We Can't Afford Luxury Priorities
While the world scrambles for energy, technology and industrial dominance the UK is still obsessed with diversity and race
Towering Columns
In The Times, Juliet Samuel says a dangerous amount of authority has been delegated to the Committee on Climate Change, which consistently pursues an optimism bias over net zero costs.
Such conflicts would be less notable if the committee’s work was not so strikingly optimistic about the costs and benefits of pursuing net-zero targets. Its optimism bias is becoming painfully clear. Until recently, for example, it was possible to go along with the climate industry consensus that the power prices delivered by wind power were only ever going to go down. But with the end of low interest rates (itself caused in part by a global under-investment in gas), that assumption needs a serious rethink. Recent wind power allocations have seen costs rocket from £50 per megawatt hour to over £80 for onshore and nearly £200 for floating offshore wind (in 2024 prices). Yet, as the retired consultant and engineer David Turver has pointed out, the CCC’s favoured “pathway” to net zero requires Britain to increase its offshore wind capacity sevenfold on the basis that wind power prices will decline from £51 to £31 per megawatt hour — a fraction of their actual current level.
At the same time, the CCC has produced surprisingly modest estimates of the investment required. Its recent carbon budget stated that its “balanced pathway” needs £26 billion per year, but claimed speculatively that this would be “offset by savings” so the actual cost is only £4 billion a year. Upon the CCC’s request, the Treasury produced its own estimate in 2021, suggesting an annual cost of £40 billion rising to over £60 billion. These estimates are, however, dwarfed by independent figures. Last year the Royal Society published a report by the Oxford theoretical physicist Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith suggesting that official forecasts are hugely underestimating the amount of power storage required to make net zero work. Llewellyn Smith said the CCC had even “conceded privately that [it made] a mistake” and estimates that the cost of building the electricity system needed will be in the order of £410 billion.
That’s not to mention curious contradictions in the CCC’s worldview, like the idea that electricity must be “made cheap” by loading the cost of green levies and suchlike on to gas bills — while also telling us that renewables are so cheap it can credibly claim we will save £700 per year in running costs from electric cars in 2050. Or the claim that new technologies like heat pumps could and should be rolled out at the same speed with which refrigerators or mobile phones conquered the world, but that this is being stopped by “misinformation” (for some reason, this didn’t happen with fridges and phones).
For Politics.co.uk, Labour MP Jonathan Hinder says that in wide areas of policy democratically elected politicians do not in fact run the Government.
Those who suggest we “take the politics out” of a particular political issue are often well-meaning, but this approach is badly misguided. What does it mean, really, to take the politics out of an issue? Is it a vote of confidence in the status quo? Or that technocratic government is better than democratic government? Surely, the future of our economy and public services should be fiercely contested questions, in the forum of democratic politics?
Consider economic policy. The Office for Budget Responsibility is given enormous power to influence government policy through their (often incorrect) forecasts and measurement of the government’s performance, comparing it against the government’s own self-imposed fiscal rules. Indeed, next week’s Spring Statement will be entirely framed by this powerful quango. Might we even question the apparently sacrosanct contracting-out of our country’s monetary policy to a committee of unelected officials? It is difficult to say that a government really “manages the economy” if it does not even have control of one of the most fundamental tools of economic policymaking: interest rates.
And when the voters say, “we want the government to reduce illegal migration”, it is entirely reasonable for them to think that the elected governments of these islands can deliver that. Former foreign and home secretary, Jack Straw, dared to broach the subject of the European Convention on Human Rights and its outsized impact on our country’s immigration policy over the weekend. The current home secretary, Yvette Cooper, is right to at least be considering how some of its articles are being applied in the courts. Meanwhile, the Sentencing Council recently proposed guidelines that could result in offenders being sentenced differently based on their ethnicity or religion. The justice secretary rightly objected to this, seeking to reinforce equality before the law, yet the Council’s dismissive response begged the question of who is really in charge.
In The Telegraph, Conservative MP Neil O’Brien says the combination of mass migration with cultural self-hatred is destroying Britain’s national identity.
Half of Generation Z think that Britain is a racist country and only 11 per cent would risk their lives to defend it in a war. Only 41 per cent of young people today were proud to be British, and just 15 per cent believed the country was united. This is depressing but unsurprising. On the one hand, Britain has been through breakneck demographic change. We ended up in a situation where around one in every fifty people had arrived in the country in the last two years. The so-called “Boriswave” of hugely increased immigration in recent years has profoundly changed the nation.
