Is Europe becoming lawless?

With rising disorder, uncontrolled immigration and cracking economic foundations, political leaders seem focused solely on short-term gain

Towering columns

In The Telegraph, Ken Clarke says critics of the Rwanda asylum scheme have failed to offer any alternative, and that Britain has an excellent record of global humanitarian contribution:

I am a lawyer and have a huge respect for the law – abiding by the rule of law is one of the most important underlying principles of our constitution – but we cannot simply produce a lot of legalisms to shoot down the Rwanda scheme without making any suggestion whatever of a practical kind that is likely to have an impact on a great national problem, which we share as part of a global issue.

We do need a solution to this problem and the only one on offer is the extraordinary one put forward by the Government – that we simply cease to entertain illegal immigration and deport to safe places. Importantly, in all the debate about the Government’s Illegal Migration Bill, no one has advanced an alternative. I have listened keenly for an idea of how else we might deal with the mounting issue of irregular migration, but answer has come there none.

People can make objections to the Rwanda scheme, they can point out legal complications with it, but they don’t have a plan of their own. So, the choice is between doing nothing and Rwanda…I cannot be certain that this policy will succeed, it is – after all – the first time this has been tried. But we can no longer simply do nothing. We must give the Rwanda scheme a chance to work.

At UnHerd, Aris Roussinos says the reckless rentierism of Thames Water symbolises a broken liberal model propped up by outdated thinking:

Yet while the world has moved beyond economic liberalism, leftover liberals still run the West. Like a post-Communist state where the old nomenklatura, having hurriedly adopted the mantle of liberal capitalists, still run the show, a great, historic revolution has occurred but the same people remain in charge, having suffered no retribution for the catastrophic mistakes their failed idealism brought in tow. A massive clear-out is long overdue: and no more absurd an illustration can be found of the immovable fatberg blocking our political future, the sheer ideological inertia preventing reform, than Britain’s failing water companies.

The failed status quo our politicians contort themselves to defend, like some ancient pillar of our constitution, was itself a bold act of political change. Thatcher’s privatisation of the national water supply was a course of action so daringly radical, so intuitively wrongheaded that only one other nation on earth, Pinochet’s Chile, took the same path. As in so many other aspects of national life, Britain carried out a reckless experiment on itself which failed. Like so much else of Westminster’s tinkering with a country which in retrospect seems to have functioned perfectly well, the failure was so disastrous that the error cannot be admitted, let alone rectified.

…In this sense, the oft-made liberal claim that Britain urgently needs to decolonise itself may be correct, though not in the way its adherents think. Exploiting a country’s resources and extracting the wealth of its people solely for the purpose of enriching foreign shareholders is how you run an unloved colony, not a nation. It is striking that it is only England, the submerged nation where Westminster’s writ runs unchallenged, with no viable nationalist independence movement to force the central government to keep voters relatively happy, that has been forced to submit itself to looting by the water companies.

On ConservativeHome, Henry Hill says the Conservatives must not sacrifice building long-term support for the sake of short-term advantage:

Large parts of England suffer avoidable drought every summer because we’ve spent 13 years not giving planning permission to the Abingdon Reservoir (which, again, the Secretary of State could do by fiat under existing legislation). There is still no decision on whether to allow Heathrow or Gatwick (let alone both) to expand, despite a dire shortage of runway capacity. And faced with the increasingly pressing problem of paying for social care, the best the Government could come up with was a hike in… National Insurance. A tax paid exclusively by working-age people. None of this is the difficult spadework of laying the foundations for a more prosperous future.

Besides which, that point about the longer horizons of younger voters has its limits. The rent crisis is biting now – one of my flatmates was just told her rent and costs are going up by over £250 a month, no negotiations. People looking to start families have to worry about their fertility; others are passing the only twenties they’ll ever get in a capital which is strangling its own night economy.

Dealing with any of those issues, or most likely any other you can think of, cannot be done overnight. Any solution must, necessarily, be a long-term one. But that delayed payoff means that if the Conservatives were serious about giving younger people a reason to vote for them, they’d need to start doing it now. But that would involve confronting other parts of the Tory coalition, not just older voters but also Conservative councillors who keep blocking housing, late licences, and so on. That’s going to be difficult – and there’s never going to be a point when it isn’t difficult. If by some act of providence the Party does manage to retain power after the next election, its position is going to be even more precarious than now, and the demands of the short term…will carry, if it’s possible, even greater weight.

