Voters of Britain, ask yourself this: if the Tories promised so much and delivered so little in 14 years, why would things be different now?

This is a question that is asked frequently and is used by critics of the Conservative Party as a sort of verbal baseball bat, not subtle or sophisticated but blunt and effective. And it’s true that the Tories crashed to an ignominious defeat in July 2024 ushering in a massive Labour majority and the drab disaster of Keir Starmer. What’s also true is that in February 2020 the Conservative Party held a 15 point lead over Labour and was polling at 47%. You can argue that decisions and choices made before the beginning of 2020 were terrible and laid the ground for the collapse in Tory support but I’ve a feeling this is a misplaced analysis.

The real reason for the collapse in Tory support was firstly the Covid pandemic and then the seemingly interminable bunfight over whether Boris Johnson eating cake constituted unacceptable partying or not. We can trace most of the current ills to the pandemic and to the manner in which the government responded to the pandemic - the surge in immigration, higher inflation, higher energy bills and the explosion in mental health derived benefits dependency. When you shut down the economy for months and use public borrowing to cover people’s loss of earnings it is hard to see any outcome in the medium term other than much higher public debt and inflation.

This doesn’t excuse the worst of the panics that came from the pandemic (and especially the largely unnecessary lockdowns associated with the response to Covid) or, after we emerged blinking into the sunlight, the decision by the government to allow immigration to surge:

“In total, three-quarters of the 4.2 million individuals granted visas or claiming asylum over the four-year period to 2024 remained in the country as of the end of 2025, according to the most recent figures.”

At the same time as we witnessed this record-breaking increase in immigration, we also witnessed a doubling in the numbers of people applying for, and mostly receiving, sickness benefits. Prior to the pandemic the numbers on assorted sickness benefits had been stable at around 250,000 for some long while. In one year 2022-23 the numbers soared to 500,000 and have remained at this elevated level ever since. It could be that the population suddenly became more ill but this seems unlikely. More likely is that remote assessment and a lot more new diagnoses for mental health conditions (especially assorted ‘neurodiversities’ like autism and ADHD) is the primary cause for the increase. Given that the ‘Boriswave’ brought in 4.2 million largely working age people, it is quite noteworthy that there are now 4.3m working-age people claiming health-related benefits.

The reason for the collapse in Tory support wasn’t the long list of sins during their period in government from 2010-2024 (seven years of which were, of course, in coalition or minority government) but the fallout from the pandemic, the decision to let immigration rip and those Tory MPs who tore the party apart to chase their own ambitions, exact vengeance on Boris Johnson or Theresa May, or enjoy the vanity of the media attention ‘rebels’ get. All followed by Liz Truss and the ‘mini-budget’ that saw an already collapsing Tory support plummet faster. On top of a perception of disunity and a legacy (largely unjustified but that changes nothing) of sleaze, the Conservative Party lost its economic credibility.

We can write a list - quite a long list - of policy failings during the “Tory Years” but there’s not a great deal of evidence that, beyond the shameless post-Covid witch hunt, the ‘Boriswave’ and the Truss budget, these policy mistakes damaged the party brand or undermined its support. The reality was that the Conservative Party lost credibility with the electorate as a result of its behaviour not because of its policy choices. There has been a great deal of post hoc rewriting done but the deep truth is that the Tory disaster was down to just four things:

1. The post-Brexit split in the party. Not just during the May premiership but under Johnson there were just too many Tory MPs willing to wield the knife as revenge for Boris’s support for leaving the EU

2. The Covid pandemic. The biggest problems here weren’t excess deaths or arguments about epidemiological models but the terrible and negative impact of lockdowns on both the economy and the population’s mental health. Plus the hideous media and parliamentary witch hunt targeting Johnson.

3. The ‘Boriswave’. The seemingly deliberate choice (in the case of Hong Kongers and Ukrainians largely justified) to allow immigration to let rip and subsequent, repeated, failures to control both the impact of this surge and the continued high levels of migration.

4. The political disaster of the Liz Truss government. It isn’t that Truss was wrong in her assessment of the problem, she wasn’t. It is that Truss tried to force through her changes while borrowing untold billions to reduce energy bills. Not only a contradiction to her analysis but a recipe for more inflation and soaring borrowing costs

These are the issues that made the Conservative Party unpopular but recognising the causes is not sufficient for a recovery because the world has moved on. Critics of the Party point to a long list of problems and policies that weren’t remotely responsible for the Party’s predicament, everything from housing and planning through to the Equalities Act and assorted issues broadly under the banner of ‘woke’. Meanwhile the Labour Party, despite its massive majority, has seemed incapable of answering the big questions Britain faces - a struggling economy, perceptions of increased crime, mass immigration and the poison of diversity, too few houses, an inability to build new infrastructure, and drab, crumbling public services.

Just as the Tories were reminding the public about the 1978/9 ‘winter of discontent’ even into the 1990s, Labour (and other parties) will continue to reference the four issues above. Any Tory economic policy will see opponents shoehorning ‘Liz Truss Mini-Budget’ into their response, any immigration strategy will see the reply of ‘why didn’t you do that when you were in government’, and any mention of sleaze by a Tory will result in cries of ‘Boris Johnson Partygate’. If the Party gets enmeshed in explaining or excusing these mistakes there will be no recovery but, while talking about now and the concerns of today is right, the negatives from these issues will remain and will affect - negatively - electoral chances.

Today the public associates the Conservative Party with problems and policies it doesn’t like (even when, as with Net Zero for example, those policies were popular at the time of introduction). There are three important areas where the Tories need clear policies but can expect negative responses:

1. Controlling immigration/integration & asylum

2. Energy policy and Net Zero

3. Economic growth

For the first two Kemi Badenoch has the basis for a believable policy but is still a long way from a credible economic strategy not least because the Party is back in its core suburban demographic which is very antidevelopment. It may be that Labour’s planning reforms and especially weakening Green Belt protections will be enough but I suspect business is looking for firm promises to undo the worst of Labour’s anti-growth policies: the National Insurance hike, the union-friendly ‘workers rights’ laws, the attacks on private renting and all round high taxes on doing business.

Beyond these areas the Conservatives need to look at policies that aren’t necessarily popular but which require attention. These include:

1. Welfare reform. Getting people with health conditions back into the jobs market will require some tough choices not least being freezing welfare payments

2. Pensions. Two issues here - the spiralling cost of the old age pension as a result of the ‘triple lock’ and the similarly out-of-control public sector pension systems

3. Defence spending. Vague promises of x% of GDP on defence are fine but Britain needs a programme to rebuild its navy and air force, increase the size of the army and embrace new technology. Probably need a cyber-defence system too

4. Foreign policy. This needs disconnecting from domestic party political concerns, we’ve spent too long setting policy on the basis of pleasing British voter blocs rather than serving the national interest

I’m sure others will have their own lists - there’s something very wrong with the NHS (regardless of how our health service should be organised), social care needs fixing (but not with the expensive gimmick of a National Care Service), and there’s probably a case for unravelling the tentacles of the regulatory state (do we really need a football regulator?). But the bedrock of any recovery doesn’t lie in endless apologies for getting things wrong ten or fifteen years ago but in getting credible policies to control who lives in Britain, how we power our lives and how we help business and individual enterprise make us all richer.

Most observers (or at least the ones not fully paid up members of the “Boys Who Hate Kemi Club”) suggest Kemi Badenoch has made good progress, made slightly easier by Keir Starmer being so awful. But there are still huge holes and inconsistencies in the Party’s approach, the policy leadership seems to take the support of people like me for granted, assuming that our distaste for Nigel Farage and Reform and historic hatred of the Labour Party will be enough to do the trick. When the rusty legacy of Tory machine politics set up ‘Prosper’ as a sort of vehicle for centrist politics it didn’t set up with the aim of getting Badenoch’s reborn Tory Party elected but with the avowed aim of creating an oppositional group within the party. Moderate Tories like me were expected to flock to this group (there are according to Prosper’s vague research, millions of us) but we aren’t going to do so because we want Kemi Badenoch to succeed. For me right now though I’m in the position of Communist mayor Peppone’s wife in ‘Don Camillo’ - ‘Lord, let him win but without my vote’:

“The Garibaldi ticket has been replaced by one that bears our own symbol, but the situation is just what it was before. You can go right ahead, without any misgivings, and vote as you did in 1948.”

“All right chief,” she said, not mentioning the fact that in 1948 she voted for the Christian Democrats.”

For a couple of years I indulged in a subscription to the London Review of Books. Partly this resulted from a very good introductory offer and partly from a genuine desire to broaden what I read. In that couple of years I read some fantastic writing - the special issue on the Grenfell Tower tragedy is, for all I disagree with some of its conclusions, a brilliant piece of journalism - and was pointed towards some genuinely interesting books that I might otherwise have missed. But the biggest thing I discovered was that the intellectual left is incredibly and vainly unselfaware. And the thing that the left doesn’t see in itself is its obsession with a romantic myth of revolution and socialist violence.

This led me to write this:

“I’ve just finished reading a review of Richard Evans book about Eric Hobsbawm in the London Review of Books. It’s fair to say I have a problem with it - not the review but the very fact of the review. I appreciate that the LRB is a sort of house journal for lefty London luvvy types but it really amazes me that such reverence is given to a man who, without irony, was an abject apologist for mass murder:

“Evans doesn’t sugarcoat the intellectual gymnastics Hobsbawn performed to defend the Stalinist show trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the Soviet invasion of Finland, but neither does he underplay the vibrant and intellectually heterodox spirit that animated the Communist Party Historians Group...”

It makes me want to throw up when a major journal allows for an essentially hagiographic book about a man who never retracted, let alone apologised for, supporting one of the biggest mass murders in human history - Stalin’s Soviet Communism. It’s as if the sake of the revolution exonerates Hobsbawm - and those who write about him as anything other than evil - from being treated with the same sort of contumely as we might treat an uncritical book about David Irving.”

I was reminded of this (and another apologia for communism published in the LRB) by two current events: the ongoing riots across France and the news that Sarah Helm, the partner of Britain’s National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell, had liked, shared and commented on a series of social media posts that were, at best, unpleasantly (and ignorantly) anti-Israel and possibly antisemitic to boot. But despite expressing support for a proscribed terrorist organisation, Ms Helm’s comments didn’t meet the threshold for the police to take any action. We can be forgiven for arriving at the view that Ms Helm gets a pass for backing terrorists because of her connections to the political and media ‘great and good’.

It also struck me, however, that Ms Helm gets a pass for the same reason that apologia for communist oppression and violence gets a prominent place in trendy left wing journals like the LRB: the Left’s obsession with that romantic myth of revolution and the idea that, as Hobsbawm said, the death and destruction might be the price to pay for achieving communism. There is no equivalent of this romantic myth on the political right so we can’t comprehend what’s inside the minds of most left-wing people, even moderate ‘Centrist Dad’ lefties.

When the intellectual left sees what’s happened in France, their minds don’t turn to the need for order and control but rather to 1848 and the Paris Commune or the ‘student’ protests and riots of May 1968. These events are, like the International Brigades in 1930s Spain, the Cuban ‘revolution’ of 1959 and Nicaragua’s Sandinista’s from the 1980s, fixtures in the mythos that informs the Left’s understanding of the world. Even the most moderate leftist will experience a frisson of excitement at such uprisings and words like ¡No Pasarán! and Intifada trip unthinkingly to their lips. It is in this context that we can understand why someone as embedded in greatness and goodness as Sarah Helm will not be punished for supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation (any more than will fêted left wing writer Sally Rooney). Those who control the processes that decide who is and isn’t brought to book for supporting Palestine Action are quite happy for over 500 silly old people to get arrested for supporting the proscribed organisation but cannot allow the same for someone so close to the heart of the government that proscribed the terror group.

On ex-twitter I wrote this:

“The decision not to throw the book at Sarah Helm is why we end up with violent thugs parading the streets untouchable by authorities. We need to stop being kind or understanding towards those, especially those on the left, who have spent decades simpering at those ‘radical’ kids smashing stuff up. Groups like Palestine Action, the SWP, PSC and Antifa exist because our authorities are too nice, too obsessed with rights, and too invested in their left wing and culturally right-on world view.

There are people like Jonathan Powell and Sarah Helm at dinner parties as I write talking about ‘48 and ‘68 in their nice safe Hampstead or Putney homes. Middle aged blokes who sit on the boards of opera houses and museums getting a semi while talking about French rioters while their female counterparts get wet fantasising about exciting revolutionary men (or women) leading the front line against les flics.

Already the editor of the London Review of Books - the centrepiece of elitist faux-revolutionary Marxist erections - is planning his special edition on the parallels between Paris ‘26, Paris ‘68 and Paris ‘48. Lots of fake revolutionaries with 3 million quid apartments in central London or New York are twitching at the profitable business of writing articles about Marxism and the French riots.

These people work at the BBC, have top jobs in the Civil Service, are celebrated lawyers or judges, they are writers, journalists and film-makers. They flit from posh restaurant to gallery opening to first night and pretend (because they are Marxists dontcha know) that they are the good people.

Meanwhile some immigrant bloke in the wrong arrondissement of Paris who opened his shop 30 years ago is crying because the thugs who those dinner party guests fantacise about fucking just smashed up his livelihood, stole all his stock and left him destitute.”

I don’t believe there’s an easy answer to the problem of the left because their intellectuals are almost all wedded to the romantic myth of revolution meaning that when ‘students’ go on a looting spree in Paris they see heroic young people rather than hyped up thugs using a protest to attack the police, set fire to (other people’s) cars and steal designer handbags and collectible Pokemon cards:

“Your name is Jean-Marc, you’re 46, and you run a video game and collectibles shop in Nice, wedged between an optician and a real estate agency selling 1-bed flats for €410,000 “with sea view” if you lean far enough off the balcony.

