Towering columns
For The Times, Juliet Samuel argues that ramping up spending in the Budget will do nothing for growth without serious economic reform.
Reeves began her tenure, in July, by slashing infrastructure projects, a bizarre act for a chancellor who claimed to want greater prosperity. But in the budget, rather than allowing public investment to shrink, as the Tories had planned, she has now found the money to keep it at a higher level for the length of this parliament. This includes a big expansion of capital spending in the health service, one of the few tangible ways in which the government has shown an interest in improving its performance. In her decisions on capital spending, then, Reeves is at least partly following through on her promise to prioritise growth.
But this brings us back to digging holes. Productive investment is not just about what you spend — how many holes the government can make us dig — but whether these resources are spent wisely. The OBR’s current model assumes that higher government investment will largely displace private sector investment: if both are competing for a fixed supply of workers and resources, after all, the overall production of houses or infrastructure or services does not necessarily rise.
But why should the supply be fixed? It is only fixed because incentives to reallocate resources, assess opportunities, train new staff and deploy capital are thwarted, in both public and private sectors, by our dire planning system, bad management, poorly designed environmental regulation, high energy costs, expensive housing, a terrible migration policy and so on. If the government can address some of these problems, in part by spending wisely on capital investments like roads and power plants, then, as the OBR predicts, Britain’s potential growth rate can rise over time. That timescale, however, runs beyond the electoral cycle, which is why governments facing tight finances always end up cutting their long-term capital budgets.
At UnHerd, Aris Roussinos believes the Budget failed to deliver the change needed to reverse national decline.
The Labour government cannot restore the conditions of post-war social democracy because the underlying basis of that economy, a strong domestic manufacturing base, no longer exists. As Hazeldine’s 2021 book on Northern England, Britain’s economic powerhouse turned welfare sink, observes, the region “has tumbled from a unique pedestal, that of the world’s first industrial region, and fallen further than the world-economic conjuncture demanded. The contribution of manufacturing to national output in the UK has flatlined at just 10 per cent since 2007, barely a third of the figure for Germany and a smaller proportion also than for other comparable economies.”
The result is a bizarre anomaly, the nation’s equivalent of possessing a Netherlands or Rhineland and choosing not just to leave it underdeveloped, but to actively un-develop it. The de-industrialisation of the North was a conscious choice made by successive Westminster governments, betting Britain’s future prosperity on a combination of London-centric financialisation and enmeshment in a globalised world economy. Yet the risks of financialisation were shown by the 2008 crash, from which Britain has never recovered; the full price of globalisation, in a now rapidly deglobalising world slipping into conflict between the great industrial land empires, is only now coming into view…
…Britain’s cloud of misery assumes concrete form in provincial high streets of unmitigated gloom, whose shuttered shops are punctuated by vape outlets, phone repairers and cash-only barbers, whose dubious legality are left unexamined by a state desperate for whatever revenue it can take; indeed even Oxford Street is now just another dismal provincial High Street. Our ruling class’s economic model is one so committed to low-wage employment over investment that the Conservative government imported almost 4% of the country’s population in the past two years just to man checkout tills and deliver food on bicycles, juicing gross GDP figures from what has aptly been termed “human quantitative easing”, even as the resulting exactions on housing, infrastructure and societal stability fray what is left of Britain’s social contract.
At CapX, David Goodhart urges the Conservative Party to embrace family policy as part of its post-election recovery.
The Tory party has long been the party of the family in name only. From Margaret Thatcher to George Osborne, there has been hostility to stay at home mothers – it was Osborne who introduced the two-child benefit cap. There has been no interest in recognising the family properly in the tax system or reducing the couple penalty in the welfare system, let alone beefing up our miserly parental leave support or making it easier for one parent to remain at home in the stressful pre-school years which many relationships don’t survive.