Not everyone can see revolution, because the effects are unevenly spread. In 2000 I moved to London from Huddersfield and rented a house. Today young British people struggle to do that given soaring rents, and even if they do, they find themselves in a small minority. In London as of 2017, immigrant households accounted for nearly two thirds of all households in the private rented sector and the proportion of social housing occupied by immigrant households is close to 50 per cent, up from 40 per cent ten years before. This implies that the majority of new allocations over that period went to immigrant households. The proportions are much higher in many areas of the city…
…Given these difficulties, you might think we would be working hard to build a strong sense of national identity to bring us all together. But instead, young people are fed a relentless diet of demoralising anti-British propaganda. Every major cultural institution seems to spend taxpayers’ money looking for new ways to claim that every aspect of our history and culture is racist and shameful. This week was the turn of Shakespeare: his birthplace is being “decolonised” by the trust that owns it, because of its concerns about the playwright being used to promote “white supremacy”. But there is a story like that every week. Endless universities, museums, galleries and schools have similar madness going on. Moves are afoot to “decolonise” everything from folk music to hiking, and from Maths to Mozart…
…Why don’t young people want to fight for Britain? Well, even if you do have roots here, why would you fight for a country that legally regards you as a second-class citizen?
Also in The Telegraph, Tom Harris says the Sentencing Council is on the point of embedding racial discrimination in its guidelines for judges.
In just over a fortnight new sentencing guidelines will come into force which will advise judges that ethnic minority defendants should normally not be sentenced until a pre-sentencing report about them is completed. The guidelines are just the latest example of the wholesale capture of our institutions by Marxist academic thought. The peculiar notion of “equity” has replaced “equality” in many organisations.
While everyone can sign up to the notion of equality – the principle that everyone should be offered the same opportunities irrespective of their background – equity is an entirely different proposition. It aims to mandate outcomes of policy by offering a “helping hand”. In the US it is called “affirmative action”. The preferred phrase in the UK is “positive discrimination”. Which is all very well as a topic for enthusiastic undergraduates to debate before they head to the student union for a round of cheap beers. But when such principles are allowed – nay, are positively encouraged – to creep into our court rooms, someone somewhere has to put their foot down. The principle of equality before the law should be sacrosanct. But a new generation of lawyers and administrators see it as getting in the way of social progress. Cultural relativism, where a crime is seen as less or more serious depending on the colour of the skin of the person committing it, is the order of the day.
Let us be clear: there is evidence that people of colour are treated more harshly by the courts than white people; that is a failure of judges and it has to change. But a defendant’s prior record and the severity of the crime are far more appropriate indicators of whether a jail sentence is justified than his ethnic background or skin colour. Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, seemed genuinely appalled when her opposite number Robert Jenrick revealed the Sentencing Council’s new guidelines to the House of Commons. Rather than equivocate, Mahmood displayed a sure political touch by immediately distancing herself from the guidelines.
On Commonplace, US Vice-President J.D. Vance says globalisation and mass migration have undermined the value of labour and harmed working-class communities, reflecting his words at the American Dynamism Summit.
Now, we assumed that other nations would always trail us in the value chain, but it turns out that as they got better at the low end of the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher end. We were squeezed from both ends. Now, that was the first conceit of globalization. I think the second is that cheap labour is fundamentally a crutch, and it’s a crutch that inhibits innovation. I might even say that it’s a drug that too many American firms got addicted to. Now, if you can make a product more cheaply, it’s far too easy to do that rather than to innovate. And whether we were offshoring factories to cheap labor economies or importing cheap labor through our immigration system, cheap labor became the drug of Western economies.
If you look in nearly every country—from Canada to the UK—that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you’ve seen productivity stagnate. That’s not a total happenstance. I think that the connection is very direct. One of the debates you hear on the minimum wage, for instance, is that increases in the minimum wage force firms to automate. So, a higher wage at McDonald’s means more kiosks. And whatever your views on the wisdom of the minimum wage, companies innovating in the absence of cheap labor is a good thing.
I think most of you are not worried about getting cheaper and cheaper labour. You’re worried about innovating, about building new things. The old formulation of technology is doing more with less. You guys are all trying to do more with less every single day. I’d ask my friends, both on the tech-optimist side and on the populist side, not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation. Indeed, I’d say that globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation. Both our working people—our populists—and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy. And the solution, I believe, is American innovation because, in the long run, it’s technology that increases the value of labour. Innovations like the American System and the interchangeable parts revolution it sparked, or Ford’s moving assembly line that skyrocketed the productivity of our workers—that’s how American industry became the envy of the world.