You know every GTA San Andreas cheat by heart. You tested all of them in 2005 on the PS2 in your bedroom at your mum’s place.

You opened in 2011 with a state-backed loan at 4.7%, and the naive belief that passion eventually pays.

It did pay, sort of. €1,900 a month in a good year, after the French tax office has eaten first, second and third. Your commercial rent is indexed on a formula nobody in the Republic actually understands.

You sell Funko Pops at €17.99, sealed Pokémon cards, refurbished controllers. You let little Enzo, 12, pay in installments because he’s saving for a Switch 2. You close at 7:30pm and walk home because the harbor parking is €3.40 an hour.

Saturday, there’s a protest “against the cost of living.”

You also think living costs too much. You almost went.

At 5:12pm, your metal shutter gets ripped open with a crowbar.

Forty teenagers in tracksuits and crossbody bags walk into your shop like it’s a bonus level. They take the PS5s, the Dragon Ball figures, the till with today’s €280 and even the box of paper bags that say “thank you for your visit.”

A guy in a floral shirt films it vertically for TikTok.”

People ask why these riots happened. And there are lots of reasons ranging from bad policing through drugs to genuine grievances about education policy or the cost of living. But nobody mentions that an important reason is that myth of revolution that lives rent free in the heads of half our politicians. Plus, of course that the rioters, thugs and criminals know they’ll get away with it, that they are untouchable We saw this with the Black Lives Matters riots,and, at least up until some ‘protestors’ beat up a police officer with a sledgehammer, with persistent vandalism, criminal damage and vile language from people purporting to support the people of Gaza.

We will watch as the blame is shifted away from the ‘student protesters’ and placed instead on the police, local authorities and national governments. Riot, the left believes, is never the fault of the rioter so long as the thugs and vandals can lay claim to ‘revolution’. That’s why those students mouth the popular slogans of resistance, whether from communist thugs in 1930s Spain or the Palestinian terrorists of today. The French rioters don’t carry the flags of Palestine because they give a toss about Gaza, they carry them because they are, in the Left’s romantic mythology, signs of revolution and uprising. The same is true of their adopted song, a rap that celebrates Islamist terrorists, which becomes a revolutionary anthem rather than a deliberately edgy celebration of killers.

Nothing will change so long as the London Review of Books thinks it’s radical to publish apologia for communist terror and the West’s great and good close ranks when one of their own is caught excusing violence and criminal damage. The reason we get these riots isn’t just economic conditions, policing or the lack of youth clubs, it is because rioters can, and do, appeal to the Left’s romanticised obsession with revolution. Until the left arrives at a place where balaclava clad thugs are just that, balaclava clad thugs then riot will still be allowed to get out of hand.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” Robert Heinlein

This quotation was, of course, attributed by Heinlein to Lazarus Long, the oldest human, in his collection of novellas “Time Enough for Love”. It is often cited as the defining feature of human self-sufficiency, an idea that sits right at the heart (along with longevity) of Heinlein’s writing. Whether it’s “Farnham’s Freehold” with its echo of frontier life or Friday Jones, the self-sufficient super-woman in the eponymous novel, Heinlein presents us with self-sufficiency as either a necessity for mankind or else as the logical outcome of human ingenuity and technology.

The problem is that, however super we artificially make our humans, they are never truly self-sufficient. The thing that makes, in Heinlein’s worlds, space travel possible isn’t self-sufficiency or even self reliance. Those possibilities weren’t made by Eric Frank Russell’s insubordinate, loner scout pilots. The wonders that open up the universe are a consequence of specialisation. For sure we still need risk-takers, we want the courageous, people who can turn their hand to multiple tasks. But we also need Adam Smith’s pin factory, we remain less than we can be if we don’t learn from Leonard Read’s pencil:

“I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.”

The pencil is a simple everyday writing tool made possible by specialisation and by the bewildering network of co-operation, collaboration and competition that is a feature (left to its own devices) of humanity. When we walk down the aisle of our local supermarket browsing tens of thousands of different products from everywhere on the planet, we aren’t looking at self-sufficiency, we are looking at mutuality, community and at a Vietnamese family with a pepper farm.

Despite these wonders, and the truth that humans gain the most from free, mutually-beneficial networks, we are regaled daily with fears of shortage, with demands for security and with the claim that these production networks are bad for the planet. Here’s Tim Lang and others making the terrifying claim that our food system is not secure and resilient:

“The UK’s post-War food system, while revolutionary in its time, is no longer fit for purpose. To safeguard our future, we must prioritise resilience at every level – from local communities to national frameworks. Food resilience is not just about surviving a crisis but thriving despite it. This report stands apart from current frameworks by taking into account the public’s current attitudes and understanding of food risks, and asking how civil society can be better engaged to ultimately become more resilient.”

While Lang centres the fearful ideology of the eco-left where climate change - “crisis”, “emergency” - results in the collapse of agriculture as we currently know it, his proposals for autarky, for self-sufficiency, appeal to that same human myth we heard Robert Heinlein put in the mouth of Lazarus Long. The nation being self-sufficient ‘feels’ right, seems like we have taken control, and that something as important as feeding our people isn’t dependent on producers in other nations. For all that “Clarkson’s Farm” is an amazing programme that’s done great things to present the realities of farming, Clarkson’s obsession with sourcing only from Britain for his pub’s menu is verging on the ridiculous.

In the 1840s a series of bad potato harvests caused by late blight resulted in a terrible hunger and famine in Ireland. About a million people died and two million left the country. The relationship between England and Ireland was scarred forever. Imagine, under the ‘resilient’ system proposed by Lang and enthused about by the eco-left and the populist right, a catastrophic grain harvest in Britain. The benign international networks had been closed off, the supermarkets directed by government to abandon the supply chains that make them cheap and efficient, and “committees at the local level, building on existing food policy networks and chaired by trusted local experts” manage local council food stores.

This so-called “food security” is literally the best way to ensure that negative impacts on domestic food production are maximised across the whole population. Abject starvation may be avoided but there will be empty shelves, probably rationing and definitely a food supply system that doesn’t meet population needs in the manner that our current system based on international supply networks does meet our needs. If we want “food security” the way to achieve it is to ensure that supermarket shelves are fully stocked. And the way we achieve this is through human co-operation, mutuality and collaboration not with the same lie about personal self-sufficiency we began with.

Depending on how you measure it, Britain produces between a half and two-thirds of the food we consume. Despite this, agriculture represents less than 1% of UK GDP and the whole food industry only around 5%. What a remarkable achievement: less than 1.5% of workers in Britain produce half of everything we eat! And, at the same time, we get to buy produce from all over the world for pennies: tomatoes from Morocco, avocado from Mexico, ham from Italy and dates from Israel. This is how a food system should work yet so many want to tell me that ‘globalisation has failed’, that we need agricultural protection and that we should be producing our own tomatoes, ham, avocado and dates. Or perhaps more realistically simply not having those products or them being, as a result of tariffs, only affordable to the wealthy and well-connected.

In saying all this, I’m sure I’ll upset some people in the farming lobby who genuinely believe that perfidious foreign tillers of the soil are the reasons for farmers’ problems. But for most of my life we lived under a system of, effectively, the same sort of corn laws that helped make Ireland’s famine worse. Quotas, price controls, tariffs, import limits and subsidies didn’t all combine to make for a fantastic and growing agricultural industry in Britain. Maybe we should look instead at the experience of another independent island nation:

“Overall the reforms were an astonishing success. There are no calls for the reintroduction of subsidies, from either farmers or non-farmers. Farmers prefer being able to get on with their business without government interference and feel a greater sense of pride by not relying on hand-outs; non-farmers benefit from lower food prices and a serious reduction in their tax burden. Today, government assistance to the industry accounts for less than one percent of producers’ income, well below the OECD average of 16%, with the majority of that coming from the $NZ30 million a year that goes towards research and development. The end of the subsidies even had unexpected positive environmental benefits. Marginal land that had been farmed solely to qualify for subsidies was reforested while fertiliser and pesticide use plummeted.”

This might well mean fewer farmers in Britain from consolidation and merger as well as marginal land moving to other uses. We should perhaps remember that nearly three-quarters of Britain’s agricultural land is permanent grassland and rough grazing. Britain was, after all, an economy built first on sheep (or more accurately, wool). The central truth, however, is that if we want the sort of dinners we’ve got used to, then Britain has no option but to be part of those amazing international supply networks. The networks that bring us black pepper from Vietnam, mangoes from Karachi and wine from Marlborough in New Zealand. People who want to tell you globalisation has failed must face up to the reality that five minutes in any large supermarket will reveal it as the most incredible, varied and magnificent failure ever.

Self-sufficiency is a myth. Interdependency, co-operation, mutual-benefit, and trade are real. Even better, these liberties - of markets, trade and enterprise - are the best way to have a resilient supply of food and other products. A proper system of food security would bin Tim Lang’s Food Security Action report, would tell the National Farmers’ Union that we won’t limit supply chains to their benefit (and the consumers’ disadvantage), and would simply point to Tesco, Sainsbury and Aldi saying ‘more of that please’. Britain has an incredible system providing affordable, plentiful, safe and varied food. Why on earth would we change because we’ve fooled ourselves that we can be self-sufficient?

Andy Burnham announced over the weekend that he intended to create a “National Care Service”:

“The prime minister said the new NHS-style service would be funded by “everybody” but did not give further details on how his long-term plan would be paid for, indicating that a tax rise may be on the cards.

One option could be to link reform of social care with looking again at the pensions triple lock, with government insiders not ruling it out in the future.

He said Labour would put the proposals into its next general election manifesto so voters could give their endorsement, in the hope of reducing the risk that political attacks over “death taxes” would sink the policy.”

I’ve a feeling that Burnham’s recent experience with his own father might inform his approach here but if we are to ‘fix’ the social care system there are a load of questions that need answering before proposals are set out.

The first question we need to answer is what exactly do we mean by care? In England (the service is devolved so falls under the remit of the Scottish and Welsh governments in those countries) care plans can include, depending on circumstances, everything from assistance with cleaning or laundry through to personal nursing care and assistance with personal hygiene. Moreover most of the care provided in England is provided in a person’s own home not in an institutional setting. Defining what is an isn’t care (for the purpose of ‘free’ funding) is a vital precursor to designing any new system.

The Scottish system puts significant limits on its definition of care. The Community Care and Health (Scotland) Act 2002 lists what is defined as care although the term “support for overall health and wellness” leaves quite a bit of wiggle room. It does however specifically exclude care outside the home (shopping, visiting and attending supported community facilities). Plus, in the Scottish system, room and board is not provided free. Typically this reduces a weekly home fee of around £1500 by £400-500.

Under the Burnham system will we get something similar to Scotland or a completely funded service? This is important because if it is the latter we can expect, on day one of the new system, the cost of residential care will increase by roughly 50% as current self-funders switch to state funded.

“Approximately, 137,480 (37.0%) of care home residents were classified as self-funders, compared with approximately 234,555 (63.0%) state-funded residents (Figure 1). This is a 9.2% increase in self-funders from last year (125,954), which was not statistically significant, and the proportion of self-funding residents was also not statistically significantly different from last year (34.9%).”

At present about two-thirds of council social care spending supports residential care and we need to add the NHS Better Care Fund to this making a total of around £27 billion. On these numbers the ending of self-care would result in an additional £9bn in direct residential care costs.

There is, however, an additional impact since across most of the system self-funded residents pay significantly more (an average of £144 per week) than council-funded residents. This simply reflects that, especially in London and the South East, council fee levels do not cover the full cost of the residential placement. If there is no more self care then the cost gap would need to be closed. This is probably going to add a further £2-3bn to the overall cost of providing care.

These estimates only look at residential care yet far more people (roughly three times more) receive council-funded domiciliary care compared to those receiving institutional care. Beyond this there is an unknown number of people who make their own arrangements for care services. The home care industry estimates just short of a million people receiving assessed domiciliary care (split roughly 80/20 between council and self-funded) but with nearly 600,000 people employed in the industry this feels like an underestimate. There is also an unknown number of people who obtain care from friends, neighbours or family. There are 1.5m people receiving carer’s allowance in the UK and a large part of these payments are to people caring for an elderly person.

We can’t assume that, in a wholly free, ‘at the point of need’, system we wouldn’t see an increase in people accessing state provided services who previously made their own arrangements. We can expect additional costs of at least £2bn and probably double that amount. The estimate of £18bn suggested to the Prime Minister isn’t a long way off what a new system would cost. The Health Foundation estimated £17bn additional cost in January 2024 and costs, especially staffing costs, have risen significantly since then.

In short, to get an answer we need to define what we mean by care, look at the cost structures within the industry at the present, and estimate the amount of care provided by people without making use of state provision or support. Because the public debate is all about care homes rather than the whole system the most likely proposal, one similar to the Scottish system, will still result in many people needing to find £1000-1200 per week to pay for bed and board at the care home where they receive their free personal care.

All this additional cost needs also to be set against the anticipated future demand. The Health Foundation estimates that (at today’s prices) an additional £8.4bn is needed just to fund the existing inadequate system. To meet the full cost of care within the system as currently structured would need an additional £18.4bn by 2032. If Andy Burnham wants a free system it isn’t going to cost £18bn, it’s going to cost £36bn.

