War and Peace: from Ukraine to the Good Friday Agreement

The Northern Ireland Protocol; lessons from Ukraine's past; automation and AI; supporting parents; intergenerational inequality; Corbynism defeated; homes for growth; high street renewal; asylum surge

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.

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Towering columns

The DUP is right that the Northern Ireland Protocol has been a threat to the Union from the start, writes Tom McTague for UnHerd:

From the beginning of this crisis, far more attention has been given to ensuring there is no physical infrastructure on the land border than on protecting the power-sharing political settlement at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement. While these two objectives are connected, they are not the same thing — as we are now discovering. After six years of negotiations, there is every chance we will end up with the former but not the latter.

In essence, the Good Friday Agreement is a grand political compromise in which Irish nationalism accepts the continued existence of Northern Ireland as a sovereign part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority of the population consent to it. In return, unionism accepts the end of majoritarian rule in favour of permanent power-sharing. The reason Brexit has proved so difficult is because there is no obvious way for the UK to leave the EU that is politically acceptable in Westminster and both communities in Northern Ireland. Constitutionally, however, the starting point for the negotiations should have been for Northern Ireland to leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the UK — unless a specific set of arrangements could be agreed by both communities.

The problem is that the exact opposite of this happened, as London and Brussels flipped the problem on its head … the challenge became not how to ease the land border to make it acceptable to nationalism, but how to ease the sea border to make it acceptable to unionism. This was never some mere practical tweak, but a significant constitutional change which unionism understandably rejected but has never been able to reverse. Unless Sunak is able to negotiate a different outcome, Northern Ireland will remain permanently locked to certain EU laws.

The flaws in the current Protocol reflect fatal compromises made by Theresa May, argues Lee Reynolds in ConservativeHome:

From day one there was to be a regulatory border between Ulster and Great Britain, with the so-called Backstop of a full customs border inside the UK if Parliament dared to diverge from the EU. Northern Ireland would have become an economic hostage, either blamed for scuppering Brexit or economically cut off from the rest of the country.

Perhaps this sounds like Ulster paranoia. But the Attorney General’s legal advice concluded the same. Unionists’ fear of this sword of Damocles was treated as irrational. No government would actually diverge, we were told; the consequences would simply not be acceptable … the sea border would be masked rather than abolished. Northern Ireland’s relationship with the EU would be a matter of treaty law; that with the UK a matter of government policy.

Economic openness, automation and technology all threaten to increase inequality - and governments must act to mitigate, says Michael Spence on Project Syndicate:

Trade, investment, and technology have significant effects on economic structure, relative prices, and income and wealth distribution pretty much everywhere. One recent paper argues that trade with China not only has direct negative effects on employment and wages in the US manufacturing sector, but also produces negative upstream effects on suppliers of intermediate products.

To be sure, the paper’s authors conclude that, for the United States, trade with China yields net benefits, because the positive downstream effect – a wide range of industries gaining access to cheaper intermediate products – is larger than the combined direct and upstream negative effects. Nevertheless, US-China trade still has important distributional implications because the negative effects are more concentrated by sector and geography, whereas the positive effects are spread widely. This has arguably had a significant impact on American attitudes toward trade with China – and thus on US trade policy generally.

Government policy must do more to help people get married, stay married and have children, says Miriam Cates on PoliticsHome:

Now I absolutely agree that parents should be responsible, they should provide for and protect their children. But having children shouldn’t be a luxury. The urge to have children is one of the strongest biological instincts and it’s a societal necessity. Having children and raising them well is the most significant contribution most of us can make to society.

If we care about the success of our nation, we should be doing everything we can to encourage young people to have children, and to support them through our tax system as they seek to do a good job of raising the next generation.

Of course there are many things that we need to fix – and housing is one of them – but reforming taxation to recognise the costs and value of raising children, to remove the ‘family penalty’, would go a long way to removing the barriers young people face in starting a family.

By overseeing soaring house prices and inflated pensions bill, the Tories have entrenched intergenerational inequality, says Tom Jones on his Substack:

Since 2010, the Conservatives have been the party of homeowners, not home ownership. The effect of pursuing a short-to-medium term economic and political rally by both restricting supply and increasing demand for homes had long term effects, however. On top of the cost of delivering the Help to Buy Scheme,  Government now spends £23.4bn a year on housing benefit.  That’s more than the MoJ, DfT or the Home Office – simply to enable people to live in a housing market that doesn’t function properly.

… Tackling the huge cost of the triple lock pension now presents an equally important mission. The triple lock is a burden that weighs heaviest on young workers and families, who already face a whole host of problems; real incomes are dropping, buying a home is increasingly unachievable, inflation is high, taxes are even higher and the coming recession is likely to be deep. Their taxes have not just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of the two crises of austerity and Covid, but have gone to making them measurably richer – which cannot be said for claimants of other benefits, as cuts have made our social safety net ‘significantly weaker.’

Keir Starmer may have finally broken Corbynism, says Danny Finkelstein in The Times:

[Ralph] Miliband did make common cause with the Bennites, people like Corbyn and John McDonnell, and they always saw him as their intellectual guru. When McDonnell was shadow chancellor he advised Treasury civil servants to read Miliband as a preparation for a Labour government. But Corbyn and McDonnell always argued with him about the party. Was Miliband right to reject Labour, or were Corbyn and McDonnell right to see membership as the best strategy for advancing socialism?

