I'm a big fan of David Frost, but I think he's as guilty of not accurately characterising his opponents as they are of him (he's right, I think - although I can't know - that they inaccurately characterise him). Frost is correct that our current state is simply not capable of effective management of anything, let alone anything as dynamic, sophisticated or requiring of humility as an economy. But I think there is an interesting test case.
There was an interesting talk at Onward recently about industrial policy. Ben Houchen explained how the UK was subsidising wind power and we ended up with lots of wind farms of ever increasing size and power. Now you might think that was a silly idea, but it was the policy and it was happening and it was going to happen in other countries too. So let's, for a moment, take as a given that this country and others are / were spending a lot of money on wind farms.
But, because Denmark backed its manufacturers and the UK didn't, the entire supply chain went to Denmark, along with the jobs and the export earnings. Was that a good outcome? I'd say categorically not. Those UK energy subsidies are now funding a Danish manufacturer rather than a UK one. Wouldn't it have made more sense to find a way to get UK manufacturers in on the act? Don't believe it can be done? Denmark did it. Other countries routinely do this sort of thing. If the state currently can't manage it, change the state. Bring in people from abroad and train British people.
Here's another one. We need a bigger Navy. That means we ought to be committing billions of pounds to building ships. What if we used some of that (using foreign know how to begin with) to build up a ship building industry. Nightmares of British Leyland causing you to wake up in a cold sweat? Well you should have nightmares about that. You need a range of *private* sector actors to build the ships who receive government support only if they export. No exports, no subsidies / overpriced government business. Gradually tighten the screw on the support to force the industry to become more competitive until it reaches the techonological frontier. All the while you're getting cheaper and cheaper naval vessels and keeping more of the cash in the UK rather than getting the Poles to build your hulls.
There are elements of competitive advantage governments can identify. Particularly, areas where the government is already spending money. Surely we can agree that having identified these we should seek to increase our competitive advantage. And it can be done. Other states (Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China) have a record of forcing their businesses to greater and greater heights.
The Scottish government didn't go for warships as they are way to complicated, instead they decided on a couple of ferries, how did that work out?
If our energy is 4 times higher than Korea forinstance, how do you think we can make anything competively? All that steel and concrete for instance let alone the rare earth metals that are owned by China?
Hi Will, I think you make good points. We can't at present make things competitively. Nor am I suggesting that through government will we would suddenly be competitive.
It sounds like you're saying (am I getting this right?) that we have such big problems that we can't possibly be competitive in manufacturing / industrial processes etc. That's probably right. Regardless of anything else, the government needs to sort out housing and energy. Energy because it's a massive cost to households and businesses; housing because it's a cost for people but because the high expense disrupts the labour supply. Those 5 million people languishing couldn't go where the jobs are even if they wanted to - housing is too expensive. So we have lots of immigration with immigrants who are prepared to put up with expensive housing.
I think we're at cross purposes here. The government needs to sort out lots of "horizontal" issues that affect pretty much everything (housing, energy, getting businesses to train people, speeding up planning for labs and business parks and all the rest of it) and getting rid of useless regulation (don't believe for a moment that Hunt's reforms are going to do much, it's far too tepid). I suspect we (and Lord Frost) might agree on that.
Where we might disagree is that I'm saying there is scope for government intervention on a "vertical" basis. There's scope for it. But it must be done judiciously - like using your military spending to generate greater home grown shipbuilding capability (military- industrial complex anyone?). That might work. Maybe. What won't work is chucking money down the drain by, say, purchasing two and only two ferries from local providers. For that strategy to work, you would need to have some reason to believe that, by supporting the ferry engineers over the medium term they would develop skills that enable them to become world beating ferry engineers. That's hardly going to happen building just two ferries, is it? Perhaps it would never happen. But certainly not just two.
If the government got out of everything then we might have a chance. It's precisely the government that adds costs to everything and makes us uncompetitive. Energy being the place where they are letting us down the most.
There is a big difference between getting rid of Legislation and adding better regulation, I believe in the first and you seem to believe in the second. That's fair enough but nearly always there are unseen consequences to adding legislation which are normally ignored at the time. It's why we import fracked gas rather than use our own, which is hypocracy to the highest order.
