• Different ways the Government can help people

• Missing Moral Messages

• The Silliest Argument for Expanding Higher Education

• Politics at its best

Different ways the Government can help people

There are two different ways in which government can help people.

One possibility it can give people things they really want. This could include tax cuts, more benefits, smaller class sizes, shorter NHS waiting lists, free stuff (childcare, TV licenses, prescriptions…), less crime or graffiti in their neighbourhood, freedom to worship, parks and libraries, integrated public transport networks or anything else that a person would be happy to receive. If the government’s stewardship of the economy causes there to be more job openings and pay rises, that should also go in this category.

Items in this category may be right-coded, left-coded, or somewhere in between. And of course, to deliver some of them a government will have to do some things that people don’t like, usually raising taxes to pay for them. But the actual deliverable is something that people genuinely want.

The other possibility is it can do things that it thinks will be good for people. This could include fining parents if they take their children out of school during term time, putting taxes on sugar/alcohol/tobacco, banning things (pornography, gay marriage, guns…), conscripting people into the army, setting out rules on who you can use as a childminder, making rules about cycle helmets or seat belts or anything else that a person wouldn’t choose for themselves, but which other people believe would be for their benefit.1

As before, items in this category may be right-coded, left-coded, or somewhere in between.

Almost everyone believes that some things in this category are necessary, but they disagree about which ones are, and which ones aren’t.2 And the fact that something is in this category doesn’t mean it won’t be popular - the British public love banning things which don’t affect them. But what really matters is their own lives getting better.

Over recent years the national government - whichever party has been in power - has appeared to spend more time focusing on policies which fall into the second category.3 In part this may be because we have been led by Prime Ministers without a strong ideology, meaning the direction is set more by civil servants and stakeholder groups, who tend to prioritise what they think will be good for people.4

This is not working in delivering the outcomes that are making people happy - hence why we are cycling through Prime Ministers faster than a Tour de France rider on steroids.

Andy Burnham, in contrast, seems to have been popular as Mayor of Greater Manchester by focusing on delivering on things that people actually wanted. He inherited a city with a good economy and maintained and continued the policies that would keep it growing; he appointed a good chief constable who cut crime; he implemented some highly visible and valued policies about buses and public transport.

But running a country is a lot harder than running a city - as our previous Mayor-turned-Prime Minister found out.5 Can Burnham repeat his success on a national level - or will it need to wait for his successor, whoever that may be?

Missing Moral Messages

I’ve written before how my problem with much of the modern mass cultural outputs is that the moral messages it conveys tend to be pretty one-dimensional: friendship is good, be kind, value others even when they’re different. Sometimes bravery, in a shallow, MCU superhero sense.

There’s nothing actively wrong with these messages - in fact, they’re pretty good! - but they’re also not very helpful when it comes to living your live well. They’re basically about how to rub along with others, rather than how to make something of yourself in an often difficult world.6

There’s another set of important messages which one can find in books such as those by Louis L’Amour, Robert Heinlein’s ‘juveniles’, Jim Butcher and David Gemmell. They include things such as:

• Life’s not fair, but you should your best anyway.

• If you get knocked down you get back up again.

• If you make a mistake, you put it right.

• You do what’s right, even if it costs you.

• Nothing worth obtaining comes easily.

• Self respect is everything - and it can’t be bought or gained by cheating.

In this passage from Out Law, Butcher’s latest novella, Dresden - the main character, an urban wizard - is talking to an ex-con who’s trying to go straight.7

“Life is hard, man. All of it. Nothing you can do will change that. But you can mostly choose what kind of hard stuff you want in it.”

He frowned. “Like what?”

I eyed him. Tripp was in good shape. At his age, that didn’t happen without effort, so I figured I could start simple.

“Exercising and staying in shape is hard. Not exercising and staying in shape is hard too; it just takes longer to set in. But you can pick which kind of difficulty you want.”

“Huh,” he said.

“By the time you consider everything you’ve gone through, working for Marcone is hard. Making an honest living is hard too. But they’re different kinds of hard. You don’t spend time in the pen when you play it straight. But there’s a lot of boring stuff, and most days, you’re making yourself do stuff you’d rather not do. You get to choose which kind of hard you want.”

“What about the easy life?”

“Maybe some people get that, sometimes, for a while. But people weren’t made for easy. We were made to work and scrap and struggle to make our lives into something better. We aren’t supposed to lie around, doing nothing, for very long. People who get away from that forward drive get weird fast.”

Out Law, by Jim Butcher

Although there is a strong message in these books to help others, there is not the abnegation of self that one might find in books such as What Katy Did or Little Women: characters in these books do want things - a decent life, respect, sufficient money to support themselves - though this is usually framed as things they can earn honestly, and sometimes contrasted with the greed or lust for power of their adversaries.

The main characters of these books are not always good people, either because they have not always been good people in their past, or because they lack the social niceties and graces that would fit into polite society. Being the type of books they are, the messages are also interwoven with a fair amount of action and violence - whether against outlaws, space pirates or demons, depending on genre.

Furthermore, the message ‘stand on your own two feet’ does not mean they are not helped by others - or give help themselves. In contrast, this is consistently presented as a positive thing. It is more that one does not expect handouts - that when life is unfair, one cannot sit back and expect someone to put it right for you, but that one must - while acknowledging the injustice - press forward anyway.

They are hard messages, that could come from the mouths of the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Most of us don’t live up to them all, or even most of the time. But we could perhaps do with more fiction that conveyed these messages, rather than platitudes.

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The Silliest Argument for Expanding Higher Education

The silliest argument for expanding higher education runs like this:

‘You went to university and you want your children to go to university, so how can you suggest restricting it for anyone else?’

It has a certain rhetorical effect, so I can understand why those who care more about persuasion than truth use it, but anyone who truly believes it should know better.

Must a concert violinist, who attended the Royal Academy of Music and hopes their children do too, believe that the Academy should drop its standards and let more people in - so they too can benefit?

Must a Premiership footballer, who attended his club’s youth team, and hopes and dreams that his two-year-old son will follow in his footsteps, believe that the youth team should let in anyone who wants to play - even if there is almost no chance they will go on to make it professionally?

Or we could choose an example closer to home. I went to Cambridge, and hope that my children will go.8 Am I a hypocrite, unless I believe that Cambridge should lower its standards and double the number of places it offers, so more people can benefit?9

Obviously not.

In each case, the value of the institution in question is in its high standards. That is core to what the person who attended them values. And our hope for our children to also attend is a hope that our children will also attain highly - not a wish that the institution degrade itself just to give them a higher chance of attending.

As with Cambridge or the Royal Academy of Music, so with higher education as a whole. The clue is in the name: HIGHER education, providing an academically rigorous education for those who are highly academically qualified. Of course there should be second chances - retakes, the OU, progression from FE - for those who did not achieve their potential the first time, but these should be pathways to allow people to demonstrate attainment of the necessary standards - not ones that remove those standards. And of course there should be other high quality routes for those not academically qualified.10

Those who make the silliest argument commit two fallacies:

1. They implicitly assume HE should be for everyone, rather than something reserved for those with high academic standards. But high academic standards are at the core of HE - the fundamental element that distinguishes it and gives it its particular value. Its degradation - with entry standards down almost across the board, 1 in 10 now going without an A-Level or BTEC equivalent, while Firsts are given out like candy11 - is fundamental to the current crisis.

2. They assume HE is homogeneous, with all universities the same. But why should the fact that I valued my high quality degree at Cambridge say anything about how I value a pack-'em-high, teach-'em-cheap course in business or social studies, with no entry requirements, minimal assessment standards and no currency with employers or postgraduate courses?

The fact is, I would not advise my children - or any other young person I cared about - to enroll on debt-trap courses such as those I described above. In most cases, I would advise them against going to HE at all unless they were on track for CCC or higher at A-Level - in such circumstances other routes are likely to be better. And I would wish neither Cambridge nor higher education as a whole to lower their standards to give my children, nor any other children, a better chance of getting a place at somewhere they were not qualified to attend.12

But meanwhile, the proponents of the silliest argument for expanding higher education will no doubt keep on making it.

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Politics at its Best

I am not naive about politics.

The idea that things would be better if everyone would just sit down together and decide what’s best to do isn’t just wrong, but dangerous: the adversarial nature of politics is essential as a check and balance on the misuse of power.

Different people have very different views on how our society should be run, what is fair, what works and what is right and moral. The lives and livelihoods of millions can turn on these differences. Politics is how we resolve these decisions without violence - and ensure peaceful transitions of power. It must be adversarial: is a struggle for power, not a game, and the stakes are high.13

But at the same time - particularly in a week where a politician has been murdered - we should also remember the human side: that our politicians are almost all good people seeking to make a positive difference, and that they, and their families, can pay a horrendous toll in emotion, abuse, time and sacrifice.

On that note, I thought the final session of Prime Minister’s Questions between Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch showed our politics at its best, revealing the human side of two people who, whatever one may think of their policies or track record, are both decent, well-meaning people who want the best for Britain.

You can watch it here.14

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Also the British Commentariat: Why isn’t [Person X] ahead in the polls right now?

A significant gap has opened up in polls asking what people think of Kemi Badenoch (up significantly) and the Conservative Party’s own polling, which is still stuck in the doldrums at just under 20%.

Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of pieces written by people over what this means for Kemi Badenoch. You can read a bullish case, by Adrian Wooldridge or a more bearish case, by .

What you’ll get here is a cautious case: not arguing that Kemi is on an inevitable path to victory, but rather that she might be - and that the ground-work she is laying is putting the Conservatives in a better place to build from than more casual observers might anticipate.

Firstly, though, let us clear the air and acknowledge that the Conservatives are not, right now, doing well.1

These headline polling figures are borne out by terrible results at the last two sets of local elections, and reinforced by qualitative data from almost every focus group. Two years after the last general election, many people have still to forgive the Tories, and/or fail to see them as answer for the challenges facing the country.

But we don’t care what the polls say now, we care what they will say in 2-3 years’ time.2 And we all know that to do that, we need to look at not just how things are now, but how they are changing - and how that in turn might change in the future:3

So what reasons do we have for thinking that the Conservative’s fortunes might improve? After first setting out expectations, we’ll then look at the cautious case for Kemi - before going on to look at what could still blow it off track (plenty!) and areas where they could be doing more to gain an advantage.

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Setting our expectations

But first, what does ‘good’ look like? Perhaps history can give us a clue:

• After 1979, Labour did not regain power for 18 years and four general elections.

• After 1997, the Tories did not regain power for 13 years and three general elections

• After 2010, Labour did not regain power for 14 years and four general elections.4

To put it bluntly, we shouldn’t see ‘not winning in 2029’ as a reasonable measure of failure for the current leadership.5 Clearly, winning is the best - but increasing seats and vote share - say to 180 seats - would also be clear progress. This would particularly be the case if this resulted in a hung Parliament (perhaps with Reform the largest party, on 200-250), or a fragile ‘Rainbow’ coalition on the left.6

On current polling, the Tories are not on track for that - and it’s where, at the minimum, they need to be.

But wait a minute: the Conservatives were in an unusually terrible position in 2024 - worse, I would argue, than Labour in 2010 or the Conservatives in 1997; perhaps Labour in 1979 comes close, facing as they did both a parlous country and, soon, a new challenger party in their space.7

They had just faced two major external events - the Covid-19 Pandemic and the energy price shock caused by the Russia-Ukraine war - the combination of which pummelled incumbents almost everywhere. Partygate had destroyed their reputation for probity and, even more damagingly, Truss had blown up their reputation for economic competence. The country were sick of them - and having been in power for 14 years, laid the country’s travails squarely at their feet.

What is more, the years from 2016 to 2024 had been an unequivocal disaster for the right.

I am not a purist - there are many ways to run a successful party on the right. Cameron effectively combined free market economics, cutting spending and pro-choice public service reform with social liberalism; in other countries and at other times the right has focused on cutting crime, controlling the borders or social conservatism.

But in 2024, delivering Brexit aside, the Conservatives had failed on every possible right-wing success criteria - all the while using inflammatory rhetoric which alienated many moderates. As Kemi herself has put it, they ‘talked right and governed left’.

Public spending, tax and the national debt had risen massively, as had the number of welfare claimants. Legal and illegal immigration had both surged to record levels, they had lost control of the Channel border and the courts were in crisis.8 Trans ideology and critical race theory were embedded in both the schools system and public sector organisations, museums and curricula were being ‘decolonised’. The armed forces had been cut to the bone. The regulatory burden on business had steadily piled up, the planning system moved at a snail’s pace and the Government was steadily rolling out new regulatory measures, from the smoking ban to a football regulator.9

As I satirically wrote the day after an election, could a Labour government possibly be worse?10

The surprise is not that a right-wing challenger party emerged; the surprise is that it did not do so sooner. Similarly on their left-flank: much has been written on how Brexit, or opposing ‘woke’, or the Rwanda plan pushed wealthier, graduate voters to the Lib Dems - and this is true - but not enough has been written about the fact that there was no countervailing pull on the economic side. Why vote for a party that has increased your taxes, taken away your child benefit and placed you in student debt - meaning the perceived cost of voting your values with the Lib Dems, Green or Labour is nothing?11

Furthermore, the party itself was hopelessly split:12 shortly before Sunak called the election, he was facing open revolt not just from backbenchers, but from cabinet members, over proposed curbs to student migration that were more moderate than those Labour would introduce a year later, while the party’s right divided into a bizarre ‘Five Families’, the divisions between which one had to squint to see.

All of this presented a monumental challenge for any new leader: not just earning back a hearing from the public, but healing the divisions in a way which could actually underpin a coherent platform for government was a monumental task.

And has Kemi done that?

Again, some honesty: the first 8 months were not a success. Her leader approval ratings steadily declined as the party stuttered like a broken-down car trying to get into motion. Being a party leader is hard - much harder than the job of a Cabinet Minister.

But over that first summer she recovered her mojo, re-organised her team and at some point - perhaps Party Conference, perhaps the response to Reeves’s tax-and-borrow Budget - she began to turn things round.

Her popularity is now consistently well above those of all other leaders except Ed Davey.

