m in 1987 to 685,000 in 2023. Between 2000 and 2024, 641 churches were closed and between 2016 and 2021, 278 parishes were amalgamated. Recent projections suggest that, at current rates, Christian church congregations will vanish by the 2060s.
The death of Christianity in England represents a change far more profound than anything like Brexit. The British membership of the European Union and its predecessors lasted for a little short of 50 years, and its practical effect for the most part was confined to trade, commerce and the movement of people. The presence of Christianity, by contrast, reaches back to before the emergence of England as a country, and has been a lodestar in the development of nearly every facet of English life - its language, law, literature, calendar, spirituality, the every existence of the nation itself.”
Quick Links
A British citizen was knifed to death by Afghan asylum seeker.
The Public Accounts Committee has found billions of pounds squandered on asylum hotels.
The Chinese Government has bought up £190bn in British assets.
A Palestine rights group is seeking to prosecute UK citizens who fought for Israel.
The Chancellor is contemplating breaking her promise to not raise taxes.
More than 10,000 non-UK citizens are in UK prisons.
UK housebuilders have said that Labour will miss its 1.5m new homes target.
The King has stripped the title of prince from Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.