Labour have long been the champions of the non-traditional family and their instinct is to not trust parents, especially those of disadvantaged children. There is a lingering association in the progressive mind between the conventional family and traditional gender roles and the subordination of women. But society has moved on. The polling data show no nostalgia for the 1950s. Yet when Jeremy Hunt announced a £4 billion extension to childcare subsidies in the 2023 budget, chiding women not to ‘waste their talent’ on mothering, he might have noted that both parents working full-time when children are pre-school (around one third of those with pre-schoolers) is an option favoured by just 9% of the British public according to the British Social Attitudes survey.
Support for the family, and indeed for higher fertility, are often seen as small-c conservative ideas. But giving women more choice about how to combine motherhood and work and helping to reduce family instability and child poverty are ideas that liberals and conservatives can unite around.
At UnHerd, Ben Cobley considers how the Southport case has exposed the legal and bureacuratic incentives to put diversity ahead of protecting the public.
For, despite 14 years of Conservative rule, the British state shares broadly the same aims as the new Labour government. They speak the same language and have the same approach, especially to things such as diversity and equality. In the last and most domestically significant act of its previous time in government, Labour embedded identity politics in the state through the Equality Act of 2010. And this has now percolated fully through the system. The government and state, now largely aligned as shown in their common response to the Southport riots, give off the appearance of being a regime, one with a common sociology. Its mantra is “Diversity is Our Strength”: an unabashed assertion that diversity causes good things to happen, which also means not bad things.
We all now know what this messaging demands. We’ve seen it before, following outrages from 7/7 in London to Manchester Arena, Liverpool Remembrance Day, London Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Reading, Parsons Green and Lee Rigby in Woolwich; as well as other largely unknown attacks happening at the fringes, such as in Hartlepool in 2023 and Burnley in 2020. Right-wing activists are familiar with the logic. Liberal-Left opinion managers know it like the back of their hands. So do the authorities, and they crank into gear whenever an attack occurs bearing the obvious hallmarks.
We all know instinctively that the system must defend diversity. It must be revealed as a strength, otherwise the meaning of our society is revealed to be fake: at best naive and mistaken; at worst mendacious lies, open for exploitation by those who mean us deep harm. The bold statements we used to hear about how such attacks have “nothing to do with Islam” are no longer convincing. Other tactics must be employed. Some things must be revealed and others concealed. And so the regime and its supporters go to war over “reporting”, “commentary” and “sharing information”. They say that this is a matter of responsibility versus irresponsibility, that it is legally necessary in order to not prejudice a trial.
On Substack, Alex Chalmers and Anastasia Bektimirova provide their personal insight into what makes impactful policy work.
Policy work often fails because of bad design, timid recommendations, or a lack of realism. But that’s only one half of the picture. The other is moving beyond the piece of research. Too often, companies or think tanks publish a PDF, hold a roundtable, secure a desultory media or newsletter reference, and decide it’s mission accomplished. And the ideas they front up are too generic, too vague, or too inoffensive to matter, because they seek consensus rather than division. This means that even well-designed work accomplishes nothing. Policy isn’t a more secure or better compensated branch of academia. Stacking up publication credits doesn’t come with any rewards. There are essentially two models for moving beyond the illusory version of ‘influence’ we often see. At the risk of being crude, you can divide them into ‘insider’ versus ‘outsider’.
The ‘insider’ model boils down to having a forensic knowledge of i) who is actually relevant or wields influence over a certain policy area, ii) understanding their motivations, pressures, and room for manoeuvre, and iii) how to win them over. At its most effective, it leads to individual groups or research organisations being able to shape entire areas of policy. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change or Labour Together with this government or Onward with its predecessor spring to mind. The ‘outsider’ approach involves using policy work as a battering ram to shove an issue up the agenda, whether those in the system like it or not. This requires i) a willingness to be confrontational publicly, ii) a thick skin, and iii) an ability to leverage media effectively. As this approach involves a degree of bridge-burning that is culturally alien to most people in policy, it’s less popular. But it can be surprisingly effective. Many institutions (especially in the UK) are so unused to being challenged robustly in public, they don’t really know how to respond to it.
