The disrupters

Conservative policy goals cannot be achieved without fixing our broken state

Towering columns

For the New Statesman, John Gray responds to the Conservative leadership results and argues that the party needs a bold vision to fix the state.

It is hard to exaggerate the depth of state failure in this country. When some of the criminals released early due to prison overcrowding are returned to custody because they pose a risk to public safety, then released again by mistake, a functioning justice system has ceased to exist. Britain’s inability to make a significant military response to war in the Middle East, noted by the former Tory defence minister Ben Wallace, confirms that national defence has been gravely compromised. Building the big society, in practice, meant gutting the state. Much of the responsibility for this situation must be assigned to David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity programme, which Labour is continuing. But the problem, in the end, is not underfunding.

In crucial areas, the decisions of government cannot be implemented. Authority has been transferred to the courts, and policies are made by judges. Almost anything government does can be litigated and undone. Declaring energy policies unlawful because they will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently, as the Supreme Court did in May this year, gives a spurious legitimacy to a particular – and politically driven – environmentalist agenda. Even when collective choices are made in parliament, Starmer’s legalism blinds him to their larger context. At a time when pensioners are at risk of freezing to death and the NHS is stretched to breaking point, prioritising a Commons vote on assisted dying – a cause this columnist supports – betrays a lack of judgement that is almost beyond comprehension.

It is not that the state has simply become too large, as neo-Thatcherites like to say. Government has surrendered much of its authority to institutions it cannot control while losing a sense of the common good. This is the fundamental source of Britain’s malaise, which is obscured by stale debates about free markets and state intervention.

For The Times, Rob Colvile believes the Conservatives are finding answers by questioning the power of lawyers, judges, and regulators.

When I interviewed Tom Tugendhat at Conservative Party conference, he argued that Britain was a country built on the rule of law — but that increasingly we are living under the rule of lawyers, which not only results in debacles like the surrender of the Chagos Islands but restricts innovation, entrepreneurship and growth. It is a sentiment that all three of his leadership rivals would share — not least given Starmer’s former profession. On-stage interviews with James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick by me and others were studded with references to a smaller but more effective state, to cutting regulation and letting enterprise bloom.

Kemi Badenoch went even further, using the conference to publish a 40-page essay called “Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class”. It argued that the central division in our society is now between those who are answerable to the market and those answerable to the state. In other words, the growth of government isn’t just about tax and spend — or public sector headcount or state control of industry — but the countless private sector compliance officers and diversity consultants who ultimately dance to the progressive tune.

The attraction of this analysis, for the Conservatives, is not just the contrast with Labour — which is by its essential nature the party of interference and regulation. It provides an explanation for electoral failure for which the Tories are not wholly culpable. Yes, they failed to deport tens of thousands of foreign criminals, and to stop a perverse application of European pollution regulations (“nutrient neutrality”) blocking many thousands of new homes. But the primal fault was in the laws and lawyers, the rules and regulators. The Tories merely failed to fight hard enough, or argue convincingly enough, against them.

Also for The Times, Juliet Samuel explains how politicians lost sight of the importance of civil service reform to governing effectively.

Cameron’s operation worked because he had, in Francis Maude, a respected senior minister tending to how the government functioned, or didn’t. The stated aim was to eliminate waste but that meant more than just cutting things. Under Maude’s tenure the government created Gov.UK, made public data more accessible for coders and digitised dozens of services, from passport issuance to tax payment. Departments began to share space in regional hubs rather than signing new leases every time staff moved around. Along the way, the civil service headcount fell 21 per cent.

Yet, like Japanese knotweed, the bumbledom has grown back even bigger than before. Almost a decade after the coalition, Maude was asked to review civil service governance and accountability. He still describes a system where no one even knows who is in charge. Legally, a prime minister delegates authority to manage civil servants to their ministers — but neither they nor their staff are actually aware of this…

…Occasionally, ministers have managed to establish a new structure or team that works. The vaccine taskforce is the most obvious example, until it was folded into the Department of Health and taken apart. Less well known is the AI Incubator, a powerful team of artificial intelligence engineers established last year in the Cabinet Office with the ability to drop into different policy areas to solve thorny problems. Getting permission to hire engineers on high salaries involved months of negotiations with Treasury and human resources officials, and even then most of its employees were taking a 60 per cent pay cut to work in Whitehall. Yet one of Labour’s first moves, before its special advisers even had their passes printed, was to fold the AI Incubator into the Department for Science and Technology. Whether it survives the onslaught of enforced mediocrity, processology and budget controls headed its way is anyone’s guess.

