Is Britain working? Strikes, retirement and inflation

Bankrupt Britain; productivity meltdown; Brexit heartlands; levelling up Germany; Sturgeon U-turn on women; cultural surrender; Northern Ireland Protocol; ethics of colonialism; woke police

We think conservatives need to talk more and get better at sharing ideas. So here we share the best newspaper columns, policy reports and books that will stimulate thinking and promote new ways of doing things.

The Conservative Reader is published every Friday lunchtime, so please do look out for it. And expect plenty of content about the things we think make conservatism such a compelling body of thought: identity and belonging, community and commitment, market economics, national resilience and good government.

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Towering Columns

In the Daily Telegraph, Philip Johnston says a sovereign wealth fund may be the only way to save younger generations from destitution:

The [Norwegian] fund holds stakes in around 9,300 companies globally, owning 1.3 per cent of all listed stocks. It also invests in bonds, unlisted real estate and renewable energy projects. It is worth about £200,000 per citizen and bolsters a generous welfare state. Is it too late for us to do the same? We have squandered our North Sea legacy, while the opportunity to use the revenues from shale gas to seed a wealth fund has been sacrificed on the altar of environmental activism.

If we are not prepared to harness the potential for wealth creation under our own feet, we need also to accept that we must cut our cloth accordingly. Spending will have to be reduced, future welfare commitments scaled back and our young people encouraged to start making provision for a future much bleaker than anything we have created for ourselves.

I look at my two grandsons and wonder how on earth the current levels of welfare and health care spending can be sustained until they are my age. The answer is they can’t be, so we need to start preparing for the financial circumstances that will prevail 50 years from now. By 2067, the OBR’s baseline projections have public sector debt increasing to 283 per cent of GDP.

At Himbonomics, James Dickson says non-existent productivity growth is why wages and living standards have stalled.

These pressures make it all the more challenging to guide a large demographic bulge through the healthcare system, supported by the proportionally smaller tax base and labour force of fewer workers relative to dependents. Since the seventies we’ve been shielded from the negative impact of bad policy by a growing population and a falling dependency ratio, with more workers’ taxed productivity servicing the obligations of society to its young and elderly, like education, old age pensions and emergency care.

…It’s hard to emphasise how catastrophically bad British productivity growth has been since the financial crisis. The march of progress, sustained even during the industrial strife of the 1970s, running essentially unbroken since the war, has stalled. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this trend established itself long before Brexit — increasing trade frictions with our nearest neighbours probably isn’t helping, but it’s almost irrelevant compared to the pre-existing growth challenge. This lack of productivity growth should shock and scare our politicians. Prosperity is in peril. It should be item number one on their agenda.

…Stagnant productivity growth means stagnant real wages. It also means, despite the highest level of taxation since the war, stagnant tax revenue, which means stagnant or declining, underfunded public services. We’re being squeezed at both ends — by demographics, and by a lack of growth to compensate for said demographics. And the UK is vastly underperforming its peer nations.

In Unherd, Jacob Furedi paints a bleak picture of Boston, a Brexit heartland failed by the political class:

Boston’s atomisation began well before the EU referendum. Perhaps it was sparked in 1970, when its direct rail service to London was canned, or, eight years later, when the medieval town was carved up by a dual carriageway. Or perhaps it started in May 2004, when the UK opened its labour market to Europe. Whatever caused it, by 2016, Boston’s decline was plain to see: in its extraordinary crime rates, especially when it comes to violent crime, and its sagging infrastructure.

Brexit was supposed to fix this. Forget taking back control of Britain; voters here would have settled for taking back control of Boston. Instead, immigration and crime continued to rise — and their town slipped from their grip.

This is where politics should step in, but, as Nichola tells me, “they’re all useless”. And to an extent, former Mayor Anton Dani agrees: “All politicians assume that people will forget things quickly. But the people here will not forget.” The legacy of this perceived betrayal is written in UnHerd’s poll results: in the fact that the root cause of Boston’s Brexit vote (its concern about immigration) remains strong, but voters’ belief in a political solution (Brexit itself) has plummeted. Politics was tried and failed.

Also in Unherd, Maurice Frank writes that ‘levelling up’ Germany was a Herculean task which London may not accept:

After the war, the country was purposefully re-crafted to have no strong centre. Although Berlin is beginning to flourish economically again — it attracts more start-up capital than any other German city — it will never be a London, generating the bulk of the nation’s wealth then distributing it like a whimsical king. To disrupt structures so deep-rooted takes a catastrophe, or else decades of slow change. German “devolution” was originally imposed by the force of a few words in a constitution, dictated by occupying powers, the country having been at the stage of some of the 20th century’s most harrowing dramas. The collapse of two dictatorships demanded drastic measures. England has not seen such severe upheavals in modern times.

An awareness of history and a deep desire for stability means the German state has been willing to take on huge tasks — and throw real money at them — in a way that might seem foreign and exaggerated to some in Westminster. I’m not sure Andy Burnham realises the scale of change required to transform England’s system into something like Germany’s. One might dream of transforming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland into a federation. Maybe that’s what it really takes to achieve more equality. But would London ever agree to such a radical move? Muddling through, having the provinces beg for crumbs, probably suits the capital just fine.

In the Daily Telegraph, Madeline Grant says the logic of gender self-ID is unravelling in real time:

Now the SNP has performed a humiliating reverse-ferret; imposing an effective ban on trans prisoners who’ve committed sexual and violent crimes being moved to all-female prisons. But this was by no means inevitable; and would probably never have happened had not feminist campaigners and concerned citizens repeatedly raised the alarm. Crucially, it comes without any acknowledgement that the nationalists’ new position even slightly undermines the overall logic of self-ID.

