Decline is accelerating
With pending tax rises, prisoners released and steelworks closing, Labour has no plan to make Britain better
Towering Columns
In The Telegraph, Nick Timothy says Britain must have an industrial strategy or face decline.
This is where even good industrial strategy can become contentious. For it requires the rejection of the laissez-faire policies beloved in the Treasury. Our sustained trade deficit – which ballooned not under Margaret Thatcher, as often assumed, but Tony Blair – causes a vicious cycle of disinvestment and deindustrialisation. Britain has brilliant research universities and a culture of enterprise, but the balance of our economy – over-reliant on services, with elites too casual about the loss of manufacturing – is all wrong.
While we need a stable long-term policy environment, the state should work closely with particular businesses. If JCB, for example, envisaged a supply chain cluster along the A50 in Staffordshire, we should be happy to designate a special zone, with lighter planning rules and investment incentives. And we should always take an interest in who owns what. As the Chinese owners of British Steel close the blast furnaces that make primary steel at Scunthorpe, they care nothing for the long-term consequences for the local community and for Britain.
Geopolitical change makes these questions more urgent. But we should anyway recognise that international trade has never been free nor fair. When countries suppress labour costs, subsidise production, dump goods in our markets, and erect tariffs and other barriers to trade, we need to get real. If we want our exporters to be competitive, we will in some sectors need to consider subsidies of our own and even, on occasion, tariffs. The mass production of cheap Chinese electric vehicles, for example, will destroy Western capacity to manufacture our own, which is why we should be prepared to tax them. Yet there is little such coherence to the Labour economic policy. Ministers blithely repeat lines such as “decarbonisation must never mean deindustrialisation”, but have no idea what this means in practice.
Also in The Telegraph, Miriam Cates says it is not the job of government to bail out failing, low-quality universities.
If higher education operated in a true market-based system, we might expect rising prices to precipitate falling demand. But because university access runs on the distorted principle of “buy now, pay later if you can afford to, if not the state will bail you out,” it is quite possible that 18-year-olds will continue to think it’s worth the risk, suggesting that fee increases alone won’t be enough to fix our broken higher education model.
Those who benefit from higher education should be the ones who pay for it. Yet employers who take on graduates pay nothing towards the cost of degrees, with the entirety of the costs borne by graduates themselves and the taxpayer. If, on the other hand, a company wants to hire a non-graduate apprentice or trainee, they must normally cover the costs themselves. For as long as this model applies, employers will prefer “free” graduates, even though apprenticeships are often more appropriate and effective.
Our current system is also highly inequitable. Taxpayers are making a significant contribution to the education of nearly half of our young adults. Yet the other – more disadvantaged – half get little or no state support. Non-graduate workers are funding the university experiences of middle-class students through their taxes, a large-scale transfer of wealth from poor to rich.
On his Substack, Sam Dumitriu reveals that building trams in Britain is twice as expensive as in Europe.
The recent history of attempts to build trams in British cities is littered with promising schemes that were either cut back or scrapped altogether due to high costs. The Supertram in Leeds was dropped in 2005 after costs spiralled and £40m had already been spent on the project. Bristol, Hampshire, and Liverpool have all seen tram projects cancelled because of high costs.
Edinburgh’s tramway was described as “hell on wheels” by its former chairman and cost £1.06bn (adjusted for inflation). Cost overruns meant that the original plan for 20 miles of tramway for £375m (£629m in 2024) was cut back to only 8.7 miles. In comparison, Cadiz in the south of Spain was able to build its first tram line, also 8.7 miles, for only £248m, less than a quarter of Edinburgh’s cost.
High construction costs make it harder for the UK to build the tramlines that we need. In our database, Britain has built 71 miles of tramway at an inflation-adjusted cost of £6.15bn. If Britain could build as cost-effectively as the European average, Britain would have an extra 75 miles of tramway without spending a penny more. At German costs, Britain could have built 181 miles more. That’s like having an extra three Manchester Metrolinks, Britain’s largest tram network. It would mean new trams in cities like Leeds, Bristol, and Cardiff.
At UnHerd, Tom McTague urges political leaders to rediscover Sir Roger Scruton’s idea of the nation as “home”.
Growth, while helpful for ensuring national stability, was not the most important thing, said Scruton: “It depends far more upon this sense that we belong together.” Such an observation should not be controversial for the socialist who believes in solidarity and collective action. But his analysis also demands the intellectual curiosity of the Conservative. If the job of a national government is to conserve a sense of national unity, as Scruton wrote, then the free market is not enough.