If your approach can’t be categorised as one or the other, the chances are that it’s not achieving much. This is the reality of most policy work: patchy engagement with peripheral ‘stakeholders’ to build ‘mood music’, matched with cautious external communications designed to avoid offence. The thing successful approaches have in common is persistence and discipline. Making progress can take months or even years. Good ‘insiders’ have to navigate their way around a morass of intermediaries, middlemen and associated hangers-on who clog up the corridors of power and will persistently want to have coffee with them. Good ‘outsiders’ need to know which arguments are worth having, when to accept a compromise, and when to push for more.
For the Financial Times, Ivan Krastev looks ahead to how the West can negotiate a sustainable peace settlement that ends the war in Ukraine.
Like many analysts and most Europeans, I believe that the war will conclude in a negotiated settlement. Kyiv will be forced to trade territory for meaningful security guarantees. Yet even if negotiations are inevitable, I am not convinced that we are as close to the end as many others hope. There are at least four factors which make the situation unpredictable…
…The fourth difficulty is that neither the US nor the EU has a long-term Russia strategy. Ukraine was an intrinsic part of the west’s Russia policy in the wake of the cold war. This policy had two sides. In its transformative version, the democratisation of Ukraine was viewed as an instrument for Russia’s own democratisation. But there was another version, one more focused on stability, in which a separate logic held: don’t poke the bear. This double-headed policy contributed to the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
In the nearly thousand days since the war commenced, the west has been reluctant to allow Ukrainians to hit targets within Russia proper but “compensates” Ukraine by providing it with a licence to define how the west speaks about Russia. The west has outsourced its Russia policy to Ukraine. If Putin believes that Russia is in a war with the west, such outsourcing is self-defeating. US and European leaders need to take back the initiative in dealing with Russia. Any meaningful negotiations will not only be about Ukraine but the future of the European order. As the old Russian proverb goes: “If you invite a bear to dance, it’s not you who decides when the dance is over, it’s the bear.”
Wonky thinking
American Compass, working with YouGov, has published The Young Men Up For Grabs, which contains the survery results of 6,000 Americans. The report examines the role of Young Non-White Men in the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump, relying on the White-Working Class, and Kamala Harris, with strong support from Affluent Liberal Women, are fighting for this crucial group of swing voters.
On two of the major thematic issues emphasized by the Harris campaign, both of which generate very strong responses from ALWs, YNMs show much less interest and have responses similar to WWCs.
The first of these themes is race and various other dimensions of “diversity.” The survey first presented respondents with dichotomous statements about “diversity” and “normal” and explained, “you will be asked two questions: First, which option do you think gets more attention and is currently a higher priority in America today? Second, which option do you think is more important and should be a higher priority?” For “America today,” and then for “your ideal America,” respondents could assign either statement “much higher” or “somewhat higher priority,” or select “Don’t know.”
The two options provided were:
A culture that celebrates normal, treating everyone with respect but emphasizing the importance of adopting traditional beliefs and choices that create a shared identity for our nation.
A culture that celebrates diversity, treating whatever beliefs people might have and choices they might make as equally valid, ensuring that everyone can feel that they belong.
The “Compass Score” was calculated as the net share choosing higher priority for an option, with responses of “much higher” receiving double weight. Thus, if 35% of respondents assign Option A much higher priority, 30% assign Option A somewhat higher priority, 25% assign Option B somewhat higher priority, and 10% assign Option B much higher priority, the Compass Score is (35*2) + (30) – (25) – (10*2) = 55. Absolute Compass Scores reflect the priority that Americans give to one option versus another, the distance from a Compass Score for America Today to one for Your Ideal America shows which direction Americans would like to see priorities shift.
ALWs perceive America Today as skewed substantially toward “normal” while in their Ideal America the priority would be given overwhelmingly to “diversity.” (Note: the Compass Score can exceed 100 if a large enough share of respondents assign a “much higher” priority to one option, with that share given double weight.) WWCs and YNMs, by contrast, have more moderate perceptions of the status quo and both want to see modest shifts toward normal.