When we include Andy Burnham things get a lot closer:

And in a head-to-head against Farage, Kemi comes out on top:

She is getting consistently better at the ‘set-pieces’ required of the Leader of the Opposition, such as Prime Minister’s Questions, and has grown better at media interviews, as well as producing the clips that get shared on social media. Focus groups typically report that people like what they see of her, though aren’t always sure what she stands for while, anecdotally, less political friends say they see far more of her coming through on Facebook, Instagram and similar - and that they often like what they see.

There are still occasional missteps - the most recent significant one was over the Iran war - but these are becoming less and less frequent. After the recent tragic murder of Henry Nowak, Kemi’s clearly articulated compassion for the family and support for equality before the law received the highest approval from the public, ahead of Starmer’s muddled defence of the status quo, while Farage’s attempt to invoke white victimhood came last.

So far, this hasn’t translated to an improvement in the polls. But leader approval rating is an important leading indicator - so it’s an important clue that while the Tories aren’t up now, they might be.

The other traditional indicator of future victory is trust in the economy - and here again the Conservatives are ahead, though not as much as they’d ideally like to be. You can see clearly the Truss Minibudget, where Labour shot ahead, and then the long-slow slog of gradual Tory recovery.

So why aren’t these indicators translating into Tory polling numbers - and why might we believe they could in the future?

The answer to both questions is time. It’s only just over two years since the Tories were voted out of office - and as we saw above, there’s a lot to forgive. It’s less than a year since Kemi started performing more strongly. These things take time to trickle through.

Similarly, public opinion tends to be thermostatic - shifting to the right under a left-wing Government and vice-versa. This can be seen in the vote share of the ‘right bloc’ vs the ‘left bloc’ - where the right’s lead has gone from -17 at the last General Election to +3.7 today.13 Similarly, as writes, a recent poll by Norstat found that 13% of ‘left’ voters from the 2024 election have moved to the right, while only 4% of ‘right’ voters have moved to the left.

But why might we think a continued thermostatic effect would benefit the Tories, rather than Reform? There are three principal reasons: the economy, immigration, and Reform’s travails.

On the economy, we’ve seen a major shift in how the public is thinking about tax and spend - an area where the Tories have an advantage over Reform. In 2019, voters on balance thought taxes were too low and we spent too little on public services, now the balance has swung decisively in favour of taxing and spending too much.14 Indications are that Burnham will shift to the left, and with deteriorating OBR forecasts, we can expect the next two Budgets - just as the last two did - to involve coming to the public for large, tax rises, likely to be in the tens of billions. The Conservatives are best placed to capitalise.

Regarding immigration, net migration has fallen to below 200,000 and is forecast to fall further. Rather like inflation, falling migration doesn’t immediately ameliorate public concerns - the new immigrants, like the higher prices, are after all still here. But over time, concern over migration does tend to be a lagging indicator of net migration levels15 - and, indeed, we can see it falling from its peak in the YouGov tracker. I would not over-egg this: the small boat crisis in the Channel and the inability to systematically deport violent criminals will prevent concerns over immigration falling too far, but the more it shifts from migration to the economy, the better for the Tories.

Finally, there are Reform’s own travails - where views are hardening against both them and Farage himself. The recent donation scandal is cutting through, including with Reform voters.16 Both polling on tactical voting and real evidence, both in Parliamentary by-elections and the local elections, suggests that Farage is a much more disliked figure, and that more voters will vote to keep out Reform - including, at times, for the Tories, than for the Conservatives.17

Of course, Reform are by no means out of the picture - but ‘Word Clouds’ taken last September and this May suggest that while Farage’s reputation is waning, Kemi’s is on the rise.

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But perhaps most importantly, the case for Kemi rests on how she has transformed the Conservative Party. It is here where I most disagree with Sam Freedman:

“Badenoch has done nothing to structurally improve the Tory position. There is no policy agenda beyond pledges to undo Labour taxes rises by cutting welfare. Because the Tory leader seems animated almost entirely by hatred of Labour her positions are always about negating something they’re doing, whether on net zero or private school VAT, rather than setting out a positive agenda of her own.”

The Badenoch Conundrum, Sam Freedman

Adrian Wooldridge is closer to the mark, but even this doesn’t fully unpack the extent of the arduous groundwork that has been successfully undertaken:

“The second thing in Badenoch’s favor is her progress on the arduous job of repairing the Tory party after the Brexit disaster, as both a political outfit and ideological force. She has replaced a discredited gang of operatives in Conservative Campaign Headquarters with competent functionaries and is identifying a distinctive philosophy that addresses people’s worries about opportunity and immigration without being deliberately divisive.”

Britain’s Tories Think They’ve Found a Winner, Adrian Wooldridge

There are three fundamental ways in which Kemi has transformed the party, carrying out the painstaking but necessary work from which an electoral victory could be built.

1. In government, the Conservatives were drifting, hopelessly divided about what they wanted to achieve. On issue after issue they would will the ends but not the means: wanting to stop the Channel crossings but unwilling to leave the ECHR; railing against public sector wokery but unwilling to touch the Equality Act; wanting to lower taxes but refusing to touch benefits or public services; saying they wanted more people doing college courses and apprenticeships and fewer at university, but unwilling to contemplate restoring number controls.18 On each of these issues and more, Kemi has been willing to set out the means - leaving the ECHR, repealing the Public Sector Equality Duty, cutting welfare and reducing university places.19

2. She has done all of this while maintaining party unity. She has been helped, it is true, by the defection of her biggest rival, Robert Jenrick, to Reform - but it was still no easy task in a party that had previously been marked by constant schisms. More centrist MPs such as Jesse Norman have written publicly on why we must leave the ECHR, and it is notable that the ‘centre-right’ pressure group, Prosper UK - composed primarily of members who were strong Remain supporters - has failed to recruit a single MP. While she was heavily criticised for taking time to work through these issues, it is unclear whether she could have moved faster and taken the deeply divided party with her.20

3. She is carrying out significant, detailed, policy work on a wide range of issues - as represented, for example, by the Alternative King’s Speech or the recent paper on reforming the City of London. These are not reviews carried out by external parties, deniable and ignorable, but formal policy documents published by the party. They represent the beginning of a serious programme - and show that she does not just wish to win power, but to achieve something concrete if and when she arrives.

Look, I get that the ‘Ming Vase Strategy’ is all the rage these days. Never say anything that might upset anyone; be deliberately vague about trade-offs and promise nothing but platitudes. It successfully carried Boris Johnson,21 Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham into office. But however successful it may be as an electoral tactic, for governing it proved a foundation made of sand (we will see if Burnham can break the mould…).

It is also not the approach that was taken by the two most successful Conservative Prime Ministers of the last half century, Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron - who, in the midst of crisis, both actively campaigned for what they believed in, and persuaded the country it was necessary:

Effective leaders set out how the country needs to change - and take the country with them. And there is no point in winning power without a working plan to achieve something with it.

Headwinds and countermeasures

So is Kemi a sure thing? Far from it.

Reform continues to threaten to supplant them as the main party of the right. They may be taking knocks, but they’re still leading in the polls. Farage may be down, but he’s not out - and this is a politician with a twenty-year track record of resilience and rebounds, who can literally crawl from the wreckage of a plane crash and go on to dominate politics. Even if Reform has peaked - which should not be counted as certain - a Reform that squats stubbornly22 at 22-24% in the polls could prove fatal to Conservative ambitions.23

The 72 Liberal Democrat MPs have managed to have surprisingly little impact on national policies - but the Lib Dems are local campaigners par excellence, and they have been digging in to those constituencies they gained. Local election results confirm they are entrenching themselves. The Tories must take some of these back - and not enough focus has been given to this.

The biggest new threat to the Conservatives is Burnham, and whether he can change Labour’s fortune. His election is a double-edged sword: it is a second chance for Labour, but if it goes sour the electorate will be even less forgiving.24

I am pretty bearish on his chances: as said above, I do not see evidence he has the answers that will turn the country round, or to alter Labour’s economically harmful policies on higher taxes, damaging employment law and increased spending. As a result, I fully expect him to have to come back each Budget imposing unpopular and damaging taxes.25 But at the same time, he will almost certainly be better at core aspects of the job than Starmer was: building relationships with his MPs, communicating with the public, telling a story of what he is doing - and why.26 This matters - including in being able to get more through Parliament. So the Conservatives should not assume Labour will remain below 20% in the polls.

So it is not enough for the Conservatives to simply wait for Reform and Labour to implode (though this might help). They must do more to convert Kemi’s personal ratings into rising Conservative poll figures. To succeed they cannot choose either right or left; they must win back voters that have deserted the party to both Reform and to the Lib Dems or Labour.

I see three areas where they have the opportunity to be doing much more.27

Firstly, Kemi needs to get all of her best players on the front bench. Some individuals have succeeded in cutting through: Claire Coutinho, Nick Timothy, Andrew Griffith and Laura Trott have all had repeated successes. Behind the scenes, ’s influence has massively upped their game on their policy announcements. But others are not making an impact.

Meanwhile there are too many top performers who are underused. Jeremy Hunt had great success in sticking it to Labour in his short stint as Shadow Chancellor - could he make a return, if not in that role, then in one of the other big economic portfolios, such as welfare or business? Tugendhat is highly respected on defence and foreign policy. Individuals from the newer intake, such as Katie Lam and Jack Rankin, could be given bigger roles.

This is not intended as a criticism of individuals: there are people who would be good ministers in government who are not as suited to the very different challenge of Opposition.28 At this stage in the electoral cycle Kemi knows who the high performers are, and should no longer be bound by other considerations, such as those who she owes a debt to from the leadership campaign.

Secondly, they must be relentlessly hammering home the economic message: Labour is making you poorer. They cannot talk too much about jobs, tax and benefits - repeatedly linking Labour’s decisions to the cost of living, fall in jobs and increase in welfare claimants.29 Kemi’s strongest moment with the public was her response to Reeves’s Budget: this must be built on, and rammed home by every member of the Shadow Cabinet and every advert and communication. Where are the Indebted Baby pictures of yesteryear?

After their record in Government, it was essential that the Tories reset their reputation on immigration and other matters (wokery, etc.). The policies they’ve announced have done this - leaving the ECHR was a vital ‘permission issue’ that provides a core answer to the question, ‘Well, why should we believe you this time’? Repealing the Public Sector Equality Duty is similar. But now these are in place, they should not try to outflank Reform. To win vote share on the right - and win back waverers in the centre and left - they must maximise the salience of the issues they are strongest, which means jobs, tax and welfare, not issues such as immigration where Reform do better.30

Thirdly, they need a much stronger offer to middle class graduates with whom they may not be fully aligned on values. I don't mean BlueSkyers or Green party activists, but moderates, genuine centrists who either stayed home or voted Labour or Lib Dem in 2024.

These voters need to see clearly that they will be better off under the Conservatives: that they will pay less tax, have more disposable income, will find it easier to get a job and will earn more. And to be blunt, for the last 10 years that's not been true. The middle classes have been seen as the cash cow used to fund an ever-burgeoning benefits bill.

They've pledged to abolish interest on Plan 2 student loans - a good, symbolic start on an issue that affects millions. More is needed. I suggest:

• Raising the higher rate threshold to £60,000 - worth £2k to every person earning £60k a year or more.

• Ending the means-testing of child benefit.

• Abolishing the removal of the personal allowance at £100k and the removal of free childcare.

Around 1 in 5 taxpayers pay the higher rate (and this will be a higher proportion of households) - and a much higher percentage of the graduate middle class they must win back. Far fewer earn over £100k - but many of them might hope to one day. Taken together - alongside the existing student loan pledge - they would combine immediate financial gains with a message that the Tory party is back on the side of aspiration.

A situation where most educated, higher earning people vote for parties in favour of large-scale redistribution is fundamentally unstable: the Tories just have to give them a reason to come back.

In reforming the party, addressing its baggage and strengthening her own reputation with the public, Kemi has laid the foundations for a Conservative revival. Now she must build on it.

Ultimately, I do not say it is inevitable that Kemi will win. Only that she might - and that she is the best chance the Tory party has of not just winning power, but knowing what to do with it if they get it.

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This is an oversimplification.

If you don’t pay your taxes, the government will send you a strongly worded letter and begin adding interest to what you owe them. If you continue to not pay, they will start to impose fines. If you don’t pay the fines, they will issue you a court order. If you continue to ignore the court they may prosecute you. If you ignore that, they can send the police to arrest you. And if you hole up in your house with a gun, resisting arrest by force, they will shoot you.1

One mark of a civilised society is that most people pay their taxes without getting involved in regular gun battles with the authorities.2 Even Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion.

But the reason this works is because the escalation ladder is clearly understood - indeed, it is embedded at such a deep level we almost never think about it. If HMRC doesn’t check whether people have filed their tax returns, if fines were ignored, if criminals knew the police would give up if you resisted arrest - then the whole system begins to break down. Not everyone, not all at once - but as soon as some people see that others can get away without consequences, then others will begin to think that they are suckers for paying, and the rot spreads.

Lately, in Britain, we’ve been forgetting that, without consequences, systems collapse. That without the temporary harshness of saying ‘no’, the long-term consequences will be far worse. That the consequences of being ‘kind’ to everyone, all the time, will result in kindness to no-one.

Take the case of shop lifting, where organised criminals have realised that security guards are forbidden from intervening3 - either because of concerns that they might get hurt, or that they might injure the thief. Yes, such interventions cannot be made entirely without risk - but if the thieves know the guards are ordered to do nothing, they can carry out their crimes with impunity.

Or the way in which fare-jumping on the Underground has become commonplace, and frequently tolerated by TFL staff. Public transport is an important common good, but falling revenues from failure to enforce payment against cheats is not ‘compassionate’. It will lead to the deterioration of the whole system - something which will hurt poorer people more.4

There was the recent situation of Wetherspoons, which bans dogs except for assistance dogs, and began asking for documentation to prove this. The response by some organisations was that the policy might be acceptable, but that asking for documentation was not acceptable - in other words, that they might have the policy, but could not enforce it. Yet an unenforceable policy is no policy at all.