One way to understand the role of government in Scruton’s view, then, is to create a sense of “home” where people become at ease in the shared comforts and rules governing them. This, in a sense, was the Scrutonian answer to the question of “populism” which Labour MPs are already defining as the central mission of this government. “When human beings cease their wandering and mark out a place of their own, their first instinct is to furnish it with things which have no function — ornaments, pictures, knick-knacks,” he had written in England: An Elegy published in 2000. “This instinct for the purposeless has a purpose — namely to make these objects into an expression of ourselves and our common dwelling place, to endow them with the marks of order, legitimacy and peaceful possession.” If this were true of our personal lives, it was true of our national life too: he believed in the knick-knacks of the state; the black rod and the King’s speech; archaic parliamentary language and oddities of the House of Lords. For politics to tread more lightly on people’s lives, as Starmer has repeatedly declared as his aim, people need to feel at home — comfortable in the predictable order of the nation.
“When people feel at home, they allow themselves freedoms, hobbies and eccentricities,” Scruton wrote. “They become amateurs, experts and cranks. They collect stamps, butterflies or biscuit tins; they grow vegetables so large that nobody can eat them, and breed dogs so ugly that only Englishman could look them in what might charitably be called the face.” And they stop being so angry. In Scruton’s view, it was only when such contented order began to be lost, that people began to understand what it was that they were losing—the fate we are now living through in our age of disorder. “‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the gathering of the dusk,” Scruton liked to quote of Hegel.
On his Substack, Sam Ashworth-Hayes argues that immigration is having a negative impact on living standards, both culturally and economically.
Immigration isn’t to blame for our failure to build, but it isn’t making the problem better. The thinner we stretch our stock of infrastructure, the more crowded and congested it becomes, the less useful it is to its existing users. Similarly, the more people we bring in with a heavily constrained housing stock, the more we end up with desperate measures like subdividing houses into flats as a substitute for building enough houses in the first place, while prices continue to rise. None of this is good for the people already here, and perhaps more problematic are the cultural and political consequences. Anyone who has paid any attention to the news over the last month will have noticed that Britain is not exactly united behind a common culture right now. The long term effects of immigration without adequate integration (forget assimilation) appear to have been the creation of flourishing minority cultures deeply at odds with the host population. This isn’t totally surprising — there’s a long literature on the corrosive effect of diversity on social capital. But it also requires management. In the UK, this seems to mean effectively erecting a two tier legal system with significant restrictions on freedom of speech in order to get things to work.
There is a strain of Libertarian thought which broadly welcomes these effects as a correction mechanism for the potential fiscal costs of migration. The theory, such as it is, is that the more diverse a country becomes, the more fragmented it is, and therefore the less likely people are to support welfare payments and taxes. For everyone else, however, it seems fairly likely that these cultural effects are negative. One estimate of the effect of immigration on local (not national) house prices is that an inflow of immigrants equal to about 1% of the local population causes roughly 0.8% of the local population to leave, with house prices dropping 1.6%. People talk a good game about loving their fellow man, but that doesn’t mean they want to live next door to them.
As Garrett Jones has noted, by shaping demographics immigration shapes the future of your country. We shouldn’t be trying to fill in a shortage of care workers, but “inviting people whose children and grandchildren are likely, on average, to become great successes”. This is not what we are currently doing. We aren’t even inviting people who will necessarily pay for themselves. And the cultural consequences do not seem to be consistent with a prosperous, stable society — the conditions that allow immigration at lower levels to work in the first place.
Reflecting on the popularity of Oasis, Post-liberal Pete warns that ageing societies risk becoming stagnant gerontocracies.
[C]ultural stagnation and economic stagnation are very likely to be two sides of the same coin with the same root causes. Cultural stagnation is an international phenomenon and therefore nation-specific explanations are likely to be incomplete in their accounting for it. One factor that does fit the international nature of the problem, and also its timing, is the ageing of many of our societies. Due to a combination of falling fertility and increased life expectancy, globally. the number of people older than 80 is expected to increase sixfold by 2100. Meanwhile, the population of children 5 and younger will get halved. Proportionally fewer young people means proportionally fewer new ideas because younger people are simply more likely to generate them.
