When politicians lose control

National institutions need democratic accountability for healthy politics

Towering columns

For The Telegraph, Robert Jenrick calls on politicians to take seriously the concerns of the public over border control or face the electoral consequences.

Controlling our borders would, of course, be far more straightforward if we extricated ourselves from the complex web of international frameworks that have taken on near mythical status within Government. These treaties were designed for a different world and have since been stretched beyond their intention. It will only become painfully more apparent that these outdated treaties cannot be renegotiated any time soon, so they must give way. 

One of the great advantages of our uncodified constitution is the unfettered power of our sovereign Parliament to create law, and that is a power we should not be afraid to take advantage of. Whilst Westminster consumes itself with debates on stopping the boats in the coming weeks – which accounts for less than 10 per cent of overall migration to the UK – legal migration remains at historically unprecedented levels. 

Yet the arguments advanced by the Government about why we must stop the boats – severe community cohesion challenges, pressure on public services and housing challenges – self-evidently apply far more strongly to legal migration, but have received a fraction of the attention. GP services and hospitals do not grow on trees. Integration is impossible if you let in over 1.2 million new people as we have done over the last two years. Business investment and productivity will continue to be sluggish if companies retain their dependency on cheap foreign labour. 

On his Substack, Neil O’Brien explains how the policies of the Johnson government allowed the numbers of legal migration to reach unprecedented highs.

When it comes to work visas the post-Brexit migration system installed by Boris Johnson again represented a tightening up of the rules for arrivals from the EU, but a significant liberalisation for the rest of the world (which is much obviously much bigger!) Until the end of 2020, non-EU citizens on an ordinary work visa would usually need a salary of at least £30,000 in a graduate job; but the new system allowed a wider range of middle-skilled occupations to qualify, with the minimum salary required set at £25,600 as standard and as low as £20,960 for some workers…

…In absolute terms numbers coming from richer countries had been trending gently down since the mid noughties. Since numbers from poorer countries have hugely increased under the new system, the share from richer countries has plummeted. Much of the change in the work route is driven by the explosive growth in the health and social care visa, but other work routes have also gone up.

I wrote before about why the social care visa is a piece of Treasury short termism, saving a little by depressing already-low wages now, at the cost of bringing in people on minimum wage jobs who are mainly going to be net recipients, not net taxpayers in the longer term. The people coming are kind, and many are exploited. But for existing citizens this is ultimately a PFI-style, pay-less-now, pay-much-more-later kind of arrangement, and compared to paying people in social care a bit more, it also has bad effects on the care of the vulnerable.

On his Substack, Andrew Sullivan argues that the recent Congressional hearing with Ivy League presidents has exposed the intellectual rot among progressive academics.

The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point. These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”

Freedom of speech in the Ivy League extends exclusively to the voices of the oppressed; they are also permitted to disrupt classes, deplatform or shout down controversial speakers, hurl obscenities, force members of oppressor groups — i.e. Jewish students and teachers in the latest case — into locked libraries and offices during protests, and blocked from classrooms. Jewish students have even been assaulted — at Harvard, at Columbia, at UMass Amherst, at Tulane. Assaults by woke students used to be rare, such as the 2017 mob at Middlebury that put Allison Stanger in a neck brace — but since 10/7, they’re intensifying.

If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take. They’ve diligently read their Fanon, and must be puzzled over what the problem is. Palestinians are victims of a “colonial,” “white,” “settler-state” and any violence they commit is thereby justified.

For The Times, Daniel Finkelstein cautions the Conservatives against becoming a populist party modelled on the free market views of Nigel Farage.

Over the past couple of months two ways of replacing the Conservative Party have been posited. The first is to use the Reform Party, headed by Richard Tice with the aid of Nigel Farage, to replace the Tories altogether. The other is for Farage to join the Conservative Party and share its leadership with other figures on the right, including Boris Johnson.

A lot of energy has already been expended, with some success, to pull the Conservative Party in this direction. And now these people wish to make their revolution permanent. In effect to supplant the Tories with a political party based almost entirely on Leave…

…Nonetheless, I think the Party of Leave idea would fail. And here is why…populism and the free market are uncomfortable partners. The basic idea behind a Farage-Johnson party is that it would win more support among less well-off, less well educated, culturally conservative voters, primarily in the north. But at the same time it would advocate lower taxes and less regulation.

It would be a party in which the voters were among the heaviest users of public services, while the leadership were among the strongest advocates of libertarianism. The party would stand against meddlesome regulation and for adventurousness over caution. Meanwhile many of its potential voters would want something almost exactly the opposite of that.

For the Financial Times, Martin Wolf responds to the Resolution Foundation’s report on economic stagnation and embraces its call for a new economic strategy.

Britain is suffering from a poisonous combination of stalled productivity and high inequality. This combination means that “typical households are 9 per cent poorer than their French counterparts while our low-income families are 27 per cent poorer”. Not surprisingly, six in 10 Britons “think the country is heading in the wrong direction”.