The thought of spending more money on the armed forces to stimulate the economy is abhorrent to me.
No chance of that with those Globalist spivs Sunak and Hunt in charge, is there?
Sunak has an unblemished record of profligacy, culminating in the £37 billion bugridden Track&Trace Smartphone app that could have been written better by a 14 year old GCSE IT student and is now admitted never so much as saved a single life.
Hunt wants to tax us to death and drive away any prospect of foreign investment - all in the pursuit of their Globalist puppetmasters objective of accelerating our Managed Decline via the AGW hoax.
Then you've got the Great Gender Fiasco, hundreds of our kids being groomed by Stonewall and Mermaids with the full approval of the Uncivil Disservice, most of whom have given up work altogether to play with their Peletons and watch their gross goldplated pensions expand a an ever increasing rate.
Sorry mate, you lot have had 13 years and made things infinitely worse, it's Reform for me and I suspect enough others to give you lot a bloody nose.
The last time we had a Conservative government was 28/11/1990 - and by God it shows!
And that's without mentioning the ongoing Covid19 mismanagement that looks likely to be more destructive to the nation than WWII.
Gove's conservative worldview was dishearteningly similar to European Social Democrats when I read him a few days ago. Not Conservative. Thanks for letting Lord Frost respond. We Conservatives are increasingly split in our views on society. The broad tent is getting smaller, unfortunately.
as a first time Conservative voter in 2019 I am in complete agreement. Please get the vision communicated before the election or failure at the polls loom.
As usual, Frost is absolutely right. It's dispiriting how little difference there is between the current Government and the Opposition. The only real divide seems to be on the culture wars.
On issue after issue Britain is crying out for Conservative solutions: higher growth, lower taxation, a smaller state, lower immigration, more home ownership, more efficient healthcare, protections for free speech, strengthened defence, etc. Yet the problems in all these areas have grown during 13 years of Conservative Government.
I look forward to a Conservative campaign in 2029 that seeks to address these problems, hopefully with Frost as a major player in the leadership team.
The one part of Frost's essay I'd take issue with is that many Brexit voters, particularly in the Red Wall, are no fans of free markets or Thatcherite economics. They tend to be conservative culturally, but they're Old Labour on the economy. Selling them Frost's vision won't be easy.
Frost: "...low productivity and growth, a poorly performing health service, a faltering energy production and distribution system, five million people on out of work benefits, and the highest level of tax and spend for 70 years ...an undynamic economy, growing slowly or not at all..."
Good words for next year's manifesto asking to extend 14 years to 19.
Michael Gove is a man who has read widely and thought deeply about the world, government and how a good society should be run. I have a lot of respect for him and he presents a conservatism that represents what the party believed before we made an unholy alliance with the classical liberal business classes (that Lord Frost represents). I would suggest that Michael Gove offers the type of conservatism that the brexit voters actually thought they were getting, and that the 2019 voters thought they were voting for, and it's the pro-rich libertarian wing of the party, represented by Lord Frost, that is the biggest reason why the Tories failed to keep the red wall voters on side and are now on course for a historic defeat. If the Tories want to win, they need to get themselves out from under the influence of Lord Frost and focus on the vision Mr Gove presented instead (also they need to listen to Matt Goodwin and Nick Timothy a lot more too).
It is understandable that Lord Frost dismisses pragmatism and empiricism and the quest for community solidarity at all levels from the local, to the national to the global, because he ideologically believes in the myth of infinite positive growth on a finite planet.
The empirical reality is that we have reached per capita peak growth and as such the human enterprise is on the cusp of a negative growth cycle as the human population continues to grow, the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) across grey to green energy producing technologies continues to deteriorate, as oil production passes its peak and as the ecological and environmental impacts of human overshoot rapidly erodes the climatic, ecological and environmental basis of human survival.
Unfortunately Lord Frost within his utopian ideological imagination has disconnected himself from Nature, thermodynamic laws and in particular the reality of entropy. Hence his aversion to pragmatism and his aversion of deeply understanding the fundamental ecological balance underlying any biological systems. In particular, the balance between the rate of energy transfer and the efficiency of energy transfer which in turn determines the route of energy transfer.