Getting people to use their own wealth to pay for their own care is often condemned as unfair. My Mum spent nearly two years in a care home eating into Dad’s assets whereas my wife’s Dad fell while shopping and died 24 hours later requiring zero in care costs. But we need also to recognise that my generation - over 60s in Britain - own roughly £3 trillion in housing assets. The average costs of care, even with a quite prolonged stay in a home, is affordable by a significant minority of older people. And remember again that most people do not end their lives in a care home. Even among those over 85 less that 15% are in a care home. Most of the elderly spend their last days in their own home supported by family and carers. And, as we’ve seen above, most care home residents are funded by the council. We are in danger of seeing a comprehensive and expensive reform to the current system that gives little additional benefit to the majority of those receiving care but is really good news for the children of those old people with valuable housing assets.

There was a point some time in the last ten to fifteen years when people stopped being press officers, public relations managers or public affairs executives and started telling us that they “work in comms, yah”. In the manner of other now ubiquitous shortenings (“what uni did you go to?”) the term ‘comms’ reeks of laziness and the pidginising of language. And, in marketing, the victory of the short over long term and the belief that branding is simply vibe without real substance. This was always a problem with every day public relations for the main reason that PR was often reactive because that’s where the crisis landed. Also PR was more concerned with managing the vibe around events and found too little time for real strategic thinking about the brand. Worse PR became seen, through people like Max Clifford, as a bit sleazy and, because of the malign media approach of men like Alistair Campbell, associated with spin and deception.

In my marketing days the term ‘comms’ didn’t simply mean a contraction of the word ‘communications’. Having the ‘comms’ ready was more about the medium for sending the message and often simply referred to the technical capacity to communicate. It is interesting to read local government PR guru Peter Holt talking about PR versus communications:

“...does using communications create a sub-conscious perception that self-limits our role to being all about the channels – the tactical work, rather than making a strategic contribution? Does it unhelpfully help anchor ourselves to the centre of our organisations, rather than being about engaging face to face with the public.”

The genie is, however, out of the bottle and ‘comms’ is the preferred term and, for governments, at every level has become seemingly the most important function. When Andy Burnham set up Number 10 North the first job adverts weren’t for policy wonks or tech gurus but for a dozen or so comms people to cover everything from social media to video. It does seem now that the primary purpose of Number 10, whether north or south, is the management and co-ordination of the government’s communications. There’s nothing particularly new about this function, we can go back to Alistair Campbell’s notorious ‘grid’ to see that Number 10 sees its role as one of keeping ministers, advisors and even civil servants entirely on message and in making sure that the timings of those messages cohere to a ‘plan’.

It does seem (and Number 10 recruiting for posts like ‘social strategy’, ‘social videographer’ and ‘social creative’ point to this) that Andy Burnham’s priority is communicating the message rather than the substance of that message. And examples like the prime minister and chancellor discussing pub snacks or the British and Irish PMs bantering about tea suggest that the Paddington Bear principle, replacing substance with twee, is firmly embedded in Number 10’s comms strategy.

We seem to have replaced Sir Keir Starmer’s government of and for lawyers with government by TikTok video, YouTube short and Facebook reel. John Power in the Spectator talks about this trend suggesting, in marketing terms at least, that politicians could learn from Andrew Tate (the politicians unfortunately don’t need lessons on sleaze and bad sexual behaviour) in using clipping services. It appears that the domination of short-form video in comms - I hesitate to use the term marketing here - is going to transform the way in which our leaders communicate. I’m sure that, in terms of reach, the clips of Andy Burnham and Micheál Martin talking about tea are far better than would be a traditional press conference.

But while it might be refreshing to see our politicians as human (or at least with carefully curated humanity) the essential problem with politics remains: the public does not trust politics believing politicians routinely lie. In 2005 the University of Southampton published an analysis of trends in political trust from the 1950s across over 100 countries:

“Whereas trust in representative institutions is generally in decline, trust in non-representative institutions such as the police, civil service and the legal system has remained stable or rising, pointing to a particular crisis of confidence in countries’ elected representatives.”

People’s trust in ‘non-representative’ institutions might be misplaced but the view of politicians perhaps isn’t. And I doubt that damaged political brands will be rescued by TikTok accounts or YouTube shorts. The inevitably short-term outlook of politicians (increasingly driven by the need to look good on the media cycle and obsessing over myriads of opinion polls rather than by the electoral cycle) means, however, that the damaged brand won’t get the attention it needs. If it does get some attention, as appears to be the case with Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative Party, the response is that the leader has their eye off the ball and should focus more on getting the comms right.

Everywhere, not just in politics, comms is replacing marketing meaning that the focus shifts from longer term brand building towards immediate media narratives. Marketers and advertisers have always been suckers for trends but if every day is spent chasing the narrative rather than building your own narrative then brands become fragile and risk damage simply by trying to surf the zeitgeist. By emphasising comms as comms rather than as part of a wider marketing strategy, Number 10, like other brand owners, will discover that giving your audiences a smile only works for as long as they don’t rumble the lack of a plan. Governments should absolutely be using TikTok, YouTube and Instagram as well as employing the annoying but seemingly ubiquitous influencers. But these must be marketing tactics not the strategy.

Andy Burnham does seem to recognise the things that bother the public (or at least some of them) but you get the feeling that having spotted that people face spiralling bills the approach is simply to echo that feeling by talking about the cost-of-living without offering anything beyond the superficial by way of response. We get free breakfasts for primary school kids and tiny discounts on rollercoaster rides rather than a coherent strategy to either make people richer or things cheaper (or ideally both).

What we now have is Burnham’s fresh, keen experts trying to retrofit a plan for government onto their social media tactics, a recipe for populism not good government. If what matters is whether a policy is TikTok-able then the tough choices around spending cuts, tax rises, regulations, national security and crime won’t make it through. Instead we’ll get a stream of gimmicks and rewashed successes combined with clips of the PM eating a biscuit or wearing a football scarf. And for all the profile this gets, the public will see through it.

Without a plan, a marketing strategy and a programme for government we are left with twee comms as the defining feature of government. Getting better at the socials is great but if that’s to be Andy Burnham’s defining contribution to the government of Britain he will be a disaster.

We are the priests

Of the Temples of Syrinx

Our great computers

Fill the hallowed halls

We are the priests

Of the Temples of Syrinx

All the gifts of life

Are held within these walls

We are apparently all doomed and there’s nothing you can do about it. In amongst the business-as-usual nonsense of politics and business a chap who nobody has heard from before posted on ex-twitter saying that AI was going to kill us all.

“A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade.

Evan Hubinger said in a post on X, the risk from the models which currently exist was “low” but he was “worried” the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity.

He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in future result in humans being wiped out.”

Now I don’t know a great deal about AI but there does seem to be a terrible tendency in our world to catastrophise just about everything. Mr Hubinger doesn’t explain just how the models become an existential risk to humanity but presents us with his p(doom) estimate of >10%. This isn’t an actual analysis of risk, of course, this is one individual’s guess about the risks to human survival from AI.

“These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

This sounds quite a lot more like a public relations exercise than doomster predictions of humanity’s demise. And the track record of millenarian cults is, to put it mildly, not a good one. The techbro alliance that’s promoting this p(doom) argument does so because it wants attention. Perhaps because real world applications of LLMs aren’t going quite as brilliantly as they predicted:

“...executives report little own-firm impact of AI over the last 3 years, with nine-in-ten reporting no impact on employment or productivity.”

So what do you do when your predictions of job-destroying, profit-boosting, efficiency-generating positives from spending money on AI turn out to be a tad undercooked? You double down. ‘The models are improving by the day, so much so that if you don’t give us billions we’ll hit the singularity and we’ll all die’. And they’re banking on us being frightened by arbitrary p(doom) guesses and that we don’t understand what’s going on under the bonnet of AI. I may not be alone in thinking that, just maybe, the emperor’s tailor is a charlatan.

But, to play along with the millenarians, let’s look at how the AI is going to kill us all. It seems there are two ways:

1. AI could make it easier for bad actors to create biological, chemical or other weapons

2. Rogue systems could attack infrastructure at unprecedented scale while evading human oversight

The first of these is, let’s be honest, not a technology issue but a humanity issue and sort of assumes that ‘bad actors’ want to destroy humanity. But outside film and comics the ‘bad actors’ don’t want to kill everyone, they want specific human outcomes related to power and resources. Moreover for AI to obtain these weapons it would require physical resources (10101010 only goes boom inside your computer, real world boom requires some chemistry or biology). This doesn’t eliminate the risks of ‘bad actors’ securing weapons of mass destruction but it does contain those risks: the ‘bad actor’ isn’t Thanos, he is motivated by prosecuting his and his group’s objectives. Which probably doesn’t involve killing off all of humanity.

Which gets us to the second way AI is going to kill us. This is more feasible since we remain inside the 10101010 world, infrastructure is increasingly dependent on computerised systems. But this doesn’t kill us, it just collapses the systems that sustain civilisation. Millions of people live without a reliable electricity supply, without piped water, and without access to the place where AI operates. Their lives aren’t great but, despite the problems, they aren’t dead yet.

There’s a lot of *intelligent* chatter about hierarchies of power and how these AI models will become ‘superintelligent’ but being able to add up quickly didn’t make computers sentient and being able to search through the vast online archive very quickly also doesn’t make AI Models sentient. Without human input (see ‘bad actors’ above) AI Models are just scratching their balls and staring out the window, they have no reason (obviously) to ‘attack’ infrastructure unless some human tells them to do so. What we should be concerned with isn’t having a boondoggle to agree an international treaty but with infrastructure owners having the capacity to use AI to stop ‘bad actors’ using AI to attack their critical systems.

It is impossible to dismiss the significance of AI and that it is going to make profound changes to your job and to the structure of business and industry. It is odd to see the emerging marriage between the big AI businesses and the political left as the former seek money to fund their pretended threat to humanity and the latter embrace a ‘neo-luddite’ agenda. In the middle we have people like Darren Jones, former cabinet minister, calling for meetings and treaties:

“I’ve never thought we should ban innovation or scientific endeavour but it’s clear we need a new multinational treaty for the safe and regulated development of superintelligence”

I’m not convinced by the p(doom) arguments. Most of these seem opportunistic and better placed in the realm of science fiction. But we do need to recognise that the AI genie is out of its bottle and that the structures of our civilisation are fragile. Without wanting to come over all Marxist, we need to democratise security, to provide people and businesses access to the tools that protect them from the stupidity of that mindless cloud of data we call “Artificial Intelligence”.

“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”

There has been, especially in the USA, the re-emerging of an old idea, “the common good”. Usually this reflects the desire to control what happens in society by slightly authoritarian right-wing leaders and thinkers. It has economic elements (against free markets and especially free trade) and social elements (the desire for conformity and a dislike of diversity) but the concept tracks back through the European authoritarian right with an idea of a national will, to Rousseau’s idea of the ‘general will’. I wrote this criticism of now Tory MP Nick Timothy’s ideas around the common good back in 2020. But you could replace Timothy’s name with J D Vance and get a good idea of the direction for part of what will be the post-Trump right in the US.

The pursuit of the common good has little place in liberalism, for liberalism is principally concerned with the maximisation of individual freedom. Liberals have always tended to underestimate how the freedom of the rich and powerful can undermine the freedom of the poor and powerless. But it is only now that this reality is becoming so blatant, prevalent and, in the eyes of many, inevitable and even legitimate.

This argument, that the pursuit of individual liberty somehow runs counter to the common good, has been a companion to liberalism since its first days on the street of Paris, the salons of Philadelphia and the lecture halls of Edinburgh. It says that in some way people being free runs counter to the common good, that the existence of the rich necessarily requires the presence of the poor, and that liberalism is about the application of power over others not the exercise of choice.

The quotation above comes from Nick Timothy, erstwhile advisor to Theresa May and renewed advocate of anti-liberal, social conservatism. Timothy joins a growing crowd, on both left and right, that has drifted (in some cases fled screaming) away from the consensus that people being free to exercise choice is a good thing so long as that choice doesn’t harm others. And the prop that such people have reached for to hold up their argument is this idea of the ‘common good’, that we can in some alchemical way divine this thing and make it real. But who decides what that common good might be? How do we ascertain the general will? And how do we respond when a minority refuse to accept the definition - can it still be called common or general?

The worst take on the ‘common good’ is that which is implicit when Timothy talks about diversity - “...the more diverse a society becomes, the less trust and reciprocity there is, and less willingness to pay taxes to fund universal public services and welfare systems.” We read from this that the common good is, in some way, a homogeneity, the sameness of people, and that a functioning society is only possible where diversity is minimised.

The mistake that Timothy (and many others) make lies in the corruption of liberalism in American usage rather than our traditional understanding of liberal. If liberal means, as it mostly does in the USA, ‘progressive, left-wing, identity politics’, then Timothy and others’ objection to the idea is justified. So much of this ‘liberal’ assault on institutions does not reflect a love of liberty but rather a view that the power of government should be used to enforce a majority view onto a minority so as to protect group rather than individual interests. This is not liberalism.

Talking, however, about the common good or the general will, especially in language that seems to exclude difference and diversity, does not seem to me to be championing western values but rather to see the common good as oppositional to religious freedom, antithetical to sexual choice, and opposed to the idea of open markets. A common good doesn’t come about from the limiting of liberty or by a policy of reducing diversity. If the general will becomes about killing market freedom because the distribution of the riches it makes isn’t even then we should begin to worry that this will, this common good, doesn’t serve the people but instead satisfies compliance and adherence to rules defined by our betters. We are supposed to make more sacrifices for this common good - pay higher taxes, accept limits to our liberty - because it will be better for the nation.