…when not a single woman was nominated for best artist at the Brit Awards after organisers opted to make the category gender-neutral, Guardian journalist Owen Jones – a long-time critic of gender-ID sceptics – pivoted to demanding that 50 per cent of nominations be “reserved for women”… Even the most zealous supporters of self-ID have their limits, it seems. For Sturgeon this was biologically male rapists in female prisons; for Jones, an all-male Brits.

In the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh says conservatives’ preference for profit means abandoning cultural institutions to the Left:

The controversies of the day expose a problem with the right and it isn’t corruption. It isn’t “sleaze”. It is the impossibility of chasing money and fighting the culture wars. Zahawi is one person, but stands for millions of a conservative temper in each generation. They are entitled to choose lucrative work over a life in the institutions that set the cultural weather. They are entitled to deplore the success of the left in bending those institutions to their dogma. What is neither honest nor becoming is to do both: to forfeit terrain and then seethe at its capture by hostile elements.

There is an axiom that is often attributed, probably wrongly, to the historian Robert Conquest. Any organisation that is not explicitly right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing. The genius of the insight is that it avoids paranoia. It doesn’t pretend that there is a plot afoot. It doesn’t imagine some Gramscian scheme to train up leftist cadres and send them on a long march through the institutions. It just recognises a general gravitation of left-leaning people to careers where the profit motive isn’t paramount. It is harder than you think for media outlets of even conservative outlook to hire and retain people who aren’t given to a sort of too-easy liberalism. Imagine how much harder it is for institutions that aren’t making a conscious effort.

Wonky thinking

In a Policy Exchange paper with a foreword written by Lord Frost, Roderick Crawford argues that the Northern Ireland Protocol is failing to protect the Good Friday Agreement:

It is no longer possible to argue that the EU’s strict condition that: “Nothing in the Agreement should undermine the objectives and commitments set out in the Good Friday Agreement in all its parts and its related implementing agreements” has been achieved. The key objective of the Good Friday Agreement was to provide a consensual basis for Northern Ireland’s governance that removed the cause of violence; that consensus has been lost and the EU’s own first principle for a solution has been breached in consequence. This is of huge significance yet sets off no alarm bells in Brussels or in member states other than Ireland. That EU principle reflects, perhaps unwittingly, the political reality of the need for consensus for Northern Ireland’s governance to function — whether the EU realised that then, or indeed now…

The EU appears committed to rigorous upholding of the architecture and supporting regulations of the Protocol whilst ignoring whether they meet the Protocol’s objectives. The EU and the UK agreed the Protocol on the basis that it would uphold the Good Friday Agreement as well as secure the EU’s internal market. It does not do both; rather, it has crashed the institutions established by the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland; it has also failed the EU’s negotiating mandate and its Guiding Principles as well as the Protocol’s own core objectives. The case for renegotiation based on the EU’s own commitments and those of the Protocol itself is clear. It is no longer the commonly agreed solution because it is no longer a solution to the complex challenge it was designed to address. The negotiators need to produce a solution that is better able to address the balance of the objectives of the Protocol; this is now both an urgent necessity and a requirement for both parties.

Book of the week

Our recommended book this week is Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, in which Nigel Biggar analyses the morality of colonialism and tests modern claims made against the British Empire. Recognising that, like any other long-standing state, the Empire involved elements of injustice, Biggar shows that a true moral inquest needs to balance such injustices against the Empire’s achievements:

There is, therefore, a more historically accurate, fairer, more positive story to be told about the British Empire than the anti-colonialists want us to hear. And the importance of that story is not just past but present, not just historical but political. What is at stake is not merely the pedantic truth about yesterday, but the self-perception and self-confidence of the British today, and the way they conduct themselves in the world tomorrow. What is also at stake, therefore, is the very integrity of the United Kingdom and the security of the West. That is why I have written this book…

Recognising the good that colonial government did, native peoples often found it to be not only sufficiently legitimate, but the best available, even admirable and to be emulated. So, in the 1950s and 1960s several million Chinese voted with their feet, fled the lawless mainland and found refuge in the colony of Hong Kong. Even now, in 2022, there are many Chinese in Hong Kong who, if given the choice, would prefer life in a gradually democratising, liberal, law-governed British colony to life under the arbitrary, repressive thumb of the Chinese regime in Beijing…

Yes, the British Empire contained evils and injustices, some of them very grave and some of them culpable – but so does the history of any long-standing state. It was not essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent. It showed itself capable of correcting its sins and errors, and of learning from them. And, over time, it became increasingly motivated by Christian humanitarianism and intent upon preparing colonised peoples for liberal self-government. So if colonial history gives those who of us who identify ourselves with Britain cause for lament and shame, it also gives us cause for admiration and pride.

This is not a case of what anti-colonialists condescendingly dismiss as ‘imperial nostalgia’. Let me be clear: Britain’s imperial moment has passed, once and for all. The conditions that occasioned it will not recur again, for good and for ill. So this is not about nostalgia. Rather, it is about discriminate identification with liberal, humanitarian principles and endeavours of the colonial past that deserve to be admired, owned and carried into the future. And it is about not letting what Elie Kedourie called ‘the canker of imaginary guilt’ cripple the self-confidence of the British—together with Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders—in their role as important pillars of the liberal international order.

Quick links

The IMF says Britain will be the only G7 economy to shrink this year.

The Bank of England said Britain may be turning the corner on inflation.

14,000 NHS beds are occupied by someone who is clinically ready to leave.

The number of deaths registered is up 11.6% compared to the five-year average.

The ONS has released statistics on the economic activity of people in the UK broken down by nationality.

41 per cent of voters say the police are too keen to be woke to catch criminals.

UK managers rank lower than those in America, Japan, Germany, Sweden and Canada.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has flown to China for talks.

Nicola Sturgeon admitted she does not always believe trans women are women.