For UnHerd, Samuel Rubinstein explains Dominic Cummings’s lifelong admiration for Bismarck.
Cummings is ever eager to emphasise that his admiration for Bismarck is not of a moral kind; indeed, he often says that the world would be better off today had Bismarck never existed. Still, given the extent of his enthusiasm — and of his vanity — it is natural to wonder whether he sees something of himself in Bismarck. The historian Katja Hoyer thinks so, and even traces some vague points of parallel between Bismarck’s career in government and Cummings’s — although even in a rather hostile article, she is too polite to point out that it is difficult to imagine the Iron Chancellor getting outfoxed in the halls of power by Carrie Symonds (Bismarck excelled at freezing the Kaiser’s wife, Victoria, out of the Prussian court). Hoyer claims, meanwhile, that Bismarck would never have written an “itemised response to every rumour that his enemies spread about him in the press”, but this I don’t find too difficult to imagine. Robert Lucius von Ballhausen said in 1875 that Bismarck “nurses thoughts of revenge and retaliation for real or imagined slights that he has suffered”; and who knows how these might have manifested had Bismarck been acquainted with Substack.
Some of Cummings’s political behaviour has a Bismarckian flavour. He is proudly cynical and non-partisan, and, like Bismarck, partial to the “secret meeting”: Bismarck with the flamboyant socialist leader, Ferdinand Lassalle; Cummings with everyone from Jeremy Corbyn’s communications team in 2019 to, it recently transpired, Nigel Farage. Notwithstanding his occasional social media rantings, Cummings strikes me as less of a mess of a man than Bismarck, who was constantly in tears and threatening to kill himself; tantrums and high emotions are not to be underrated as blunt instruments in his “diabolical” toolkit. Beyond all this, I am not so sure that Cummings does fancy himself as a latter-day Bismarck. The subtitle to his chronology is “A Case Study of the Unrecognised Simplicities of High Performance”, and Cummings, who hawks books such as Superforecasting and The Scout Mindset to anyone who will listen, strives to be an expert “recogniser” of things “unrecognised”. Cummings’s Bismarck, at least when seen from the outside, is more a phenomenon than a human of flesh and blood; he is, in fact, a “super-intelligence”.
Cummings has used this metaphor on multiple occasions, and he means it seriously. Watching Bismarck “play politics” is akin to watching the best computers play chess; they’re not just playing it better than the rest of us, but “so differently that it’s really a different game”. Elsewhere, Cummings writes that the question Bismarck forces us to ponder — a question “relevant” to debates over AI today — is “how much was the effectiveness bound up with the dangerousness”. Cummings’s chronology lingers on the bourgeois teetering that met Bismarck on his elevation to the chancellorship in 1862 by those who recognised neither his effectiveness nor his dangerousness; he draws for us an intellectually hollow world order utterly unprepared for what was about to hit it, incapable even of seeing it for what it was. And those few who did recognise Bismarck’s brilliance — Albrecht von Roon, for example, who summoned him to be chancellor with his famous telegram, Periculum in mora — made the other fatal error, of assuming that he would “align” with their interests rather than pursuing his own; they recognised his effectiveness but not his dangerousness. Bismarck was not predicted or understood by “professors” and “pundits”; “the odd ‘maverick’ warns ‘you’re making a fatal error, I beg you to reconsider’ but is dismissed by the experts”. Cummings clearly isn’t Bismarck in this story: he’s the “maverick”.
Wonky Thinking
Onward published Lessons Learned: Looking back and the impact of schools reform in England. The report shows the improvements to standards experienced by schools in England as a result of academisation, free schools and changes to the curriculum from 2010. Labour’s Schools Bill puts this progress at risk, it argues.
The reform of the schools system in England, a process driven by all three major parties, is one of the major achievements of the last twenty years. First introduced under New Labour, the mass roll-out of the academies system, the creation of free schools and reforms to the curriculum and standards were a flagship of the 2010 Coalition and subsequent Conservative governments. Now more than half of all state schools in England are academies, and over 80% of all secondary schools. And this period also saw the introduction of more than 650 free schools across the country.
Major reforms to the curriculum, qualifications and methods of assessment have helped transform English education. The introduction of tests like the Phonics Screening Check and the rollout of Maths Mastery have helped build foundational skills that improve outcomes later on. The introduction of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and the shift of emphasis towards a more knowledge-rich curriculum have increased rigour and improved the uptake of tough subjects among disadvantaged pupils.