The Centre for Policy Studies has published The Politics of AI by David Rozado. The paper reviews the left-wing bias found in Large Language Models powered by AI, promoting price controls, state regulation, social liberalism, and net zero. Failure to address this problem could lead to further social fragmentation and political polarisation in Western societies.
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT represent one of the most significant technological advancements in recent decades. The effect of LLMs on society has already been considerable, influencing areas such as information retrieval, semiautomation of tasks like computer code completion, copy-editing and language translation. Private investment in model training is rapidly increasing. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities continue to improve, their effect on society is expected to be profoundly disruptive. AI holds the potential to revolutionise various societal processes by enhancing productivity, providing cost-effective access to high-quality medical diagnoses, accelerating scientific discovery, automating routine tasks and many other potential uses. However, AI systems also pose significant and well-attested risks.
One of the most obvious such risks is the role played by LLMs as analysts of, and gatekeepers to, information. It has often been said that in the modern world, information that only comes up on the second page of Google’s search results might as well be invisible. But we are rapidly replacing even that first page of a highly curated set of answers with a single source of algorithmic truth through AI-generated content. Even during the writing of this report, Google began to place AI-generated answers at the top of its search page – and it is not alone. OpenAI is itself testing a search engine prototype with selected users, SearchGPT, that uses AI to provide single direct answers to user queries. Given the enormous weight that will be placed by billions of users on the answers generated by these LLMs, it is important that the answers they generate are as neutral and factual as possible. Not least because, by the very nature of LLMs, there is no way to determine precisely how their judgments have been reached, beyond scrutiny of the output itself.
The academic literature has extensively examined bias in AI systems, particularly those related to demographic appearance cues such as ethnicity and gender. Yet political biases in AI systems have received comparatively less attention. It is obvious, however, that political bias in AI systems could lead to real harms. Potential impacts include:
Unequal treatment of groups: AI systems with embedded political biases can lead to discrimination, favoring certain groups over others.
Manipulation of public opinion: Politically biased AI could manipulate public opinion via biased content generation.
Societal polarisation: A proliferation of AI systems with different ideological biases could increase political polarisation by promoting echo chambers, reinforcing existing viewpoints, and excluding opposing perspectives.
Erosion of trust: Politically biased AI could erode public trust in AI technologies and the institutions that deploy them.
This issue has already caused public concern. Shortly after the release of ChatGPT, reports indicated that its answers to politically charged questions often reflected leftleaning preferences when administering 15 different political orientation tests (14 in English, 1 in Spanish). Subsequent studies revealed that many other popular LLMs, both closed and open source, exhibited similar political biases. And then of course there was the furore surrounding the launch of Google’s Gemini AI tool, where the company’s hardcoded instructions to increase diversity in the AI output resulted in distorted depictions of historical phenomena. There is, therefore, clear public interest in examining and evaluating the extent to which political bias is embedded into the LLMs we are using. However, most studies so far – including by this author – have relied on political orientation tests, which constrain takers to selecting one from a predefined set of multiple-choice answers.
Book of the week
We recommend Beauty: A Very Short Introduction by Sir Roger Scruton. The author unpacks how beauty is not subjective or relative. Instead, it is a rational concept with universal value that provides meaning to people’s existence, through art, music, literature, and architetcure. It can be found in high culture as well as ordinary life and is worth conserving.
There is an appealing idea about beauty which goes back to Plato and Plotinus, and which became incorporated by various routes into Christian theological thinking. According to this idea beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations. Why believe p? Because it is true. Why want x? Because it is good. Why look at y? Because it is beautiful. In some way, philosophers have argued, those answers are on a par: each brings a state of mind into the ambit of reason, by connecting it to something that it is in our nature, as rational beings, to pursue. Someone who asked ‘why believe what is true?’ or ‘why want what is good?’ has failed to understand the nature of reasoning. He doesn’t see that, if we are to justify our beliefs and desires at all, then our reasons must be anchored in the true and the good.