For The Guardian, Martha Gill unpacks the failure in Canada to resolve the moral and legal complexity of changing the law on assisted dying.

Why can’t Canada get those safeguards in place? Well perhaps the issue is slightly less straightforward than some suggest. It’s easy to forget how radical it is to approach suicide in this way. At the heart of the debate, after all, is a question. If you see someone headed determinedly for the edge of a cliff, do you rush to stop them, or do you respect their autonomous decision and help them on their way? When it comes to the answer, assisted dying policies divide the population in two. In one group, the sincere wish to die is treated not as a decision but a symptom – evidence of mental unbalance, irrational by definition. This is the basis on which depression is diagnosed, defences are placed along bridges, and pro-suicide websites are shut down. For the other group, though, the thought switches categories: suddenly it is not a medical emergency, but a “right”.

What separates these groups? Not the determination to die, which after all can be as strong in a depressed teen as a terminally ill grandmother. No, membership is based entirely on how nice your life might seem to the observer – whether we agree with you that it is not worth living. Assisted dying, you see, is not really about autonomy at all, but the perception of others, and how valuable your life appears to them.

And that’s a problem. How your life looks and how it feels are two different things: the terminally ill may be strangely at peace, the healthy in mental torment. What happens, for example, if a robustly happy person who has long met the criteria for assisted dying suddenly gets depressed? Do they end up on medication or in the mortuary? It’s not easy to say with the guardrails taken off. But if, on the other hand, you decide to believe that patients know their own minds, regardless of how their lives may look, you could end up where Canada is, on the verge of granting state-sanctioned death to physically healthy people.

At UnHerd, Aris Roussinos reflects on the relationship between the legacy of British imperial governance and today’s deepening sectarian divisions.

In Britain, the ongoing sorting along ethnic and sectarian lines rather than the racial categories of popular discourse — with Hindus and Nigerians leaning towards the Conservatives and Muslims and West Indians to Labour (both reflected in Cabinet choices and policy decisions) — remains only tacitly recognised. As the renowned sociologist of ethnic conflict Donald L. Horowitz put it, in a divided society “the election is a census, and the census is an election”, just as we see in Northern Ireland. Britain is not so dissimilar to Northern Ireland after all — nor are Palestine flags hanging from lampposts in Stepney markedly different, in their symbolic meaning, to Israeli ones flying on the Shankill…

…The Palestine conflict, and its destabilisation of the entire Middle East, is surely the greatest single historical disaster wrought by Whitehall governance so far. British conservatives aggrieved at the domestic culture war over British imperialism — in which their own barely expressed demographic fears underlie much of the discontent — would do well to recognise that there was a darker side to the imperial experience than railways and parliamentary democracy. British Conservative opponents of mass immigration ought surely to show more empathy for the Palestinians whose society British civil servants destroyed. Equally, now that Britain’s experiments with demographic engineering and management of ethnic tensions have turned inwards, domestic advocates of mass immigration should reflect on the historical precedents, and the dismissive contemporary discourse surrounding Palestinians’ ineffective and sporadically violent resistance to their displacement.

The symbolic centrality of the Israel-Palestine conflict in this new British discourse is surely fitting. The very existence of the conflict is the product of Westminster governance, and decisions made in London a century ago which, Woodrow Wilson’s aide warned at the time, were certain to make the Middle East “a breeding place for future war”. It is not heartening, given the ethnic riots which spread across England and Northern Ireland this summer, to reflect that, according to the academic literature, both Westminster state’s management of differing ethnic groups within Britain is a direct descendent of its colonial policies, nor that a legacy of British colonial rule is famously one of the greatest statistical predictors for current ethnic conflict.

For the Wall Street Journal, Bojan Pancevski examines the political fragmentation and paralysis sweeping across western Europe.

Voter dissatisfaction with mainstream politics has led to a gradual fragmentation of political groups: There are now seven significant parties, three of which are on the political fringes, making a coherent coalition nearly impossible, both at a federal level and in most of Germany’s 16 states, said Prof. Manfred Güllner, founder of Forsa, one of the largest German pollsters. The far-right AfD is now the second-largest party in nationwide polls, while in some eastern states it has become the biggest political group, forcing rivals into complicated coalitions designed to keep it out of power. At the same time, a new far-left party, known as BSW, which like the AfD is pro-Russian and anti-NATO, has overtaken mainstream parties in local elections.