As it happens, Lord Frost does allude to the efficiency of energy transfer in terms of productivity. However as the Maximum Power Principle clearly highlights, the biological goal isn't infinite growth in productivity since this corresponds with a reducing rate of energy transfer which in monentary terms equates to reducing velocity of money. In other words, the unintended goal of Lord Frost is a highly unequal society akin to feudalism whereby the benefits of technological productivity are simply amassed at the top resulting in widespread social instability and unrest.
Empiricism, pragmatism and the quest for community are rightly prioritised by Michael Gove because we are on the cusp of a negative growth cycle. This means we can either vainly try to transcend natural cycles and elongate the peak into a perpetual plateau of increasing debt whereby sovereign countries become more and more beholden to bond vigilantes or we as a species can accept our overshoot state and begin to cooperatively plan our collective economic descent aided by an interventionist social democratic state.
This will mean much more focus on the route of energy transfer rather than the efficiency of energy transfer in terms of maintaining social equilibrium through redistribution and sufficient investment in essential goods and services whether they are produced in the public or private sector.
This means a leftward shift in economics and a rightward shift in culture which is the true basis of the Great Realignment and the motivational basis for change as we enter the natural cycle of negative growth which will mean reducing per capita living standards.
In conclusion, we can either navigate the descent from peak per capita growth from a naturally disconnected ideology that focuses on rational self interest and the profit motive with unintentional catastrophic results or we can navigate the descent from a naturally connected empiricism and pragmatism that intentionally focuses on the wellbeing of the community.
Your conclusion is much clearer than the rest of your article. However, you do not acknowledge the basic fact of human life. I am confident that if we dig deeper, we will discover that what you do for a livelihood is not for the community, but for yourself. First you must cultivate your own self-interest, then you will give back to the community. How can I offer or prioritize the well-being of the community if I am not successful with myself? Even this website requires donations (profit) before contributing to the conservative community. In certain situations, pragmatism can lead to vulnerability. Additionally, investigate the success of Florida's governance in the United States. You will observe that "disconnected ideology" is so popular that it appears no pragmatic claptrap will be needed there.
Interesting. Your self-interest is supported by the community and the wider society. No man is an island. The fundamental interdependencies of an ecosystem is what creates the diversity of Life. The same applies to human societies.
Education, health, infrastructure are basic to your self-interest so the question is when does your self-interest begin and end.
My livelihood is a simple one in which I grow my own food and support the community in which I live in terms of maintaining essential infrastructure. I do this because I acknowledge that without community my self interest amounts to nothing. No exchange within the community results in isolation and impoverishment.
Therefore, the individual and the community are indivisible. You cannot provide for yourself all that you need. So you need to nourish community in order to nourish yourself.
Separation from the community that nourishes you through gross inequalities leads to social resentment and contempt and ultimately to crime.
So even at a basic level, rising inequalities through narrow self interest that puts the individual before the community requires a state to protect private property. This is the very meaning of a low tax small state society, a society that protects the few from the many whilst at the same time eroding the community basis by which the individual can pursue self interest and prosper.
In a positive growth cycle, then a society can afford to put the individual above the community knowing that the economic pie is growing for the unequal benefit of all. In a negative growth cycle, then a society cannot afford to put the individual above the community knowing that the economic pie is not growing. The former requires competition, the latter requires cooperation.
Times of plenty and lean times are natural cycles associated with the adaptive cycle.
I'm delighted you've joined the neighborhood. I am a trustee of a local charity, a former member of the Rotary Club, and I do my best to help others. However, my self-interest allows me to do so. I'll bow out with this: Consider the following scenario: you are on a plane and the oxygen supply has been cut off, and you are traveling with your child. You must put on your mask first before offering it to your child, as recommended. I am not sure if this makes sense but thank you for your input.
Sure, the survival instincts of the individual organism are strong but the survival of the species requires community. When a civilization collapses due to overshoot, then the higher good of the community prevails. The alternative is a war of all against all.
I'm a big fan of David Frost, but I think he's as guilty of not accurately characterising his opponents as they are of him (he's right, I think - although I can't know - that they inaccurately characterise him). Frost is correct that our current state is simply not capable of effective management of anything, let alone anything as dynamic, sophisticated or requiring of humility as an economy. But I think there is an interesting test case.