Timothy and others set nations as greater than the sum of their parts, semi-mythical entities rather than temporary arrangements in the churn of human history. Rather than it being a shared place with a shared history (however contested), nation becomes a thing itself symbolised by flags, hymns and rituals not an association between free people to largely mutual benefit. We cannot know the common good, Rousseau was wrong about there being a general will, and those who lay claim to knowing the will of the people - even in a newspaper article - open up the doors to a less free, more controlled and less pleasant world.

Liberalism, for all that it is misused to justify oppression by the left, is the thing that made the world we have today. Not just “the west” but all of it. Moreover liberalism is the thing that will make our world even better - free speech, free assembly, free exchange, these are the most important things for us to champion. Limiting any of these for fear of diversity or because your religion is dying out does not serve the common good. The common good is served by remembering the mutual benefit that comes from our selfish interests - as one of liberalism’s founders, Adam Smith, put it: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”.

“One tiny Hobbit against all the evil the world could muster. A sane being would have given up, but Samwise burned with a magnificent madness, a glowing obsession to surmount every obstacle, to find Frodo, destroy the Ring, and cleanse Middle Earth of its festering malignancy. He knew he would try again. Fail, perhaps. And try once more. A thousand, thousand times if need be, but he would not give up the quest.”

This last week marks the anniversary of the death of the man who wrote the most important 20th century work of fiction. I’m careful here to use the term important rather than greatest or best-written despite my personal view that the book in question is also the greatest 20th century work of fiction. Importance is measured by the scale of the social, cultural and even political reach of a book. And JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” had a bigger cultural and social impact than anything else written in the 20th century. In the wider field of arts perhaps only The Beatles had a comparable impact on everyday cultural lives.

You don’t need to love “The Lord of the Rings” to appreciate its impact. You can believe that Tolkien nicked the story from Wagner (a bit of a stretch but the controlling ring is a big crossover), or that it is simply a children’s story made into a cult. But you cannot deny that the simple story of a great quest, a battle between good and evil and the triumph of ordinary little people, literally little people in the book, informs and influences such a lot of modern thought. From the environmental movement to anti-globalist conservatives and Big Tech billionaires the redemption of middle earth through the destruction of an over-powerful ring provides a guide.

This all struck me hard when the prime minister of Italy, at the very moment of reaching power, referenced Tolkien saying she “didn’t consider the Lord of the Rings to be a fantasy”. Now while the Italian right shares a love of Tolkien with Peter Thiel and the US techbro brotherhood, there’s an interesting difference. For Giorgia Meloni and the post-fascist right in Italy the inspiration is the hobbits and especially Sam Gamgee (not some sort of imagine race politics as her critics claim), whereas the occasionally libertarian but mostly authoritarian ‘effective altruism’ movement in America’s tech world is obsessed with the symbols of power, with the palantir, the sword that was broken and with the Simarils that caused all the bother in the first place. I’m pretty sure Peter Thiel would have done the full Isildur with the One Ring.

I’ve strayed a little here but the use of Tolkien as a cultural reference point is enormously important. You only need to read the book to appreciate why, just maybe, a palantir might not be as innocent and independent as you think. We aren’t all Aragorn after all.

Led Zeppelin’s fourth album (untitled like the previous three but called Led Zeppelin IV by everyone) is most noted for “Stairway to Heaven” but also includes “The Battle of Evermore”, featuring the wonderful Sandy Denny alongside Robert Plant. It’s an homage to “The Lord of the Rings” complete with ring wraiths and reminds us that 1970s progressive rock is replete with folk music and fantasy references. Even Caravan’s drugged up “Land of Grey and Pink” (where boy scouts stop to think) tangentially reflects this obsession. The idea of noble elves, greedy but good dwarfs (or dwarves if you are Tolkien) and a fight to stop bad people killing trees made for a perfect hippy rallying point.

We have control-crazed Silicon Valley techbros branding their products as Tolkien’s swords and crystal rocks or hippies wearing yellow boots while singing “Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing, Comes hopping home again. Can you hear him singing? Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! and merry-o, Goldberry, Goldberry, merry yellow berry-o!” But the deeper truth is that “The Lord of the Rings” isn’t about kings, swords, battles and heroic men on horses. Nor is the “Lord of the Rings” about skipping up the Withywindle in yellow boots. The book is about the heroism of ordinary men. And that’s why Sam Gamgee is the real hero of the book. That’s what Giorgia Meloni understands and Peter Thiel doesn’t: the heroes in our world, and Tolkien’s, are living next door doing mundane, ordinary jobs. Cutting grass, fixing walls, painting fences. Tolkien knew, he’d seen it in Flanders, that ordinary people did extraordinary things. And, just as importantly, returned from those extraordinary things to their mundane, ordinary life as if nothing had happened.

The “Lord of the Rings” influenced so much. The world of gaming is filled with high fantasy because of Tolkien. A simple idea of individual combat in ancient wargaming became Dungeons and Dragons but the resulting game was infused with Tolkien’s (or maybe ancient mythology through Tolkien) creations: elves, dwarves, orcs and half-orcs and, of course, halflings or hobbits as they’d have been called if 20th century copyright didn’t prevent it. And Dungeons and Dragons set the tone, helped set the systems for computer gaming. Tolkien went online.

It doesn’t matter that the creators of Dungeons and Dragons plundered Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock because all of those writers nodded in respect or (for Moorcock) distaste to Tolkien. Why? Because the genre, the intellectual space, in which they wrote was created by Tolkien. Long shelves filled with fantasy literature - David & Leigh Eddings, Ray Feist, John Gwynne, Karen Miller, Brandon Sanderson - exist in large part because of “The Lord of the Rings”. And the idea of a mapped fantasy world went from books to film and TV. “Game of Thrones” is as unlike Tolkien’s great book as its author, George R R Martin, could manage. But it still had an existential and evil threat to the world - “Winter is Coming” - and a recognisable mix of magic, dragons and war.

Gaming is a huge industry with Tolkien’s imprimatur. Because of Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy role playing became a huge part of the gaming world from straight D&D transfers like Baldur’s Gate to games like The Witcher. The idea of a quest, of the struggle between good and evil, law and chaos became central parts of the gaming world. In the 1980s Games Workshop launched Warhammer, the hugely successful tabletop game. And the first edition of the game featured elves, dwarves, halflings, humans and orcs. If you made a fantasy setting for your story, film or game it was almost a requirement to have this mix of characters! Warhammer’s lore evolved into a reflection of Michael Moorcock’s law versus chaos but, regardless of Moorcock’s characterising of “The Lord of the Rings” as “Epic Pooh”, there’s no question that some of his literary success rode on the shoulders of Tolkien.

For fantasy writers there are, it seems, two routes: echo Tolkien’s epic quest or try to make your story as far removed from Tolkien as possible. Writers like Moorcock, Martin, Joe Abercrombie and Steve Erikson distanced their work by making characters more morally ambiguous but they still write in a fantasy setting that barely existed before “The Lord of the Rings”.

The cultural importance, especially in literature, of “The Lord of the Rings” is hard to deny. But the defenders of high culture dislike this because Tolkien’s work is genuinely popular. Over 500 million copies of “The Lord of the Rings” have been sold and familiarity with characters like Frodo, Sam and Gandalf is high. YouGov polling shows that 95% of those polled knew of the book, higher than any other work of fiction. In 2003 the BBC’s “Big Read” used public votes and the commentary of expert defenders to choose Britain’s best book. The look of disappointment on presenter Clive Anderson when he announced “The Lord of the Rings” as the winner remains one of my favourite TV moments and generated this priceless comment:

“Somebody said that The Big Read was not just un-literary but anti-literary and I think that’s right,...It is based on the assumption that the opinion of the public is always beyond reproach.”

The latest attack on Tolkien returns us to the political world where the ‘Research Information and Communications Unit’ (RICU) at Britain’s Home Office “...warns radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell.”

Conservative writers now routinely cite Tolkien as an influence and “The Lord of the Rings” as an important conservative book. This might explain the Home Office’s concerns although it probably has more to do with Fratelli d’Italia being big on hobbits. Tolkien would have been a NIMBY but he also hated the idea of ‘the state’ and the manner in which industrialisation made everywhere less green and more unpleasant. Like lots of rural and suburban Tories I’ve a feeling Tolkien would have a soft spot for the Greens, or at least the bits of that movement which wants to save bats or newts, clean up rivers and plant more trees.

Without setting out to do so, Tolkien changed the literary world by creating, from the mythology and languages he loved, an entirely different kind of book. And that book inspired a renewed cultural appreciation of fantasy, folklore and the old world of pre-Christian Northern Europe. But “The Lord of the Rings” also told a great story that works everywhere because it is about saving the world from evil and that ordinary people, just as they did in the 1940s, did extraordinary things in the process of completing the quest.

The story isn’t about great warriors or mighty wizards wielding great power but about the heroism of people who’d done nothing much beyond gardening, going for walks and eating more than one breakfast. Indeed the great warriors and mighty rulers, we’re reminded by Tolkien, are eminently corruptible by things of great power like the palantirs. The heroes of Tolkien’s book are relatable. They may be four foot tall with hairy feet but they feel like us, like the men of WW2 whose obituaries we still read. Men who went to war, performed incredible acts of selfless bravery, then returned to being accounts clerks or gamekeepers and never mentioned the war much again.

It is this that means the book still resonates and, maybe, why there has always been a slightly elitist group who want to deny the possibility of individual heroism who resent the success of “The Lord of the Rings”. For me the book changed everything, reminded the world that storytelling matters more than great prose or elaborately nuanced characters, and above all put courage back where it belongs as one of the greatest virtues. And we should remember that even if Frodo hadn’t reached the cracks of doom - Sammath Naur - he’d still have been a hero, albeit an unremembered one.

There is a video doing the rounds of social media where a young man wearing what appears to be a striped dressing gown explains at some length why he is leaving Britain to set up business in Vietnam. The young man explains that he and (especially) his wife don’t feel safe in London, that it is a “low trust” society. The young man goes on to complain about how much he pays in tax and how little he gets from the state in return. We’re regaled with tales of the overcrowded London tube and with the general grottiness of life in London. The crunch is, however, when this young man tells us how much easier and cheaper it is to live, work and do business in Vietnam. And that he has some friends and former colleagues already living and working in South East Asia.

In one respect this video is a parable of life for young, ambitious and skilled people in Britain. It seems at times that everything is stacked against those keen to get on, to achieve what their parent’s generation achieved, to own a home, raise a family and enjoy a good life in a great country. It is hard to argue against when some young engineer decides to take their skills to New Zealand, Australia, the USA or, as with the young man in the video, Vietnam.

Up here in the North of England we’ve long talked about the ‘brain drain’ to London but now the clever kids who got study engineering at university from Wigan or Barnsley aren’t going to London:

“One in 10 students who will graduate from UK universities this summer are planning to leave the country for better job opportunities, according to a new survey.

Research conducted by High Fliers Research has revealed that the proportion of final-year students who said they will look for a job overseas has risen by a third in just two years, from 7.8 per cent in 2024 to 10.2 per cent this year.”

And who can blame them? I was talking to a slightly older graduate recently who is being made redundant. This bright young person showed me the wages on offer for their level of experience observing that they weren’t a whole lot better than minimum wage. Why would a young person get hocked up to the eyeballs with student debt so they can earn barely ten grand more than they’d get in a minimum wage job. And that sort of assumes there’s a job available.

“Graduate job vacancies in the UK have sunk to their lowest level since they started being tracked a decade ago, according to a recruiting website.

Just 8,383 jobs for people leaving university were advertised in July, Adzuna reported on Monday, down 45% compared with the same point last year and the lowest since the company started gathering the data in 2016.”

If we want to understand what’s wrong in Britain, we need to start with the almost complete lack of opportunity for young, ambitious people. And that, even if such young people find exciting jobs at growing companies, they quickly discover that their wages barely cover the rent and that’s after nearly half those wages have been snaffled by the state in taxes. Nearly everywhere (but especially anywhere within 100 miles of London) young people look at their financial circumstances and prospects then conclude that there’s no chance of them buying a house let alone starting a family.

Meanwhile my generation and the politicians who pander to my generation carry on with militant NIMBYism, opposing new housing, data centres, power stations, solar panels, roads, railways, airports and anything that looks remotely like a factory. In Wilsden, the next village to Cullingworth, outline planning permission has been granted for up to 100 new houses on what was green belt land at the northern end of the village. You’d have thought the apocalypse had arrived. Everywhere we see little campaign groups set up, always infected with cynical political campaigners from every political party, to oppose development of every kind. If you drive anywhere in England you’ll encounter protest banners taped to fences protesting new homes, new jobs and new infrastructure.

Meanwhile government, nationally and locally, presides over a vast regulatory state where anything and everything that enterprising and ambitious people might want to do requires an avalanche of forms, applications, assessments and permissions. From a planning system that wants to control advertising posters and the colour of shop fronts to unaccountable quangos like Natural England and the Environment Agency that have given themselves the power to just say ‘no’ to anything they don’t like.

Then there are those taxes. It isn’t just that the government wants to take half your income, they also want to tax you if you employ someone, tax your company, tax your property and, if you dare run a business involving things the government thinks are sinful, whack enormous duties on the goods you sell. What’s worse though is that politicians and the media cheers at each and every new and petty restriction on our lives.

“When the government interrupted everybody’s Friday evening two weeks ago with a howling text message urging them not to have a barbecue, those who complained that it was a bit much were confronted by nanny state appreciators reciting the usual script. “It’s just a text message! You can turn the alerts off if you want to! Haven’t you got bigger things to worry about?”

It was the same story when Birmingham City Council announced plans for a blanket 20mph limit this week. Could there be any ill effects from slowing every vehicle in England’s second city down to the speed of a pushbike? Dare to ask and you will be met with a familiar refrain. “What’s the big deal? So you’ll reach your destination a few minutes later? It’s not the end of the world!””