This has long been the case in smaller nations such as Sweden or the Netherlands, but paralysis has now become a structural feature of Europe’s largest political systems, Güllner said. “We always had alternatives and clear majorities around leadership in the center, but now there is no plausible majority, no uniting force,” he said. “The prospect is hopeless.” To be sure, Germany’s government has long struggled to implement major changes, even dating back to Angela Merkel’s 16-year tenure, but her governments benefited from steady economic growth and a relatively stable geopolitical environment, said Prof. Clemens Fuest, head of the Munich-based Ifo Institute that advises the government. Now, Fuest said, internal and external shocks have exposed the government’s inability to implement policies…

…Europe can’t snap out of its malaise even in the face of war in Ukraine. In the third year of the war, the EU has failed to meet the pledge to deliver one million shells to Kyiv, while also failing to match Russia’s expansion of arms production. The military stockpiles of France, Germany and others are all but depleted and there is little sign of the promised upscaling of their defense capabilities, said Ivan Krastev, a fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.

Wonky thinking

In an update on the UK’s current national security threats, the new MI5 Director-General, Ken McCallum, addressed the Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in London. Britain’s intelligence services face a wide range of threats, including a growing number of state-based threats as authoritarian powers jostle for power and influence in the world.

I now want to turn to the threats posed by autocratic regimes, whose repression at home increasingly extends to aggression overseas. They invest heavily in human intelligence capabilities and in advanced cyber operations. Their targets include sensitive government information, our technology, our democracy, journalists and defenders of human rights. We’ve been growing our efforts against heightened state aggression for several years now. In just the last year the number of state threat investigations we’re running has shot up by 48%.

Russia continues its illegal attempt to subjugate Ukraine. While the Russian military grinds away on the battlefield, at horrendous human cost, we’re also seeing Putin’s henchmen seeking to strike elsewhere, in the misguided hope of weakening Western resolve. Over 750 Russian diplomats have been expelled from Europe since Putin invaded, the great majority of them spies. This goes well beyond all historical precedent – and has put a big dent in the Russian intelligence services’ ability to cause damage in the West. With allies, we’re keeping up that pressure by denying diplomatic visa applications from Russian spies. It’s not flashy, but it works. Kick them out, keep them out.

Just as they’ve done in Ukraine, though, we must expect them to adjust and adapt. A reduced roster of Embassy-based spies means, for one thing, that cyber is ever more important to them. My teams and their colleagues in the National Cyber Security Centre are on the case. But we should expect further testing – and in places defeating – of the West’s cyber defences. The more eye-catching shift this year has been Russian state actors turning to proxies for their dirty work, including private intelligence operatives and criminals from both the UK and third countries. Once again, the internet provides the crucial platform connecting these malign actors.

While altering MI5’s detection challenge, Russia’s use of proxies further reduces the professionalism of their operations, and – absent diplomatic immunity – increases our disruptive options. Alongside pending criminal prosecutions, the UK has taken robust action to constrain Russian aggression. Earlier this year the last remaining Russian military intelligence officer was expelled from the UK, and diplomatic accreditation removed from a number of sites. We’ll keep bearing down. The UK’s leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin’s regime, and we should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home. The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more. Dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness. And having precisely the opposite effect to what the Russian state intends, in driving increased operational coordination with partners across Europe and beyond.

This concerted campaign requires a strong and sustained response. We’re working with the police to use the new National Security Act to its fullest extent. And the National Protective Security Authority, part of MI5, already works to strengthen our critical national infrastructure. We want to help others who may be at risk of attack. So I urge businesses and public authorities to think about the risks you face. Seek out the NPSA guidance, which is informed by intelligence, to help you protect your people and your assets.

Now, to Iran. Since the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022 we’ve seen plot after plot here in the UK, at an unprecedented pace and scale. Since January 2022, with police partners, we have responded to twenty Iran-backed plots presenting potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents. As events unfold in the Middle East, we will give our fullest attention to the risk of an increase in – or a broadening of – Iranian state aggression in the UK.