In The Spectator, Jonathan Miller says decades of failed immigration policies across Europe are fuelling the riots crisis - which is not confined to France:

Common to all European countries where gangs are seizing control is the near collapse of the education system in immigrant areas. A British friend who teaches English in an inner-city high school in the southern city of Béziers tells me that one of her students, a gang member, was recently arrested for a serious assault. Her principal has advised her not to discipline her students lest she be assaulted herself. Some Swedish teachers report being told by pupils ‘Jag kan brösta en fyra’ or ‘I can take four’. The reference is to the number of years in prison that a Swedish teenager can expect for killing a teacher.

…It would be easy to put all the blame on  Europe’s current leaders. But it’s not entirely their fault that so many unemployable young people, many born to immigrant parents, have lost loyalty to their countries. Sweden’s gang warfare may have worsened since the 2016 wave of migration, but many of those now arrested are Swedish born and bred (the ‘Kurdish Fox’, for example, is from Uppsala, born to Kurdish parents).

Integration failures are coming to a head. The crisis across Europe is the result of decades of wishful thinking about how migration-related problems will resolve themselves. But Britain would be unwise to revel in the misery of Sweden and France: social disorder is contagious. The recent French riots seamlessly crossed the border to Brussels, with its own population of angry young men. It might only take only a spark to plunge Britain into an inferno of its own.

In The Independent, Catarina Fernandes Martins and Anthony Faiola paint a bleak picture of Portugal’s experiment with drug legalisation:

But in the first substantial way since decriminalisation passed, some Portuguese voices are now calling for a rethink of a policy that was long a proud point of national consensus. Urban visibility of the drug problem, police say, is at its worst point in decades and the state-funded nongovernmental organisations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.

…A newly released national survey suggests the percentage of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001, though still below European averages. Portugal’s prevalence of high-risk opioid use is higher than Germany’s but lower than that of France and Italy. But even proponents of decriminalisation here admit that something is going wrong. Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage. In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 per cent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last. Crime – including robbery in public spaces – spiked 14 per cent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use.

…Elsewhere in the world, places implementing decriminalisation are confronting challenges of their own. In Oregon – where the policy took effect in early 2021 openly citing Portugal as a model – attempts to funnel people with addiction from jail to rehabilitation have had a rough start. Police have shown little interest in handing out toothless citations for drug use, grants for treatment have lagged, and extremely few people are seeking voluntary rehabilitation. Meanwhile, overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 per cent.

In the New Statesman, Imogen Sinclair suggests Generation Z might be more inclined to conservatism than millennials:

A sentence beginning “If present trends continue” has never been the soundest guide to predicting the future. There are trends that newspaper columnists ignore. There are beliefs that go undetected by polling companies. What those perpetuating the narrative of a Tory extinction refuse to acknowledge is that first-time voters – the post-millennial generation – are not as liberal as millennials. Rather than disappearing, like paganism did as Christianity spread through what remained of the Roman empire, conservatism may find itself rejuvenated by Generation Z.

…Gen Z could yet play a role in this future Tory voter base. There is a type of young, restless right-wing thinker that shares a common enemy with 2019 Tory voters: the liberal consensus. These voters are still waiting for the politics to materialise that was offered to them in the Conservative Party manifestos in 2017 and 2019: lower migration, revived industries, a renewed national culture. A reheated mixture of Thatcherism, Blairism and Cameronism is all that successive Tory prime ministers have given in return for their votes.

The supposedly “sensible”, “grown-up” politics is not something that Gen Z wants either. Research by the think tank Onward suggests that Gen Z are also challenging the status quo, falling out of love with classical liberal orthodoxy. But it would be a mistake to interpret this as a lurch to the left. Gen Z are, in fact, more authoritarian than older generations and far from enamoured with free markets and their consequences: austerity, financialisation and cartel capitalism. The economics of the post-millennial generation is more likely to be Tory in the Disraelian sense: preferring domestic production to imports and respect for the dignity of labour.