Since the introduction of these reforms, that there have been major improvements to educational standards in schools in England is undeniable. Now 89% of schools are rated as Good or Outstanding by Ofsted, compared to just 68% in 2009-10. And 96% of schools in London now receive this rating – in 2015 this was just 40%. The creation and expansion of multi-academy trusts (MATs) has helped promote best practice, rewarding innovation and talent in school leadership. These have been particularly important for turning around underperforming schools – seven out of ten sponsored academies now have a positive Ofsted rating. And during prior to the Covid pandemic the disadvantage gap at Key Stage 4 fell.
Schools in England have risen up in international rankings – pupils are now ranked fourth for reading in the western world and England has risen consistently up relative to OECD counterparts in surveys such as PIRLS, PISA and TIMMS. Sadly the same cannot be said for schools in Wales, where education is devolved. There, pupils now perform only as well as the most disadvantaged pupils in England. Challenges undoubtedly remain, particularly with teacher recruitment and retention, SEND provision and educational cold spots. And academisation and free schools have not been spread evenly enough across the country.
The current Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill before Parliament, however, will not address these challenges. By undermining academy freedoms over governance, admissions and recruitment, the Bill risks turning the clock back on the reform agenda. Ending the academisation of underperforming schools and introducing the presumption that new schools will not be academies risks handing power over education back to local authorities and away from the professionals. This report assesses the achievements and remaining challenges of schools reform in England, and lays out principles for what positive further reform would look like. And it urges policymakers responsible for our education system to embrace and complete the successes of schools reform, rather than putting two decades of progress at risk.
Jennifer Pahlka reviewed three books on the theme of material abundance for the Eating Policy Substack.
Two things came out this week that address that question: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, and Steve Teles’s article on Minoritarianism. Derek and Ezra’s argument is essentially that we’ve own-goaled ourselves by artificially restricting the supply of the things people need, including but not limited to housing. We’d have a more flourishing society, and better politics, if we removed the barriers we’ve imposed on ourselves to building not just housing but also clean energy infrastructure and transportation, to providing healthcare and education, to enabling and advancing scientific discoveries. Steve picks up on one critical reason we don’t do these things: we’ve let decisions that should be made in the broad public interest get captured by small groups with self-serving interests.
All three authors are going to get the same pushback from the left about what might seem like awkward timing. Kara Swisher starts right out with it before the conversation with Derek and Ezra on her podcast even starts: “I want to talk about their strategy to punch left, so to speak, with a book that shames liberals and whether that's the best strategy in our current times.” Their conversation is much friendlier than that lead line suggests, but you get the feeling that it's liberal malpractice not to start with the warning that, of course, NOW IS NOT THE TIME. There is one source of what ails us, and one source only. Stay on message.
Of course, punching left is by no means the total — or, outside of the hoopla of a book launch, even the majority — of any of these authors’ work. Listen to Ezra’s audio essays on Trump in particular for a reminder of how seriously he takes this moment, and how clearly (sometimes bone-chillingly) he articulates what’s at stake. But a consistent message for Derek and Ezra in particular has been that countering Trumpism requires a compelling alternative. Some on the left insist that liberals have one. Polling suggests otherwise: Dems’ approval ratings just hit record lows with “27% of registered voters saying they view the party favorably and only 7% of survey respondents said they said they have a ‘very positive’ view of the party.” Perhaps more importantly, look around at places governed by Dems, where prices are high, housing, transportation, and renewable energy are scarce, homelessness is rampant, educational attainment is low, and inequality slaps you in the face. Lived experience, to use an overused term, suggests otherwise.
There is no one source of dissatisfaction with Democrats’ leadership (and I mean in federal, state, and local politics, not just the fights in Congress) but understanding that dissatisfaction requires peeking under the hood of how liberal jurisdictions are run. We say good things. We just don’t deliver. Lack of capacity at government at all levels is part of why — and what we talk about here a lot. Capture by interest groups is another.
Minoritarianism is an eight syllable word. I normally keep it to six here, up from five to accommodate proceduralism, my favorite.1 But it’s just what it sounds like. “Minoritarianism is a political and governance condition in which a small, organized, and often unrepresentative group wields disproportionate power over decision-making, policies, or institutions, often at the expense of the broader majority.”2 In other words, decisions that should be made in the broad public interest are captured by a minority. (We’re generally not talking about racial, ethnic, gender or religious minority groups here — see examples below.)