The Economist reports that; ‘Younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, meaning the ability to solve new problems and engage with new ideas. Older people have more “crystallised intelligence”—a stock of knowledge about how things work built up over time. There are no precise cut-offs, but most studies suggest that fluid intelligence tends to peak in early adulthood and to begin to decline in people’s 30s….In the long term, it is only by raising productivity that standards of living can be lifted. Demographic decline will chip away at that contribution over time by reducing the number of novel ideas stemming from the fluidly intelligent minds of young workers…..Some researchers believe such a demographically driven reduction in innovation is already under way in parts of the world. James Liang, a Chinese economist and demographer, notes that entrepreneurship is markedly lower in older countries: an increase of one standard deviation in the median age in a country, equivalent to about 3.5 years, leads to a decrease of 2.5 percentage points in the entrepreneurship rate.’
Furthermore, ageing societies risk becoming gerontocracies characterised by economic stagnation, which is then mirrored in its pop-culture. Hence, endless sequels, prequels, remakes, franchises, spin-offs, reformations and revivals, all of which are hallmarks of a widespread cultural stagnation. Ageing societies are less creative because, as Ross Douthat put it; ‘societies without many young people are simply less likely to be dynamic, less interested in risk taking, than societies with younger demographic profiles.’ An insight borne out by the available research on this matter.
In The Times, pollster James Kanagasooriam says Kamala Harris is behind Trump in key areas in the US presidential race.
This election will be won and lost in moderate suburbia and specifically the state of Pennsylvania. With huge Democrat votes in its cities — Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — big Republican support in its southern counties that border Maryland and 50/50 suburbs, it’s a composite of moderate, conservative America.
Pollsters’ forecasts of a Trump victory (the Olympian pollster Nate Silver has given the Republican a 64 per cent chance of winning) flow in large part from which way Pennsylvania will go. Our model had Harris 1.4 per cent behind Trump here, and other polls in the state also have her trailing. Harris could have improved her chances of winning here by choosing its popular governor Josh Shapiro as her vice-presidential nominee. He won the state by 15 points in 2022.
To win, Harris needs to speak to voters who care about immigration and the border and who want to know how the government is going to help them survive pay cheque to pay cheque. She must nod more towards rural, religious and business-minded America. Irrespective of Silver’s probabilities — he gave Trump a 29 per cent probability of winning in 2016 — Harris has time before November 5. Our modelling suggests some 60,000 voters will determine who becomes president. That’s like one person’s vote determining the decision of a group of two and half thousand people. Probabilities don’t fully capture just how small the battleground is to determine the leader of the free world. There’s a lot more talking to be done.
Wonky thinking
Policy Exchange published Might is Right? The Right to Protest in a new era of disruption and confrontation by David Spencer, Sir Stephen Laws and Niamh Webb, arguing for reform of the laws governing the right to protest, given overwhelming public support for tougher measures to govern disruptive protests.
The riots during the summer of 2024 were the largest episode of violent disorder in the United Kingdom for over a decade. The disorder followed an attack in July 2024 at a dance studio in Southport: three children were murdered and a further ten people were attacked. Following this tragic event, misinformation spread through social media regarding the attacker. In towns and cities across the country there followed scenes of considerable violence. Large numbers of police officers were injured. Mosques were attacked. In one instance, attempts were made to set fire to a hotel where people were living. A robust response to the disorder, by the police, was necessary. Similarly, those involved in the riots must be swiftly sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment. There is a clear distinction between scenes of such flagrantly violent and criminal disorder and protest.
Recent years have seen a measurable increase in the number of disruptive and confrontational protests. Groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have conducted a campaign of disruptive, and often unlawful, protest activity which has included tactics such as ‘locking on’ (where protestors attach themselves to buildings, the transport network or other structures to prevent their easy removal); mass obstruction of the highway (through both ‘sit down’ and ‘slow walking’ protests); and offences of criminal damage.
Protest groups themselves are highly organised. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign contacted the Metropolitan Police to inform them of their intention to conduct their first mass protest march just over ten hours after the start of the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel had commenced on the 7th October 2023. As previously shown by Policy Exchange, Just Stop Oil has in the past asked activists to sign a ‘contract’ committing them to action that would lead to ‘at least one arrest’.
In the months following the 7th October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel there was a rolling campaign of highly disruptive protests. An alliance of campaign groups mobilised many thousands of people to conduct protests on Britain’s streets, in railway stations and outside the homes and offices of Parliamentarians. In the months following October 2023, almost every fortnight parts of London were given over to large-scale protest marches. The mass protest marches (and the assemblies linked to them) covered an average of 3.6km of central London’s streets on each occasion and lasted, on average, five hours.
Exclusive nationwide polling conducted for Policy Exchange shows that the average number of times respondents believe protest groups should be permitted to undertake major protests in central London is no more than 12 times per year. This is far fewer than the phase of protests which took place in the months following October 2023. 58% of respondents stated that they do not believe an organisation should be permitted to protest more than once per month.