Wonky thinking

In a report for Policy Exchange, The Eight Great Technologies 10 Years On, David Willetts reflects on the successes and failures of government in cultivating key technologies he identified ten years ago in an earlier report, which made the case for targeted industrial strategies:

The classic liberal view rests on a clear distinction between “horizontal” policies, applying across all sectors equally to promote a stronger supply side, and “vertical” ones for particular places or sectors or technologies. The distinction looks clear but in the real world of policy the horizontal often tilts unexpectedly and ministers and their advisers find themselves sliding, rather baffled and disoriented, into a position which is surprisingly vertical.

Here are some examples. The purest classical liberal will agree on the importance of public investment in infrastructure but where do you actually put it? How do you decide? Perhaps it looks safe just to do the cost benefit analysis on the current distribution of people and activity. But what if that is changing? Could you work instead on the basis of a future plan?

Government needs to procure goods and services but from whom and on what criteria? Should they have a track-record but in that case could you ever buy from an innovative start-up? (New procurement legislation tries to tackle some of this.) Procurement by the NHS is potentially a powerful tool for promoting life sciences but why has it proved so hard to do in practice? One big VC fund would not invest in any British life sciences start-up which had selling to the NHS as part of its business model because of the difficulty of getting it to adopt any innovation. What could Government do about that?

The UK has its own trade policy post Brexit. That boils down to negotiation on the terms of access to particular markets – what are our priorities in any negotiation?

A new technology is emerging – should new regulations be drafted for autonomous cars or genetic modification? (Two examples of excellent recent initiatives.) Should they reflect our own capabilities? Should we try to influence international standards?

Education and training is another horizontal policy but in what form? What if specific industries are growing but held back by shortages of particular skills? The Home Office identifies shortage occupations - should their list shape domestic skills policy?

The idea of Industrial Strategy has become so burdened with past associations that it has ceased to be a useful term. But really it is just an attempt to answer those sorts of questions. It means thinking strategically about how to grow your economy. Inward investors say they can have conversations on these real issues with individual American states or Federal agencies which often have quite ambitious industrial policies but find it much harder with anyone in England. It is not socialism. It just recognises that a key role of Government is to bear risk. Indeed Government is the biggest bearer of risk we have got – that is why we have a welfare state as well. There are limits to how much risk commercial enterprises will accept. These risks are particularly high with innovation-driven by science and technology. If Government takes on some of the risk it can promote business investment alongside it. Think of those illustrations of thermometers on the side of Church steeples showing how an appeal to raise £1m to restore it is going. Cautious official advice can often be that if they succeed in raising £900k from others then Government can put in the last £100k. (Though then you are caught in a Catch 22 as by that point the Treasury can argue that public money isn’t needed.) But often Government has most impact if it puts in the first £100k, signalling that this is a serious project worth backing, and promoting more private funding. And there is now rigorous economic evidence that this pays off with more growth. Public support need not displace or distort private investment it can increase it and nudge it into key innovative new technologies.

The danger with such interventions is not picking losers: it is playing safe and pushing extra resource to the big incumbents. Requirements for private co-funding early on can mean that only big companies have the capacity to join the programme. The British managers of global businesses make persuasive points that there is an international competition going on about where to locate a new activity and British funding and engagement can persuade their global HQ to invest in the UK. I was involved in persuading IBM to locate some of its research in cognitive computing at our new Hartree Centre for digital innovation at Daresbury in Cheshire by committing public expenditure to the programme. On another occasion Vince Cable flew to the US successfully to persuade GM to invest in Ellesmere Port. But there is more beyond the big players. There are also lots of programmes for start-ups. The gap is sustained support for rapidly growing scale-ups. One way to reduce the risk of capture by the big players is to focus is on new technologies and industries. Then one is less likely to be backing incumbents and more likely to reach the fresh scaleups. New technologies are inherently disruptive. As Schumpeter observed: “In general it is not the owner of stagecoaches who builds railways.” The barriers have been public procurement processes that look for a long track record and do not fund innovation. Moreover policy churn with the endless launch of new schemes gives advantages to big companies with public affairs departments tracking all the new initiatives. One reason I relaunched the excellent SMART programme of innovation grants for small business which the late David Young had first set out in the 1980s was that the brand name was still well-recognised so we had a better chance of reaching smaller companies.