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Thanks to a friend, Wakefield Morys-Carter1, this model has now been turned into a Political Compass-style internet quiz - which you can take to find out which right-wing archetypes (if any!) you align with.

Take the quiz here.

The quiz consists of 50 multiple choice questions, each of which will present a proposition to which you have to say whether you agree or disagree. ‘Not sure’ is also always an option.

At the end of the quiz you will be presented with a star chart (you can see mine below!) that set out your archetype affinities, as well as a link to take you to a page where you can read more about the archetypes.

No information will be used to identify any participant. There is an optional demographic page at the end, which we will use to see if there are any interesting patterns in the data2 - however, this can be freely skipped if desired to get to the results.

As this is specifically a quiz about right-wing archetypes, it is likely to be of most interest to those on the political right or centre - but even left-wingers may find in themselves a surprising affinity to one or more of the archetypes!

Take the quiz here.

Once taken, please do feel free to share your results - and this quiz - on social media or elsewhere.

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From the right, the concerns largely stem from classic right-wing views including libertarianism, personal choice and the belief that parents, not the state, should make decisions regarding what their children can do. From the left I am a little less sure as to what motivates the opposition, but it appears to be primarily motivated by concerns that it will be ineffective, that it might stop some children accessing good material, or that it distracts from what they see as more important goals, such as tackling misinformation, taking off harmful content, or getting the Government to stop posting on X.

I would like laws to have an impact. I’m also someone who is normally fairly opposed to safetyism and the nanny state, and supportive of parental choice. At the same time I’m not a full-on libertarian: I think some products should be age-gated (tobacco, gambling), regulated even for adults (cars, guns) or outright banned (drink-driving, heroin).

To put my cards on the table, I believe smartphones in general, and social media in particular, have been a deeply harmful societal innovation, at the ‘hey, let’s put lead in petrol’ scale of innovation. Their affects appear to include contributing to declining mental health, collapsing attention spans, bullying and general unhappiness, as well as contributing to broader crises such as falls in literacy, loneliness, fertility collapse and political polarisation. In some cases this is due to direct harms caused by use; in others, it is because the addictive nature crowds out other, healthier activities such as outdoor play or in-person socialising with others. For some of these, we increasingly have causal as well as correlational evidence; for others, it is simply highly indicative, when one looks at the trend lines across very many different countries going south at the same time.1

Smartphones have sufficient other positive uses such that we’re not realistically going to get rid of them - any more than we did cars, despite the deaths they cause. But the case for social media is much weaker: regulation is needed, and a social media ban for under 16s (and a properly enforced phone ban in school) is a good place to start.

So here are responses to twelve of the most common objections to the ban which set out why I think that, even if it’s not a silver bullet, it’s both necessary, and will have a positive impact.

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1. Australia’s experience shows the ban won’t work. 40% of 12-15 year olds in Australia who had had social media accounts were no longer using it. A 40% drop in people doing a harmful thing is a big impact. The proportion not using it will increase in future cohorts as it is easier to persuade people not to start using something than to persuade existing users to stop.

2. This is about culture change, not legislation. Culture and legislation are mutually reinforcing. ‘It’s illegal’ is a strong signal to parents not to let their children use it - and, for some children, not to use it (or at least not regularly). Previous shifts - drink-driving, smoking - saw culture gradually change after legislation was passed.2

3. Parents are responsible for their children, not the state. They are, but we already age-gate many products, from alcohol and tobacco to films and video games. Social media has a particularly strong case for state intervention because it’s hard for parents to act alone. If 95% of children are on social media and use it to socialise, keeping your child off has real downsides; if only 50%, or 20% of children are on it, these downsides greatly diminish.

4. We should be focusing on removing bad material, not banning platforms. There is no way to have ‘harmless’ social media for children in its current form. Yes, some content is very bad, but many of the damaging impacts are caused by the nature of the medium, and repeated exposure to - in themselves - harmless content, not by specifically harmful content.3

5. Social media causes harms to adults, too. Yes, it does - and we can come to that. But children are more vulnerable, the civil liberty concerns are much smaller when it comes to children, and there is a much higher public consensus for action regarding children - so we should do this now. Many other harmful products where regulation for adults followed began by limiting access for children.

6. Children will still be able to see this material by other means. No doubt they will - but fewer will, and those that do will see it less often. The availability and frequency matter a lot. In the old days, a 14 year old could sneak his older brother’s top-shelf magazine, or watch an 18 when his parents were out; this is far less harmful than an endless stream of porn or violent content delivered via social media or short-form video.

7. These sites are useful for study / other purposes. The ban is on social media, not the internet. Many other sites for study and other purposes exist and can be easily found and accessed by those who want to use them for this purpose.

8. Without social media, children who feel isolated/bullied/have abusive parents won’t be able to find others to support them. Again, we’re banning social media, not the internet. The kids who really need it can find other routes.4 Ultimately, this is a trade-off: overall, social media is a major vector of cyber-bullying and abuse, as well as a source for radicalisation into all sorts of extreme cults - far more kids are being exposed to or being drawn into harms than are using it for escape.

9. Enforcing this will require IDing every adult. Many sites already carry out age-verification without using ID.5 They do it by face-scans, or by scanning documents which are then deleted after verification. Plus unless you’re very unusual you already give your identity online to your bank, multiple online retailers and dozens of other sites, so let’s get real about the added risk here.

10. This will reduce the pressure to act against social media in other ways. Possibly - but this is an argument of the form ‘accepting civil partnerships will make gay marriage less likely to happen’ or ‘if we tax cigarettes we won’t get an advertising ban’. Those arguments were wrong - and this one is likely to be too. If the harms caused by social media to adults are as significant as you think they are - and they are - then it won’t prevent further regulation.

The objective of the ban isn’t to stop every under 16 year old from using social media - an unrealistic goal - but to stop most of them using it, and for those of them who are using it to use it less.6 And for both of these numbers to improve, over time, just as was the case with under age smoking or drink-driving.

As an addendum, I’m aware that there are people who think the entire focus on children is a right-wing plot to deflect from wider social media regulation. I set out in (5) why it makes sense to start with children.

But to demonstrate good faith, I’ll say here that yes, I agree that regulation of social media more broadly would be desirable, and give some examples of measures I think would be worth considering.

I am, it is true, deeply sceptical that the answer lies in giving a regulator a duty to (or mandating tech barons to) censor certain materials, not because, as one person said, I ‘can’t tell the difference between pro-ana material and political discussion’ but because I don’t trust the regulator - or tech company - to rapidly move from the first into the second.7 I also believe it is the innate harms of the platforms, rather than the content, which cause the most harm, so these measures focus there.

These are all initial thoughts rather than fully fledged out ideas; they are not intended to be an exclusive or comprehensive list; furthermore, some may not work in practice, or be less useful than they seem as we gain a greater understanding of how social media causes harms. But they are a set of starting suggestions.

1. Ban continuous scroll. Appears to one of the most addictive features with no downside in banning it.

2. Require a 20s delay before playing any video. Would make essentially no difference to watching TV episodes or films, but would effectively nuke short-form video.8

3. Require all platforms to have the default feed as people you follow, in chronological order. Reduces algorithmic effects.

4. Any platform that uses an algorithm more complex than ‘people you follow in chronological order’ to be treated as a publisher, and held to account for content. As above, but more robustly.

5. Require users to use real names. Much of the worst content is produced by anons; it would also make it easier to hold people to account for things that are banned in real life, such as libel or incitement to violence.

6. Require all platforms to provide a suite of user tools. This might include hard blocks, ability to detag yourself or restrict ‘quote tweets’, and community notes.

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I’ve always said I’m not very into poetry.

I’m sure that’s true, compared to some people. I don’t ‘get’ a lot of poetry and have always found it hard to memorise, compared to songs.1 I rarely pick up a book of poems to read.

But when I had children, it turned out there were a surprising number of poems I realised wanted to introduce them to. And that process, it turned out, made me read them with greater appreciation, revisiting old friends and sometimes discovering others, unknown, by familiar authors.

Below are twenty poems I return to, that for various reasons send a tingle down my spine.2 A short extract of each - from the beginning, middle or end - are included. I hope you enjoy.

In alphabetical order.

1. The Destruction of Sennacherib - Lord Byron

This was in the post that prompted mine - but how could I leave it out? One where the sheer beauty of the language causes shivers.3

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

…

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

2. Duck’s Ditty - Kenneth Grahame

One of the rare ones I know by heart, I would recite to my children as babes, to get them to sleep. Its words conjure the world of the River Bank, with Mole, Rat, Otter, Badger and, of course, Toad.

Ducks’ tails, drakes’ tails,

Yellow feet a-quiver,

Yellow bills all out of sight

Busy in the river!

3. Excelsior - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I have a beautiful picture-book copy of Hiawatha’s Childhood which I love, and my children have also.4 Yet it is that ‘banner with that strange device’ which with its mystery has wormed itself into my brain and stuck there.

The shades of night were falling fast,

As through an Alpine village passed

A youth, who bore, ‘mid snow and ice,

A banner with the strange device,

Excelsior!

His brow was sad; his eye beneath,

Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,

And like a silver clarion rung

The accents of that unknown tongue,

Excelsior!

4. The Gods of the Copybook Headings - Rudyard Kipling

If is the classic choice, and it is indeed glorious. The Female of the Species is the funniest. Now Chil the Kite, Buddha at Kamakura and Recessional all have their case to make. But as I make my way through middle age, and look at the state of the world, it is increasingly The Gods of the Copybook Headings that return again and again.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

5. Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll

The quintessential nonsense poem - and another I know by heart. As an aside, excellent French and German translations can be found in Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

6. The Jumblies - Edward Lear

How pleasant to know Mr Lear! His longer poems have always had greater appeal to me than his limericks - and again, aided perhaps by a gloriously illustrated compendium that both I and my children have enjoyed.5

Far and few, far and few,

Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

And they went to sea in a Sieve.

7. The King’s Breakfast - A. A. Milne

Beloved volume, packed full of beloved poems. How could I choose just one? But choose one I must, and there is really no other contender.

The Dairymaid
She curtsied,
And went and told
The Alderney:
"Don't forget the butter for
The Royal slice of bread."
The Alderney
Said sleepily:
"You'd better tell
His Majesty
That many people nowadays
Like marmalade
Instead."

8. The Lady of Shalott - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Between this and The Charge of the Light Brigade it was a close thing, but ultimately this won out.6 Very long, and very beautiful.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried

The Lady of Shalott.

9. Lepanto - G. K. Chesterton

I discovered Chesterton as an adult rather than a child - which was a glorious thing to discover! The Donkey packs a tremendous punch in its 16 lines, but there is something particularly wonderful about an epic poem about something that took place in (relatively) modern history, rather than ancient myth.7

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,

Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,

Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,

The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,

The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,

That once went singing southward when all the world was young,

In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,

Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,

Don John of Austria is going to the war,

10. The Listeners - Walter de la Mare

I can remember reading this as a young child and desperately wanting to know more than the few, haunting, lines of the poem reveal.

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

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These are not very useful numbers to know in daily life. But thanks to having done a physics degree, so embedded are they in my brain that I still remember them 20 years later, long after I’ve forgotten how to do a contour integral.

When reading the news - or doing policy work, or journalism - one will, however, frequently come across a bunch of numbers, often very large, that one has to put in context. Is £20 million a lot? How about £20 billion? How many schools are there, anyway?

What follows is a list of 50 basic facts to have at your finger tips that, if you know them2, will help you to make sense of the news and of public policy more broadly.

All figures have - deliberately - been rounded for ease of committing to memory. They are accurate enough to get a handle on something or - with the addition of an ‘about’ - to say on the radio, not to plug into precise calculations.

Population

1. The population of the UK is 70 million.

2. The population of England is 60 million.3

3. The population of the United States is 350 million.

4. The population of India is 1.5 billion

5. The population of the world is 8 billion.

6. London > Scotland > Wales > Northern Ireland.

Demography

7. Life expectancy is about 80 years.

8. Total Fertility Rate (children born per woman) is 1.4.

9. 1 in 6 of the population belongs to an ethnic minority – or 1 in 3 of children under 18.4

10. 1 in 5 of the population is aged 65 or over.

11. Net migration last year was 170,000.5

Economy

12. The GDP of the UK is £3 trillion.

13. 0.1% of GDP is £3 billion.6

14. National debt is 95% of GDP.

15. The deficit is 5% of GDP.

16. Tax as a share of GDP is 35% – 40%.7

17. Spending as a share of GDP is 40 – 45%.8

18. Median salary for a full time employee is £39,000.

19. Minimum wage is £12.71.

20. The state pension is £12,500 a year.

21. 35 million people are in employment – 80% of them in the private sector.

22. Unemployment stands at 5%.9

23. Prices have roughly doubled since 2000.

24. The richest 1% pay 25% of income tax; the richest 10% pay over half.

Public services

25. There are about 25,000 schools in England – with about five times as many primary schools as secondary schools.

26. There are 9 million pupils in school.

27. A quarter of these are eligible for Free School Meals.

28. About 6% of children are in private school; about 2% are home educated.10

29. About 1/3 of 18 year olds go straight to higher education – with over 40% going by aged 21.

30. There are around 200 hospitals with an A&E department in England.

31. The NHS waiting list has 7 million cases on it.11

32. The median time to wait for an elective treatment is 3 months.

33. Around 10 million crimes are committed each year.

34. There are approximately 100,000 people in prison.

35. On average, it takes a year between an offence being committed and a case concluding in the Crown Court.

Housing

36. There are 30 million households in the UK.

37. About 2/3 own their own home.

38. About 1 in 6 live in social housing.

39. The average house price in the UK is £250k - £350k.12

40. 200,000 – 300,000 houses are built each year.

Energy

41. Peak electricity demand is 45GW.

42. We get about:

· 30% from wind

· 25% from gas

· 10% from nuclear

· 15% imported

43. The energy bill for a typical household is £1500 - £2000 a year.

Public Spending

Of the £1,400 billion (£1.4 trillion) spent by Government each year, we spend:

44. £200 billion a year on the NHS.