Current legislation requires protest organisers to provide only six days notice to the police of their intention to stage a march. During this six-day period the police are expected to assess the nature of the protest (including considering its route, timing and the likely number of attendees), gather relevant intelligence, plan for how they will police the protest including ensuring sufficient officers are available for deployment both at the protest and covering other local policing duties, determine what conditions they may apply to the protest and communicate these conditions to the public. This means that the final plans for any march are only provided to the public at the last possible moment – often the day before or the day of a march itself. The ordinary public, businesses, tourists and other local services are therefore required to adapt to these events at very short notice. It is simply unreasonable for the public to be required to continually adapt to such a situation week after week.
Polling conducted for Policy Exchange shows members of the public are choosing not to engage in a whole range of activities because of large-scale protests.
This is particularly the case for women (compared to men) and older (compared to younger) people – showing the disproportionate impact of large-scale protests on different groups. The polling clearly demonstrates the negative impact on people’s willingness to take advantage of tourism, shopping and entertainment venues when mass protests are taking place. If a major protest was taking place in a nearby town or city centre a clear majority of people would drop their plans to:
• Travel with small children (71%);
• Travel with an elderly or mobility-impaired friend of relative (69%);
• Visit a tourist attraction (62%);
• Go shopping (58%);
• Eat at a specific restaurant (58%)
Following and during the protests linked to the Palestinian cause, there were several occasions where the police were met with violence when attempting to enforce the law. On these occasions the police officers involved responded with conspicuous courage – for this the officers involved should be commended. During the first six months of the protests – between October and April 2024 – 415 individuals were arrested during the protests, with 193 of those for “antisemitic offences”. At the time the Metropolitan Police stated there were arrests for 15 offences related to terrorism – which it described as being “unheard of previously” and that the “majority of these have been on suspicion for support of proscribed organisations, namely Hamas”.
There are huge costs to the policing of protest activity. The Metropolitan Police states that the costs of policing the Palestine related protests in London between October 2023 and June 2024 were £42.9million with 51,799 Metropolitan Police officers’ shifts and 9,639 police officer shifts from officers usually based outside the Metropolitan Police area required.10 6,339 police officers have had rest days cancelled between October 2023 and April 2024 – all of which will need to be repaid to officers in due course. The impact on levels of crime and disorder in local communities of police officers being removed from their normal policing duties is surely considerable.
Polling for Policy Exchange shows that the public overwhelmingly support police intervention in disruptive protests. The polling shows the public believe that the police should intervene if protestors are:
• Causing damage to private property (85%);
• Approaching passers-by to shout at and/or threaten them (84%);
• Causing damage to public property (84%);
• Holding banners containing racist or derogatory slogans (80%);
• Deliberately obstructing the road, preventing traffic from passing (79%);
• Blocking access to public transport, such as tube or railway stations (79%);
• Holding banners or chanting slogans that are threatening or implying violence to specific groups of people at home or abroad (78%);
• Blocking access to people’s workplaces (78%);
• Climbing on buildings or public monuments (78%); and
• Blocking access to private or public buildings such as shops or museums (75%).
The polling shows that only 49% of the public believe the police should intervene if the protestors are chanting loudly in a way that some people could find intimidating (49%). Only 24% believe that the police should intervene if the protestors are holding banners with slogans.
Central to these events is the claim of a ‘right to protest’ – despite there being no such explicit and unfettered right within the European Convention on Human Rights (ratified by the UK in 1951, the ECHR came into force in 1953) or the Human Rights Act 1998. Instead of an explicit ‘right to protest’, the key rights applicable to protestors, amongst others, in this context are:
• Article 11: the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and;
• Article 10: the right to freedom of expression.
Both rights are explicitly qualified by restrictions as “prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society”, amongst other things, “in the interests of national security …, or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals or for the protection of the … rights …of others”. These qualifications are all too often overlooked.
The legal regime governing the policing of protests has become increasingly complex, involving a patchwork of UK legislation, guidelines, ECHR case law, domestic case law interpreting and applying ECHR rights through the HRA 1998. This patchwork has made it more challenging, and indeed confusing, for the police, Government and the public to understand what the law requires and permits.
Despite public support for police intervention, and the powers which exist under the existing legal regime, the authorities too often strike the wrong balance between the ‘right to protest’ on one side and the rights of everyone else to go about their daily lives without unnecessary and excessive disruption on the other. Following one egregious recent example of police failure, Dorset Police explained their inaction at an intimidating protest outside the family home of a Member of Parliament, by saying that they “respect people’s right to lawful protest”.
