The Conservative Reader

Record immigration; how migrants change countries; demands on the state; housing perma-crisis; problems with QE; the drugs don't work; American colonialism; insecure Britain; the truth about Qatar.

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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Best wishes, Nick and Gavin

Towering columns

Rakib Ehsan says the record-shattering rise in immigration is a disaster for the economy and for social cohesion:

The only difference is that immigration is now coming from a greater diversity of countries. We still have a high proportion of people arriving from south-east Europe, especially Albania. But now we are seeing many more coming from India, Pakistan, the Middle East, Nigeria and other parts of Africa. This is a diversification of high immigration rather than the reduction promised. Politicians claim we need high levels of immigration to fuel economic growth. But we've had a steady increase throughout this century, pushing our population from about 59million in 2000 to 68million today – and we still have low growth…

… Just as dangerous is the effect on social cohesion. The current policy treats immigration as an economic issue, without considering the social and cultural impact. With immigration increasing from countries that have deep religious and societal fractures, we should not be surprised when those problems are imported into Britain. It is not racist to suggest that immigration from places with deep-rooted problems of homophobia, the abuse of women or intolerance of Christians and Jews, risks spreading those very problems here – in what is traditionally the most tolerant country in the world.

Paul Goodman argues that tax and spending cuts are hard, but could be achieved if we reduce demand on the state - which will be a long slog:

Let’s be frank.  Those four terms of Conservative-led government have failed to reduce the demand for government.  Doing so was just about the last thought in the mind of Boris Johnson in 2019, so Rishi Sunak is saddled with a manifesto that promised more spend, spend, spend – 50,000 more nurses, 50 million more GP surgery appointments a year, 20,000 more police.

How might the Conservatives plan to reduce the demand for government?  They could start by taking an unsentimental look at modern Britain.  Like other western countries, we have a relatively low birth rate, which means a hard choice for funding the staggering sum above: either working for longer or importing more labour.

In the ideal world that doesn’t exist, our birth rate would be higher, with more people requiring less help.  The “five giants” identified by Iain Duncan Smith and the Centre for Social Justice would be smaller: there would be less family breakdown, worklessness, serious personal debt, addiction and educational underachievement.

Ed Conway argues that the hidden bombshell from the Autumn Statement is down to Quantitative Easing:

In spite of all the spending cuts and tax rises, the government is still planning to borrow hundreds of billions of pounds in the coming years. Since it also needs to issue new bonds to replace the expiring ones (the fiscal equivalent of refixing your mortgage), the sums are staggering: the total value of bonds it is issuing next fiscal year is £295 billion.

Now you’re probably wondering: why is this suddenly a problem? After all, when Covid struck the government issued astonishing quantities of bonds to finance the furlough scheme: £486 billion in 2020-21… [But] the Bank of England is now selling the gilts it bought over the past decade and a bit, adding to the tidal wave of bonds rather than reducing it. What you can see on this chart is what happens when the biggest monetary experiment in history ends — and coincides with an energy crisis which has forced the government to borrow to keep everyone’s lights on.

Robert Colvile argues that young people increasingly have no reason to vote Conservative, if the party continues to block the dream of home ownership:

Yes, there is a case for greater local control of housebuilding. Michael Gove has made it repeatedly. The bill includes many good ideas to that end, not least “street votes”, which would allow communities to agree rules on extensions and development.

But the Villiers amendments destroy the existing system without erecting anything in its place. The think tank I run, the Centre for Policy Studies, recently suggested that under normal circumstances such proposals could cut the number of homes being built by 20 to 40 per cent. But these are not normal circumstances. The housing industry is already reeling from recession and interest rate rises. Already some are suggesting that the number of houses being built will fall by more than half next year. The Villiers plan would make the fall that much steeper, and any recovery far harder.

Mary Wakefield warns against the dangers of normalising psychedelic drugs:

Why would you want to bring anxiety-inducing drugs back to the family and give them to children, whose brains are still developing? In the end, for old dopeheads like Doblin, students of the 1970s, the goal is the same as it’s always been: love, progress and unity – and the chemical alteration of conservative minds. ‘It’s about people’s fears and anxieties that have become irrational. And then they don’t want certain kinds of change,’ he explains. So dose them up, destroy their faculty for rational thought, and the world will be as one.

Over the last decade Scott Alexander, America’s best psychiatrist blogger, a hero of the rationalist movement, has examined the claims made for psychedelic therapy and repeatedly pointed out that it’s very unlikely to be any sort of panacea. Between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of Americans have tried psychedelics, he said – if they did anything miraculous we would know about it. More to the point, says Alexander, what use is the feeling of revelation anyway? ‘In my model of psychedelics, they artificially stimulate your insight system the same way heroin artificially stimulates your happiness system. This leads to all those stories where people feel like they discovered the secret of the universe, but when they recover their faculties, they find it was only some inane triviality.’

Ahead of the England v USA World Cup match, Dominic Sandbrook says Britain has become an American colony:

Who decided that schoolchildren in Leamington Spa should care about Rosa Parks? Why did thousands of people take to the streets in Britain about the killing of a single black man in Minneapolis, when barely a handful bother to protest the sack of Mariupol or the incarceration of the Uyghurs? And why on earth, when a couple of half-crazed American academics announce that we must cancel the term Anglo-Saxon to describe Alfred the Great and Athelstan because it’s a racist “dog whistle” for “white, Western superiority”, do so many British historians fall limply into line?