Like the Russian services, Iranian state actors make extensive use of criminals as proxies – from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks. Last December a man was jailed for reconnaissance he had carried out against the then-headquarters of the Iran International media organisation. Detecting criminals prepared to have their strings pulled by states has at least some similarities to spotting would-be terrorists dancing to the tune of online radicalisers. It is a familiar challenge. We’ll keep finding them. So to those tempted to carry out such tasks, I say this: If you take money from Iran, Russia or any other state to carry out illegal acts in the UK, you will bring the full weight of the national security apparatus down on you. It’s a choice you’ll regret.

And thirdly, China. China is different. The UK-China economic relationship supports UK growth, which underpins our security. And there are also risks to be managed. The choices are complex, and it rightly falls to Ministers to make the big strategic judgements on our relationship with China: where it’s in the UK’s interests to co-operate, and how we do so safely.

MI5 continues to focus where you’d expect us to: Disrupting attempts at harming or coercing people, where often we’re protecting people of Chinese heritage. Tackling threats aimed at our democracy. And safeguarding valuable information against a threat that manifests at scale. Proportionate and targeted security protections are part of the foundation for a confident relationship with China that both enables economic growth and maintains the UK’s values. Strong as our operational response is, we know that accumulating disruptive successes isn’t enough. The strategic response is to build the UK’s resilience – helping businesses, universities and others intelligently navigate the more contested world we now live in, engaging with China on real opportunities where the risks can be sufficiently managed.

If you are working at the cutting edge of technology, in business or in academia, I encourage you to seek out the NCSC and NPSA joint guidance, Trusted Research and Secure Innovation, to help you secure your hard-won advantage. And just as we seek to protect the UK’s technological edge, we deploy that edge in support of our mission. We use AI, lawfully and ethically, to detect threat amongst an avalanche of information. Cloud technology gives us faster access to vital insights. Advanced privacy enhancing techniques allow us to join up with the private sector without either party sharing more than they need to. In 2024 scientists and technologists are key to the UK’s national security and to driving growth.

Book of the week

We recommend Britain’s Europe by Brandan Simms. The author delves into the centuries of history in which Britain shaped and was shaped by continental Europe. Through its highs and lows, Europe has always been critical to Britain’s national security and foreign policy priorities. Understanding this complex relationship could be the key to understanding the nation’s future role in the international order.

Europe made us. The emergence of England as a nation state was the product of European pressures. So was the formation of the United Kingdom. Relations between the English, Scots, Irish and Welsh have always been fundamentally determined by the continental context. Europe almost invariably posed the biggest threat to the security of the island, strategically and ideologically. The principal function of the Royal Navy and, in time, the Royal Air Force, was homeland defence and European deployment, not overseas power projection. These military priorities remained remarkably stable despite major technological change, ranging from new shipbuilding techniques, through the invention of aircraft to nuclear weaponry. Until the late eighteenth century, naval superiority was no guarantee against invasion, and in the twentieth century the power of the Royal Navy was challenged by land-based aircraft. Moreover, the maintenance of naval and later air superiority from Louis XIV to Hitler was always dependent on preventing the emergence of a continental hegemon who could out-build Britain at sea or in the air.

Europe has almost always been more important to us than the rest of the world. Edmund Burke spoke of a ‘Commonwealth of Europe’ long before the British Commonwealth of Nations was even thought of. The British empire was conquered largely for European reasons. Colonies gave Britain the demographic and financial weight she lacked on the continent; denying them to rival powers was equally important. At the same time, the overseas empire was acquired and maintained through the management of the European balance of power. This was a virtuous cycle, to be sure, but one which began and ended in Europe. When the empire became an embarrassment in Europe and the world after the Second World War, it was mostly wound down. In short: no Europe, no England, no United Kingdom, no British empire and no decolonization.

The nature of the European challenge varied greatly over time. It was always strategic. In the Middle Ages, the main enemy was France; in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries, it was Spain; from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, it was France again; in the mid- to late nineteenth century, it was Tsarist Russia; in the early and mid-twentieth century, it was first the Kaiser and then Hitler’s Germany; and then Russia again – with a brief interruption after the fall of the Berlin Wall – from the end of the Second World War down to the present day. Very often, the danger was also ideological, from continental heresy in the Middle Ages, through Counter-Reformation Catholicism (which also became a synonym for absolutism and continental tyranny) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jacobinism in the late eighteenth century, continental autocracy in the nineteenth century, right- and left-wing totalitarianism in the twentieth century, to Islamist terrorists arriving from Europe as migrants. The external threat was exacerbated by the fact that all of these ideologies had a domestic constituency of varying strength within the British Isles.