And now Starmer has intervened to make the position clear. Corbyn might want Labour, but that no longer matters. Labour doesn’t want Corbyn. Starmer’s party will be “a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system” rather than one “seriously concerned with socialist change”. There will never be another moment like this for the left. Never another moment where they have, outside the party, such a prominent leader, a household name (for good or ill) with a personal following. Someone with allies, someone with a brand, someone able to attract hundreds of thousands of people to join a political party. Someone who had thousands of young people singing his name.

Wonky thinking

The high street can be saved through a model of community ownership, says Toby Lloyd in a report for the the Create Streets Foundation, “From empty shops to thriving local assets”:

Since the mid twentieth century the high street has been thought of primarily as a place for retail. It was not always thus: in earlier times most high streets and town centres played richer and more complex roles as centres not just of shopping but of commerce and community life, of living and working, and their retail premises were often densely inter-mingled with homes and civic buildings. In recent decades the retail-dominated British high street has been in decline, hammered first by the rise of car-oriented urban planning and the lure out-of-town shopping centres, then by online retail, and most recently by the Covid pandemic and the rising cost-of-living. This story is well known.

… Nothing exemplifies a high street in decline more than vacant retail and commercial property, which the Secretary of State for Levelling Up has likened to ‘missing teeth in the smile of an old friend.’ This simile perfectly illustrates both how damaging boarded up store fronts are to communities’ experience of their high streets and the extent to which high streets are uniquely social, even personal, parts of economic life. No-one would describe a change in interest rates, or a shift in international trade flows, by likening them to a friend’s face. High streets are essential to our town and local centres, to the places where we come together as communities and neighbourhoods and to our very sense of home. They transcend the merely functional process of ‘shopping’.

A new generation of housebuilding is essential to re-start economic growth, writes James Vitali in a report for Policy Exchange, “Homes for Growth”:

Low growth has had material effects on the living standards of the UK population. Wage growth has stagnated over the last two decades, whilst inflation has meant that at intervals real pay has actually decreased for many households. Low economic growth has also forced the government into increasingly difficult decisions on tax and spend in order to fund public services.

A key driver of the UK’s weak economic performance is the chronic shortage in housing supply. Demand for new housing has increased consistently, through population growth and through the shrinking size of households. However, housing supply has failed to meet rising demand for a prolonged period. Estimates suggest that some 340,000 homes a year need to be built in England alone to address the backlog and existing demand, and the government itself has set a target of building 300,000 new homes per annum; annual housebuilding in England has averaged around half of that figure since the turn of the century. The last time 300,000 homes were built in England was the 1960s. The result of housing shortage has been rapidly deteriorating affordability, vastly increased mortgage debt, an inflated housing benefits bill, and most damningly of all, declining homeownership levels, especially amongst younger adults.

Book of the week

As we mark the anniversary of the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine, our book this week is Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, in which Anne Applebaum records the history of the famine that the Soviet Union inflicted on Ukraine in the early 1930s:

It is possible to hear the echo of Stalin's fear of Ukraine - or rather his fear of unrest spreading from Ukraine to Russia - in the present too. Stalin spoke obsessively about loss of control in Ukraine, and about Polish or other foreign plots to subvert the country. He knew that Ukrainians were suspicious of centralized rule, that collectivization would be unpopular among peasants deeply attached to their land and their traditions, and that Ukrainian nationalism was a galvanizing force, capable of challenging Bolshevism and even destroying it. A sovereign Ukraine could thwart the Soviet project, not only by depriving the USSR of its grain, but also by robbing it of legitimacy. Ukraine had been a Russian colony for centuries, Ukrainian and Russian culture remained closely intertwined, the Russian and Ukrainian languages were closely related. If Ukraine rejected both the Soviet system and its ideology, that rejection could cast doubt upon the whole Soviet project. In 1991 that is precisely what it did…

History offers hope as well as tragedy. In the end, Ukraine was not destroyed. The Ukrainian language did not disappear. The desire for independence did not disappear either - and neither did the desire for democracy, or for a more just society, or for a Ukrainian state that truly represented Ukrainians. When it became possible, Ukrainians expressed these desires. When they were allowed to do so, in 1991, they voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine, as the national anthem proclaims, did not die…

The history of the famine is a tragedy with no happy ending. But the history of Ukraine is not a tragedy. Millions of people were murdered, but the nation remains on the map. Memory was suppressed, but Ukrainians today discuss and debate their past. Census records were destroyed, but today the archives are accessible. The famine and its aftermath left a terrible mark. But although the wounds are still there, millions of Ukrainians are, for the first time since 1933, finally trying to heal them. As a nation, Ukrainians know what happened in the twentieth century, and that knowledge can help shape their future.

Quick links

The US can make 180,000 155mm shells per year, and Europe 300,000 - in total, only three months’ consumption for Ukraine.

Tony Blair and William Hague have called for universal digital ID cards.

Less than half of British adults are now married.

Britain recorded a £5.4 billion surplus in January - £5 billion better than predicted by the OBR.

11.5 per cent of young people not in education, employment or training.

The census says there is no clear north-south divide in qualifications outside London.

There were nearly 1 million asylum requests in the EU last year.

Labour now leads the Tories on the NHS, the economy and immigration.

The conviction rate for rape has risen from 55% to 75% over the last 15 years.

Lady Susan Hussey has been reinstated in the Royal Household.