There’s only one answer to all this — and in an age that prizes victimhood above all else, what a richly satisfying answer it is. For it’s time we Britons recognised ourselves for what we are: a cruelly oppressed people, so brutalised by our imperial overlords that we don’t realise how badly we’ve been treated. Our idioms, our customs, even our cooking have been ruthlessly erased from history, our pies and puddings driven out by chicken wings and cheeseburgers, and we haven’t even noticed. And now they’re even coming for our ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons of sainted memory! So what would Athelstan, the first king of all England, say? I think we all know the answer to that. He’d say: “Lads, it’s time to decolonise ourselves. Who cares what the Yanks think?

Wonky thinking

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation exposes the link between material insecurity and poor mental health in modern Britain, revealing the North East leads the country in antidepressant prescriptions:

As for the assets people have to fall back on, the most substantial one is often a home. But whereas in the 20th century the rising tide of homeownership seemed unstoppable, in the 21st century it has gone into stark reverse, with a great shift away from home-buying with a mortgage to private rental accommodation, a swing since 2000 of more than 10 percentage points of the total UK working-age population between these two categories of tenure. Among young people, rates of homeownership have halved over the past generation. The private rental market, in which tenants often have few guarantees over either their rent or length of tenure, has doubled in size. Over the 2010s, a growing proportion of Britons have been recorded as having no savings at all…

… material security can be achieved by pooling resources, so it is not only money but also relationships that matter. Households in the UK are small by historical standards, and the proportion of children raised by lone parents is higher than in many other countries. While neither trend has intensified recently, these patterns leave a lot of Britons dependent on a single adult’s income. As for dependable relationships with friends and relatives beyond the household, the bulk of the ‘social capital’ indicators that the Office for National Statistics tracks has declined recently. In sum, there is much to support the characterisation of 2020s Britain as an ‘insecurity society’.

As the World Cup gets underway, Policy Exchange asks whether Qatar is really a friend or enemy:

What has received less attention is Qatar’s role in facilitating and funding Islamist ideologues and providing a base for them, including promulgating Islamist ideas across Europe and supporting groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the proscribed terrorist organisation Hamas. The main section of this report catalogues and analyses this process, across many years. In its foreign policy, Qatar has often pursued a route in conflict with British interests – for example supporting Islamists in Libya and hosting Hamas. It has been accused of tolerating private funding of Islamist terror groups.

Whilst Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have increasingly moved away from supporting political Islam, Qatar has taken a different approach. European research has exposed that Qatar is funding an assertive Islamist milieu in the West. The need to look closely at Qatari funding of Islam in the West is emphasised by its track record in the Gulf. It has hosted Hamas and Taliban representatives in Doha, and its support for the Muslim Brotherhood, stretching back many decades, became a serious source of friction with its neighbours. Far from changing its outlook after being awarded the World Cup in 2010, in 2011 Qatar increased its support for the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab Spring.

Book of the week

Our choice this week is The Culture Transplant: How migrants make the economies they move to a lot like the ones they left, a newly-released book by Garret Jones, in which Jones provides data to back his assertion that “culture persists and substantially survives migration”, even among second, third and fourth-generation migrants:

… in the longer run, we now have a sense of how that wave of immigration would turn out. If the next hundred years is at all like the last hundred - or the last five hundred - we can predict that year after year of massive immigration from the world’s poorest countries into the I-7, the world’s most innovative nations, would eventually tend to have effects like these:

The quality of government would fall; corruption would rise. Social conflict would increase - and so would the risk of civil war. Trust - and probably trustworthiness - towards strangers would decline. Support would rise for higher minimum wages and laws making it harder to fire workers. Innovation would decline overall, and since new innovations eventually spread across the entire planet, the entire plant would eventually lose out. The final result of this kind of decades-long immigration wave: average incomes in the I-7 would be lower than if that massive wave of immigration had never happened, and there would be a world of slower, more sluggish growth in new science, new technology.

Of course, the descendants of immigrants would themselves certainly be better off than if their ancestors had been banned from immigrating - there’s no doubt about that, for perhaps a century or maybe even longer. But over the decades - and very likely before a century had passed - the lower government quality, lower trust, and greater social conflict in the I-7 would tend to hurt the productivity, the incomes, the rates of innovation, and the long-term well-being of the descendants of those who had lived in the I-7 before the immigration wave. And crucially, humans living everywhere on the plant would lose out as the I-7 became less innovative… [Such a wave of immigration] would be very likely to wound the goose that lays the golden eggs of global innovation and worldwide prosperity.

Quick links

Annual net migration has reached a record 504,000.

60 per cent of 18-24 year-olds believe Britain is a racist country.

Six in ten school leavers have been taught concepts connected to critical race theory.

The ONS has revised how it counts R&D spending - and says it is 55 per cent higher than previously thought.

Joe Shalam wants high-quality social housing through a ‘Living Homes’ programme.

A new movement aims to decentralise the web, give users control of their data and detoxify social media.