So, how might it be put in the right direction? The shockingly un-English answer the report offers is that it needs an economic strategy. It would be wrong to say that the country has never had such a thing before: it had one in the world wars, under Attlee and again under Thatcher. But the kind of strategy this book recommends would be new. It is not to be implemented under the shadow of a world war or during its aftermath. Nor, as Thatcher’s was, is it to be focused on shrinking the state’s economic footprint. This strategy demands an active state in peacetime. That would at least be novel.

The case for a new economic strategy is not just the dismal economic performance since the financial crisis of 2007-2008. It is also that the pre-crisis economy was, at least in part, an unsustainable bubble. It is, in addition, that the country confronts so many challenges beyond slow growth and high inequality. These include adjusting to Brexit, financing and implementing the green transition, reducing regional inequality, spending more on defence, and managing the pressures of ageing.

At the New Statesman, Claire Ainsley believes Labour is preparing to make a break from the economic consensus but will still face major structural obstacles.

The scale of the challenge facing Labour is daunting. Only this week, the Resolution Foundation’s Economy 2030 inquiry powerfully demonstrated that the British economy faces continued relative decline unless we urgently correct our course. Some of our malaise dates from the post-financial crisis era and the political and policy choices made in its aftermath, most notably austerity and a botched Brexit. But, depressingly, much of it is attributable to long-running structural weaknesses in the UK economy which predate the 2008 financial crisis, such as the lowest investment in the G7 over the past 40 years and high inequality between people and places. 

The consequence of all this is that our middle and lower earners are far worse off than their counterparts in similar-sized economies. As the Resolution Foundation charted, typical households in Britain are 9 per cent poorer than their French equivalents, while low-income families are 27 per cent poorer.

Perhaps even more profoundly, Britain’s workers feel that the deal by which hard work is rewarded is broken, according to research by the Progressive Policy Institute. They feel they get less in return for their labour than they did a decade ago, and that young people today will be worse off than their parents’ generation. As the 2030 Inquiry spelt out, their perception is reality. 

Wonky thinking

The Social Justice Commission published its report Two Nations: The State of Poverty in the UK. Commissioners include Miriam Cates, Lord King, Andy Burnham, and Tim Farron. The report is an extensive look at the most disadvantaged people in society and identifies the root causes of poverty and inequality in modern Britain.

The country is deeply divided. There are those who are getting by and there are those who are not. Those left behind face multiple disadvantage and entrenched poverty. For these people work is barely worth it, their lives are marked by generations of family breakdown, their communities are torn apart by addictions and crime, they live in poor quality, expensive, and insecure housing, and they are sick. Our analysis has found that 40 per cent of the most deprived report having a mental health condition compared to just 13 per cent of the general population.

Breakdown Britain, which launched the Centre for Social Justice 20 years ago, conducted an unflinching inquiry into what life at the bottom of society was really like. This landmark report identified family breakdown, addiction, worklessness, serious personal debt, and educational failure as the key drivers of poverty and disadvantage across the nation. Nearly 20 years on, Two Nations: The State of Poverty in the UK revisits those five key areas and provides an in-depth analysis of life in the most disadvantaged communities today. A situation which got worse as a result of successive lockdowns.

Two Nations has found a yawning gap between those who can get by and those stuck at the bottom. This gap was stretching apart after years of increased family fragility, stagnating wages, poor housing, and frayed community life, but the lockdown implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic was the dynamite that blew it open. During lockdown: calls to a domestic abuse helpline rose 700 per cent; mental ill-health in young people went from one in nine to one in six; and nearly a quarter amongst the oldest children; severe school absence jumped by 134 per cent; 1.2 million more people went on working-age benefits; 86 per cent more people sought help for addictions; prisoners were locked up for more than 22 hours per day, and a household became homeless every three minutes.

Niall Ferguson examines why intellectuals in higher education have tolerated the spread of antisemitism on university campuses for The Free Press. Ferguson uses the example of German universities under the Third Reich to understand how the highly educated can turn their back on morality in the pursuit of power.

It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.

A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 percent went to Americans. Albert Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1933, when he moved to Princeton, but from 1914 to 1917, when he was appointed professor at the University of Berlin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany.  

Yet the German professoriat had a fatal weakness. For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, in the belief that only such a leader could preserve the purity of the German nationalist project. Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion…

…German academics acted as Hitler’s think tank, putting policy flesh on the bones of his racist ideology. As early as 1920, the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published their Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, which sought to extrapolate from the annual cost of maintaining one “idiot” “the massive capital. . . being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes.”

There is a clear line of continuity from this kind of analysis to the document found at the Schloss Hartheim asylum in 1945, which calculated that by 1951 the economic benefit of killing 70,273 mental patients—assuming an average daily outlay of 3.50 Reichsmarks and a life expectancy of ten years—would be 885,439,800 Reichsmarks. Many historians were little better, churning out tendentious historical justifications for German territorial claims in Eastern Europe that implied massive population displacement, if not genocide.