45. £175 billion on pensions and pensioner benefits

46. £150 billion on working age benefits

47. £60 billion on schools

48. £40 billion on defence

49. £0.1 billion on MP salaries…

50. …and £110 billion on debt interest

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Simple to explain, it clearly communicated their values: what they stood for and who they were against.1 It was also massively popular, with even 2024 Tory voters being almost evenly split on the policy.2

Even better, the policy was absolute catnip for right-wing commentators, who simply couldn’t stop talking about it. These ranged from the comically unsympathetic Telegraph case studies, on the lines of, ‘Oh no, if this goes through we might have to give up one of our three annual ski holidays and trade in the second Ferrari for a Porsche’ to earnest analytical studies arguing that Labour had slightly overestimated the money it would raise.3

Whatever the genre of criticism, it served no purpose but to raise the salience of one of Labour’s most popular policies - plus the fact that every minute that Bridget Phillipson spent being asked about VAT on private schools was one in which she wasn’t being asked about her (non-existent) policy on tuition fees.

I deliberately avoided talking about this subject until it had happened - I had no wish to do Labour’s campaign work for them, and there was clearly no chance of averting it. But with the policy now in effect, it’s time to have a clear-eyed look at how the independent sector created an open goal for Labour - and how they could regain their lost support.

But how did it get that way?

On a purely personal basis, it’s notable that I, as a middle-class professional in the Home Counties, with a household income in the top 10% of the country and plenty of friends and acquaintances in similar situations, can think of just three families I know who are sending their children to private schools.4 Indeed, while I oppose the VAT policy, it’s out of principle - those parents are already paying twice for their education - rather than from any personal stake in the decision.

For that matter, while Phillipson’s VAT raid has now caused a rally round the flag effect, when I was a Tory SpAd, the interest in private schools amongst Conservative MPs was surprisingly low - certainly lower than it was in grammar schools, or faith schools. I’m not saying any of them were opposed to them, they just weren’t a big deal.5

So how did private schools so comprehensively lose the middle classes?

There are three principal reasons:

1. Fee inflation

2. Phasing out of full scholarships

3. Failure to combat university discrimination

1. Fee inflation

The IfS finds that average school fees have gone up, in real terms, 20% since 2010 and 55% since 2003. Longer term studies suggest that fees have gone up in nominal terms by 5% a year since the earlier ‘90s, meaning they’ve almost doubled in real terms since then.

This isn’t pure greed.6 Private schools are in competition with each other, which creates a natural arms race. And the large injection of state-school funding under New Labour, followed by the improvements in quality under the Conservatives, have meant stiffer competition from the (free) competition.

But to keep fees rising above inflation year-on-year, through weak growth and a cost of living crisis, was abject folly. With average fees standing at over £15,000 per pupil - plus extras7 - the days in which a mid-ranking civil servant, a good journalist, a clergyman or an MP could consider sending their children private are long gone - unless they have private means or a high-earning spouse.

Of course, it’s not that in the past all people in these would have sent their children private.8 But the fact that they could made all the difference: people in these roles would have seen private schools as a valuable component of their options, even if they never took it up - and, as such, valued them.9

Similarly, by raising their prices so high, private schools have made themselves irrelevant to the segment of people who might not quite be able to afford it - but hope they might be able to, some day. People can be optimistic about their future earning potential - but only up to a point.

By narrowing their clientele to bankers, city lawyers and accountants, private schools may have increased their revenue - but it turns out that broad-based support for an institution can’t be built on such a narrow base.

2. Phasing out full scholarships

Very few private schools these days offer full academic scholarships on a non-mean-tested basis. An informal survey of a dozen or so private schools found few offering more than a 25% fee remission. Full fee remission is now overwhelmingly confined to bursaries for pupils from low-income families.

Private schools made the shift from means-blind scholarships to means-tested bursaries at the behest of social mobility charities and campaigners. Regardless of the merits of the two options, what private schools failed to recognise is that there was no amount of bursaries they could offer that would appease these campaigners, or persuade them to stand by them against attacks.10

But by removing full scholarships for the middle classes, private schools made themselves irrelevant to a huge chunk of their potential customers. Particularly with the aforesaid increase in fees, a 25% reduction still leaves them unaffordable to most in the top half of the income spectrum. But the chance to win a full scholarship, if your child is bright enough? Ah, suddenly the school enters your landscape.11

A private school wouldn’t have to offer many scholarships to have a big impact on middle class awareness. We used to (just) live in the catchment area for Dame Alice Owen, a semi-selective state school that’s regularly ranked one of the best in the country. There was endless talk about people wondering if they should apply, if their children would get in, studying for the exam, tutoring for the exam - and this for a school that offered 65 academic places in a catchment area containing upwards of half a million people. The vast majority of people who talked about Dame Alice Owen never had children who went - but they felt they might, so it was part of their landscape.12

A few means-blind scholarships from a private school would have the same effect.13

There’s a section in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe after Aslan has offered his life in exchange for Edmund’s, where the White Witch says:

“Fool, did you think that by all this you would save the human traitor? Now I will kill you instead of him…but when you are dead, what will prevent me from killing him as well? And who will take him out of my hand then? Understand that you have given me Narnia forever, you have lost your own life and you have not saved his.”

Her Imperial Majesty Jadis, Queen of Narnia, Chatelaine of Cair Paravel, Empress of the Lone Islands, etc.

By switching out scholarships for bursaries, private schools lost those who might have supported them - but did not gain new friends.

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It is, of course, correct to say that the Ancient Greeks did not envisage her to look precisely like this. Homer describes her as ‘white-armed’, with other ancient writers similarly suggesting lighter colouring. But for anyone looking to precisely determine Helen of Troy’s ‘correct’ ethnicity, her semi-divine egg-born status should be a clue that they may be asking the wrong question.1

The Aegean of Greek mythology was far from an ethnically homogeneous arena, with the troops in defence of Troy coming from as far afield as Africa and the shores of the Black Sea - and other Greek adventurers ranging far afield, from Colchis to the Pillars of Hercules.

And while Helen was not black, there is at least one well-known Greek heroine who was canonically, explicitly, unambiguously black: Andromeda, daughter of Cassiopeia, bride of Perseus and Princess of Ethiopia.

Here’s how she was depicted in the 1981 film, Clash of the Titans.

And here’s how she was portrayed in the 2010 remake:

None of these casting choices matter - any more than it matters whether, when you go to see a production of Hamlet, he looks like an authentic Mediaeval Dane, or that Macbeth looks like an ethnically pure 11th century Scotsman.2 When it comes to Shakespeare or the great myths and epics, we’re not watching them for the realism, but for the archetypal stories and legends that have shaped our culture over the centuries.3

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If you want the canon to survive and thrive, you have to reckon with the fact that the UK and the US today are multiracial societies. A third of the children in the UK are non-white. Do you think Shakespeare and Homer are going to remain cultural pillars if you tell a third of the class they can never play Hamlet, or Odysseus, or Helen, or Juliet?

The same goes for other things. If we want things to stay the same, some things are going to have to change. That means, in most cases, colour-blind casting becoming the norm. Both Miss Honey and the Master of Jordan College were white in the books, but there is no problem with them being black in the recent film / TV series. A black primary school teacher, or a black Master of an Oxford College, do not in any way break our suspension of disbelief. Dune did it brilliantly, with the broader Imperial society being - as one would expect - multiracial - and the Fremen broadly looking plausible for people who’d lived thousands of years in a desert. We should be relaxed, in most cases, about ahistorical proportions of non-white people in depictions of the New Victorians.

But if we’re going to embrace this as a society, we also have to be honest about the small number of circumstances when it doesn’t work - and not gush, coo and suspend all judgement just because a production has used a non-white actor. The approach of some identitarians, in which casting becomes an arena in which ethnic minority actors can do no wrong, while arbitrary guardrails are placed around what white actors can do, won’t wash either.

If a show is going for high levels of strict historical realism, then that has to include race, if our suspension of belief is not to be shattered.4 Shogun got it right here, with the Japanese characters looking Japanese and the European actors looking European. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say Wolf Hall got it badly wrong in its second season.

The same goes for realistic biopics of historical characters5, particularly recent figures, or those where race was essential to their lives, such as Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King.6 (Theatre, as opposed to film and television, is and always has been far more flexible, and should remain so. The audience demand for verisimilitude is much lower).

And while I’ve praised some fantasy/sci-fi works such as Dune and His Dark Materials, the Wheel of Time did less well. Having Padan Fain and Siuan Sanche be black was fine,7 but for the Two Rivers, an isolated, rural area, to be highly multi-racial jarred. The characters from there are country bumpkins emerging into a much wider world;8 there’s a significant plot point about one of the characters looking as if he doesn’t come from there; and there’s even a story-arc in a later book in which the region takes in large numbers of immigrants and becomes more cosmopolitan! To compound it, having done the rest of the world with colour-blind casting, they then made Shienar homogeneously ethnically East Asian, a peculiar decision which made the previous incongruities stand out more.

Most importantly we need to stop the nonsense of calling out people for not being precisely ‘the right shade of black’, or Jasmine in Aladdin being Indian-origin rather than Arabic9, or a Jewish actress not being a good fit for a role that was canonically half-Mexican, half-Jewish.10 The idea that actors can only play someone with the same identity characteristics is nonsense and wrong - they’re actors, and that’s what they do: act.11 Most roles should be open to anyone, and where that’s not the case, what matters is avoiding suspension of disbelief for the audience.12

Ethnically gating the canon only serves the interests of the philistines who wish to tear it down. Those who are only too ready to declare great works ‘problematic’, or ‘Eurocentric’13; who speak of ‘decolonising’ the curriculum or the arts. There is a legion of such small-minded, small-souled, individuals, who have wormed their way into positions of influence in our schools, our universities, our government bodies and our cultural institutions.

But though they have had great success in seizing the commanding heights of our cultural establishment, the wreckers face one insuperable problem. New-fangled pap, selected for its ideological purity or the identity of its author, can’t hold a candle compared to the works the iconoclasts seek to denigrate.

There’s a reason why audiences still throng in their millions to see Shakespeare, why Hollywood has given a top director hundreds of millions of dollars to make a blockbuster, or why the remakes and retakes keep coming.

Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships isn’t good only because she’s a great writer, but because she’s retelling, with both great faithfulness and originality, timeless myths that have been told again and again over two thousand years, such that most of us, going back generations, would have familiarity with.

Hamilton isn’t only good because Lin-Manuel Miranda is a musical genius, but because the ideals of the American Revolution are noble and inspirational, and the founding fathers, collectively, a set of brilliant, impassioned and heroic men with the courage to make their dreams a reality.14

These are songs to echo through the ages, sung and resung by voices anew.

I care about the Western canon not because it is necesarily better than any others, but because it is ours.15 Because it speaks timeless truths. Because old things that have endured should continue to do so. And because more than ever, in a society that is becoming more diverse, and buffeted by social and technological change, we need shared narratives, shared stories and shared culture that we can hold in common.

If you care about the canon, your problem shouldn’t be with those such as Nyong'o or Miranda who wish to seem themselves within it.16 We are all17 adoptive, not natal, heirs to the legacy of Greece and Rome, through the actions of those in the Renaissance and Enlightenment who chose to centre it.

Western Civilisation is an idea18, not an ethnicity - and it is open to all those who choose to embrace it.

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Hot on the heels of that thought comes the realisation of just how hard it is to actually inculcate these values - and hot on the heels of that comes the awareness of all the ways in which you yourself, as an adult, fail to live up to the practices you’ve just decided are the healthy and wholesome ways to live.1

So what are those traits?2 Well, academic ability and perseverance (or ‘grit’) may be amongst the most important for success, and social skills for making friends and forming relationships.3 But in terms of happiness, contentment may be at the top - for however much we have, or achieve, without contentment, we can always want more.

One of the earliest things we banned with Eldest was watching those awful videos of children unwrapping toys on YouTube. At the age of 3 or 4 he’d watched some at a friend’s house - and I vividly remember the following conversation, in which I told him that these videos were made by bad people,4 who were trying to make other people unhappy so that they could make money - and that no good could come of watching them, except discontentment and misery. The message went home and they’ve remained verboten for our family ever since.

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Speak to anyone who’s used a vet recently, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear them lament how much they had to pay. But what’s really causing the problem?

As a preamble, yes, the Competition and Markets Authority has recently completed an investigation which concluded there were some problems in areas such as transparency and competition. Various remedies are to be enacted, such as requiring practices to publish a comprehensive price list for standard services. These are good things to do - but as many vets have pointed out, it’s not going to cause prices to plummet.

The fact that some countries in Europe (with similar GDP/capita levels) have cheaper vet fees than us for similar procedures suggests that some of our regulation is likely to have driven up costs in order to obtain higher animal welfare standards / staff ratios / safety than they accept in other countries.1 Given this has been a feature of almost every area of British society - from house-building to childcare to industry - it would be remarkable if this was not the case. But again, while reversing this to lower prices, it’s not the crux of the problem.

Last year, we sadly had to make use of a vet, after a kitten we acquired sadly took ill. It had been a rescue kitten and, sadly, had congenital FIV,2 upon the heels of which came a host of other infections which ultimately carried it away at around six months old.

We had excellent care and found each of our interactions with the vets professional and dedicated. The prices for routine treatments - check-ups, antibiotics and the like - were perfectly reasonable. But overall, the process gave me a new insight into what the real problem is - and it’s not the fault of vets, of the market or of regulation.

We decided to get a blood test, which told us the full extent of the problems. At this point, we are offered an advanced treatment, which would cost £6,000 - £8,000 over several months involving regular (daily?) injections and similar. Over this period, the kitten would have been in considerable discomfort - and the chance of success was only 25%.

The vets didn’t pressure us, or try to guilt-trip us, and were entirely open about the costs and the chance of success. The issue is not their behaviour - it is that the treatment exists at all.

In our case, we declined. While of course one would do this for a human3, we are both of the view that pets are not people, and that this is not something we would do for a pet. But even so, it felt hard.

