Lions led by foxes

Technocratic managerialism is fuelling British dysfunction

Towering columns

At UnHerd, N.S. Lyons reflects on the extent to which the recent riots are a direct consequence of the ruling elite’s fundamental character traits.

Security and prosperity produce a proliferation of foxes. Foxes are unsuited to and deeply uncomfortable with the employment of force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, because they’re nerds. They will use physical force if necessary, but prefer to disguise its nature and are prone to use it ineptly. The brainy and cosmopolitan foxes have talents the lions don’t, however: they are good at managing complexity and scale, navigating the nuances of diplomatic alliances, or extracting profits from an extensive empire.

As long as peace prevails, civilisations come increasingly to morally prize the indirect and diplomatic methods of foxes and to avoid and indeed abhor the strength and violence of lions. As states grow larger and more complex, establishing new layers of bureaucracy, law and procedure, this quickly favours the Byzantine organising and scheming of foxes. In comparison, lions are inarticulate and unprepared for the traps of more underhanded mammals. So eventually, a wholesale replacement of the elite occurs: the lions who founded the nation are pushed out of its leadership, marginalised and excluded by a class of foxes who see them as brutish relics of a barbaric age.

But a curious thing then happens, Pareto observed: the instability of societies overly dominated by foxes begins to increase relentlessly. The foxes, reluctant to properly distinguish and identify real threats or to openly employ force even when necessary, find themselves defenceless against wolves both internal and external. When faced with escalating challenges, the foxes tend to resort to doubling down on their preferred strategy of misdirection and manipulation, and attempt to bury or buy off threats rather than confronting them directly. This does nothing to solve problems that require the firm use of force, or the threat of it, such as keeping packs of wolves on the other side of the borders. Eventually, when things get bad enough, foxes may desperately lash out with violence, but do so indecisively, ham-fistedly, or in entirely the wrong direction. The wolves, for their part, can instinctively smell weakness and just keep coming.

At The Critic, Fred de Fossard warns that free speech will be undermined further by the government’s crackdown on online opinion.

Britain today is not the free country she used to be. In the latter part of the 20^th century and into the 21^st, Parliament has passed a stream of laws restricting speech, and the courts have created a web of precedents around privacy which have restricted it even further. The Public Order Act functions like a de facto blasphemy law, and the Communications Act has made it a criminal offence to send offensive jokes on social media, even in private group-chats. Following the rise of de-banking, political speech is also being prosecuted via other means, with financial institutions and regulators utilising ESG rules and codes to remove bank accounts from people whose political views they dislike. Freedom of speech goes much further than just the right to offend.

Unsurprisingly, there are many calls for a First Amendment to protect freedom of speech in Britain. This is understandable, but codification of rights does not necessarily solve the issue. After all, the Human Rights Act of 1998 states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”

While this sounds nice, it doesn’t seem to have protected the countless people from prosecution and imprisonment for matters of speech since 1998. Indeed, when the then Labour government passed the Communications Act into law, it signed a statement that some of its provisions were not compatible with the Human Rights Act. Instead, British free speech advocates would be better focusing their efforts on campaigning to repeal the laws which are restricting speech. No Parliament can bind its successor, after all.

For the New Statesman, Adrian Pabst considers the threat posed by tech platforms to free speech and democracy.

Increasingly, we are prisoners of the global online panopticon in which Meta’s algorithms and Google’s artificial intelligence know more about us than we do. It reflects the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s theory that a prison is ideally designed if its inmates are kept under permanent observation. Digital surveillance is the contemporary expression of a sacrificial utilitarian calculus that dispenses with the dignity of the person for the supposed greater good of the masses and their masters. Tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are the new gods of our secular age, as Bruno Maçães has argued in these pages.