There was an interesting talk at Onward recently about industrial policy. Ben Houchen explained how the UK was subsidising wind power and we ended up with lots of wind farms of ever increasing size and power. Now you might think that was a silly idea, but it was the policy and it was happening and it was going to happen in other countries too. So let's, for a moment, take as a given that this country and others are / were spending a lot of money on wind farms.
But, because Denmark backed its manufacturers and the UK didn't, the entire supply chain went to Denmark, along with the jobs and the export earnings. Was that a good outcome? I'd say categorically not. Those UK energy subsidies are now funding a Danish manufacturer rather than a UK one. Wouldn't it have made more sense to find a way to get UK manufacturers in on the act? Don't believe it can be done? Denmark did it. Other countries routinely do this sort of thing. If the state currently can't manage it, change the state. Bring in people from abroad and train British people.
Here's another one. We need a bigger Navy. That means we ought to be committing billions of pounds to building ships. What if we used some of that (using foreign know how to begin with) to build up a ship building industry. Nightmares of British Leyland causing you to wake up in a cold sweat? Well you should have nightmares about that. You need a range of *private* sector actors to build the ships who receive government support only if they export. No exports, no subsidies / overpriced government business. Gradually tighten the screw on the support to force the industry to become more competitive until it reaches the techonological frontier. All the while you're getting cheaper and cheaper naval vessels and keeping more of the cash in the UK rather than getting the Poles to build your hulls.
There are elements of competitive advantage governments can identify. Particularly, areas where the government is already spending money. Surely we can agree that having identified these we should seek to increase our competitive advantage. And it can be done. Other states (Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China) have a record of forcing their businesses to greater and greater heights.
Why not the UK?
The Scottish government didn't go for warships as they are way to complicated, instead they decided on a couple of ferries, how did that work out?
If our energy is 4 times higher than Korea forinstance, how do you think we can make anything competively? All that steel and concrete for instance let alone the rare earth metals that are owned by China?
Hi Will, I think you make good points. We can't at present make things competitively. Nor am I suggesting that through government will we would suddenly be competitive.
It sounds like you're saying (am I getting this right?) that we have such big problems that we can't possibly be competitive in manufacturing / industrial processes etc. That's probably right. Regardless of anything else, the government needs to sort out housing and energy. Energy because it's a massive cost to households and businesses; housing because it's a cost for people but because the high expense disrupts the labour supply. Those 5 million people languishing couldn't go where the jobs are even if they wanted to - housing is too expensive. So we have lots of immigration with immigrants who are prepared to put up with expensive housing.
I think we're at cross purposes here. The government needs to sort out lots of "horizontal" issues that affect pretty much everything (housing, energy, getting businesses to train people, speeding up planning for labs and business parks and all the rest of it) and getting rid of useless regulation (don't believe for a moment that Hunt's reforms are going to do much, it's far too tepid). I suspect we (and Lord Frost) might agree on that.
Where we might disagree is that I'm saying there is scope for government intervention on a "vertical" basis. There's scope for it. But it must be done judiciously - like using your military spending to generate greater home grown shipbuilding capability (military- industrial complex anyone?). That might work. Maybe. What won't work is chucking money down the drain by, say, purchasing two and only two ferries from local providers. For that strategy to work, you would need to have some reason to believe that, by supporting the ferry engineers over the medium term they would develop skills that enable them to become world beating ferry engineers. That's hardly going to happen building just two ferries, is it? Perhaps it would never happen. But certainly not just two.
If the government got out of everything then we might have a chance. It's precisely the government that adds costs to everything and makes us uncompetitive. Energy being the place where they are letting us down the most.
There is a big difference between getting rid of Legislation and adding better regulation, I believe in the first and you seem to believe in the second. That's fair enough but nearly always there are unseen consequences to adding legislation which are normally ignored at the time. It's why we import fracked gas rather than use our own, which is hypocracy to the highest order.
The thought of spending more money on the armed forces to stimulate the economy is abhorrent to me.
But thank you for responding.
"Get tax and spend down."
No chance of that with those Globalist spivs Sunak and Hunt in charge, is there?
Sunak has an unblemished record of profligacy, culminating in the £37 billion bugridden Track&Trace Smartphone app that could have been written better by a 14 year old GCSE IT student and is now admitted never so much as saved a single life.