And our society encourages people to feel that way4 - and even if it did not, it is natural to love a pet, and for many it may be their primary source of companionship. We are all far removed from the rhythms of the farm and field. So it is understandable that many will choose to pay - or else feel guilty that they will not, or cannot. What of those for whom such a sum is not merely large, but the house deposit they’ve been saving up for years, or their only buffer for a rainy day, or who choose to go into debt? What of those who feel no choice in the moment but to pay - and who then regret what it has cost them?

The range, sophistication and complexity of the treatments available have expanded dramatically since the days of James Herriot - or even since the 1980s and 1990s. Veterinary medicine has advanced, just as human medicine has. Advanced drugs, blood tests, MRI scans and more. They exist - and they are not cheap, for animals any more than for humans.5

There is simply no good solution to this. To ban them would be perverse. Banning an effective treatment that could save an animal’s life, and that someone was willing to pay for? People who wished to, and could afford to, pay would understandably be outraged.

About all that can be done, if one is a pet owner, is to think about it in advance, and - if relevant - to discuss it with your partner. What do you think about such matters? Are you both on the same page? At least, this means that any decisions can be made with forethought, and with less agonising, than if confronting them for the first time in the heartache of the moment.

In the meantime, we can and should see if we can make the market work better, or if every bit of regulation is needed. Every little helps in bringing down prices at the margin. But it will not obviate the central cause: that veterinary medicine continues to advance.

Religious Freedom

A couple of months ago there was a row over Muslims celebrating Eid in Trafalgar square6, after an MP, Nick Timothy, described it as an ‘act of domination’. This was widely criticised by a wide range of people who accused him of singling out Muslims. Some of his defenders tried to muddy the waters, arguing that his criticism had not been based on Islam, but that the event had been ‘against British values’ because it had been gender segregated, or ‘exclusionary’; before Nick, helpfully, used a follow-up column to clarify that his critique had explicitly been based on ‘Islamic domination’.

I don’t intend to relitigate the issue, on which many column inches have already been expended. Rather, I’d like to note that the debate showed that many of both his critics and defenders appear to have a minimal understanding of what both religion, and religious freedom, really mean.

It was notable that the criticism of Timothy’s comments was not just unusually severe, but included many who do not usually care about religious freedom; indeed, some who on other occasions have criticised religious institutions such as faith schools, practices such as Halal/Kosher slaughter, or supported restrictions on religious expressions, such as buffers around abortion clinics. The issue for such people was not Muslims’ freedom to pray, but the singling out of Muslims as a specific religious group. The issue was discrimination and uneven treatment, not a concern for religious freedom.

This is, of course, a valid thing to be concerned about! But there are two implications.

• First, one should not mistake this as demonstrating any upswell of support for religious freedom more broadly. Some may, of course, hold both views. But to assume those criticising Timothy would be willing to actively defend religious practices, freedoms or institutions they disagree with - provided any prohibitions were applied impartially across all religions - would be a mistake.

• More significantly, those who see religion as essentially equivalent to skin colour have a sorely lacking understanding of religious faith. The real world is not Civilization IV, where all religions are identical, with just a different colour, emblem and religious building.7 Religions are different: and for those who take their faith seriously, will shape their morals, values, actions and lives. It is absolutely possible that a religion - or to be more precise, a manifestation of a religion8 - may have values and manifestations that are opposed to those of liberal democracy.9 By refusing to even see that Timothy’s specific criticisms are worthy of engaging with, too many of his critics reduce religion to the realm of window dressing.

But if that is his critics, the statements of some of his defenders are even more inimical to religious freedom.

The suggestion that ‘there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet’, in itself, is unacceptable in a public place, would seem to cause severe problems for both the first commandment and John 14:6, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ I have certainly seen the latter outside many churches! The logical implication is that only polytheisms should be permitted to worship in Trafalgar Square.10

The defences that rest upon gender segregation being ‘against British values’ are even worse. There was at least one occasion when a person advancing this was flummoxed when it was pointed out that some Orthodox Jews worshipped in this way, and did he wish to ban them too? And what of Catholicism, in which only men can become priests? This is the same perversion of ‘British values’ that saw Ofsted repeatedly fail private Jewish primary schools for not teaching LGBT content.

A religious liberty that depends upon the religion conforming to all of the current secular society’s mores is a shallow form indeed. It leaves no space for any but the most ‘progressive’ religions in public life. If that’s the goal, say so - but don’t hide behind religious freedom.

Defending religious freedom doesn’t just mean standing up for happy celebrations of diversity, such as celebrating a festival in public. It means defending the right of people to do things you fundamentally disagree with and think are actively bad.11 There can be limits, of course - FGM would be an example of something beyond those limits for me - but if those limits are not well beyond what things that you personally think are good, the amount of real toleration you are displaying is zero.12

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Fractional Soul Trading

Selling your soul to the devil is a mug’s game. No matter how much money, power and sex you get, it’s not worth a lifetime of eternal torment.

So while Faust is a great story, the number of people willing to make such a deal will be highly limited. There is therefore a strong incentive for the devils to make such deals more enticing.

One option explored in literature13 is the concept of a get-out clause if one passes a test, or challenge. The sort of person who believes they can strike a good deal with the devil is probably also the sort of person who thinks they can beat this sort of test. But this is a bit complicated and not that scalable.

In a world in which deals with the devil exist and the devils are as portrayed - powerful, intelligent, evil, hungry for souls and incapable of breaking explicit deals - sooner or later, either the devils or the humans are going to invent fractional soul trading.

In fractional soul trading, rather than trading their soul, a person trades a fractional probability of their soul - for example 10% - in exchange for proportionally lesser rewards. Multiple deals over a lifetime would be possible. Upon death, with probability equal to the amount that is owned by the devil, the devil takes custody of that person’s soul; if not, it goes to its normal destination.14

While the expected value of such a deal is still negative infinity, for any given individual, it looks rather different. Yes, they have a 10% - or 5%, or 20% - chance of damnation, but a 90% chance of an improved life, with no negative consequences at all. That is a bargain that many people, sadly, would take.15

Different people might take different approaches. Some might trade 15% or 20% for something they really wanted, such as great wealth, or the perfect partner. Others might trade 1% every few years, for small but significant boosts throughout their career. Those who abjured from such deals would rapidly be left behind.

Unfortunately, this would rapidly become a Molochian situation. Once some begin participating in such pacts, the higher levels of success in politics, in business or the arts could not be obtained without it. It would be the doping scandal in cycling writ large. In any zero sum game, others would be forced to do the same - or abandon any hope of success. The fractions of a typical soul traded would gradually edge up until the probability became too much for people to stomach - and yet each person’s chance of success would be no better than before fractional soul trading was invented.

A good nation would, therefore, prohibit such deals.16 But one can equally see a darker fate. A nation that institutes a draft, in which draftees are forced into fractional soul trading for the good of the nation. Inevitably this would go beyond wealth and infrastructure, to success in military matters, continuing the Molochian arms-race on an international scale, fuelled by the unwilling souls of the partially damned.

A devil’s deal, indeed.

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I appreciate there a lot of things to subscribe to, so I’ve set the monthly fee at the Substack minimum of £3.50 - about the price of a cup of coffee,1 and rather less than a pint. For those who’d rather not pay, about half of my regular posts will continue to be free for everyone to read - as will the Forecasting Contest, Christmas Quiz and any reader surveys.

To say thank you to all my existing readers, I’ve also cut the price for this opening weekend. For those who take out an annual subscription by or before Sunday, it will be £25 - or 40% less than paying monthly.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

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Complimentary subscriptions

I’ve provided complimentary subscriptions to a small number of people, including family, close friends,2 current work colleagues, MPs and peers. If you’re in one of these categories and I’ve accidentally missed you out,3 please get in touch to let me know.4

If you have your own Substack with at least 1000 subscribers, I’m also happy to give you a complimentary subscription if you add me to your ‘Recommendations’ list.

Looking forward to continuing this blogging journey with you all, free or paid.

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My political views haven’t changed dramatically over the years. While I was much less politically engaged as a student, I would still have put myself on the right. But occasionally it’s worth looking back at some of the big things I’ve changed my mind on in politics - and what prompted me to do so.

Now, too many ‘changed my mind’ lists end up being, ‘once I believed in social democracy, but after much reflection I’ve realised I’m actually a democratic socialist’ or, ‘I used to support clause 32(a)(iii) of the Tax and Accountancy Act 1994, but now I don’t.’ And I could give you dozens of small shifts of that nature.

So the five items below are all ones where (a) they’re genuinely big issues; and (b) I’ve properly changed my mind; a 180 degree turn1 taking me from one side of the argument to another.

They are, in no particular order:2

1. The Iraq War

2. Raising income tax thresholds

3. French/Welsh style cultural protection

4. Lifting student number caps

5. Public Sector Pensions

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1. The Iraq War

A classic one first: like around half of the population, I supported the war at the time, whereas now I think it was a mistake.3

Why did I support it? I believed the Government that Saddam Hussein either had, or was close to, obtaining weapons of mass destruction4 - and Saddam was clearly a bad guy, meaning I thought Iraq would be better off with him gone. The interventions in Kosovo and (as it seemed at the time) Afghanistan made foreign interventions look easy. I underestimated the challenges of nation building. And I didn’t (and still don’t) think that the consent of Russia and China makes a difference to whether or not a war is moral.

On an emotional level, I was probably irritated by the casual anti-Americanism and general lefty-ness of many of my fellow students,5 meaning a level of contrariness may have shaped my position.

My views have changed for much the same reason as everyone else’s. There were no WMDs, nation-building was hard, the cost was huge and the number of allied and Iraqi deaths, over the years, was immense. It squandered the good will of 9/11 and fractured the Western coalition that had gone into Afghanistan - and undoubtedly created the power vacuum which first enabled ISIS to flourish and strengthened Iran, both of which have caused as many problems down the line as Saddam did.6

2. Raising income tax thresholds

When the Coalition Government set out to raise the income tax threshold from c. £6,500 to £10,000 I was a big supporter. Although it was originally a Lib Dem policy, it was one I thought fitted fully with Conservative values.

It helped to make work pay - serving justice and strengthening the incentive to come off benefits. It was a tax cut, focused on the working poor who needed it most - and yet was universal, in that everyone benefited. I also felt the idea that we should tax low paid people, only to give a bunch of that money back via benefits, seemed pointless and inefficient: why should the government take with one hand and give back with the other?

Yet with hindsight, this was a mistake: a clear move away from the Lawsonian principle that taxation should be broad-based with low rates; i.e. that most people should contribute to some extent.7 Even if some of the money is ultimately given back, it would be better to have more people feeling they are contributing through tax, in order to maintain a stronger constituency for lower taxes.8

Following the reforms, more than 40% of adults were not paying any income tax at all. This is now down to just over a third - a much healthier state of affairs, and it is no coincidence that the pendulum on tax cuts vs tax rises has swung back as more people are dragged into the tax system. As someone who believes high taxes are economically damaging9, a broader base so that more people can directly feel the impact of higher public spending would be both beneficial and fairer.

To that extent, the recent freezes to the income tax threshold are a good thing. Of course, I’d have preferred them to be accompanied by a cut in the base rate of income tax (or, better yet, National Insurance10) alongside corresponding cuts to public spending. But raising the thresholds above inflation was a mistake - and restoring high-thresholds should not be a priority of a future tax-cutting government.

3. French/Welsh style cultural protection

I used to scoff at the way the French had language quotas for cultural preservation on the radio, or the Welsh government’s policy of relentlessly promoting Welshness via language, culture and history. Haha, how weak the French must think their culture is, to need such protections, I thought. Us in Britain have no need of such foolish things, as our culture is so great.11

But the reality is that any nation that wishes to survive as a nation needs to shore up its identity - which means an active, deliberate and ongoing programme of nation-building and cultural support. It is one of the most basic tests of whether you are a serious nation12 - and we can see that every nation (or similar) that is serious about its identity does this, whether it is small (Wales, Scotland) or large and powerful (the EU13, the US, China). Some in Britain mutter about North Korea every time this is suggested, but the truth is we have multiple democratic examples right on our doorstep.14

Even in Britain we used to do this - look at the Victorians! The idea we ‘don't do flags’ is a modern myth, dating to around the 60s and 70s, and perhaps one that was convenient for both those who regretted the loss of Empire, and those who were ashamed of its existence, to rally round.

In today's Britain - or rather England - we've moved from complacency to sabotage, with most of the institutions that should be at the forefront of maintaining our sense of self as a nation more interested in undermining it. Schools are more focused on highlighting areas of national shame rather than pride, while universities and museums openly adopt the anti-British, anti-Western ideology of ‘decolonisation’ to reorder their curricula and collections. Rather than the series it used to, such as Simon Schama's ‘A History of Britain’, the BBC chooses to commission David Olusoga's relentlessly anti-British ‘Empire’.15

This is not something that has public support. When polled, people - across every ethnic group - repeatedly show strong net agreement with statements such as ‘Britain, throughout its history, has been a force for good in the world’ or that ‘young people who grow up in Britain should be taught to be proud of Britain and its history.’ The approach taken by our schools, universities and museums has been a top-down cultural revolution, imposed by a small minority of the educated elites.16

And yet we can see the results of this relentless campaign of negativity in the attitude of young people, with only 41% of 18-27 year olds expressing pride in their country today, compared to 80% twenty years ago.17

Unlike the French and Welsh, our national language doesn't need protecting. But every publicly funded school and university, every publicly funded museum, and the BBC, should have an underlying duty to promote pride in Britain's history, heritage and culture.18 This doesn’t mean fabricating events, or banning the teaching of slavery. But it means an overall lens that is steadfastly dedicated towards pride, not shame. Again we don't have to look far to find an example of where this is done well. Visit Edinburgh Castle. They don't conceal that the English took Edinburgh at one point. But pride in Scotland oozes from every stone, along with a clear sense of satisfaction for every time they sent the English packing. And that - in Edinburgh - is exactly how it should be.

The biggest threat to Britain's continued survival, qua Britain, is not Russia, or China, or the EU, or Trump, or any external threat. It is simply that the British people give up any sense that Britain is something that is worth preserving, as an independent and united nation.

4. Lifting student number caps

You’ve seen me write about university over-expansion before, such as here, here and here. But believe it or not, when Willetts first said he was going to lift the caps on how many students each university could recruit, I thought it was a good idea.