Chris Snowdon is right to complain about these petty and mostly pointless little restrictions on our lives and to point out that it isn’t simply a matter of us being irritated by them but that this fussbucketry has a real economic cost. Imagine if, instead of disappearing down the horrible rabbit hole of American moral panic about vaping, we embraced this groundbreaking and life-saving innovation? How many jobs and business have we lost because of fussbucketry? Hardly a day passes without some self-serving politician telling us that the pub is the heart of the community. But they’d look at you like you’d two heads if you suggest they might like to reduce beer duty, liberalise planning and licensing, and make it easier to employ kids to serve at the bar.

I don’t think the numbers leaving Britain will become a torrent but I do fear that the ones who do go are the young, ambitious, enterprising people we need if we’re to have any chance at all of a bright future in Britain. Ministers, opposition leaders and the media constantly blather about economic growth but faced with the realities of stagnation prefer to indulge in populist nonsense about postal voting, setting up a state version of Checkatrade, blocking housing development or calling for rent controls. All while cheering on every pettifogging new regulation aimed at stopping us sinning, saving the planet or protecting us from wholly imaginary technology bugaboos.

“Vape shops. Betting shops. Dodgy businesses.

If you look at your high street these days and think ‘who asked for this?’, you’re not alone.

I’m doing something about it. We’re giving local people and councils more control over what opens, and tougher powers to crack down on businesses that aren’t good for our communities.

For too long, Westminster has stood by while our high streets declined. That ends now.”

Britain’s Prime Minister, back from the seaside, has launched his grand summer tour by announcing plans to “Save the High Street”. A carefully coordinated plan to deal with the scourge of vape shops, betting shops and dark places filled with slot machines. A scourge that is destroying that most precious of English things: the high street. Andy Burnham is going to do this by giving powers for local councils to ban and block the sorts of shops that you don’t like. Vape shops with garish pink neon signs: gone. Betting shops filled with sad people poking at betting machines or sat forlornly staring at some greyhounds on a TV screen: gone. The ‘Adult Gaming Centre’ with subdued lighting, bad carpets and rows on one-armed bandits: gone. It isn’t in the PM’s message but I assume that all the Turkish barbers with big chairs plus one like a racing car for kids to sit in while their hair’s trimmed will be gone.

Just a few innocent tweaks to planning regulations, inventing a new Use Class that’s essentially “shops that councillors think people don’t like”. With this single act of genius, Andy Burnham has saved the high street. Never again will the scourge of ‘dodgy businesses’ plague our precious town centres. Little old ladies window shopping in the old Hoagy Carmichael song return safe now that there won’t be any vape shops. Solid housewives with Silver Cross prams will gossip outside the greengrocers while, on a Saturday, their hard-working husbands will discuss power tools and screw sizes with Albert in the hardware store. What young people there are, can be found staring at the display of model railways, die cast cars and dolls in the general stores. Everywhere is clean, tidy, unbroken and respectful. Bernard Drake, President of the newly vibrant Chamber of Trade is heard to say how much better it is and “all because of Mr Burnham, what a fine leader he is”.

We can say safely that none of this is going to happen. Andy Burnham announcing that councils can ban vape shops isn’t going to save the high street. I know you are all shocked to hear this but the decline in our town centres and high streets has almost nothing to do with vaping, gambling or the need for black marketeers and criminals to launder their ill-gotten gains through strangely empty barber shops, nail parlours and mobile repair businesses. The decline of Britain’s traditional shopping places is down to us. We did it.

The same people who tell you it is because of parking charges, crime, litter, and unpleasantly garish shop fronts were, yesterday, sat in their kitchen ordering hardware, clothing, shoes, toys, and household goods using their mobile phone and a credit card. Earlier those same people had driven to the supermarket where they purchased a week’s worth of groceries, some clothes for the grandkids and a lovely vase for the sister’s birthday. Last weekend, these same people drove 20 miles to look at some new furniture for the kitchen where they ordered the rest of their shopping. Don’t blame the death of the high street on dodgy businesses moving into the gaps made from businesses that closed because of supermarkets, big box stores and online shopping. You hold in your hand, you might be using it to read this, the gun that killed the high street. And it is smoking.

If Andy Burnham wants to save the high street, perhaps start somewhere else. Rather than listen to Hyacinth Bucket wannabes and other assorted fussbuckets, worrywarts and busibodies, he should maybe listen to people like Vaughan Allen, chief executive of Manchester’s Business Improvement District:

“Or you could, you know, reduce business taxes, reduce employment taxes, scrap planning powers and let the market do its job.”

Even these changes, welcome though they’d be, won’t put an end to the high streets decline because that’s driven by our behaviour, our choices, not but regulations, taxes and rules. If we want to understand what’s necessary to save the high street, then we need to start with the town centres and high streets that are thriving and ask why that is. There’s a great piece of ethnographic research from Susie Prior and Sandford Grossbart (2005) in a thriving American small town that observed:

“Other consumers and retailers describe social activities on Main Street, which they associate with a variety of experiences, including dining; window shopping; strolling for relaxation; jogging for health reasons; pub crawls; wine tastings; book clubs; language clubs; craft guilds; charity events; art events; parades; demonstrations; mass celebrations following major sports victories; and meeting friends. Many informants also refer to social interactions between and among retailers and consumers.”

Town centres need impresarios as much as they need managers. But the thing that connects these activities in small town America is that they are the activities we associate with the better off, even the wealthy, and especially with the older variants of these people. Successful high streets are places where there are lots of people with time and money. Sometimes this is, as you’ll see in Haworth and Saltaire near me, a function of tourism but more usually it is like Ilkley or Boston Spa, where the people nearby are wealthy and retired or semi-retired.

If you want thriving high streets and town centres, you don’t achieve it by giving councillors more powers to stop things and ban things, you start with economic growth, with a stronger local economy. And you then do the sorts of things Vaughan Allen does in Manchester: cleaner streets, attractive street environments, control of anti-social behaviour and working every day to improve a place’s image. But, as I wrote in 2023:

“The solution stares us in the face - economic growth - but nobody seems to have any desire to help make that growth real. Unless there’s maybe 20-30% more disposable income in places like Keighley, Oldham or Wolverhampton there is little prospect of getting a thriving town centre. Making those places look nicer, getting a few more community facilities maybe, will merely give the illusion of betterment rather than actually making these places better.”

If, urged on by Andy Burnham, councils get rid of vape shops, ‘Turkish’ barbers and betting shops, they won’t be replaced by bijou cafes, boho clothing stores and smart wine bars. What you’ll get is more boarded up shops: here’s lottery funder Power to Change:

“A record 16% of shops on Britain’s high streets stand empty and one in every 20 vacant units across the country have been shuttered up for more than three years.”

Doing what Burnham proposes will simply get you more empty shops because the reason why all those old time uses have gone is because people don’t have the money to pay the premium for buying in a high street and, let’s face it, buying online is most of the time a load easier and quicker.

Hoagy’s little old lady sits in our memory as an image of something lost. We’d like it back, that bustling town square filled with happy, smiling shoppers and strollers. But we’d like it back without us giving up buying on our phone and loading up the car with groceries at the supermarket. It isn’t coming back, just enjoy the song.

“A little bit of business here

A little bit of business there

Bet that you’ve been window shopping

All around the square

Little old lady, time for tea

Here’s a kiss, two or three

You’re just like that little old lady

I hold dear to me”

“Like most other developed countries, income and productivity growth has been very slow in the UK since the financial crisis of 2008–09. But on a per person basis, economic growth has been slower than in the US, the EU27 and Germany in that time. The slowdown has been particularly stark given that the UK economy, and its productivity, were growing quite quickly prior to 2008. While employment growth has been strong, average earnings growth has been dreadful - for which read almost non-existent. Gross Domestic Product per head is today nearly £11,000 lower than it would have been had pre crisis trends continued.”

It doesn’t have to be like this. This reality is a direct consequence of choices made by successive governments. From Gordon Brown ‘saving the world’ to the post-Covid triumph of welfarism, British governments’ have opted for policies that acted as a great sheet anchor on the prospects for economic growth. It is hard to pin down the reasons for this disaster, they certainly aren’t exclusive to Britain as economic crises in Germany and France attest, but it is very clear that economic policy everywhere in the West has acted to stress the role of government in economic growth, the significance of regulation - most usually international regulation of one sort or another, and a bigger focus on state-ownership or direction. At the same time, critics of economic policy from left and right speak of ‘neoliberalism’ and that the world’s economic challenges derive from the supposed disaster of free market liberalism and the era of Thatcher and Reagan.

It is peculiar that, in a world where government is large and regulation extensive, the criticism of economic policy is that it favours small government and light touch regulation. And we get bizarre assertions like this in “From Thatcher to Johnson: 40 years of Neoliberalism in the UK, Continuities and Adaptations”:

“This chapter focuses on the principal features of neoliberalism in the UK over the last 40 years. Successive governments—New Labour (1997–2010), the Conservative/Liberal Democrats coalition (2010–2015), and the Conservative government (since 2015) have remained faithful to this model, even if they also took measures that were out of step with it.”

The writer here, Catherine Mathieu, is correct to observe that much of economic policy since the 1990s has been anything but ‘neoliberal’ and then asserts that, nevertheless, governments are still a bunch of neoliberal Thatcherites. The belief in neoliberalism as the principal determinant of economic policy is now little more than a statement of faith, a statement that regardless of all the evidence to the contrary ‘neoliberalism’ is the world’s dominant economic ideology.

There are those who, with more merit, ground neoliberalism in Thatcher’s domestic agenda rather than in simply free market liberalism. The criticism here involves firstly the argument that the 1970s were really all that bad after all and that the economic outcomes of 1980s Thatcherism were less good than its advocates claim. These arguments are found from both left and right, reflected in a renewed enthusiasm for an ‘Old Labour’ (or, if we’re honest ‘One Nation Tory’) managed economy and in the Trumpian eagerness for tariffs, import substitution and industrial strategies. All of these arguments are accompanied by the rejection of the Thatcherite belief in supply side reform, deregulation and privatisation.

Economists are mostly agreed that Britain’s problems stem from a collapse, indeed almost the absence of, productivity growth since 2008:

“Britain’s relative lack of growth in the last fifteen years can be explained by a decline in productivity. Productivity is defined as the average output produced for each hour of work done in the country. Much like GDP, productivity in the UK has stagnated in an unprecedented way: in the 35 years before 2008, productivity doubled. In the 15 years since, it has gone up by 5%. This stagnation became known as the productivity puzzle, and has prompted a lot of debate amongst economists.”

The article that opens with this observation presents a variety of possible reasons for the productivity dilemma - lack of investment, unemployment, Brexit, Covid and the energy crunch. And, while the article is targeted at ‘A’ Level economics students, it is curious that it doesn’t mention tax or regulation (essential enemies in the neoliberal model we are supposedly following) as possible reasons for the productivity crunch. Even the decidedly statist OECD has noted how regulation drags on economic growth (emphasis mine):

“The latest OECD Economic Outlook, in its thematic chapter Time for a Regulatory Reset? (OECD, 2025a), confirms that this is more than a feeling – and that it matters for growth. Labour productivity growth has slowed across most OECD countries since the late 1990s, due to weak business investment (OECD, 2025b) and diminished economic dynamism, which reflects the declining likelihood of new firms to enter and scale-up, workers to change jobs and scarce resources to be reallocated towards more productive firms (Figure 1). Some of this is due to benign forces such as ageing populations or the rise of firm-specific human capital in an intangible-driven economy. But growing regulatory frictions are also part of the story.”

The OECD notes how there has been a gradual increase in the share of employment directed to regulatory management and compliance showing that “...the average increase in compliance costs is associated with roughly 0.5% lower labour productivity and a 0.4 percentage point drop in the employment share of young firms.”

Meanwhile the triumph of welfarism and the entitlement economy in Britain has led to taxes reaching historically high levels and for political (and practical reasons) for those increased taxes to fall most heavily on the most productive people in the economy. The World Bank is very clear about the link between low taxes and economic growth, and the OECD observes that the preferred taxes in much of the developed world (corporate taxes, payroll taxes and income taxes) are those least conducive to productivity and economic growth.

It is self-evident that higher rates of corporate taxation will reduce firm investment (and, we assume, productivity) and there’s a strong case for the same effect being seen with higher rates of personal income taxes and capital gains taxes. Yet the UK has increased the proportion of income tax paid by the most productive as well as rates of corporation taxes. Proposed changes to capital gains taxes will result in capital owners not realising capital gains having a further negative effect on investment and productivity growth.

This is all, as its critics will be quick to claim, orthodox ‘neoliberalism’ (or common sense as others might observe) but there’s a further part of this to consider, the role of the public sector. The British state has grown steadily in size since 2008 with most of that growth driven by the increase in financial entitlements (pensions, benefits, right to support) and health costs. The British state’s activities make up 25% of GDP and its spending represents 46% of GDP so how efficiently all that is done matters. The evidence tells us that the public sector is a big part of Britain’s productivity conundrum:

“The single biggest factor in the disappointing UK productivity figures this century has been the poor performance of the one fifth of the UK economy that provides health, social services, education, defence and other public services – predominantly in the state sector.

The March 2024 Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures reveal that public sector productivity remained 6.4% below its pre-Covid 2019 peak, whilst the private sector has now surpassed its 2019 level. In its study of the long period from 1997, the ONS shows that over more than a quarter of century the public sector did not increase its productivity at all. It fell a little to 2010, rose a bit to 2019 and then lost all the gains leaving it back where it started by this year. The big fall in 2020 was not fully recouped by the recovery in 2021.”