Furthermore, Europe profoundly shaped domestic politics. It was the subject of argument without end for hundreds of years. The debates began with the question of how to protect the realm against external attack, mainly from France and Scotland. They continued over whether and how to vindicate the king’s claim to the French throne. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these discussions gave way to disputes about the best way of protecting Protestantism and parliamentary freedoms in a Europe in which both were under severe attack. From the eighteenth century onwards, Britons disagreed on the best strategy for maintaining the European balance of power. The prevailing Whig orthodoxy looked to alliances and armies on the continent; Tory and radical heresies called for greater restraint in Europe and more concentration on the naval and the colonial. The reality was often less clear cut, of course, and the Whigs were often ardent imperialists (albeit for European reasons), just as many Tories were far from crudely isolationist and were often well-informed about and concerned with Europe. Throughout these debates, some have argued for military intervention on the continent and interference in the internal politics of sovereign states there, while others have demanded equally passionately that one should stay out, for reasons of pragmatism as well as principle. Both views are well represented in both major political parties today…

…If Europe made Britain, then Britain also made Europe. The British shaped Europe in their interests and increasingly in their image. Their military presence and reputation on the continent was usually formidable, from the nobles who took their levies to the chevauchées of the thirteenth century, through the iconic victories for English arms at Agincourt, Dunkirk, Blenheim, Dettingen, Waterloo, in the Crimea and during the two world wars, to the deterrence in Europe under NATO. It was enhanced rather than reduced by the fact that many, even most, of these triumphs had been secured with the help of coalition partners. Britain played an important and often a decisive role in most of the major European settlements since the late seventeenth century. This is true from the Treaty of Utrecht, which enshrined the principle of the ‘balance of power’, through the Congress of Vienna, which remodelled Europe after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, right down to the treaties on European Union in the present day. Moreover, England and, later, the United Kingdom, saw and realized her security in ideological terms, beginning with the defence of the Protestant interest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the protection of European ‘liberties’ in the eighteenth century, the promotion of liberalism in the nineteenth century, and the spread of democracy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Britain reached her greatest territorial extent in Europe with the Acts of Union, but she has enlarged herself ideologically much more since then.

England, and then the United Kingdom, has been distinctive in Europe, and not just in the lazy sense that all histories are somehow ‘special’. Our European story is not merely separate and equal to that of the continent but fundamentally different and more benign. This is a subjective judgement, to be sure, but not an arbitrary one. Britain’s good fortune has been partly a matter of luck and location on the western edge of the continent. In this sense, the Poles have been born unlucky, between Germany and Russia, and in the twentieth century between Nazism and Stalinism. But the English and the British have also made their own luck. They pioneered two innovative forms of political organization: the nation state, as represented in Parliament, however selectively; and then the concept of multinational union based on a parliamentary merger. This model has been adopted by the great democracies of the Anglo-sphere, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and it is the reason why all these happy polities are so fundamentally alike, despite important differences. They had and have their problems, no doubt, but these pale into insignificance with those of continental Europe, past and present. Over the past five hundred years, as we have seen, Europeans have explored political unhappiness in many different forms, from absolutism, through Jacobinism, Napoleonic tyranny, Nazism, Soviet communism, to the well-meaning but broken-backed European Union today.

Quick links

Gilt yeilds reached levels higher than on election day as bond markets watch the government’s plans for increased spending and borrowing.

Scunthorpe steelworks could be closed and replaced by Chinese steel imported via Brazil.

Elon Musk unveilled a new line of Optimus robots that can serve drinks, mow the lawn, and get groceries.

North Korean soldiers have been fighting with Russian forces in Ukraine.

Polling showed a 1% lead for Labour over the Conservatives.

Analysis found that one in fifty Albanians in the UK are in prison.

The European Court of Justice ruled that all member states had to recognise gender and name changes made across the EU.

An Iranian-linked Kurdish party is in regular contact with Labour officials.

South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7, which will cause a 96% drop in the number of new people after three generations.

Christian symbols and imagery in Chinese churches are being repalced with communist propaganda.