Essentially I bought the argument that, ‘If Manchester wants to recruit more students, and more students want to go to Manchester, why should the state stop them?’ I believed that choice could be a powerful driver of quality - as it has been in schools, and in the private sector. And although I thought too many people were going, the numbers had been steadily increasing even with the caps, so I didn’t see this as a huge deal breaker.

In reality, what seemed like nice logic at the top of the sector had disastrous consequences. At the bottom end, thanks to no effective quality and standards oversight,19 we saw a huge proliferation of low quality courses, including in business studies and franchised providers, amongst other things. Higher tariff universities expanded rapidly, lowering their entry standards and degree standards to do so - all the while inflating grades, reducing staff/student ratios and over-crowding accommodation and lecture theatres. This in turn put yet more pressure on mid- and low- tariff providers, who faced further pressure to drop standards to recruit students, or else lay off staff.

Student choice also proved a poor driver of quality. In schools, strong external oversight and externally set exams provide robust information that parents can use to judge which schools are best. At university level, institutional autonomy meant it was all too easy for institutions to inflate grades or to dumb down content to inflate their National Student Survey results to climb the league tables. Removing the caps - alongside moving to an almost entirely fee-funded model - meant Government lost almost all influence on issues such as which courses should grow, regional provision or maintaining financial stability.

For some, that would have been a feature, not a bug. But we didn’t see the competition on price or quality that was promised. Instead, rather than competing on quality - as they used to - many universities chose to compete on size instead, with low interest rates fuelling an unsustainable splurge into facilities and infrastructure to attract new students, leaving debts that have come back to bite as interest rates rose.

Although student numbers rose when the caps had been in place, I also underestimated how much harder removing the caps would make it for government to put the genie back in the bottle. Rather than simply dialing the existing control mechanism into reverse, a whole new control mechanism would need to be added - a much harder political ask.

However, regardless of the issue of how many people should go to university, removing the caps was a disaster - as, increasingly, people who disagree with me about the ‘how many?’ question are also saying. The ‘market’ does not function in HE, it is a quasi market, backed by taxpayer funding, that has unleashed all the worst elements of competition - instability, reduction in standards and investment in wasteful conspicuous signalling - with none of the benefits, such as improved quality or lower costs. Regardless of whether you think more or fewer people should be going to university, institutional level caps need to be restored.

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5. Public Sector Pensions

When I was in the civil service it seemed both right and proper that I should have an excellent defined benefit pension. After all, this was an appropriate reward for our lower salaries - and likely outweighed by the large bonuses and stock options enjoyed by our counterparts in the private sector. I felt this strongly: the one time I went on strike was due to pension changes.20

The arguments that final salary schemes were unaffordable I discounted, or rather felt it was artificially created, blaming it on Brown’s tax raid on pension fund dividends. The other thing that struck me as unfair about the defined contribution model was the degree of luck that surrounded a person’s final pension. Particularly when the requirement to buy an annuity was in place, two people retiring just a year apart with the same pension pot might have annual pensions 20% different in size.21 Surely pooling this sort of risk was exactly what Government should do - in fact, could it not encourage this sort of risk-sharing in the private sector, perhaps backed by large insurance firms?

I might have accepted my initial pension - a ridiculously generous final salary scheme accruing at 1/60 per year and takeable in full from 6022 - was a little lavish, but remained strongly in favour of a defined benefit scheme.

A lot of these things are partly true. Brown’s tax raid did have an impact, there was an unfairness regarding the timing of annuities23, and many private sector workers do get benefits - whether shares, bonuses, private health care or staff discounts - outside of their headline salary that the ‘what about the pension?’ crowd ignore.

But it’s pretty clear that overall I was being biased by my own employment.24 Public sector pensions are, and remain, unreasonably high. Including bonuses, public sector pay is only 5% lower than the private sector - which cannot justify the disparity of 27% public vs 6% private average employer contribution into the pension.

Plus, of course, the public sector is more advantageous to employees in other ways, including greater job security, better terms and conditions (such as sick pay or maternity pay) and - at least for office based jobs - more working from home.25

Even if one did think the public sector (or parts of the public sector) should be paid more - perhaps to recruit and retain better staff - then having such a high proportion of total reward devoted to pension contributions would not be the way to do it.26 Employees notoriously undervalue their pension, and for retention and recruitment purposes it would actually be better to give a less generous pension and put more of that funding into increasing headline salaries. This is true whether we’re discussing getting more physics teachers to work in London, or compensating the very highest echelons (the only area where pay really does significantly lag the private sector equivalents) better.

A defined contribution funded pension scheme, with a standardised employer contribution of 10% and an employee contribution of 5%, would be much fairer. This aligns more closely with the best private sector schemes rather than the average, compensates for the 5% lower salary, and the total proportion of salary being invested into an employee’s pension, at 15%, is above the 12% recommended by Pensions UK for a suitable retirement.27 It would still be a good pension - just not an excessive one.

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Lessons learned

So is there a common theme?

There isn’t an obvious directionality: in some I’ve shifted to the right, in others to the left.28 And they are on both economic and cultural matters.

There’s definitely a case that in some cases I was biased - either because the system personally benefitted me (public sector pensions) or played into my prejudices (the English being better than the French) - or to be more credible of ideas if they were coming from people I agreed with on other things.

There’s perhaps another commonality on putting too much confidence in theoretical models of how something should work - the power of choice, nation building - and not enough into how things could go wrong, or how the incentives might play out differently in the real world to in theory. These often look obvious in hindsight, but are hard to spot in advance.

Overall, beware of bias, beware of sympathy/antipathy, and pay more attention to second-order effects as well as theory aren’t bad lessons to take away - even if they can be easier said than done!

26

Other peculiarities of public sector pension schemes include the fact that they vary so much between different parts of the public sector, for historical rather than economic or market conditions, or the fact that employee contribution rates can be relatively high (which is causing an increasing minority to opt-out altogether) and, in a weird ‘progressive’ way, get significantly higher as you get paid more - which can cause someone to see their take-home pay actually decrease when they get a pay-rise.

As someone who has worked through multiple changes of minister and Secretary of State, I’ve seen first hand how, after a transition - even within the same government - policies the civil service doesn’t like are quietly deprioritised or recommended for termination, while those it favours are presented again and again, until a minister can be found who will agree to take them forward.

So it was no surprise to see, despite having played a part in blocking them in 2021,2 the new School Food Standards emerge this week, like a dead rat the cat refuses to stop bringing in, just as I had seen them in draft, five years before.

As if designed by a committee of health food aficionados, to suck all the pleasure of eating from the next generation3, the proposed new rules are full of killjoy sentences such as ‘Fried breads, pastries and croissants are not permitted’, ‘Restricting the use of cheese as a main ingredient,’ ‘Once a week fruit to be the only available dessert option in primary schools’ and ‘Allowing only plain water, semi-skimmed or skimmed milk, lactose free milk and some plant-based drinks in primary and secondary schools.’

The more one reads it, the more depressed one gets:

For drinks:

For whole-grain starch:

Cheese is in the firing line:

As are meatballs, sausages and bacon:4

Traditional puddings such as crumbles, jam roly-poly and syrup sponge are almost completely eliminated - reduced to just once a week:

The Government’s announcement is supported - but of course it is! - by a host of charities, celebrities and assorted do-gooders. And quite possibly it polls well, if asked in the right way, to a population with dim memories of the Jamie Oliver ‘turkey twizzlers’ campaign from 2005. But in the real world, was this at the top of anyone’s priority list? In a world where the cost of living and the state of public services regularly top every poll and focus group,5 across voters from all parties, ages and locations, why do this?6

This is death by 1000 cuts, a never-ending stream of regulations that impoverish business, households and the public sector alike. It is not just the hundred million pounds bat tunnels and fish discos; not just the HS2 bridges to nowhere. It is the £1.8 billion cost of Martyn’s Law, requiring all premises such as church halls and larger pubs with over 100 capacity to take steps to mitigate the impact of terrorism; the £2.7 billion cost of requiring new higher buildings to have second staircases - both policies the Government’s own impact assessments assess to have minimal benefits.

It is the plethora of regulations which mean childcare costs have increased by 80% in real terms since 2000, why ever-longer regulatory codes choke our financial services, and why 20mph zones proliferate across our towns and villages. It is why Eldest’s year 8 school trip to France costs 33% more for 20% less time than mine did 30 years ago7 and behind the increasing requirements heaped upon pubs, restaurants, small businesses and charities. Nor is the public sector immune. It is why schools which used to have a couple of admin staff now have admin blocks, why the NHS needs more midwives to deliver fewer babies and why everything, from reservoirs to prisons, takes longer and costs more.

I am not saying any of these are unpopular in themselves - on the contrary, most are brought in to cheers and any attempts at abolition are met with howls of outcry.8 The British public loves banning things. Very few of these rules are entirely stupid, or have no benefit at all. But in aggregate they are immiserating, making life more expensive, less convenient and less colourful. The British people are facing the revealed consequence of their own actions.

What is more, those who push these regulations will never be satisfied. The school food standards were updated shortly after, and as a direct result of, Jamie Oliver’s campaign, updated again in 2014, with various smaller amendments since then. But still they cry for more. Whether it is alcohol, road safety, childcare, hygiene, health and safety or food, the ratchet only goes in one direction.9

As C. S. Lewis wrote:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.”

C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

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This stuff makes me despair far more than major laws I disagree with, such as the Employment Rights Act. While the latter is individually more damaging, it is at least the result of a distinct political process: championed by a senior Cabinet Minister, included in a manifesto and passed with deliberate intent by a government strongly aligned with its measures. It can as easily be repealed - indeed, both the Conservatives and Reform have pledged to do so.

But how to deal with the torrent of regulation pouring, incessantly, from every department and quango? How to put the risk-aversion ratchet into reverse? St George marches out with shield and spear10 to face the dragon - but instead meets a plague of locusts which, sweeping past his clumsy efforts, strip the countryside bare.11

I have on occasion suggested that we should simply repeal every law and regulation passed since the mid-90s, with only a small grace period allowed to identify those we wished to keep.12 In reality this probably would not work - even if we could find a politician bold enough to do it.13 Other whimsical ideas, such as every law ceasing within 10 years unless an MP can be found to read it out, in full, in the Chamber, similarly belong more within the pages of a Heinlein novel than in real life.14

Nevertheless, there are measures that can be taken. The One In:Two Out mechanism imposed by the Coalition had some success, though too many measures were excluded from its scope to be effective. Sunset clauses could be applied routinely to new quangos and regulation (and even to older ones) and parliamentary approval required for regulators to impose new regulations which would have more than a minimal cost. An interesting idea I recently came across was for a standing committee tasked to systematically review regulation - primary, secondary and requirements from regulators - that could only recommend repealing (in whole or in part), not additions. Each quarter a package for repeal would be presented to a senior minister, who would then have the final decisions on whether or not to repeal, confirmed by a Parliamentary vote.

But all these mechanisms can only go so far. After years of stagnating living standards, to restore our prosperity, our freedom and our public services, we will need a Prime Minister and Cabinet who will tackle regulation with the same single-minded focus that Thatcher applied to privatisation, or Cameron and Osborne applied to deficit reduction.

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I’ve spent much of the last week playing Theme Manor, a fun new game created by members of the development teams behind the old classics Theme Park and Theme Hospital - and very much in the same vein - in which you have to design and manage your own Stately Home.

Initially developed in partnership with the National Trust, the Trust pulled the plug on the design team halfway through development, citing those old chestnuts ‘irreconcilable differences in values’ and ‘gratuitous levels of violence and gore.’ Fortunately the developers were able to raise the highly impressive $5,318,008 on Kickstarter - one of the largest sums ever raised for a computer game crowd-funder1 - and were able to complete the project despite the National Trust’s attempted cancellation.

Those of us who backed the Kickstarter got it a week in advance, and it has now just gone on general release.

Gameplay

The premise is that you’ve just inherited a dilapidated stately home with a rapidly declining bank balance, and that you have to renovate it and turn it into a top tourist destination before you go bankrupt.2 Gameplay and graphics are very much in the style of its classic 90s predecessors, with the same trademark detail-orientation and sense of humour.3

A quick-start game plunges you straight into the action after choosing a number of parameters: difficulty level, the circumstances under which you inherited the hall (including gambling debts, experimental architect and excessive travel - each of which can lead to certain events triggering) and location, for which choices include the Home Counties (expensive land and staff, but good proximity to foreign tourists), Wales (cheap land but it rains almost every day4) and Yorkshire (where the staff are hard-working but bloody-minded). Advanced start provides you with a much wider range of options, including the ability to customise every member of your family tree, who will then appear in portraits and statues.

You begin with a couple of rooms open, a basic car park and a cheap tearoom that looks like Ivy’s cafe from Last of the Summer Wine. You expand by ‘renovating’ rooms, both ‘upstairs’ such as the master bedroom or dining room, and ‘downstairs’ such as the kitchens and servant’s quarters, as well as building outdoor facilities such as a maze, falconry exhibit and adventure playground. In addition to this you’re responsible for hiring staff and volunteers5, maintenance and hygiene6, and much more.

Almost everything can be upgraded and customised, from the ornaments in the grand hall to the depth of the ha-ha. You can lay out guided tours, produce museum brochures and place your own period-style furniture.7 Refreshment stands are obviously needed - and former Theme Park players will be pleased to know that the classic trick of dialling up the salt still works. As you attract more international tourists, you’ll need to diversify your fare: Japanese like sushi bars, the Italians want pizza and the Americans demand burger bars.8 Everyone likes scones with clotted cream and jam in the tearoom, which periodically upgrades as you hit certain milestones, in the manner of9 the original Civilization’s palace.

In addition to money, the two main resources you’re managing are customer satisfaction and fame. The former must be kept high to ensure repeat visitors; it is improved by more and better rooms, facilities and amenities, and damaged by shoddy services, unkempt grounds and various money-gouging tactics you may choose to resort to. Fame is harder to get, but is essential for expanding your visitor base beyond the local area - and particularly to attract high spending international tourists.