Hunt wants to tax us to death and drive away any prospect of foreign investment - all in the pursuit of their Globalist puppetmasters objective of accelerating our Managed Decline via the AGW hoax.
Then you've got the Great Gender Fiasco, hundreds of our kids being groomed by Stonewall and Mermaids with the full approval of the Uncivil Disservice, most of whom have given up work altogether to play with their Peletons and watch their gross goldplated pensions expand a an ever increasing rate.
Sorry mate, you lot have had 13 years and made things infinitely worse, it's Reform for me and I suspect enough others to give you lot a bloody nose.
The last time we had a Conservative government was 28/11/1990 - and by God it shows!
And that's without mentioning the ongoing Covid19 mismanagement that looks likely to be more destructive to the nation than WWII.
Gove's conservative worldview was dishearteningly similar to European Social Democrats when I read him a few days ago. Not Conservative. Thanks for letting Lord Frost respond. We Conservatives are increasingly split in our views on society. The broad tent is getting smaller, unfortunately.
as a first time Conservative voter in 2019 I am in complete agreement. Please get the vision communicated before the election or failure at the polls loom.
As usual, Frost is absolutely right. It's dispiriting how little difference there is between the current Government and the Opposition. The only real divide seems to be on the culture wars.
On issue after issue Britain is crying out for Conservative solutions: higher growth, lower taxation, a smaller state, lower immigration, more home ownership, more efficient healthcare, protections for free speech, strengthened defence, etc. Yet the problems in all these areas have grown during 13 years of Conservative Government.
I look forward to a Conservative campaign in 2029 that seeks to address these problems, hopefully with Frost as a major player in the leadership team.
The one part of Frost's essay I'd take issue with is that many Brexit voters, particularly in the Red Wall, are no fans of free markets or Thatcherite economics. They tend to be conservative culturally, but they're Old Labour on the economy. Selling them Frost's vision won't be easy.
Frost: "...low productivity and growth, a poorly performing health service, a faltering energy production and distribution system, five million people on out of work benefits, and the highest level of tax and spend for 70 years ...an undynamic economy, growing slowly or not at all..."
Good words for next year's manifesto asking to extend 14 years to 19.
Michael Gove is a man who has read widely and thought deeply about the world, government and how a good society should be run. I have a lot of respect for him and he presents a conservatism that represents what the party believed before we made an unholy alliance with the classical liberal business classes (that Lord Frost represents). I would suggest that Michael Gove offers the type of conservatism that the brexit voters actually thought they were getting, and that the 2019 voters thought they were voting for, and it's the pro-rich libertarian wing of the party, represented by Lord Frost, that is the biggest reason why the Tories failed to keep the red wall voters on side and are now on course for a historic defeat. If the Tories want to win, they need to get themselves out from under the influence of Lord Frost and focus on the vision Mr Gove presented instead (also they need to listen to Matt Goodwin and Nick Timothy a lot more too).
It is understandable that Lord Frost dismisses pragmatism and empiricism and the quest for community solidarity at all levels from the local, to the national to the global, because he ideologically believes in the myth of infinite positive growth on a finite planet.
The empirical reality is that we have reached per capita peak growth and as such the human enterprise is on the cusp of a negative growth cycle as the human population continues to grow, the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) across grey to green energy producing technologies continues to deteriorate, as oil production passes its peak and as the ecological and environmental impacts of human overshoot rapidly erodes the climatic, ecological and environmental basis of human survival.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2023/05/15/256-a-path-of-logic/
Unfortunately Lord Frost within his utopian ideological imagination has disconnected himself from Nature, thermodynamic laws and in particular the reality of entropy. Hence his aversion to pragmatism and his aversion of deeply understanding the fundamental ecological balance underlying any biological systems. In particular, the balance between the rate of energy transfer and the efficiency of energy transfer which in turn determines the route of energy transfer.
https://www.ecologycenter.us/ecosystem-theory/the-maximum-power-principle.html
As it happens, Lord Frost does allude to the efficiency of energy transfer in terms of productivity. However as the Maximum Power Principle clearly highlights, the biological goal isn't infinite growth in productivity since this corresponds with a reducing rate of energy transfer which in monentary terms equates to reducing velocity of money. In other words, the unintended goal of Lord Frost is a highly unequal society akin to feudalism whereby the benefits of technological productivity are simply amassed at the top resulting in widespread social instability and unrest.