Far from empowering people, tech platforms create what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of voluntary servitude” – a “kind of servitude, ordered, mild and peaceable, a singular power, tutelary, all-encompassing”. The attention economy of click-bait and TikTok videos appeals to our base instincts. Powered by unprecedented computational power, the tech platform’s algorithms do not merely entertain or distract us – they absorb our attention to the point of undermining our fundamental capacity for critical reflection and self-discipline on which robust public debate, a vibrant democracy and human nature depend.

Increasingly, politics as a civic practice aimed at reconciling estranged interests – capital and labour, young and old, indigenous and immigrant – is abolished in favour of new forms of tribal warfare. Unregulated by national media laws and unmoored from ethical constraints, social media unleashes the violence of mob rule in which tech owners and prominent influencers are prosecutors, judge and jury all at once. The tech platforms are no ordinary big business but empires of everything that acquire rival messaging and imaging services. Tech owners such as Musk or Zuckerberg seek to replace the old politics of competing ideologies with a populist plutocracy that destroys democracy: “Move fast and break things,” as Zuckerberg is fond of saying.

At Compact, Noel Yaxley looks at how the decline of British steel has been caused by misguided environmental policies.

Because of devolution of Westminster’s power to local authorities, the Welsh government now sets environmental policy. The Labour-led devolved administration established a nonbinding target in 2016 to reduce carbon emissions by 3 percent annually. If projections come true, the new electric furnaces will lead to a significant decrease in emissions in Wales—roughly 15 percent, with a corresponding decrease in Britain’s overall emissions of roughly 1.5 percent.

But alternative, green processes are bound to come up short. To extract iron from iron ore, a reducing agent must react with heat to remove oxygen from the iron ore. To produce high-quality steel, the primary agent involved in this reaction is coal. Suffice it to say, high-quality steel won’t be produced in Port Talbot using electric furnaces.

Even if the electric furnaces reduced carbon emissions in Britain, it would only be possible if another country, most likely China, would also have to adopt the technology. China produces 64 percent of the world’s pig iron, the raw material needed to create high-quality steel. With diminished furnace capacity, Britain would need to import more steel. When you consider the carbon intensity of Chinese electricity—61 percent of which is generated by coal-powered stations—we are essentially outsourcing our emissions.

At The Spectator, Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde argues that the global fertility crisis is being misunderstood and underestimated.

Whenever I raise the issue of falling birth rates during lectures, I’m always met with three questions. The first is: won’t a falling population benefit the environment? This is misguided. A gently falling population could be good for sustainability, but we’re facing population collapse and economic turmoil. Environmental concern is a ‘luxury good’: we do it more when prosperous. Voters in 2050 in a country with acute budgetary problems caused by an ageing population will care a lot less about global warming.

The second question is: can’t we bring in more immigrants? But the falling population is for the planet, not one country. Every Argentinian who moves to Spain alleviates Spain’s demographic woes but aggravates Argentina’s. This argument also ignores the huge number of immigrants needed to keep the population constant in countries such as South Korea. By 2080, 80 per cent of people living there would need to be immigrants or the children of immigrants. Can any society absorb so many without social unrest? It’s not clear either that immigration fixes pensions or healthcare costs. When immigrants are young, they pay taxes; as they grow old, they draw pensions and use health services. The same is true for first- and second-generation immigrant children.

The third question is: won’t AI make a population collapse immaterial by doing all the work for us? This is wishful thinking. AI’s effect on productivity won’t match the hype. Daron Acemoglu, a leading expert on the macroeconomics of AI, estimates it will increase productivity by 0.66 per cent over the next decade. Even multiplying his estimate by ten, the figure would be much lower than what’s needed to overcome the declining labour force. The gulf between what the McKinseys of the world think and what the real experts think is vast.

On his Substack, Henry Newman investigates the appointment of Labour donor Ian Corfield and whether the Ministerial Code needs greater clarity.

