The Defence of The Realm
The time has come to resist attempts to undermine the country's social and economic freedom
Towering Columns
For The Telegraph, Nick Timothy calls for everyone to resist attempts by groups to dominate the public realm.
And that pattern is clear. We have seen protestors take a break from their marches against Israel to pray in the open air. We have seen symbolic ritual worship in front of national monuments such as the Houses of Parliament. When the extremist preacher Abu Hamza was turfed out of Finsbury Park Mosque, he led his supporters in ritual prayer on the residential streets nearby.
These are all acts of domination: an expression of power. And that power is now shaping our public life. The politics of communalism are already corrupting important institutions like the police, as we saw with the scandal of the ban on Israeli supporters from a football match in Birmingham. We are likely to see it at the ballot box in the local elections in May. And of course, these political trends are behind the Government’s new “Islamophobia” definition.
The purpose of that definition is to shut down debate, and stifle scrutiny of religious ideas and associated political beliefs. This should appal us all, because it is contradictory to the basic tenets of a free society. If we lose the ability to challenge ideas, beliefs and even actions, we can no longer call ourselves a free country.
In The Spectator, Jonathan Sacerdoti writes that we must be more nuanced in how we debate the use of public spaces.
It’s true, I have stood several times under the shadow of Admiral Nelson next to a massive Chanukiah, eating doughnuts and spreading Jewish good cheer. But it is intellectually dishonest, and socially tone-deaf, to equate these events with crowds of Muslim men prostrating on the pavement to the sound of “Allahu akbar” during a full public prayer service. They register differently with Londoners who witness them, shaped by distinct cultural backgrounds and motivations. That, in essence, was the point Nick Timothy was making.
I have often seen small groups of Muslim men praying in Israel’s Ben Gurion airport, unfolding their rugs and quietly engaging in their religious practice. Nobody bats an eyelid. Similarly in airports across the world, many observant Jewish men wrap tefillin in groups of ten when it is time for their morning prayers. These episodes tend be uncontroversial because they are clearly quiet, personal moments of religious reflection, respectfully carried out in an unusual place out of necessity, because of travelling schedules, time zones, or a lack of synagogues or mosques nearby to pray in. Mass street worship is different.
Suppressing discussion of the fears surrounding this sensitive subject will only deepen, for some, the sense of being overridden or subordinated.
For The Times, Tony Sewell calls for policies that improve life chances for all and do not divide the country.
A striking finding was that in many areas it was the white working class who experienced the worst outcomes. African women, for example, had the longest life expectancy, while poor white men in parts of northern England had the highest mortality rates. Educational attainment among poor white boys lagged behind many minority groups. Rather than demonstrating systemic privilege or racism, these statistics suggested disadvantage was primarily linked to poverty and social conditions rather than ethnicity alone.
The backlash was immediate. Critics accused the report of downplaying racism or ignoring historical injustice. Some suggested that highlighting the struggles of poor white communities was politically suspect. Yet ignoring these realities would not make them disappear. Indeed, the frustration of neglected communities has already helped to fuel the rise of populist movements such as Reform UK.
The central principle of the report was straightforward: the most effective social policies raise standards for everyone rather than privileging particular identity groups. A rising tide lifts all boats. If governments improve schools, strengthen families and expand economic opportunity across society, the benefits will reach every community.
In The Telegraph, Allister Heath writes that everyone is too scared to admit how vulnerable Britain has become.
We can no longer afford the luxury beliefs of a bygone peacetime. Why is Britain still obsessed with offshore windfarms, when they pose a double threat to national security, providing costly, intermittent electricity, while sometimes partly blinding missile detection systems? The Swedes vetoed windfarms in the Baltic Sea as they feared the turbines may cut Russian missile detection time to as little as 60 seconds, possibly by introducing clutter and blind spots.
Britain prefers to sacrifice itself pointlessly. In an act of gross geopolitical hara-kiri, Britain’s output of electricity is down 25 per cent since 2004. We slashed North Sea oil and gas and refused to frack. Modern warfare is all about technology, manufacturing and logistics, and that requires cheap and plentiful power, working closely with America (rather than picking inane fights with Donald Trump) and doing everything possible to nurture investment in the UK.