Empiricism, pragmatism and the quest for community are rightly prioritised by Michael Gove because we are on the cusp of a negative growth cycle. This means we can either vainly try to transcend natural cycles and elongate the peak into a perpetual plateau of increasing debt whereby sovereign countries become more and more beholden to bond vigilantes or we as a species can accept our overshoot state and begin to cooperatively plan our collective economic descent aided by an interventionist social democratic state.
https://inroadsjournal.ca/overshoot/
This will mean much more focus on the route of energy transfer rather than the efficiency of energy transfer in terms of maintaining social equilibrium through redistribution and sufficient investment in essential goods and services whether they are produced in the public or private sector.
This means a leftward shift in economics and a rightward shift in culture which is the true basis of the Great Realignment and the motivational basis for change as we enter the natural cycle of negative growth which will mean reducing per capita living standards.
In conclusion, we can either navigate the descent from peak per capita growth from a naturally disconnected ideology that focuses on rational self interest and the profit motive with unintentional catastrophic results or we can navigate the descent from a naturally connected empiricism and pragmatism that intentionally focuses on the wellbeing of the community.
The choice is ours.
Your conclusion is much clearer than the rest of your article. However, you do not acknowledge the basic fact of human life. I am confident that if we dig deeper, we will discover that what you do for a livelihood is not for the community, but for yourself. First you must cultivate your own self-interest, then you will give back to the community. How can I offer or prioritize the well-being of the community if I am not successful with myself? Even this website requires donations (profit) before contributing to the conservative community. In certain situations, pragmatism can lead to vulnerability. Additionally, investigate the success of Florida's governance in the United States. You will observe that "disconnected ideology" is so popular that it appears no pragmatic claptrap will be needed there.
Interesting. Your self-interest is supported by the community and the wider society. No man is an island. The fundamental interdependencies of an ecosystem is what creates the diversity of Life. The same applies to human societies.
Education, health, infrastructure are basic to your self-interest so the question is when does your self-interest begin and end.
My livelihood is a simple one in which I grow my own food and support the community in which I live in terms of maintaining essential infrastructure. I do this because I acknowledge that without community my self interest amounts to nothing. No exchange within the community results in isolation and impoverishment.
Therefore, the individual and the community are indivisible. You cannot provide for yourself all that you need. So you need to nourish community in order to nourish yourself.
Separation from the community that nourishes you through gross inequalities leads to social resentment and contempt and ultimately to crime.
So even at a basic level, rising inequalities through narrow self interest that puts the individual before the community requires a state to protect private property. This is the very meaning of a low tax small state society, a society that protects the few from the many whilst at the same time eroding the community basis by which the individual can pursue self interest and prosper.
In a positive growth cycle, then a society can afford to put the individual above the community knowing that the economic pie is growing for the unequal benefit of all. In a negative growth cycle, then a society cannot afford to put the individual above the community knowing that the economic pie is not growing. The former requires competition, the latter requires cooperation.
Times of plenty and lean times are natural cycles associated with the adaptive cycle.
https://www.postcarbon.org/the-big-picture/
One can either flow with the adaptive cycle or vainly attempt to flow against it. Either way, natural cycles prevail.
I'm delighted you've joined the neighborhood. I am a trustee of a local charity, a former member of the Rotary Club, and I do my best to help others. However, my self-interest allows me to do so. I'll bow out with this: Consider the following scenario: you are on a plane and the oxygen supply has been cut off, and you are traveling with your child. You must put on your mask first before offering it to your child, as recommended. I am not sure if this makes sense but thank you for your input.
Sure, the survival instincts of the individual organism are strong but the survival of the species requires community. When a civilization collapses due to overshoot, then the higher good of the community prevails. The alternative is a war of all against all.
https://sevenpillarsinstitute.org/glossary/war-of-all-against-all/
Apparently "freedom" includes dying from asthma caused by vehicle emissions, as Ella Kissi-Debrah did, rather than have a ULEZ.