The lack of supply side reforms, poor tax policy and increased economic regulation are, alongside a general lack of investment across the economy, big reasons for Britain struggling to raise its productivity. The current approach, seen in the last couple of budgets, is focused on delivering ‘savings and efficiencies’ across the public sector with “...all government departments to deliver at least 5% ‘savings and efficiencies’ by 2028–29.” The government is laying its bets on investment in the use of AI along with a wider digitisation agenda, something the IFS observe has been a feature of similar productivity strategies in earlier budgets under different political leaderships.

One of the ways in which Britain has moved away from that 1980s ‘neoliberalism’ is believing that simply mandating efficiencies is an effective budget management strategy. Thatcherites would say that, if you want to reduce spending, then the state has to either stop doing things it doesn’t need to do or else transfer activity into the more productive private sector. And the double whammy here comes from stopping doing things that unnecessarily regulate economic activity - we get a boost from a less regulated economy and a smaller, more focused public sector. If we reduce enough of this unnecessary activity we also open up the chance to reduce taxes on the most productive, further boosting investment and productivity growth.

Britain’s problems are that, since at least 1997, and probably since 1990, the nation’s governments have done the opposite of ‘neoliberalism’ (except perhaps in trade policy) with the result that an interfering, overmighty and very overweight state eats the nation out of house and home. And because so much - approaching 50% - of government spending is simply the distribution of cash to people who qualify for one or other entitlement, the prospect of a renewed Thatcherism gets vanishingly close to zero. Why would anyone in receipt of the state’s benevolence and generosity vote for people who want to take some of that away? The result is stagnation and decline. As a friend said to me recently, nothing changes until something breaks, and that hasn’t happened yet.

The rhetoric is great, the excitement (at least among the political cognoscenti) is palpable but as I’ve observed before what we’re offered isn’t devolution or genuine local control over anything much beyond the colour of the buses. And it seems, if the turnout for the Greater Manchester Mayoral by-election - a mere 25% - is any guide, that the public has twigged this truth.

Today, 1st August, is Yorkshire Day when people across the broad acres smile at their good fortune while others look on in disappointment at not being in or from Yorkshire. The whole of Yorkshire, from Hull to Huddersfield and from Settle to Sheffield now has these new-fangled ‘Mayoral Authorities’. Some like West Yorkshire and Hull & East Riding have a modicum of geographic coherence but York & North Yorkshire encompassing everything from Sutton-in-Craven to Scarborough is a historical and geographic catastrophe. Other than both places being in Yorkshire it is difficult to see how this makes sense except as “all the bits left over”.

Worse than this though, we’re being sold a fake devolution. Compared to pre-1972 local councils, these ‘Mayoral Authorities’, have almost no say over how much they have to spend and what they get to spend it on. For all Andy and Tracy tell us about ‘new powers’ and ‘new money’, the reality is that these elected mayors run the public transport authority and administer regeneration funding given to them by Whitehall. A few of the Mayors have the role of ‘police and crime commissioner’ which means they have no control over the police or crime but collect the rates that, in part, pay for the police and fire service.

The Mayors can’t issue bonds, can’t borrow money, they might be getting 25% of income tax but on Whitehall terms it isn’t their money to control. And those mayors don’t run any of the services of local councils, they just get to boss those councils around because they control the bits of central government capital and grant funding that relate to regeneration, highways and skills. The Mayors don’t control how much of this money they get to spend, don’t control which schemes they’ll fund, can’t raise their own tax to supplement this money and can only conclude investments with the signature of the relevant minister down in London - perhaps secured when that person toddles up north to the pointless piece of posturing that is “No 10 North”.

This is not devolution, this is the illusion of devolution. It is Whitehall using Mayors to give a regional accent to decisions that, in the end, are made in London. This might be the right way to run decision-making in England but it really isn’t devolution. I know it isn’t devolution because I can look a little further North and see something in Scotland that looks a load more like actual devolution (I appreciate there are Scots, not all nationalists, who think even their extensively devolved government is still faux-devolution). I can also look elsewhere, to Spain, Italy or Germany and see countries where decision-making is spread across local, regional and national governments. Even better, and unlike our elected mayors, these places have elections for assemblies that hold the executive leaders to account. In England it is just a cosy little club of unelected council leaders and carefully selected business representatives usually from the same party as the mayor.

If we want devolution (I’m not so sure we do) we should be electing regional assemblies responsible for a wide range of services across health, policing, transport and economic development as well as the power to raise the taxes to fund those services. Even in Scotland, the desperate urge of Whitehall to keep control, creates a situation where that nation’s leaders can blame Whitehall rules and (lack of) funding for their own inadequacies. And vice versa.

I don’t believe that devolution - even actual devolution rather than the fake English variety - leads to more economic growth. Yet this is the main argument we hear from its advocates. It isn’t clear that less centralised places than England necessarily have high rates of economic growth. What you do get is a slightly better distribution of that growth. As Tom Forth and the people at Centre for Cities are endlessly reminding us, France’s regional cities have enjoyed more growth than regional cities in England. Whether this is down to ‘devolution’ is moot but they do have the advantage of having local councils able to set and raise taxes, plan investment and, if necessary, issue bonds or borrow money. None of this pertains in English devolution, the mayors just get to paint the buses yellow, pink or green.

If we are serious about improving public administration maybe we should start by getting back to levels of local government independence last enjoyed prior to the 1972 reforms. The problem we face with local administration isn’t about devolving more things to localities, it is about the ability of localities to make their own decisions about what is right for that place rather than have Whitehall tell them what to do. When politicians in Westminster are deciding about the colour of recycling bins, whether to provide a food waste collection service and the methods for managing waste, it is hard to see that we gain much from giving a regional mayor half a say over road building and no real say at all over public transport infrastructure.

We’re being told that these devolution proposals are a radical transformation of public administration in England - all illustrated with twee videos of Andy Burnham talking about teacakes (or barms as he calls them). In one respect they are because we have a substantially different political geography but underneath that change nothing much is different. The new satrapies administered by elected mayors serve the policies and purposes of Westminster and Whitehall not local priorities or interests. Mayors can’t, for example, decide to have radically liberalised planning, lower business taxes, or a focus on energy abundance rather than Net Zero. The mayors can’t lead on building nuclear power stations or adopt a different approach to delivering health services. The mayors can’t even make decisions about investing in public transport (except what colour the buses should be). The mayors simply act as local agents for Whitehall in the same way that No 10 North isn’t radical let alone devolution, just Whitehall making Whitehall decisions in an office in Manchester.

English devolution is a mess. English devolution is an act of political smoke and mirrors. Above all, English devolution is a fake.

The Lord of the Rings is the most important, most consequential, novel of the twentieth century. You don’t have to like Tolkien’s masterpiece or even believe it to be well written to acknowledge that its significance and impact on literature and our wider culture is enormous. Beginning in 2001 a monumental film version, directed by Peter Jackson, was released. Many, I’m not especially qualified to assess, consider the film trilogy and especially 2003’s “Return of the King” also to be a masterpiece. And, while I loved the films, I’m not alone in seeing that they changed the emphasis of the story losing the sense of corruption that followed the ring and Sauron (an idea of original sin that was perhaps too Catholic for modern tastes) as well as cutting out the ‘Scouring of the Shire’ and the final confrontation with Saruman - Sharkey - back where the story began outside Bag End.

I’m writing this because I want to write about The Odyssey, or at least some of the critical responses to Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation of Homer’s poem. Not the “it’s too woke” criticism because a black woman was cast as Helen of Troy or even that a transman plays a boy soldier called Sinon (who, of course, doesn’t feature in the poem). Watching the film, neither of these supposedly ‘woke’ attacks on Western civilisation seem incongruous or without purpose.

Nor am I concerned with those obsessed with what might be called “kit purity”: iron swords in the Bronze Age, the wrong sort of armour and inauthentic ships. I’d be happy to read about the arms and armour of Bronze Age Greece (probably more leather and spear than sword and breastplate) but, just as the modern obsessions about woke don’t matter to a story neither does a quest for archaeological accuracy.

What annoys me is the manner in which some experts and a whole load of what can only be called ‘Homer Nerds’ attacked the film (sometimes without seeing it) because it did not cleave purely to Homer’s narrative but uses the thread of Odysseus’s story to create a modern narrative about the collapse of civilisation, guilt and homecoming. There are a mixture of criticisms most notably from from Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of Homer’s poem Nolan cites as an inspiration for the script. In Wilson’s review it is clear she doesn’t like the film mostly because it sails too close to superhero movies or even, god forbid, “..is often reminiscent of other 21st-century screen ‘epics’, not least Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.”

It feels like Wilson (who in classic left wing LRB style steps out from the review with an ethical snipe at the film locations in the Western Sahara) wants a film version of an imagined National Theatre production targeted not at the movie mass market but at a bunch of luvvies who want Homeric purity (plus more sex) rather than a gripping narrative. Wilson’s conclusion (other than a slightly self-important bit about how the film might encourage people to read the poem and stop universities shutting down classics departments) captures this idealised version:

“It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

This concern with narrative purity is repeated across the media and, aside from people with flags and symbols in their nametag on social media shouting about the end of western civilisation, makes for a huge difference to the way in which Lord of the Rings Nerds reacted to Peter Jackson’s film adaptation:

“Huge contrast between the prissy-ness of classicists about The Odyssey and the “wow this is great but...” response of Tolkien nerds to the LotR trilogy.”

I shared this comment on ex-twitter because the difference strikes me as interesting. Tolkien fans set off to watch the films excited and hopeful, returning having been entertained royally by a magnificent spectacle - why shouldn’t adapting a Greek story of derring-do, The Odyssey not be equally magnificent?

Tolkien fans, the ones who have read the book ten times, poured over the appendices, consumed books about the man himself and, these days, chatted on forums or listened to podcasts exploring the books and the film. All of us see the film’s flaws - the rewriting of Aragorn, the exclusion of Bombadil, the elevation of Arwen to provide romance earlier in the story, the sidelining of Faramir and the dechristianising of the story. But all of us, with no exception I’ve found, will tell you that the films are great (even the odd bit with Legolas surfing down an elephant’s trunk).

I’ve never read The Odyssey, relying instead on partially remembered lessons from school and children’s storybook adaptations that focus more on the monsters and magic than on the narrative of xenia, homecoming and Penelope’s suitors. I wanted the experts, even the self-appointed experts who read the poem once a decade ago, to show a bit more enthusiasm for the effort made to bring a dense and nuanced story, from a time of a different ethos, to a modern film audience. That audience is, remember, steeped in superhero movies (if Odysseus isn’t a superb hero where have I been all my life) and high fantasy. The carefully balanced, true to the poetry, version of the story that the purists want would, without question, have flopped just as would a Lord of the Rings adaptation with twenty minutes of Hobbits eating Bombadil’s dinner.

And, it seems, Nolan has made a film that is genuinely popular:

“Yet Nolan’s reputation appears to override conventional headwind. The director’s ability to turn dense, adult-skewing material into must-see theatrical events remains peerless. The Odyssey now claims the second-largest second weekend ever for an R-rated picture, trailing only Deadpool & Wolverine, which collected over $96 million after a record-shattering $221 million domestic debut.

After all, domestic receipts stand at $286 million, while international markets have contributed $353.2 million, pushing the global tally to $639.6 million after just 10 days, according to Box Office Mojo. These numbers already place The Odyssey among the year’s highest earners, with plenty of runway ahead.”

The Odyssey is a good film. In many ways, quite literally, a spectacular film. The manner in which the soundtrack invokes the power of the goods and merges into the sound effects of storm and battle is fantastic. But, just as a purist adaptation of the Lord of the Rings would have worked less well than the epic fantasy version Peter Jackson produced, Christopher Nolan has brought the narrative of Odysseus’s homecoming into a style and ethical context that works for an audience used to Thanos, Spiderman and Game of Thrones. In Emily Wilson’s review there’s a snide remark (I suspect Wilson isn’t a Lord of the Rings fan) that sums up why the film works:

“At the end of the film, a character sets out to ‘sail beyond the sunset’ and I almost expected everyone to break into Elvish.”

The Odyssey, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, succeeds because it takes the ancient narrative and twists it to suit a modern cinema audience. And it works because of these changes, not to have done so would have lost the ‘flawed superhero’ that is the central trope in most popular blockbuster films. Just as Jackson made Aragorn the hero of the Lord of the Rings rather than Frodo and Sam, Nolan has made Odysseus a troubled superhero like Spiderman or Batman because he knows that this is what the audience wants. A purist Odysseus filled with pride, celebrating the rape and pillage of Troy would have seemed incongruous to a modern audience.

As I concluded in another ex-twitter post:

“But because I’m one of the 99% of people who haven’t read The Odyssey but have half remembered school boy stories, authenticity is less important than fun. Maybe the way to respond is to enjoy the film and signpost the poem”

Back in the young days of the Blair Ascendency there was this urgent desire to replace all the fuddy-duddy institutions with new, bright and shiny, modern replacements. The Blair government, triumphant in its massive majority, wanted to emulate the previous time when a Labour government was swept to power on a radical manifesto to change the nation. Government would be transformed at every level with devolution to the Scots and Welsh, the conclusion of the Northern Ireland process begun by John Major, the reform of the House of Lords, and having parliament meet in the day time. Old fashioned things like having a Lord Chancellor and having the courts (and local councils) oversee the process of elections were to go, replaced by a prosaic Minister of Justice, a disturbingly American sound Supreme Court and an unaccountable Electoral Commission.