As far back as 2021, an inspection into the policing of protests by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS), said: “…the police do not strike the right balance on every occasion. The balance may tip too readily in favour of protestors when – as is often the case – the police do not accurately assess the level of disruption caused, or likely to be caused, by a protest.”
Not enough has changed since 2021 – in an exclusive interview with Policy Exchange in May 2024, Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist of the Metropolitan Police admitted: “When we look back at the policing of protests over the last 8 months, we know we didn’t get everything right – particularly in the early stages in October. We’ve developed our tactics since then, becoming faster and more decisive. On occasion we did not move quickly to make arrests, for example the man chanting for ‘Jihad’ which was a decision made following fast time advice from lawyers and the CPS. We are now much more focussed on identifying reasonable grounds for arrest, acting where needed, and then investigating, so in these circumstances its very likely arrests would be made more quickly now.”
This report examines the legal framework around protests, including the relevant European and domestic case law, and the police’s response to the actions of protest groups. While there is room to make recommendations for change in the legal framework, any claim by the police that they have done ‘everything possible’ under the existing legal framework is not borne out by the facts. Although some recent UK case law may present an unduly ‘pro-protestor’ picture, the police must not misinterpret the courts’ judgments and use it to take an approach which unduly prioritises protestors at the expense of others. In particular, the police must not unduly refrain from arresting individual protestors reasonably suspected to be committing criminal offences. There remains a wealth of judgments, at both the domestic and European level, which make clear that protestors cannot rely on their frequently misinterpreted ‘rights’ to immunise them from police action against them.
The core argument of this report is that changes are necessary to both the policing approach to protest under the existing legal regime and to elements of the legal framework itself. This would enable what is an essential rebalancing in favour of the ordinary member of the public who wishes to go about their daily lives unimpeded by the activities of relentlessly disruptive protest groups.
Book of the Week
We recommend Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, which examines unflinchingly how Western European states sleep-walked into being mass migration societies.
Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind. Mass immigration began - with little public debate, it would later be stressed - in the decade after the Second World War. Industries and government in Britain, France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia set up programs to recruit manpower to their booming post-war economies. They invited immigrants. Some of the newcomers took positions, particularly in heavy industry, that now look enviably secure and well-paid. But others worked in the hardest, most thankless, and most dangerous occupations that European industry had to offer. Many had been loyal colonial subjects, and had even borne arms for European powers.
Europe became a destination for immigration as a result of consensus among its political and commercial elites. Those elites, to the extent they thought about the long-term consequences at all, made certain assumptions: immigrants would be few in number. Since they were coming to fill short-term gaps in the labour force, most would stay in Europe only temporarily. Some might stay longer. No-one assumed they would ever be eligible for welfare. That they would retain the habits and cultures of southern villages, clans, market-places, and mosques was a thought too bizarre to entertain.
Almost all the assumptions with which mass immigration began proved to be false. As soon as they did, Europe’s welcome to the world’s poor was withdrawn - at first ambiguously, few the oratory of a few firebrand politicians in the 1960s, then explicitly through hard-line legislation against immigration in the 1970s. Decade in, decade out, the sentiment of Western European publics, as measured by opinion polls, has been resolutely opposed to mass immigration. But that is the beginning, not the end, of the story. The revocation of Europe’s invitation to immigrants, no matter how explicit it became, did little to stem their arrival. As the years passed, immigration, to Europe accelerated. At no point were Europeans invited to assess its long-term costs and benefits.
Quick links
Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen has a new podcast, The BluePrint, where he has been interviewing the Conservative leadership candidates.
Russian President Vladimir Putin accused six British diplomats of spying, as tensions rose between the Kremlin and the West over UK-made missiles.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has recognised that low-wage migrants are projected to present a net fiscal cost to the UK.
There has been a 20-point shift in younger voters’ views on immigration.
A drug dealer declared himself a new lifelong Labour voter having received early release from prison, as 1,700 inmates were let back on the streets.
The Treasury refused to disclose details of Labour’s claimed £22bn fiscal black hole.
Labour will close the Port Talbot steelworks, costing 2,500 jobs, with the only other UK blast furnaces at Scunthorpe due to close this year.
The High Court blocked the approval of the Whitehaven mine in Cumbria over carbon emission rules.
An Afghan asylum seeker falsely posed as a child to enter the UK before going on to murder an aspiring Marine.
The number of start-ups in China has collapsed.
The US now produces 50% more oil than Saudi Arabia.