Both works address housing and land use. This is not the same, exactly, as my affordable housing example above, in the sense that building any housing at all is the larger problem in a city like San Francisco, where utter lack of supply has met ever-increasing demand and sent prices into a territory few can afford.3 But even I (not a housing expert) have talked about how we end up with such low supply multiple times. So let me harp on a different example from Steve’s excellent paper: professional licensing. Roughly one in five American workers needs a government-issued license to do their job. Depending on the state, you may need a license to braid hair, sell a casket, or recommend a paint color for a client’s living room. In theory, this protects consumers and ensures high standards. In practice, licensing boards—staffed largely by members of the professions they regulate—act as gatekeepers that restrict competition, inflate wages for insiders, and make it harder for workers to switch careers. (Not to mention creating enormous amounts of paperwork that burden small business owners.)
Some of the worst abuses are in medicine: doctors and dentists often prevent nurse practitioners or dental hygienists from performing routine procedures, not because it’s unsafe, but because it threatens their monopoly. A dental board tried to outlaw independent teeth whitening—not for public health reasons, but to protect dentists' profits. Yascha Mounk ranted the other day about losing his glasses in the Connecticut River, and not being able to get new ones because his prescription hadn’t been checked recently. Sure, a requirement for a recent exam catches eye disorders that may otherwise have gone untreated, but it’s a stiff price to pay —- those eye exams aren’t cheap. Were it left to the majority, this requirement would not exist, and we’d have abundant eyeglasses, when we need them, as they do in other countries.
If it were left to the majority, we’d also be optimizing for more abundant education. But as public school parents found out during the pandemic, the rules that dictate how our schools work aren’t set by a broadly democratic process. In K-12 education, Steve explains, “almost every consequential decision regarding schools — hiring and firing policies, teacher evaluation, class size, the organization of the school day, etc. — is enshrined in teacher contracts rather than ordinary laws.” Those teacher contracts are decided by a process with “exceptionally low transparency and participation: collective bargaining” between the teachers unions and elected officials like school board members who are themselves chosen disproportionately by the unions, since union members vote at higher rates, especially in off-cycle elections, which unions advocate for. Same with police officers. The reason your local elected official can’t do anything about that abusive cop is that we’ve ceded power from the laws of our communities to provisions in contracts around things like discipline. Those contract provisions are decided by a tiny and non-representative minority, and that’s a problem…
Book of the Week
We recommend Revolting! How the establishment is undermining democracy and what they’re afraid of, by Mick Hume. This post-2016 polemic reflects on the results of the EU referendum and the first election of Donald Trump, excoriating elite attempts to overturn what they saw as a “wrong” result.
This is not a book about Brexit. Not is it a book about the election of Donald Trump. It is about a much bigger issue - one the debate around those extraordinary events has highlighted. What’s at stake is the future of democracy itself, in the UK, the US and across the West.
We live in a strange moment in the history of democratic politics. Today, perhaps for the first time, every serious politician and thinker in the Western world will declare their support for democracy in principle. Yet in practice the authorities are seeking to limit democratic decision-making and separate power from the people.
They invest authority instead in unelected institutions, from the courts to the European Commission. Elected politicians act as a professional elite, divorced from those they are supposed to represent. And everywhere, the intellectual fashion is to question whether voters are really fit or qualified to make democratic decisions on major issues, such as membership of the European Union of the Presidency of the United States.
Ours is the age of “I’m a democrat, but…”, when the establishment insists it is all for democracy, but only in moderation; it just cannot tolerate what one former member of President Barack Obama’s administration calls “too much of a good thing”, suggesting that America “might be a healthier democracy if it were a slightly less democratic one”. For some in high places these days it seems that, where democracy is concerned, less really can be more.
It is an attitude captured in the UK by former Conservative Prime Minister John Major who, dismissing the suggestion that the Brexit referendum should be binding, declared that “the tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy”.
Quick Links
Heathrow airport closed completely after a fire at an electrical substation.
The Office for Budget Responsibility halved its growth forecast from 2% to 1%.
The public sector borrowed £11 billion in February, £4 billion more than forecast…
…Meaning total borrowing for 2024-25 might be £23 billion higher than expected.
A leaked Government document suggested that 10% might be wiped off GDP by 2030 due to net zero.
From 1999 to 2002 the Government sold £3.5 billion worth of gold which would now be worth £38.5 billion.
The NHS refused to force-feed an anorexic woman in imminent danger of death.
China now accounts for 76% of global EV sales compared to just 13% in 2013.
52% of adults are now more reliant on the state than not.
A quarter of Covent Garden will be sold to Norway’s oil fund.
The number of people claiming asylum after entering the UK on a Skilled Worker visa rose from 53 in 2022 to 5,300 in 2024.
Over the next few years 800,000 migrants could get indefinite leave to remain (ILR).
Some liberals admitted they are not conservatives.