Without public-spirited individuals willing to donate to political parties, we would either have weaker politics (because strong political parties are the basis of a strong democracy), or we would have to follow a Continental model and use public money to pay for politics. The reality is politics costs money. Running an election, employing qualified staff, conducting opinion analysis, researching policies, doing proper HR on candidates, printing leaflets and buying online advertising. These are all expensive. Not massively expensive. But they can’t be done for free. Much of politics is run on a shoe string…

…No one could seriously think that he gave the donation in order to secure a role in Government. The amount was relatively small – £5,000. He also gave to other Labour figures – Rebecca Long-Bailey when she was a shadow Treasury minister, and Tom Watson, including while he was Deputy Labour Leader. You can see the donations on the Electoral Commission’s website. Mr Corfield should be applauded for his interest in supporting members of Parliament. We need more people giving more money to politics – to political parties, to candidates, and to political campaigns. It’s not healthy for parties to rely on a few big donors, whether individuals or trades unions…

…This is why some greater clarity around the rules is important. And why transparency matters. After all, we only found out about this appointment thanks to Politico’s Vincent Manancourt and his reporting. We also have no idea what the ‘Director - Investment’ role will actually entail. But we can expect it to entail, by definition, attracting investment. That means contact with some high-net worth individuals and businesses, and investment decisions. Precisely the sorts of areas where ethical standards need to be whiter than white.

Wonky thinking

Conservative Leadership Candidate Tom Tugendhat delivered a speech on tackling extremism in the wake of the riots. Situating the events of the past few months within a longer pattern of public disorder and political violence, Tugendhat considered questions around government leadership and social trust as well as setting out a conservative agenda for police and criminal justice reform.

Last week, we saw a senior officer from West Midlands Police explain that officers had been absent during violence by young Muslim men because they had discussed their plans with “community leaders, with business leaders… to understand the style of policing we needed to deliver.” Criminal acts committed during protests – whether by Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil or the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – were not stopped, with police seeming to stand by the wayside. And in Birmingham, police deferred to so-called community leaders while pubs and cars were attacked, windows broken and citizens intimidated. This is not, as the police oath requires, policing “without fear or favour”. No police officer should ever tolerate the presence of a militia, no matter what the provocation or the cause they claim. The intrusion of politics – the politics of protest, the politics of self-appointed “community leaders” – into policing must end.

We need a new programme of police reform to make sure it does. The institutions of policing should be reviewed and reformed, including the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs Council. The culture of police leadership – how leaders are recruited, trained and rewarded – must change. The structure of policing – not least the Met’s confused mix of national and local responsibilities, and its reporting to the Mayor of London and the Home Secretary – with each blaming the other – must also change. Removing Counter Terrorism Policing from the Met to create a new National Security Police force, whose focus is not just counter-terror but also state threats, would be one way of doing so.

Our response to conspiracy theories and disinformation – and our response to the truth, when those in authority find it inconvenient – cannot be silence. The antidote to conspiracy is transparency, and transparency is vital to knowledge. Where possible the police – subject to the protection of the right to a fair trial – should err towards sharing more information, not less. Silence feeds lies and allows our enemies to exploit the darkness to spread disinformation and try to divide us.

In the criminal justice system, we also need change. It is true that we do not have the capacity in the prison estate that we need. There is little point spending vast sums on more police officers who arrest more criminals only to see them given trivial or non-custodial sentences. Research shows that only one tenth of criminals commit more than half of all crimes. And even with this group, a number of “super-prolific” criminals are responsible for an even greater share. The first rioters to be convicted sum up the problem. Derek Drummond had fourteen previous convictions from nineteen offences and a history of violence. Declan Geiran had thirteen previous convictions for eighteen offences. Adam Wharton had sixteen previous convictions for 26 offences, including robbery and burglary. As more people are prosecuted, we are likely to find many repeat offenders among them.