A critical factor in the decline and fall of the German universities was precisely that so many senior academics were Jews. For some, Hitler’s antisemitism was therefore—not unlike woke intersectionality in our own time—a career opportunity. For German academics of Jewish heritage, particularly those who had married gentiles and converted to Christianity, it was disorienting. 

Book of the week

We recommend A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by economic historian Joel Mokyr. The author analyses how the Enlightenment’s culture of growth helped spark the Industrial Revolution and economic progress in Europe.

Nations and their economies grow in large part because they in- crease their collective knowledge about nature and their environment, and because they are able to direct this knowledge toward productive ends. But such knowledge does not emerge as a matter of course. While most societies that ever existed were able to generate some technological progress, it typically consisted of one-off limited advances that had limited consequences, soon settled down, and the growth it generated fizzled out. In only one case did such an accumulation of knowledge become sustained and self-propelling to the point of becoming explosive and changing the material basis of human existence more thoroughly and more rapidly than anything before in the history of humans on this planet. That one instance occurred in Western Europe during and after the Industrial Revolution.

Many factors contributed to this unique event, and the trans- formation of elite cultural beliefs in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution was only one of them. The big difference between Europe and the rest of the world was the Enlightenment and its implications for scientific and technological progress. But the rise of the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth century was the culmination of a centuries’ long process of intellectual change among the European literate elite. The changes in the market for ideas were the crucial events that set Europe apart from the rest of the world. Europe was not in every respect a better-organized or a more dynamic society than other Eurasian societies. Goldstone (2012, p. 238) suggests that the “intellectual shift that began around 1500, ... limited for centuries to a small circle of scholars and theologians, ... by 1660 had started producing significant changes in the way elites acquired and validated knowledge.” Changes in cultural beliefs for a while could move almost independently from changes in other economic variables, such as commercialization, urbanization, and economic growth. Eventually, however, they would feedback into the economy in a direction and with a magnitude that even the most ebullient of the seventeenth-century moderns and most committed believer in progress could not have imagined. In that sense, at least, we can see a major correction to the view that insists that the Great Divergence was a late and temporary phenomenon due mostly to fairly minor and accidental differences in geography. Culture, after all, mattered.

In this book, I have outlined a model of cultural change that explains why the Enlightenment took place in Europe. The question that will inevitably be raised is whether the Enlightenment in Europe was a necessary or a sufficient condition for the great breakthroughs that led to explosive economic growth and the modern economy. Could another and different civilization have eventually broken the Malthusian and knowledge barriers that kept human society at living standards close to subsistence since the beginning of humanity?

We may never know, because the Islamic world, Africa, China, India, and the original societies of America were all exposed to European culture, and their trajectories were irreversibly perturbed. But most societies that ever existed were subject to what I have called elsewhere Cardwell’s Law (Mokyr, 1994, 2002), which is a generalization of the phenomenon that technology in any economy crystallizes at some point, and progress slows down and then fizzles out. The stagnation occurs because the status quo can suppress further challenges to entrenched knowledge and blocks nonmarginal advances using a range of means, from the threat to persecute heretics and the burning of their books, to subtle but effective mechanisms, such as meritocracies in which the key to personal success was the uncritical expertise in the existing body of knowledge inherited from the past.

Quick links

The ONS estimated that monthly GDP fell by 0.3% in October 2023.

Edinburgh’s Court of Session upheld the UK government’s veto of the Scottish government’s gender self-ID reforms.

The Jewish Leadership Council and Jewish News found that 49.2% of British Jews feel much less safe since the October 7 attacks.

Polling showed that 17% of the public support Israel while 15% back Hamas and 36% are neutral.

Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman reasserted her claim that multiculturalism has failed in an interview with The Telegraph.

The UK’s national debt as a percentage of GDP will reach 310% by 2070, based on current trends.

Housing in the UK is the most expensive in the OECD when compared to countries’ overall price levels.

NHS England’s chief nursing officer revealed that 93% of the 51,245 nurses who have joined the NHS in the last four years have been recruited from overseas.

Thames Water admitted it does not have enough money to pay off its £190 million loan that is due next April.

A cross-party group of MPs reported that more than £100 million of contracts awarded by government departments in 2021-22 did not face competition.

ONS figures showed that 9.5% of people aged 16 to 59 years (3.1 million people) reported using a drug in the last 12 months.

A report from the Foreign Affairs Committee on critical minerals called for an honest debate about the tradeoffs between net zero targets and economic resilience.

Australia announced it will halve its immigration intake within two years and toughen language requirements for students.

One in five Americans aged between 18 and 29 believed the Holocaust is a myth.

The use of ‘not for EU’ labels on meat and dairy products has spread across the UK and not just Northern Ireland.