Does the same go for beauty? If someone asks me ‘why are you interested in x?’ is ‘because it is beautiful’ a final answer—one that is immune to counter-argument, like the answers ‘because it is good’, and ‘because it is true’? To say as much is to overlook the subversive nature of beauty. Someone charmed by a myth may be tempted to believe it: and in this case beauty is the enemy of truth. (Cf. Pindar: ‘Beauty, which gives the myths acceptance, renders the incredible credible’, First Olympian Ode.) A man attracted to a woman may be tempted to condone her vices: and in this case beauty is the enemy of goodness. (Cf. L’Abbé Prévost, Manon Lescaut, which describes the moral ruin of the Chevalier des Grieux by the beautiful Manon.) Goodness and truth never compete, we assume, and the pursuit of the one is always compatible with a proper respect for the other. The pursuit of beauty, however, is far more questionable. From Kierkegaard to Wilde the ‘aesthetic’ way of life, in which beauty is pursued as the supreme value, has been opposed to the life of virtue. The love of myths, stories and rituals, the need for consolation and harmony, the deep desire for order all have drawn people to religious beliefs regardless of whether those beliefs are true. The prose of Flaubert, the imagery of Baudelaire, the harmonies of Wagner, the sensuous forms of Canova have all been accused of immorality, by those who believe that they paint wickedness in alluring colours.
We don’t have to agree with such judgements in order to acknowledge their point. The status of beauty as an ultimate value is questionable, in the way that the status of truth and goodness are not. Let us at least say that this particular path to the understanding of beauty is not easily available to a modern thinker. The confidence with which philosophers once trod it is due to an assumption, made explicit already in the Enneads of Plotinus, that truth, beauty and goodness are attributes of the deity, ways in which the divine unity makes itself known to the human soul. That theological vision was edited for Christian use by St Thomas Aquinas, and embedded in the subtle and comprehensive reasoning for which that philosopher is justly famous. But it is not a vision that we can assume, and I propose for the time being to set it to one side, considering the concept of beauty without making any theological claims.
Aquinas's own view of the matter is worth noting, however, since it touches on a deep difficulty in the philosophy of beauty. Aquinas regarded truth, goodness and unity as ‘transcendentals’—features of reality possessed by all things, since they are aspects of being, ways in which the supreme gift of being is made manifest to the understanding. His views on beauty are more implied than stated; nevertheless he wrote as though beauty too is such a transcendental (which is one way of explaining the point already made, that beauty belongs to every category). He also thought that beauty and goodness are, in the end, identical, being separate ways in which a single positive reality is rationally apprehended. If that is so, however, what is ugliness, and why do we flee from it? And how can there be dangerous beauties, corrupting beauties, and immoral beauties? Or, if such things are impossible, why are they impossible, and what is it that misleads us into thinking the opposite? I don’t say that Aquinas has no answer to those questions. But they illustrate the difficulties encountered by any philosophy that places beauty on the same metaphysical plane as truth, so as to plant it in the heart of being as such. The natural response is to say that beauty is a matter of appearance, not of being; and perhaps also that in exploring beauty we are investigating the sentiments of people, rather than the deep structure of the world.
Quick links
Average growth rate over the next few years will be just 1.58%.
Government borrowing will be significantly higher as a result of the budget, reaching £70.6 billion in 2029/30.
The Office for Budget Responsibility estimated a 54% chance of the government hitting its fiscal mandate.
Sterling suffered its largest fall in eighteen months.
Total Fertility Rate has fallen to 1.44 children per woman in the UK, the lowest on record.
Australia is investing $12 billion in its missile defence capabilities.
Legislation introducing self-identification came into force in Germany today.
Speculation grows that the German coalition government could collapse and trigger federal elections early next year.
Vacancy rates on high streets increased to 14% in 2023.
Out of the 17,500 police firearms operations last year, only two involved shooting someone.
The share of new HIV diagnoses to people born outside the UK increased to 91% in Yorkshire, and 88% in the East Midlands and East of England last year.