Instead, misled by our third-rate Prime Minister, we cling to appeasement when it comes to Iran and China, in the hope that we can continue to consume beyond our means, to ignore the sectarian divisions racking our society, to worship at the altar of net zero and socialism, to turn a blind eye to the violence and rapaciousness that characterises the New World Disorder.
In The Critic, Chris Bayliss describes how we have traded our energy security for a mythical belief in the long arc of progress.
Miliband sees his role as an agent who bends the long arc of history toward progress, and that justification totally overwhelms trivial questions like “Does this policy make logical sense?”. Like many green zealots — especially those who have been converted as adults — Miliband has a profound sense of his own historicity. As he sees it, these are the critical years in the history of humanity and the entire planet; to have been born in these times when fate hangs in the balance is to have been entrusted by destiny with a unique and heavy duty. That he holds relevant political office during such momentous times only makes this obligation more awesome. For him to back down over the fact a litre of petrol has gone up by a few pence would be a laughable dereliction. A few million households facing financial hardship is a banality that will not even make the footnotes when the history is written.
Furthermore, the point that it makes little sense for Britain to cease oil and gas exploration while we continue to import the stuff is to consider agency and responsibility on a national level. Which Miliband doesn’t. For him, climate redemption is achieved as an individual. It just happens to be that he is a national politician with responsibility for Britain’s energy policy. He would be similarly unmoved by what the rest of the world were doing if he were making decisions as a European commissioner, or as a county councillor, or if he were merely responsible for his own household. If he could completely shut off oil and gas imports, he would, but that isn’t an option yet. However, the decision of whether the British government will issue licences for new oil and gas exploration is his to make right now, so the answer is “no”.
Others may argue that making reasonable concessions to public opinion at critical moments might benefit the green agenda in the long run, by limiting the chances of a backlash. But climate politics lives or dies by its sense of inevitability. There are only so many true believers like Miliband or Al Gore who get near positions of power. The movement is only effective so long as it retains its power over the cynical or weak-willed — the likes of Angela Merkel, David Cameron or Boris Johnson. And that power comes from the green movement’s monopoly on a vision of the future, at least in terms of energy.
In The Times, Juliet Samuel calls for politicians to blast away dogma to successfully build urgently needed nuclear power.
It will take time and ironclad political will. But my gosh, done right, the energy is cheap. The average generating cost for nuclear in Korea is about £30 per megawatt hour — about a third of the UK’s power cost and a sixth of what our own nuclear costs — and that includes future decommissioning and waste management costs. Even if you assume higher labour and regulatory costs in Britain, this explodes the 20-year dogma propounded by dominant factions in Whitehall that nuclear is always just too expensive.
How did Korea do it? The country’s success comes from a genuine sense of urgency about the need to survive. Emerging from Japanese rule in the 1940s as a tiny western-aligned and subsequently war-divided nation in a hostile neighbourhood, with a population of poorly educated peasants and few natural resources, Korea had to do something drastic. Successive presidents and military dictators put their extremely limited resources into nuclear technology, construction and education and placed their fledgling industry under the tutelage of America’s Westinghouse.
By the 1980s, as Britain’s civil nuclear programme was running out of steam, Korea was ready to scale up. Incredibly, instead of the programme being shut, its scientists were allowed to treat Chernobyl as a buying opportunity, snapping up US technology on the cheap and beginning an era in which the country commissioned an average of one big new plant per year, even through the Asian financial crisis.
In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank cautions against a naïve faith that AI will fix our economic problems.
Yet polling suggests that less than half the British public trust this policy, and, at a time when public trust in the state is at record lows, this is a very risky gamble indeed. Whatever the technology’s potential, it is very far from reaching it, and as I have written previously, the limitations and risks of the technology are largely ignored or concealed by those touting it. That leaves Britain as an “early adopter”, forking out billions for AI systems that will be far worse and less specialised to the needs of the public sector than what we might see emerge in 5-10 years time.