In some cases, customer satisfaction and fame are aligned - but not always. For example, the more you expand your falconry display the better the customer satisfaction, and once you get enough rare birds it will start improving fame also.10 With the maze, however, beyond a certain size customer satisfaction drops off, as it turns out visitors don’t like spending their entire visit lost inside a giant maze - but making it bigger will still boost your fame.11

Getting fame to certain thresholds unlocks special rooms and buildings, including various follies, a hermit hut (complete with hermit), an artist in residence, secret passageways and the mad scientist. The last is particularly important because it enables new gameplay elements, including time travel missions to retrieve historic artefacts, as well as dinosaur cloning, which allows you to add a dino park to your manor grounds.

This in turn unlocks the second, and altogether stranger, part of the game.

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Dinosaur Mayhem

Whenever a storm occurs after the dino park is built, there is a small chance of an escape occurring - with the chance increasing with the size and number of dinosaurs in the dino park. At this point the game transitions to a first person shooter - like Doom or Half-Life - using the Unreal engine, in which you have to kill all of the dinosaurs before they eat the staff and visitors.12

In contrast to the more relaxed earlier part of the game, this section of the game is incredibly intense, fast-paced and violent, where your reactions will be tested to the limit to keep ahead of the dinos. Bodies pile high - both humans and dinosaurs - with masses of blood and entrails spraying in every direction. A hyper-realistic anatomy model ensures that disembowelments, trampling and limbs being torn off are rendered in graphic detail - with even the herbivores a potentially lethal threat. Meanwhile, the effects of the different weapons you can find to fight back with, from Kalashnikovs to chainsaws, are depicted with no less attention, brutality and gore.13

It was at this point that the National Trust, already frustrated by the supposed ‘cultural insensitivity’ of the design team, finally pulled the plug. Stereotyped food carts they could (just about) tolerate; graphic dinosaur violence, less so. But the developers refused to have their creative vision censored - and the rest is history.

Personally, I think the National Trust was a bit oversensitive. Sure, maybe some people would be distressed at the sight of an allosaurus swallowing a young family whole, or a pack of velociraptors ripping into the bodies of fleeing teenagers - but doesn’t that make it even more enjoyable when you blow them to pieces with a rocket-propelled grenade? As Iona Money-Pott, columnist for the Daily Telegraph, wrote:

‘This is cancel culture gone mad. Just because some woke palaeontologists in their ivory towers claim that humans and dinosaurs never co-existed, why should the National Trust try to spoil our fun? In my day, we spent our time playing good wholesome games like Grand Theft Auto and it never did us any harm.

The National Trust claim they want to diversify their audience, but they don’t seem to care about young men in their teens and twenties - most of whom wouldn’t be seen dead in a National Trust property. Theme Manor might have tempted some of them to take a visit - but the Trust would rather they were murdering each other like in the documentary Adolescence, rather than taking part in healthy dinosaur mayhem in the grounds of our glorious stately homes.

Iona Money-Pott, Daily Telegraph

Assuming you survive the onslaught, once the last dinosaur is killed you are shown a victory screen, in which you can be seen standing upon a mound of slaughtered dinosaurs. At this point, you are offered the opportunity to quit, start a new game, or return to your original manor (with dino damage miraculously repaired) to continue building and expanding in sandbox mode.

The last laugh

Despite having been left high and dry when the National Trust pulled out, the developers had the last laugh - as one of the Kickstarter ‘stretch goals’ they hit was for a ‘decolonisation’ mod.

If you install this mod (which comes included with the base game), a menu button is added with the option ‘decolonise your manor’. If you click it, you receive a prompt saying, ‘Warning: selecting this option may permanently damage your heritage. Are you sure you wish to continue?’ If you do continue then apologies for slavery are added to all of your family portraits, the scones in the tearoom are replaced with vegan alternatives and all of your statues are replaced by statues of black Welsh disabled women trade unionists.14

Overall Rating: 9/10. Theme Manor flawlessly blends the best of the classic simulation and first person shooter genres, combining surprising depth, modern graphics and the charming humour of its classic predecessors.

Theme Manor is available to purchase for £69.69 from Steam.

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Thank you to the 289 people who completed the Question of Law Survey. Thanks to you we now know important facts such that gay marriage is more popular than gravity, and that my left wing readers would rather see the return of slavery than smoking in pubs.1

As several people commented, there was a level of vibes about this, because in reality ‘repealing’ an Act - particularly an older one - might not be so simple, as it will have become intertwined with many other laws. But vibes still tell us something interesting, particularly when comparing different groups.

The survey respondents were:

• 84% male and 14% female (the remainder preferring not to say);

• 26% considered themselves to be on the political right, with 65% on the political left and 9% unsure or preferring not to say.

Given they were filling in an internet survey about Acts of Parliament, it would also be safe to assume that respondents were more politically engaged than the typical population.

To start with the more serious part of the survey, Acts of Parliament.

After the abolition of slavery, by far the most popular Acts to retain were same sex marriage and banning smoking in pubs - which is frankly quite astonishing given both were passed relatively recently to great controversy (including within the party that passed them). Both enjoyed very strong support from both right and left - a clear sign of rapid societal change.

Moving down, I was surprised to see such strong cross-spectrum support for banning the closed shop (Employment Act 1982). Reflecting the left-wing skew of respondents (see below) there was strong support for the Equality Act and Human Rights Act, though with a core of dissenters in each case. Digital-related bills such as the Data Protection Act and the Online Safety Act saw a strong desire for reform - while it was no surprise that the Groceries Code Adjudicator Act2 evoked the most indifference.

The Act of Settlement was the only Act which had an absolute majority for repeal - though almost as many, unsurprisingly, wanted to reverse Brexit. Worth mentioning also are a few Acts at the bottom which very few people who know about them think are working well, governing the planning system, the SEND regime, universities and the courts - each representing one of the more dysfunctional elements of the British state.

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But how does the picture change when we only consider right-wingers?

Abolition of slavery stays top of the ‘Retain’ list, but is followed by keeping the closed shop abolished and, to my delight, another of the Acts on which I worked,3 the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech Act). Gay marriage and the smoking ban slip down a little, but both still enjoy over 60% support with no more than 1 in 5 wanting them repealed. Brexit is unsurprisingly more popular than with the wider survey respondents, though there are unsurprisingly some right-wing remainers.

I was a little surprised to see so many right-wingers wanting to keep the Act of Settlement. My assumption is that this stems from support for the Church of England to remain established - and thus the monarch, as head, needing to be an Anglican - rather than any particular animus to Catholics.4

Most notable is a strong opposition to the core pillar of the New Labour constitutional settlement: The Equality Act, the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act and the Constitutional Reform Act. We see support for outright retention between 8% and 24% - and an absolute majority in favour of outright repeal for three out of four (the remaining one being 47% repeal). This is significant: these are hugely influential laws which were retained without significant amendment throughout the following fourteen years of Conservative-led government. Despite the small size and self-selection of this survey, I think this does reflect a broader mood shift on the political right - as indicated by both Reform and the Tories now being committed to leaving the ECHR - that is behind both the rise of Reform and a broader recognition that the right cannot substantively achieve any of its broader aims without substantive reform of the New Labour settlement.

Scottish devolution had some support, with Welsh less so. The Freedom of Information Act escaped the broader purge of New Labour legislation, while the Online Safety Act - despite being passed by a recent Tory Government - is deeply unpopular. A worryingly high proportion of right-wingers want to get rid of the OBR, while views on the SEND and planning regime track the broader sample’s very similarly.

And what about the left?

In contrast, the New Labour constitutional settlement enjoys huge support with left-wing respondents, with over 70% outright support for the Equality Act, Human Rights Act and Constitutional Reform Act, and only just under (67%) for the Climate Change Act. Dissenters in each case are almost all those favouring reform, not repeal. Devolution also enjoys very strong support.

Left-wing respondents also really really care that fox hunting remains banned5 while, unsurprisingly, over half wanted to reverse Brexit. Conservative legislation that did have more wanting to retain it than reform included the Academies Act and the Online Safety Act (though both with a big chunk for reform). There is no wish, however, to return to the days of the closed shop - it seems today’s employment rights battles are fought on different grounds.

Fully a third of left-wing respondents want to repeal the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act - no doubt believing that because their views aren’t censored, there isn’t a problem.6 Though disappointingly for me on tribal grounds, my left-wing respondents are far more fiscally responsible than my right-wing ones, showing much stronger support for the OBR, so I have to give them points here.

One interesting point is that if you average across all Acts, the total for each category is notably different for right-wing and left-wing respondents:

This suggests a country where the right - at least those who did this survey - is fundamentally less happy with the legal and constitutional settlement than the left. This makes a bunch of sense to me for two reasons:

• Logically, in that New Labour made some very significant, broad and deep changes to our law, which impact almost every area of domestic policy and life, which have not been altered, while the Conservative Governments that followed did not (with the exception of Brexit).7

• Observationally, on the right Reform is comfortably leading the Conservatives in the polls, whereas on the left, Labour and the Lib Dems are, together, still well ahead of the Greens,8 which suggests deeper dissatisfaction with the state of the country on the right.

  Thanks for reading The World of Edrith! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Now time for some fun

But what about the other laws - of physics and of society?

I’m honestly a bit disappointed by my respondents here. Sure, one wouldn’t want to actually repeal the law of gravity, but not to reform it? Even to make it easier to generate antigravity or artificial gravity? That would be great!9

I was a little surprised to see such strong opposition to Hubble’s Law,10 but glad to see the Second Law of Thermodynamics get some of the dislike it deserves (though still, an absolute majority for keeping it - astonishing!).

People were more willing to tamper with the sociological laws - with five seeing more votes for Reform than Retain. Gresham’s Law, Sturgeon’s Law and the Pournelle’s Iron Law all justly disliked. I was surprised to see how many people, even on the left, wanted to repeal Conquest’s Second Law11 (though more wished to retain, 32:24) and by the comparative lack of hate for Murphy’s Law (why do a third of you want to keep it?).12

Unsurprisingly, particularly with the rise of AI, The First Law of Robotics was top of the list to retain - though given how often it goes wrong in the books, perhaps we should not be complacent, and it should be reformed.13

And finally, the grand law megamix - thank you to everyone who took part!

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Following a consultation, the Bank of England announced that the practice of featuring renowned individuals was to cease, to be replaced with animals and nature scenes. Amongst the reasons for the decision they gave were that it ‘is not divisive: The theme should not involve imagery that would reasonably be offensive to, or exclude, any groups.’

This was met with an outpouring of criticism over Churchill being replaced by a badger,1 erasing Britain's history, and so forth, and a counterwave of others criticising those in the first camp for click bait and working themselves up over nothing. Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and Ed Davey have all weighed in to criticise the Bank's decisions and even a few Labour MPs have, when asked, admitted that it might be nice to remember Churchill's role in defeating fascism.2

A few preliminaries. Firstly, yes, the sky will not fall in from this decision. Yes, bank notes only began featuring figures (other than the Queen) in 1970. Yes, the banknotes are updated every 10-20 years for anti-counterfeiting reasons so any current figure should be thought of as temporary, including Churchill.

Secondly, the Bank’s decision is not woke - a bit naff, perhaps, but not woke. They are not replacing the figures with lesbian trade unionists, or with Tipu Sultan and others who fought against the Empire. Badgers are not woke. The British countryside is not woke.3 Some of us are old enough to remember the Conservative Party Conference in which Boris Johnson bellowed ‘Build Back Beaver’ to the resounding cheers of the faithful.

But nevertheless it matters, both in itself, and as a symptom of a wider malaise.

As Ed West has written, “Banknotes are a little window into a country’s soul, and instructive…and that is precisely why states with weak or fractured identities tend to feature animals and natural objects.” He goes on to say, “It’s not the most important thing in the world, but bank notes do signify a great deal about a country’s prospects. Nature-currency is a bear signal, because if the ethnic groups comprising a state cannot unify around shared historical figures it’s an indicator that they won’t easily co-operate in the country’s political system.”

Indeed, the Bank itself has spoken repeatedly of the importance of the figures on its banknotes, as when its Chief Cashier said, “Banknotes are more than just an important means of payment — they serve as a symbolic representation of our collective national identity and an opportunity to celebrate the UK.” And those who campaigned in 2013 for a woman to be represented on a bank note, or in 2018 for an ethnic minority figure to be represented, certainly thought it mattered.

The Bank’s decision may not have been woke, but it was timorous at a time when we require leadership. By using the public consultation as an excuse to retreat to nature designs, it sought to avoid a public row over any particular choice - a decision which, on that criteria alone, has clearly backfired.4

Cohesive, confident societies do not simply arise - they must be built. And in a nation such as Britain’s today - multi-ethnic, multi-faith, with high levels of inward migration, growing ethnic tensions and low economic growth - an active approach to integration and cohesion is more important than ever. Contrary to the beliefs of some liberals, a set of deracinated values that could belong to anywhere is not enough to anchor that integration: it must be rooted in specific history, specific people, specific landmarks, heritage, places, sports teams and culture, an attachment to which binds and unites.5

I myself would not have signed the petition to put an ethnic minority person on a banknote. This is because while Britain has many ethnic minority people in its history who did inspiring things6, who deserve to be honoured with statues and blue plaques, it has - due to the relative recency of mass demographic change - none who stand in the first rank of national significance that marks others on our bank notes - though I have no doubt it will do in time. They are, to use my terminology, ‘Heroes’ rather than ‘Giants’ - and thus placing them on a bank note would be, and would be clearly seen to be, tokenistic.7

(I would note that this is not the case for women (Austen, Nightingale, Franklin, Pankhurst…), gay people (Turing, Wilde…) or disabled people (Nelson, Hawking…) where multiple individuals who are very clearly of that first rank of significance exist).

But while it would not be my first choice, nor would it distress me to see Khan, Equiano or Seacole appear on a banknote - and if that were part of securing broad-based support, alongside other, clearly deserving figures, then so be it. Sunder Katwala, who writes from the left on patriotism and cohesion, has suggested adding one ethnic minority figure, keeping Churchill, and then having two others. He understands that symbols matter - and while I may not agree with him fully on this, if push came to shove, I would stand shoulder to shoulder with him against a legion of badger apologists.