According to research compiled by my friend, Neil O’Brien MP, the number of offenders with more than fifty previous convictions who were convicted but not sent to prison rose from 1,299 in 2007 to 3,196 in 2018. The number of offenders with more than a hundred convictions but who still avoided jail doubled to 295. Over the years of Neil’s study, 206,000 criminals with 25 previous convictions avoided prison for their next offence. Instead, more were handed community sentences. This is madness, and under Labour the problem is only going to grow worse. Just as he is set to raise taxes, Keir Starmer is doing here what he fundamentally believes in – in this case, releasing criminals early – while pretending he is forced to do it because of his inheritance from the Tories.

We know this is nonsense for two reasons. First, he appointed a prisons minister, Lord Timpson, who thinks only one third of current prisoners should be behind bars. And second, since the riots, the Government has done what it had previously said was impossible. It has created an extra 567 prison places from within the existing estate. Yet the Government’s mass prisoner release scheme does not start until September. Nobody denies that there are problems with prison capacity. And of course we should be better at prisoner rehabilitation, and much better at probation. But prison punishes offenders and takes dangerous and prolific criminals out of circulation allowing the rest of us to live in peace. We should be updating and improving our prisons, not releasing criminals.

On his Substack, Neil O’Brien took a deep dive into the general election results, mapping the new contours of Britain’s multiple electoral systems. He found two party systems in England, two in Scotland, and two in Wales. Rather than fighting three-way contests in England, the Conservatives face the Liberal Democrats in the South and South West and Labour everywhere else.

There are 306 seats where the Conservatives and Labour battled for first, with Labour winning 219 and the Conservatives 87. There are 84 seats where the Conservatives fought the Lib Dems for first place, with the Lib Dems winning 64 of these and the Conservatives 20. But Labour and the Lib Dems fight only very rarely: In only 8 seats did the Lib Dems fight Labour for top place, with Labour winning 6 of these and the Lib Dems 2.

The Lib Dems have gone back to being what they were in the 1997 election - the yellow wing of an anti-Conservative coalition. Outside the South West, which doesn’t have large cities, the urban/ non-urban split between Labour and Conservative is incredibly clear…The Lib Dems are strongest in the greater South West and Cambridgeshire, with random hotspots elsewhere. Of the 72 seats the Lib Dems hold, 64 have the Conservatives second, 6 have the SNP second and just two have Labour second.

Other than a few seats where they broke through, Reform’s vote was very evenly spread across England and Wales. They did better on the coast, particularly east of London, better around the Wash, in the midlands, and in non-urban post-industrial areas in the north…The Green vote in 2024 was pretty strangely distributed. They had two shire breakthroughs. They are quite strong in Bristol and Brighton (no surprise), but if you zoom in, they have a chunk of the vote across east London and in the centres of northern conurbations: Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Huddersfield (the latter is not new - they already had an office in town when I was growing up there).

In Scotland the SNP fight everywhere - as you can see from the maps above, they fight Labour in the central belt, and the Conservatives elsewhere. In Wales, Plaid Cymru are strong in the west, but much weaker in the rest.

One thing I hadn’t really clocked is the large number of seats where “others” did well…Obviously there were the four Gaza independents who got elected in Blackburn, Dewsbury & Batley, Birmingham Perry Barr and my new neighbour in Leicester South. But ‘others’ were significant in a number of other places and the number of votes won by others was bigger than the majority in 60 seats. Most of these are driven by a single person, mainly on a Gaza ticket, though there are also unusual seats like Doncaster North, with a messy mix of various independents.

Book of the week

We recommend The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton. The author examines Britain’s nationalist moment in the 1940s to 1970s between its phase as an imperial power and its subsequent transformation into a component of the European Union. Rather than focusing on the continuities within British history, Edgerton sheds light on the disruption and changes that shaped the post-war era.

We need to recover the nature and power of the key animating ideas, not least the powerful assumptions that undergird national histories – the idea of the centrality of governments, rather than the state, of Westminster rather than Whitehall, of ‘political’ ideas rather than economic or scientific ones. The key set of ideas discussed in this book are summed up by the term ‘political economy’, which I take to be the central language and conceptual scheme for understanding and acting in the twentieth-century United Kingdom. It is an abstract, universalist language which hid as much as it illuminated, yet was the language not only of politics, but of thinking about international relations, and indeed of thinking about the nation. The most important form was liberalism, with its cosmopolitanism, its economism and its internationalism. It was hugely influential in shaping even British militarism, whose central ideas owe more to British liberalism than to jingo Tories or US imperialists.