For local councils the intention was clear, Blair’s aim was straight from the Redcliffe-Maud and Michael Heseltine school - elected mayors for councils, reorganisation to clear out those silly districts, and a new tier of grand (and strategic) regional government. Like so much about the Blair Revolution, the local government reforms ended up as a fudge and a compromise - local councillors hated the proposals and back then Labour ran a lot of places that they’d never run before. Local councils were given a choice about whether to have an elected mayor (and near universally rejected the idea) with the alternative being the ‘leader and cabinet’ model where the leader of the controlling group appointed a few councillors to be the cabinet - no more than ten the rules said - leaving the remaining councillors scrabbling about doing little or nothing.

The Blair Revolution’s idea was that local councils would mirror parliament with backbench councillors sitting on scrutiny committees (designed to ape Parliament’s Select Committee system) that would hold the leader and cabinet to account. These committees, the government decided, would be independent - by which they meant not subject to a political party whip - and would be able to call in decisions and propose changes, even send the decision for consideration by the (whipped) full council.

It all sounded really exciting at the time, some councils (Bradford was one) even jumped the legislative gun and introduced scrutiny committees before being required to do so. The old committee system would be swept away. its fat bundles of papers, pre-briefings and meetings that lasted 15 minutes cast into history’s waste paper bin. A national organisation, the Centre for Public Scrutiny, produced a set of guiding principles for scrutiny:

• provide constructive “critical friend” challenge;

• amplify the voice and concerns of the public

• be led by independent people who take responsibility for their role

• drive improvement in public services.

The new system would be fit for the modern age - streamlined, effective, transparent and public-facing. Yet somehow it never seemed that way. I chaired Bradford’s first education scrutiny panel at a time when the Council was introducing a major reorganisation of schools (scrapping a three-tier system for the more commonplace two-tier system of primary and secondary). Officers, right up to the chief executive, told me I wasn’t allowed to require the new education portfolio holder to attend and answer questions (she did eventually come) and nor would the leader and that chief executive come. The relatively junior scrutiny officers were put under huge pressure not to allow me to do a ‘single issue’ meeting just on reorganisation and I was presented with a long list of other topics that simply had to go on my agenda.

The meetings themselves were a strange affair. For much of the time they consisted of me asking officers questions supported by the liberal democrat on the committee while the five Labour members sat there like cartoon Yorkshiremen, “Ear all, see all, say nowt; Eyt all, sup all, pay nowt.“ Matters improved once the torturous process of appointing faith school and teacher members but the Council’s corporate view remained that I should scrutinise the things that the Council wanted me to scrutinise - “it’s all about driving improvement”, I’d be told - rather than the things I felt the public would want me to examine.

Nothing much had changed when a decade later I returned as a scrutiny chair for adult social care - I wanted to look at (how topical) excess winter deaths but was told this wasn’t for me but the health scrutiny committee. There was a constant battle between my desire to look at things that mattered - bed blocking, care home fee structures, continuing care - and the Council’s preference for a long agenda of individual matters going through the authority’s decision-making processes. I still, however, found myself in the position where many of the councillors barely contributed to the meeting (and would start huffling and shuffling if the end of the meeting crept passed the kick-off at Bradford City or the start of some far more important party meeting somewhere else in the City).

The reality, at least in my experience, is that scrutiny is seen as unimportant (the local press only once attended my adult care scrutiny) with the chair roles often used as de facto sinecures - a little paid job in the gift of the party that could reward a supporter or buy off an independent or minor party leader. The financial pressure on local councils has resulted in less and less officer support for scrutiny, in the merging and closing of scrutiny committees, and in the whittling down of membership to a bare minimum. Bradford’s seven committees and now four (soon to be three) meaning that there’s no real time to consider much of substance, especially given the increase in process aspects of these meetings (”full council has said that all procurement decisions over £350,000 should go to scrutiny”).

Bad chairs, poorly managed agendas, reducing officer support - all these make for scrutiny being less effective. There is, however, a more fundamental problem - scrutiny acts to reduce effective opposition by reducing the spaces where the decision-makers on a council are questioned and challenged by their political opponents. Indeed much of scrutiny, especially where a controlling group controls the chairs, never questions the decision-makers but focuses on responding to reports prepared and presented by officers. Add to this the (understandable) reluctance of Council press officers to issue statements or releases from scrutiny chairs that might challenge the political leadership.

As we move to a new era of sub-regional mayors and combined authorities with doubtful levels of accountability (who scrutinises the LEPs, for example), we need to ask what model is best for the vital task of questioning and challenging those decision-makers? The scrutiny chair at the sub-regional level is another appointment brokered between authority leaders and the membership is either unpaid (meaning too often councillors don’t give it due attention - or even turn up) or represents another de facto sinecure used to reward members.

The current system doesn’t enable good scrutiny (which doesn’t mean no good scrutiny takes place, just that it’s rare) and means too many decisions are made poorly, too little time is spent looking at the outcomes of those decisions, and very little attention is given to accountability which should be a central tenet of a democracy. If we are to move towards the direct election of leaders and mayors, this should be matched by an adequate system of accountabiity, something not served by the current structures for scrutiny. Even if we remain with councillors elected as at present, we need to think about how the small number of councillors who make decisions can be held more properly to account for those decisions. For all its faults the old committee system did mean councillors made decisions in a contested environment, in public and open to question. The current system sees decisions made by unchallenged cabinets faced by poorly resourced and badly led scrutiny with the result that too many poor decisions get made.

Reforming local government should start here - with accountability, scrutiny and challenge - rather than with grandiose debates about geography and leadership. We are moving towards a situation where the latter (new boundaries, mayors, unitaries) come ahead of the pipework of democracy - scrutiny and accountability.

“Britain’s incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first speech as Labour leader Friday to condemn the economic model established in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher and promise greater public control of essential services, signaling a shift to the left from outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Burnham, who will formally become prime minister Monday, said that Britain had taken “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,” when political power was centralized and economic power was transferred to private companies.”

One of the consistent things about GenX left-wingers is the extent to which Margaret Thatcher, or rather a Mythic Maggie quite distinct from the actual person, occupies their mind. I remember, when Margaret Thatcher died, the beer writer and successful ad man, Pete Brown wrote two thousand sad words about how much he hated Thatcher because everyone like him from Barnsley hates Thatcher. This despite the freewheeling legacy of the Thatcher years lying behind the achievements of British advertising agencies, the very thing that gave Brown his early financial success. Less biting the hard that feeds and more chewing its arm off at the elbow.

Andy Burnham is typical of these, middle class (usually but not always with exaggerated claims to being working class) and educated left wing 50-somethings. It’s true that the 1980s miners’ strike, a folk memory of Militant Labour and Neil Kinnock’s 1985 speech are factors in the embedding of 1980s mythology in the minds of that decade’s teenagers. But I suspect that a much bigger influence on the politics of those bright teenagers from Labour voting families was ‘Saturday Live’ (and its successor, ‘Friday Night Live’). The show featured popular, and often very funny ‘alternative’ comedy including greats like Harry Enfield, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tracy Ullman. All hosted of course by writer, stand up comedian and full time lefty, Ben Elton. It was Elton’s ‘a little bit of politics’ with its focus on ‘Mrs Thatch’ or later just ‘Thatch’ that created the earliest versions of Margaret Thatcher as an evil hag: a characterisation that dominates less informed left and right wing opinion of her and her policies.

“The Irish death goddess, Morrigan, is usually portrayed either as a hag or else as a glorious queen of battle. This reflects her two domains, albeit that death and battle are inevitably closely entwined. For some Morrigan is beautiful, dangerous and magnificent, the Queen of Battles, while for others she is evil, bitter and hateful, a Night Hag. These two images capture beautifully the responses to the Japanese ambassador. And reminds us that even now, over 35 years since she left office, the mere mention of Margaret Thatcher elicits such strong feelings, often from people too young to have experienced her period as prime minister. It is, however, the Mythic Maggie - either night hag or battle queen - that people address, not the real Margaret Thatcher.”

We listen to these myths when Burnham talks about ‘trickle down economics’, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘privatisation’ while painting mythical pictures of working class communities under the domination of trade union bosses. Burnham shares with the populist right a rose-tinted vision of an imaginary past when sturdy men from Lowry paintings walked to work in great factories where we made things. In this fairy story the unions weren’t thuggish men who enforced closed shops and used coercion, violence even, to control the communities of those mills, mines and factories but sainted leaders who held rapacious bosses in check. Burnham shares with people like J D Vance the idea that something called ‘neoliberalism’ and its planned ‘deindustrialisation’ took away this happy world replacing it with a ‘dog eat dog’ world filled with people apeing Harry Enfield’s most famous character by talking about how they’ve ‘loadsamoney’.

This is the world of ‘Other People’s Money’ where uncaring men in broad red braces with big city offices arrived in towns that ‘made things’ to close down and asset strip the traditions of industry. This terrible ‘neoliberalism’ was for Burnham and other 1980s teenagers simply all Thatcher’s fault: she did it, their vibe tells them, out of simple spite and hatred for the traditions of the working class. Burnham’s claim that under Thatcher “economic power was transferred to private companies” isn’t a considered assessment based on economic history but a statement of faith. Men like Burnham ‘remember’ in the way of fourteen and fifteen year olds everywhere, it’s all mixed up with clothes, music, boys and girls but they definitely ‘remember’ how terrible it was and how it was ‘All Thatcher’s Fault’.

Yesterday I stubbed my toe

All because of that so and so

And today some fucking brat

Had the nerve to call me fat

And I’m very inclined to say

I guess you could say

That it’s all Maggie Thatcher’s fault

The average age of a Labour Party member is in their mid-fifties, Burnham speaks directly to their deeply held teenage belief in the Thatcher Myth in a way that Starmer, a child of the 70s couldn’t. The conservative right in Britain has long been accused of living off the ‘Maggie Myth’ but we don’t always appreciate that the reverse of that myth is one of the most powerful forces in the Labour Party too. Ben Elton once refused lunch with Margaret Thatcher because he feared that he might find he quite liked her and this would spoil the vibe of his stand up. That vibe remains with us today and is manifest in the person of our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham.

With the terrible and tragic murder of Anne Widdecombe we have been treated, often too publicly and from people who should probably know better, to a choice selection of “I’m glad she’s dead” statements and a veritable torrent of “I hated her and her politics but being murdered is bad” remarks. Most of this, because of Widdecombe’s politics, coming from the political left in its various guises.

Thinking about this, and the tragedy itself, I recalled a book published back in 1976 that tells the story of a wrathful god and his faithful followers. The book, “Deus Irae” by Philip K Dick and Roger Zelazny is about the pilgrimage, ‘pilg’ in the book, of Tibor McMasters, a disabled artist commissioned to create a likeness of the God of Wrath himself. His priest, Father Handy, near the start of the story presents us with his idea:

“De mortuis nil nisi malum, he thought, correcting the old saying to make it come out the more wisely: Of the dead only speak evil. Because they were that stupid; it was cretinism carried to the dimension of the satanic.”

When Father Handy corrupts the Latin tag about not speaking evil of the dead, he does so because the choices of those millions now dead led to the destruction he sees around him. Those dead men and women didn’t deserve him indulging the vanity of not mentioning their sin. Like most post-apocalyptic stories, ‘Deus Irae’ sets out to both imagine how a world after cataclysm would appear and to explore how human vanity, our hubris, created the mess in the first place. And in upsetting the old presumption about the dead, one dating back thousands of years, Dick & Zelazny make us think about why we are advised not to speak ill of the dead.

The most obvious answer to this question is that the dead, being dead, cannot defend themselves from accusations and allegations. So speaking ill of the dead becomes unfair since that dead person cannot rise out from their grave to set the record straight. The problem is, however, that we routinely criticise the dead. The entire study of history would be challenging if there weren’t criticisms, attacks and condemnation of people now dead. We also know that, when a revered ancient is condemned there are plenty of others prepared to step up and defend that revered ancestor’s choices, decisions and actions. We may be angry at Daryl Cooper calling Winston Churchill ‘evil’ on a podcast but our response isn’t to deny Cooper the right to make such claims but instead to explain why he is wrong.

The stricture not to speak ill of the dead is, at its heart, a matter of respect. Which is why Father Handy felt able to speak only evil of the millions dead in a human-wrought apocalypse: he could not respect them since they allowed the ‘God of Wrath’ to lead them to destruction. In our world there is no self-appointed god-figure leading people to their doom so we see the dead and ask if they earned our respect. This is not a matter of agreement or approval: when Tony Benn was asked why he went to Enoch Powell’s funeral his simple answer, ‘he was my friend’, wasn’t a statement approving of Powell’s politics but that Benn, having known the deceased for many years, respected him and his memory. There was no endorsement of views or actions, just a recognition that the newly dead person merited a moment of reflection and thanks.

It isn’t that we shouldn’t ever speak ill of the dead but rather that we should, at the moment of a person’s death, be reflective and considered. Above all we should remember that the deceased had family, friends, a wife or husband, children and these people are hurt by that person’s passing. The rawness of that moment of loss should, in most circumstances, mean we hold back from criticism. Like many of you, I could write a short list of people whose death I would not mourn: some are public figures, others people I’ve known personally (a few are both). And, should those on this list go before me, there may be a time and context when setting out why I don’t mourn them is possible. But that time isn’t close to the time of the death itself and it isn’t usually a public forum. There’s a world of difference between saying “I really hated so-and-so” privately to your spouse or close friend, and sounding off in print or over the airwaves.