Rather than timidly retreating from the fray, the Bank should have found the courage to identify four figures which, together, could symbolise and celebrate our nation. Perhaps that would have meant facing down those campaigning for an ethnic minority figure, by finding an alternative impeccable candidate, as they did in 2019 with Turing - or perhaps it would have meant facing down sceptical voices on the right, and including one. Either way, Britain’s history is rich enought hat it would not have been beyond the wit of man to find a combination that could command broad-based public support - and to make that case to the nation.8

As our society fractures, public authorities must find the courage to lead. Bank notes may not be the be-all and end-all of national identity, but they play their part - and they are the only part for which the Bank of England is responsible. Only a nation that is confident in celebrating itself, its history and its heritage, that is patriotic, proud and inclusive, can hope to maintain its cohesion in these times. And if our public bodies and civic institutions will not take the field, they simply leave it open to the far-right ethno-nationalists, sectarian Islamists, and others who would rip our society to shreds.

To end on a lighter note, there is, of course, a solution.9 Just as the polar vessel RRS David Attenborough used the publicly voted name ‘Boaty McBoatface’ for its autonomous underwater vessel, so the Bank could acknowledge the public’s love of nature by combining both nature AND famous people, by filling the borders with woodland animals peeking through foliage, like the marginalia in Mediaeval manuscripts.

Or, for those who prefer the work of the great Quentin Blake, perhaps this, too, might find a spot on a banknote, at some point in the future:

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This isn’t just an academic question: we use all of these in the UK in numerous places. And while I spoke of ‘philosophies’, in practice they are often the way they are because of vibes, political calculation or historical accident. Nevertheless, thinking explicitly about the different design options for schemes, and their pros and cons, is useful for anyone wanting to reform them - or to design future schemes.2

We’ll look here a three of the principal options for designing a scheme, and then look at five other variants which are also used, some more than others.

1. Universalism

2. The poor get more

3. The rich get less

4. Sinners pay more

5. Saints get more

6. Contributors get more

7. The favoured get more

8. Those in a hurry pay more

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Universalism

A universal service or benefit is provided to everyone, regardless of their income.3 Some of the UK’s largest and most strongly supported spending programmes are provided on a universal basis, including schools, the NHS and the state pension, as are many public amenities, such as libraries and free museums.

There are strong arguments that appeal to all parts of the political spectrum for universalism4 - including the not-to-be-overlooked benefits of simplicity and cost of administration. For the right, universalism avoids the trap wherein those with savings, or who have worked hard, are penalised for their prudence or success; for the left, there is strong evidence that programmes which are used by all remain higher quality and enjoy stronger support than those which become ‘ghettoes’ for the poor.5 Given that all programmes or benefits are ultimately funded out of general taxation, to the extent that taxation is progressive - which it is in most countries, including the UK - a universal scheme is progressive.

One objection to universalism is that it may lead to services used by the middle classes or the wealthy more than the poor, who could be considered to need them most - middle class people use public libraries more, for example.6 As someone who believes in individual agency, I don’t see this as a problem7, however, this is a problem for Social Calvinists8, as well as for those who believe the principal purpose of government is to ‘close gaps’ rather than to provide opportunity for all.

However, the biggest disadvantage of universalism is that it is incredibly expensive - and that is disadvantage enough to place severe limits on its use. It is no coincidence that the the programmes mentioned above cost, between them, over £400 billion a year, or around a third of state spending. To make every social programme in the UK universal would have a prohibitive cost9 - so with resources scarce, it is understandstandable that people seek approaches that target scarce resources more narrowly.

In the next sections, we’ll be talking about ‘the poor’ and ‘the rich’. It’s well-established that no-one agrees who is poor and who is rich, but fortunately we will not need exact definitions here. Almost all of us would agree that the dividing line for ‘the rich’ is in the top half of the population by affluence, and similarly that for ‘the poor’ is in the bottom half, and that is the only intuition we need here.10

The Poor Get More

In Poor Get More (or pay less) schemes, some benefit or service is given only to a subgroup of people at the bottom of the income distribution11, with others either not receiving it or having to pay. This is frequently based on the concept of a ‘safety net’, where the state steps in for those who have fallen on hard times.

Free School Meals, free prescriptions and most benefits, including child tax credits, and housing benefit, are based on this principle. Universal Credit is means-tested, such that those with £16,000 or more in savings cannot claim it. Plan 1 and Plan 5 student loans are also a Poor Get More scheme, in that most people will repay their loans in full, but the bottom third by income will not, and see all or part of their debt written off.

The principle benefit of Poor Get More schemes is that the benefit is only given to those most in need, making it significantly more affordable to the taxpayer than if delivered on a universal basis. It keeps the size of the state to a minimum, keeping it out of most people’s lives, and in most cases has a clear philosophical underpinning, in that we are saying that no-one in society should go without certain necessities.

Disadvantages include that such means-testing inevitably creates circumstances where people on the edge of eligibility for such benefits can face very high effective marginal tax rates - or even lose income - as they lose eligibility, reducing incentives to work. The administration of eligibity can be costly, with some deserving people falling through the cracks. And with the middle classes and those with influence in society having no stake in them, programmes for the poor can often become poor quality programmes - repeatedly cut and then eliminated.

The Rich Get Less

In Rich Get Less (or pay more) schemes, the majority of the population receives a benefit or free access to a service, but a subset of people at the top of the income spectrum do not.

Child benefit is an example of such a scheme, as is free childcare and the final version of means-tested Winter Fuel Allowance.12 Plan 2 student loans are an example too, with the wealthiest graduates paying back far more than they borrowed in real terms, as well as being simultaneously a Poor Get More scheme, with the lowest earners not repaying.13 The withdrawal of various tax allowances for high earners could also be characterised as Rich Get Less schemes. Schemes such as Finland’s approach to driving penalties, where the level of your fine is based on your income, could also be considered to fall into this category.

The advantage of Rich Get Less schemes is that they are popular - it is easy to whip up dislike for anything that can be charaterised as giving benefits to millionaires. As the majority of the population continue to benefit from the programme it is easier to maintain public support. They are a little cheaper than Universal programmes and those who don’t get it are usually those who don’t actually need it.

The disadvantage is that compared to Poor Get More schemes, they save comparatively little - but bring with them all of the same disadvantages of additional cost and complexity in administering and high marginal rates of taxation.14 Whatever you think the top rate of tax should be, it is surely ridiculous that someone with two children under five is better off earning £99,999 than they would be earning £149,999 - an effect that you can literally see showing up in the stats.

We should not be sorry for those on the verge of earning six figure salaries - but that spike represents NHS consultants cutting back to 4 day weeks; programmers, lawyers and other professionals working and earning less - and millions of pounds in foregone tax due to the inefficiency.15

As you may be able to tell, I tend to think that where means-testing is necessary (and it often is), it makes more sense from a fiscal, moral and economic perspective to focus those scarse resources on those who genuinely need it, using the Poor Get More schemes. Sadly, due to politics, we all too often end up with Rich Get Less schemes instead (as the Winter Fuel Allowance row so aptly demonstrated).

The above three schemes represent the most common ways of determining who gets what based upon income or wealth. But there are other approaches, which use entirely separate criteria to determine who gains and who pays.

Sinners Pay More

Such schemes make the price of something we think is bad more expensive - either because we think it is bad for the individual or to price in negative externalities that the activity has on others.

It’s not hard to think of examples: taxes on alcohol, tobacco or sugar, carbon taxes, or fuel duty. A dynamic road tax would be a way of pricing in the externalities caused by congestion, by altering the price depending on what road, and at what time, someone was driving. Schemes which raise money from wrongdoers - such as speeding violations or library fines - are also applying this principle.

The advantages to such schemes is that deterring the activity is part of the point - if the tax causes fewer people to do the activity, that’s a benefit. This does cause a trade-off between money raised and amount of activity deterred.16 The main disadvantage is that such schemes tend to be regressive, with the heaviest burden falling upon the poor.17

Saints Get More1819

The reverse of the above, where government seeks to encourage a behaviour they value by rewarding or subsidising those who take part in it. Subsidies for solar panels or electric cars, the (miniscule, limited) transferrable tax allowance for married couples and Hungary’s lifetime income tax exemption for women who have four or more children are all good examples.20

The advantage to such schemes is that they are a straightforward way of government incentivising something it thinks there should be more of while still permitting free choice. The disadvantages are that such schemes typically carry a large amount of deadweight loss - paying people who would have done it anyway - and as such can be very expensive, particularly if one wants to pay enough to significantly shift behaviour. There is also a question over how effective such schemes are compared to overall cultural effects - or whether they need to combined with a much broader societal movement to have much impact.21

Contributors Get More

In Contributors Get More schemes, a person’s eligibility - and often how much they get - is determined by the extent of their contribution, or a proxy that is considered to measure it. The UK is an outlier in how little we make use of such schemes, with the principal one being the state pension - and that being quite loosely based.22 New Style Job Seeker’s Allowance is also a contributory benefit, paid to unemployed people who’ve paid Class 1 NI contributions in recent years.

The advantage of such schemes is that they tap into many people’s sense of fairness: that it is right that those who have made more of a contribution to society receive more back when they need it. Most people would be happy for a person who had worked in a factory for twenty years and lost their job when the factory closed to receive more unemployment benefit than someone who has never worked a day in their life. By linking benefits to contributions, it can also provide additional incentives to work, and reduce the circumstances where those who have done the right thing by society get the same as those who have shirked.

One disadvantage is that they can reinforce existing wealth differentials - though this can be mitigated if benefits are based upon years of contribution, rather than the actual amount paid. They can be more costly to administer than a simpler scheme - and more subject to fraud. A further disadvantage is that either the level is set such that some people (the contributors) end up getting more than they really need, increasing the cost, or some people (the non-contributors) get less, or nothing, which may be something that society is not willing to stomach.

The favoured get more

In such a scheme, only those who are in a certain identity category are able to access the scheme. Examples include those over a certain age receiving free TV licenses, ethnic-minority only internship schemes, or Reform’s proposals that only British citizens should be able to claim benefits.

Importantly, and distinguishing this approach from other entries, these categories are not directly connected with either affluence or need.23 They may be correlated - for example, someone might argue that British citizens are more likely to contributed, or that pensioners are more likely to be poor24 - but in such schemes someone is explicitly prioritising the identity category, otherwise it would be possible simply to make eligibility dependent on income, or on contribution, or whatever the supposedly relevant category is.

A scheme of this sort can be combined with other categories: for example, the modified Winter Fuel Allowance is both a Rich Get Less scheme (higher income pensioners do not get it) and a The Favoured Get More scheme (poor people who are not pensioners do not get it).

The advantages or disadvantages of such schemes depends entirely on how legitimate one thinks the favoured group deserves to receive differential treatment. Woke people who think we need to compensate for historic disadvantage may believe it is acceptable to establish schemes that differentially benefit ethnic minorities. Those who wish to strengthen the nation state and reduce immigration may support schemes based on citizens’ preference. Boomers may believe we should inexorably move to a situation in which every penny of GDP is given to pensioners,25 after which we should move on to converting first the solar system and then the Milky Way into more pensioner benefits. In each case, other people’s mileage may vary

Those in a Hurry Pay More

In rare cases, typically where a service is provided on a cost or near-cost basis, we allow those who wish to to pay more to get a better - typically a faster - service. An example is getting a new passport: there is a standard price to get it in the standard time, a higher price to get it within a week and a truly exorbitant price to get it within days.

The advantage of this is that it allows price differentiation: those willing to pay more can do so and the money is kept within the service, meaning that either prices can be lowered for everyone else, or the service can be improved by hiring more staff. We are used to this in the private sector, in everything from Amazon deliveries to business class travel.

The disadvantage is that it allows the wealthier to directly purchase a better service - something most people are typically not comfortable with on essential services, such as health care.26 In practice, what tends to happen is that this sort of scheme operates in effect outside of the core service, via the existence of a privately purchasable alternative for those who can afford it and wish to.

So, lots of possibilities, which should we prefer?

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3

Note that it may still be provided only to people in certain circumstances. When child benefit was provided to everyone who had children, that would class as a universal benefit, even though not everyone has children. Similarly, the NHS is allowed to give insulin only to those with diabetes, not to everyone, unless you are this guy:

The Greens have arrived. They’ve never won a by-election before, never got over 10% in a by-election - and this time it wasn’t even close. With 41%, they’ve shown they can contest and win - and are a genuine alternative in Labour’s heartlands. This will surely boost them in the coming local elections.

Growing your bloc matters more than ever. As I wrote before, if bloc politics is real - and it is - then growing your bloc matters more than ever. Both left and right have been stuck around 44% - 47% for the last few months - if either could break through to the 50%-55% territory, that would make a big difference party. Note that the right has an advantage here as the right vote is splitting two ways and the left three.6

Candidates matter. Both Labour and Reform could have picked better candidates for the seat. Labour blocked the popular Andy Burnham for reasons of internal party politics10; for Reform, a genuine local who coached the local football team (for example) would have been better in a by-election than a southern academic, even if the latter has a bigger national profile.11 Meanwhile the Greens chose a local plumber who was clearly rooted in the constituency.

Reminder, my reader survey, ‘A Question of Law: Retain, Reform or Repeal?’ is still open - a chance to say what you think of 25 of Britain’s most iconic laws - and a few others.

Take the survey here.

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Whether or not one agrees with him, there is no doubt that it has entered the pantheon of Britain’s most iconic laws - loved by some, hated by others, debated by many.

This survey is a chance to say what you think about Britain’s most famous laws - from the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 to the Equality Act 2010 and more.

Like an ultra-nerdy2 version of ‘Kiss, Marry or Kill’3, for each law you simply have to say whether you would retain it, repeal it or significantly reform it. There are also options to say you don't know or don't care, and any question can be skipped.4

There are 25 iconic5 laws from 1701 to 2023 for you to give your verdict on, plus a few questions at the end on the law of gravity and Murphy's Law, just for fun.

Take the survey here.

The survey will be open until Sunday 8 March and results will be published shortly after that.

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