Nor is this primarily benefiting a domestic British industry — the AI industry is concentrated in America, and Britain’s most successful AI firm, DeepMind, was acquired by Google 12 years ago. Somehow, I don’t expect government plans to extend to renationalising it. And over in Silicon Valley, tech industry leaders openly acknowledge that the pace of investment in AI vastly outstrips its present potential for profitability. Figures like Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman have cheerfully admitted AI is a bubble. The calculation there is that it is a “good bubble” and that, as one investor puts it, “the benefits of innovation outweigh the costs of volatility”.
Yet the sheer scale of investment, which has seen firms like NVIDIA hit valuations putting it on a par with the entire British economy, reflects an unprecedented level of hype. Many of those same figures who see this as a “good bubble” are also claiming that we are on the brink of something called “the singularity”. According to Sam Altman we are “close to building digital superintelligence”.
Wonky Thinking
On Substack, Archie Hall outlines a number of scenarios for how Britain could be negatively impacted by the emergence of AI given our service-heavy economic model.
There’s an entirely respectable career to be made in conjuring up prophecies of economic doom for Britain. The past few years have offered plenty of raw material. Still, that’s a temptation I mostly prefer to resist. Permit me, though, a brief exception—a moment to indulge my inner perma-bear. I think it’s worth the lapse.
I want to air a possibility that has been troubling me for the past year1: that Britain could make a real mess of the AI age. Certainly, there are plenty of great AI-adjacent British institutions, like AISI2, ARIA, Arm and (further into the alphabet) DeepMind. But that does not, alone, mean that Britain’s wider economy, or its political system, is well-placed to navigate the shocks coming. On the contrary, I worry that Britain is especially exposed.
Here are a few scenarios. They almost certainly won’t all happen, and aren’t even always entirely mutually consistent. But, hopefully, the exercise pulls open a few windows into how the coming years could go wrong for Britain. (A common starting-point isn’t quite AI doom or rapid takeoff, but a case where much of the economy does get remade rather quickly.)
Also on Substack, Neil O’Brien goes through the latest data on youth unemployment including the gap between big tax rises and small incentives for employers to hire people, as well as wage compression that has made it much less attractive for employers to hire younger workers.
In contrast, at present the government has created a big problem but is offering only small solutions.
Employers are still being told that if they plan to take on young people they can soon expect them to be being paid the same as 40 year olds.
The triple whammy of higher tax, much more regulation and the attempt to flatten wages has clearly increased youth unemployment in the UK compared to other countries. And this was all before the war in the Middle East. If we are going to end the tragedy of youth unemployment, the government needs to stop coming out with fiddly small policies - and have a much bigger rethink.
Book of the Week
Correlli Barnett’s The Collapse of British Power, the first book in his ‘Pride and Fall’ series, describes the deadening impact of liberalism in the lead up to the Second World War which left the country unprepared for rising economic and political threats from overseas.
The swift decline in British vigour at home was not owing to some inevitable senescent process of history. They shared a specific cause. That cause was a political doctrine; a doctrine blindly believed in long after it has ceased to correspond with reality.
The doctrine was liberalism, which criticised and finally demolished the traditional conception of the nation-state as a collective organism, a community; and asserted instead the primacy of the individual. According to liberal thinking a nation was no more than so many human atoms who happened to live under the same set of laws. From such a belief it followed that the State, instead of being the embodiment of a national community as it had been under the Tudors and the Commonwealth, was required to dwindle into a kind of policeman, standing apart from the national life, and with the merely negative task of keeping the free-for-all of individual competition within the bounds of decorum.
Quick Links
An Iranian man was arrested trying to enter one of the UK’s naval nuclear bases.
Labour backbenchers threaten to vote against the Labour government’s immigration reforms.
British government debt interest was £8.8bn higher than economists expected last month.
Iranian missiles cause extensive damage to the world’s largest LNG export facility.
The South East of England is on alert due to an outbreak of meningitis.
The Bank of England signals interest rates will rise twice this year to combat inflation caused by War in Iran.
One of the country’s largest North Sea Oil producers says that it is ready to exploit UK’s biggest oil field this year with government backing.
The Natural History Museum has overtaken the British Museum as the country’s most popular tourist destination.
Norwich is the best place to live in the country according to The Sunday Times.