New technologies and enterprises are on a long and tricky journey to the market. Easing some of the risk burdens on business as they innovate is one of the best ways Government can promote growth. It is a serious mistake for Government to withdraw its support too soon and then expect commercial investors to take it on. It may hide its mistake by complaining that business leaders are risk averse but actually it is expecting them to take more risk than in many other countries. This lesson is harder to learn because by the time there is an IPO and another unicorn floats on the stock exchange the original support from an Innovate UK programme may well have disappeared from view. Innovative companies usually only identify previous equity investments when they float. Non-dilutive funding such as Innovate UK grants are not part of the capital table so will not be visible, even to experienced investors coming in at that stage. This promotes the illusion that all this “just happens” because of savvy City investors with no public policy behind it. Bold self-confident tech entrepreneurs and VC investors perform an invaluable role but they can understate the role of public agencies in getting these companies going in the first place.

Book of the week

We recommend Robert Putnam’s The Upswing: How we came together a century ago and how we can do it again. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett argue that social tribalism and polarisation are increasing across the West, but that we learn from how America moved from an individualistic to a more communitarian society following the Gilded Age:

The United States in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s was startlingly similar to today. Inequality, political polarisation, social dislocation and cultural narcissism prevailed - all accompanied, as they are now, by unprecedented technological advances, prosperity and material well-being. The parallels are indeed so striking that the foregoing description could have been written virtually word-for-word about our nation today. Looking back to a time Mark Twain disparagingly called the Gilded Age turns out to feel eerily like looking into a mirror.

…A great variety of measures shows that on the heels of the first American Gilded Age came more than six decades of imperfect but steady upward progress towards greater economic equality, more co-operation in the public square, a stronger social fabric, and a growing culture of solidarity. Throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century we actually narrowed the economic chasm born in the Gilded Age, making progress not only during the Great Depression and World War II, but for decades both before and after. In that same period we gradually overcame extreme political polarisation and learned to collaborate across party lines. We also steadily wove an ever-stronger network of community and family ties. And our culture became more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. In short, America experienced a dramatic, multifaceted, and unmistakable upswing.

…Over the first six decades of the twentieth century America had become demonstrably - indeed measurably - a more “we” society.

But then…in the mid-1960s the decades-long upswing in our shared economic, political, social and cultural life abruptly reversed direction. America suddenly found itself in the midst of a clear downturn. Between the mid-1960s and today - by scores of hard measures along multiple dimensions - we have been experiencing declining economic equality, the deterioration of compromise in the public square, a fraying social fabric, and a descent into cultural narcissism. As the 1960s moved into the 1970s and 1980s, and beyond, we re-created the socioeconomic chasm of the last Gilded Age at an accelerated pace. In that same period we replaced co-operation with political polarisation. We allowed our community and family ties to unravel to a marked extent. And our culture became far more focused on individualism and less interested in the common good. Since the 1950s we have made important progress in expanding individual rights (often building on progress made in the preceding decades), but we have sharply regressed in terms of shared prosperity and community values.

Quick links

The Government will implement 7% pay rises for police, 6% for doctors and 6.5% for teachers.

Real GDP is estimated to have fallen 0.1% in May, with production output falling 0.6%.

Spending on the state pension is expected to be £23bn higher by 2027 (a further 0.8% of GDP).

The UK has had among the worst productivity and wage growth of large European economies since 2010.

The Government is now spending £2.2bn per year housing refugees and illegal migrants - more than the latest round of levelling up funding.

Economist Dame Kate Barker suggested raising taxes on the rich as a fairer way to calm inflation.

The French riots caused 650 million euros of damage, say insurers.

A Chinese spy is believed to have infiltrated a House of Commons briefing by Hong Kong campaigners.

China’s trade surplus has normalised post-Covid, but to a much higher level than pre-pandemic.

…And Brazil’s trade surplus is now around $10bn per year.

…And China is now the world’s largest auto exporter.

Numbers of adult social care workers are now rising, according to a new report.

Cannabis users are more likely to be diagnosed with depression or bipolar disorder, according to a new study.