Liberal political economy was the language of the key public intellectuals from Beveridge to Hayek and beyond. It is also important because of what it made difficult to think about or describe. One cannot get a full enough picture of the economy from within the conventions of liberal political economy, Keynesianism included. Political economy even rendered the empirical manifestations of a capitalist economy invisible – its abstractions had no need for the discussion of particular capitalists or particular firms. The British left, steeped in political economy, itself notably failed to write an account of actual British capitalism, of British militarism, of the British state, and instead, in nationalist mode, criticized British capitalism for not being British enough and the nation for being subservient to the militarism of others. Social democratic political economy was weakly developed, at least until the 1970s, as was Marxist political economy. The language of class has been important, but not class analysis.

British nationalist political economy is much less familiar not least because it had little overt presence. I associate it mainly but far from exclusively with Labour, though only after 1945. This is in contrast to the more common view in which Labour is seen as a weak carrier of social democracy, which is itself seen as the main alternative to liberalism. But nationalism too was a great challenge to both liberal and imperial orthodoxies and was, I suggest, at least as important as weak forms of socialism in the British case. I think, for example, that the actual post-Second World War United Kingdom was in some ways better prefigured in the programme of the Tories and the British Union of Fascists (BUF) than that of the Liberals or the Labour Party. Although explicit nationalist political economy was a rarity, it was to become implicit in much economic commentary, concerning everything from the balance of payments to research policy. As economic practice it was very important.

Nationalism was also important in history-writing. Like historians in other post-imperial formations, whether Hungary or Australia, or Ireland, British historians from the 1960s especially created national histories of the twentieth century, which downplayed and/or criticized the imperial and global context in which the proto-nation existed. Many national histories tended to criticize the United Kingdom for not being national enough, and were both national-celebratory and declinist. They also downplayed the fact that the United Kingdom was and is a country of countries, a nation of nations – England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. These national histories, mostly written by the centre-left, especially those from the 1960s, tended to tell the story of the nation in terms of the rise of the welfare state. Other key concepts deployed in national histories were such notions as appeasement, consensus, Keynesianism, post-war settlement, people’s war, decline, welfare state, affluence, permissiveness, reconstruction and indeed neo-liberalism.

Such ideas have powerfully constrained the writing of histories, much more so than they constrained or explained the actions of historical actors. We no longer need to think with such clichés, but rather with new principles which help us understand the power they once had. Much recent historical work on the United Kingdom has stressed the significance of imperialist ideas, seeing nationalism as indivisible from imperialism. In fact nationalism needs distinguishing from imperialism. If we do so we can see the significance of nationalist critiques of imperialism, from both the right and the left.

Quick links

The number of jobs filled by Indian workers has increased by 488,000 since 2019, but only 257,000 new jobs have been taken up by UK citizens.

Labour ministers have sacked Whitehall non-executive directors appointed by the Conservative government.

Housing Secretary Angela Rayner abandoned plans to ban terrorists from social housing.

Data shows that just 0.6% of the 3.6 million migrant visas handed out since Q1 2021 have gone to scientists and engineers.

British Challenger 2 tanks have been used in the Ukrainian offensive into Russia.

America is predicted to produce around one-third of the global supply for cutting-edge chips by 2032.

Aslef train drivers will get a 14.25% pay rise and keep the right to restart lunch breaks when spoken to by a manager…

…but will still strike every weekend from 1 September until November against LNER.

Walthamstow residents protested against the opening of a Gail’s branch due to chain’s Israeli founders and the owner’s pro-Brexit views.

Foreign-born Swedish nationals could be offered $960 to voluntarily emigrate.