Father Handy was angry. We could say justifiably angry since the choices of millions to endorse the wrathful god resulted in those millions dying. But his anger wasn’t directed at the god himself despite that being the most obvious response. Instead his collapse of respect was in the shallowness, selfishness and hubris of those now dead millions. There will be times when a death seems just, American drones gunning down Osama Bin Laden might be one such an example. But for Father Hardy to opprobrium shouldn’t fall on Bin Laden but on the thousands, millions maybe, who made that terrorist’s actions possible. We can be grateful for the evil person’s demise but also recognise that all of the crimes associated with that person are also the consequence of choices made by others, ideas formulated elsewhere, and support given for reasons of ideology, search for power or just pretending you have the authority of God.

Although there is something of a contradiction in humanity, we are both individually creative and creatures of what has gone before, when someone chooses to attack someone recently deceased, to call them mad or bad or evil, this creates an unanswered cruelty: the critic is the evil one, the person at fault, because despite the object of their criticism (in Father Handy’s case the God of Wrath, Carleton Lufteufel) being individually evil, that is only possible because humanity contains a collective evil. As Professor Heinz Kiosk, Michael Wharton’s crazed psychologist, would put it; “we are all guilty!” This is why we don’t speak ill of the dead, why as someone’s friends and family mourns we keep our thoughts to themselves. There will come a time when criticism is merited but nearly always there is no justification for publicly dancing on the newly dead person’s grave.

Philip K Dick and Roger Zelazny’s exploration of faith, doubt and genius finishes with Tibor McMasters, seventeen years dead, celebrated for the great art he created. Tibor is a saint despite us knowing that his commitment was to his art not to the painting of god they had commissioned him to produce. You cannot speak ill of the saint, to do so would be heresy. We are left hoping that the chance to speak ill will come, not for the sake of it but for the sake of humanity.

“It was indeed the visage of the God of Wrath, Carleton Lufteufel. There could be no doubt. Any disputing this was henceforth illegal…This was to insure reverence in an irreverent world, faith in a society which had become faithless, and belief in a world which had already discovered that most of what it believed were in actuality lies.”

“What was once, as my boss put it, “the richest city in the richest county in the richest country in the world” is now a sorry place where the city centre, those parts of it that aren’t empty and boarded up, provides a shopping offer suited to the poor, old, tired and ill that you see walking that centre’s streets. The council and other bodies have, over the last thirty years or so, poured huge amounts of public money into seeking to turn round the City’s fortunes. Any visitor to the City would be forgiven for assuming that no investment has taken place over those years.”

I wrote this two years ago about Bradford but, if you’ve had your eyes open, you’ll recognise in these comments the sad reality of what we chose to call ‘regeneration’. For nearly 50 years now Britain’s national governments have poured cash into programmes designed to avert, turn round, the decline of places just a bit too remote from the minds of policy-makers in London to benefit directly from that great city’s success. There have been, in broad terms, three types of central government regeneration programme: Shiny Boosterism, Hugging Communities and The Big Party.

Shiny Boosterism is the most recognisable type of regeneration, we see it in Andy Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’, in the endless obsession with trams, concert halls and shopping centres as the means to transform the lives of Britain’s left behind. The idea is that we use public money to sponsor physical development. Sometimes this takes the form, as for example with Bradford’s excellent City Park, of better public realm but more commonly it involves the underwriting (through direct grants, loans or loss guarantees) of private property development. The rationale for this strategy contains two elements: a ‘field of dreams’ idea that shiny new development will begat more shiny new development that doesn’t need public subsidy to happen, and the concept of agglomeration where the very fact of dense city environments sparks, by some magical process of interaction, economic growth.

For every example of success (and there we talk almost exclusively of Manchester) from this Shiny Boosterism we can find a dozen or more examples where the expensively subsidised new development or extravagant public realm did nothing to change the economic realities of places. Wolverhampton, Stoke, Hull, Bradford, Wakefield, and Liverpool have all had plenty of this boosterism without, if we’re honest, any noticeable boost to these places’ economic performance. Paying the profit margins of developers to attract them to your town seems like a good idea (certainly politically - all those lovely cranes) but if you take a moment the reality is that the beneficiaries here are men like Daren Whitaker rather than the local economy. When I look at the developments in Bradford delivered using this model - a half empty cinema/leisure complex, a pretty but badly built block of ‘luxury’ flats now filled with recent migrants, an uninspiring block of mostly unoccupied ‘Grade A’ offices across from City Hall - I wonder where the developers are now? They certainly aren’t in Bradford and the sloshes of public money used to ‘lever in’ investment are, I fear, mostly paying the rent on Monaco penthouses and the leases on swish supercars.

In the second part of the 1980s some regeneration folk began to question the Shiny Boosterism approach arguing (correctly) that it did nothing to help the most deprived places, the poorest people. We needed to change the emphasis of regeneration to focus on people and communities rather than physical investment. Yes there’d still be physical programmes but they’d be about creating opportunities for the inhabitants of those most deprived places. Programmes like City Challenge and its successor the ‘single regeneration budget’ (or SRB as we lovingly called it) were created that focused on poor communities rather than town and city centres. Funding was directed to social programmes (often supported by EU funding like ERDF and ESF) that spoke of skills, capacity building, ‘breaking down barriers’ and access to employment. Inevitably these schemes became filled with sub-Marxist ideas about the reasons for deprivation and, inevitably, a new collection of middle class expert mouths to feed. It’s not that none of these projects worked but that for every successful training or jobs programme there were three social programmes that amounted to little more than middle class professionals going into poor communities to give them a big hug and say ‘there, there’.

Capacity building and community development created a plethora of community centres, women’s groups, social outreach programmes and health promotion enterprises. Each of these organisations employed community development workers, centre managers and project leaders, nearly all of whom would get in their car at the days end to drive to their home in a place that wasn’t deprived. It wasn’t that no good was done by this Hugging Communities regeneration strategy - parks were improved, community centres did provide much needed social space and kids were helped into work - but more that so much of the cash vanished into ideologically pure projects and, in the end, the money didn’t resolve the reasons for the places being so deprived in the first place.

Some people then argued that a more ‘holistic’ approach was needed, one that combined the politically popular Shiny Boosterism with the regeneration professionals’ preference for Hugging Communities. The idea of focusing on the local economy began to develop as a strategy, promoted by think tanks like the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR) - full disclosure, I did my Urban Regeneration MSc at Sheffield Hallam University where CRESR is based - and the Centre for Local Economies (CLES). The core of this strategy is another economic idea, popularised by the New Economics Foundation, the local multiplier. The essential conceit of the multiplier is that the reason for deprivation is that because poor places see a net outflow of money to richer places, the response to regeneration must focus on keeping money circulating within these poorer communities. And public agencies - councils, universities, colleges - need to contribute through their procurement strategies and employment policies. If these ‘anchor organisations’, recipients of money from outside the poor area, spent more of their money locally there’d be more money in the community and the economy would grow.

There are lots of reasons why this approach doesn’t work (which doesn’t stop NEF, CLES and assorted left wing councils and MPs claiming it does) but the actual national strategy, New Deal for Communities, founded on these ideas was no more successful than earlier social regeneration programmes like City Challenge and SRB. We might as well just spend the money on a Big Party.

In the history of regeneration there’s nothing new about the idea of throwing a Big Party. You could argue that various EXPOs across the world represent using the Big Party to get some economic boost. But for urban regeneration the ‘throw a big party’ approach starts with the 1984 International Garden Festival in Liverpool. Great dollops of government cash was thrown at a derelict industrial site to put on the festival, obviously in the hope that this would stimulate a long term transformation. It is safe to say that this long term benefit (other than the remediation of a big landfill site) remains tantalisingly unrealised forty years later.

The questionable success of the International Garden Festival hasn’t stopped governments from believing that throwing a Big Party will transform struggling provincial towns and cities. Most notably there’s the Capital of Culture and City of Culture competitions that, in true Heseltine-style, got places to bid for the accolade of being the chosen city. It would be an excellent pub quiz question to name the four cities that have been UK City of Culture since the scheme was introduced in 2013 (they are Londonderry, Hull, Coventry and Bradford, Liverpool had been European Capital of Culture in 2008). But even being kind to these great cities, it is hard to see what substantive economic benefit they’ve got from their respective year-long cultural celebrations.

Throwing a Big Party does seem like a great strategy, it is certainly popular with the great and good of successful cities who get to dress up a lot and attend big events. And some of those events, magician Dynamo launching Bradford’s year of culture in a freezing cold City Park was brilliant despite the frostbite, are genuinely popular with local people. I’m sure also that there’ll be an expensively procured evaluation pointing to lots of ‘legacy’ from the year of party but has that cultural boost also boosted the economic prospects of the host cities? This is the problem - who remembers Bradford hosting Britain’s first International Markets Festival with traders from 20 different countries filling the streets of the city centre? What economic gain has Gateshead got from its long term strategy of culture-led regeneration? For sure there’s the magnificent Angel of the North but everyone thinks the Glasshouse and other Tyneside wonders are in Newcastle not Gateshead.

These three regeneration strategies haven’t worked, at least if you accept that the objective of regeneration is the long-term economic transformation of a place. England’s Northern and Midland cities have all sorts of shiny buildings, hundreds of community organisations born from SRB or NDC, and fading memories of whatever Big Party the city managed to wangle the cash to put on. But any long-term betterment hasn’t come from these programmes, it has come from the economic fundamentals changing, sometimes at the expense (as we see in Manchester) of other struggling regional towns and cities.

There isn’t a magic wand, a secret formula, for regeneration. This isn’t an argument against government, national or local, spending money on physical, social or cultural projects but one asking for more realism. And when we’ve been honest with ourselves about regeneration we should maybe ask about what makes a place successful. We can’t do much about the weather but we can think seriously about what is realistic (Hull is not going to become San Francisco) and if the regulatory environment attracts inward investment and, as importantly, supports the making of new local businesses. If the North’s (or indeed anywhere else’s) cities want to grow they need control of more taxes, regulations and rules - not so they have more money for the mayor or council leader to spend on getting re-elected but so they can reduce the negatives that those taxes, rules and regulations impose on business, investors and trade.

Bradford didn’t need lashings of cash from Whitehall to build its amazing City Hall, Cartwright Hall Gallery, and Wool Exchange, not to mention thousands of other incredible places. Or to build water works, gas works, railway stations and concert halls. Bradford built these wonders because back then it was the richest city, in the richest county in the richest country in the world. And in the Wool Exchange there stands a clue as to why Bradford got so rich, a statue of Richard Cobden, champion of free trade, free enterprise, free markets and local government. Richard Cobden the father of true Manchesterism.

“A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.”

The space where I’m nearest to being an expert, partly from study but mostly from experience, is urban regeneration. This began when, despite my asking to be portfolio holder for housing, Margaret Eaton put me in charge, politically at least, of trying to regenerate Bradford. Some people will remember our city’s famous hole in the ground, may recall the hair-tearing efforts to rescue Manningham Mills, and the maniac scheme (in a good way) to reopen the Bradford canal. That was, in small part me:

Secured the restoration of Manningham Mills

Improvements to Manningham Park

The rescuing of Eastbrook Hall

Robert’s Park, Saltaire

Bradford International Markets Festival

City Park

Impressions Gallery & Gallery One

Refurbishment of John Street Market

Airedale greenways project

Airedale Partnership

Broadband enablement of the whole District

Improvements to Keighley market

The problem is that every person who has taken on the task of regenerating Bradford can provide a list of achievements just as long. After I stopped being the regeneration portfolio holder in 2006, I decided that I ought to learn something about regeneration and headed off to do an MSc in urban regeneration. Here I mostly discovered that nobody really knew what they were doing and that regeneration was mostly a game of chasing pots of central government or EU funding so as to give the impression of doing things to make struggling places and people better. At one point I compared the distribution of England’s poorest places in 1968 with the distribution of deprivation in 2008. The depressing discovery was that, with a few exceptions (inner south west London was no longer deprived and once fairly prosperous mining towns were) the same places that were poor in 1968 were still poor in 2008. I’d hazard a guess that the comparison will still hold in 2028.

Since everyone is expecting Andy Burnham to move into Downing Street and that with a northern accent running the country our long forgotten, crumbling northern places will, by force of Andy’s short vowel sounds, leap into life again. Every struggling place, even those struggling places near Manchester, will become boom towns like Manchester filled with shiny towers and trendy bars. We’ll be told it’s all about investment by people like Lord O’Neill from the Northern Powerhouse Partnership as if the simple act of spending money provides the catalyst for economic growth. Advocates of shiny regeneration like Sir Richard Leese and Lord Heseltine will argue that all you need to do is have the government underwrite the profit margins of developers and, bingo, off zooms the economy.

The problem is that we’ve been doing this sort of regeneration for nearly fifty years and Heseltine’s ‘field of dreams’ strategy became economic policy orthodoxy from the early 1990s. “Build it and they will come” cry the regenerators and enthusiasts for state investment. But we built it and they didn’t come. I’m not sure how much has been invested over that time in regenerating Bradford, it could run into billions. Does anyone really think it has worked? Or that similar sums spent in Hull, Sunderland, Blackburn, Barnsley and Doncaster have worked? It isn’t that what we did was bad - there are great public spaces, brilliant stadiums, fabulous concert halls - but that the investment theory has been proven wrong. We were told by the experts that these billions in regeneration funding would ‘lever in’ billions more in private investment, that paying the profit margins of developers was worth it because the next developers won’t need that guarantee. We were told that connecting places with very expensive trams and metros would be transformative and that subsidising bus fares would boost employment and retail spending. We were told that community capacity building, a focus on skills and more social housing would end deprivation.

The people who told us these things - ministers, property developers, academics, council chief executives and public transport enthusiasts - were wrong. Just investing, just spending money doesn’t work. Worse, the most successful regenerations - Manchester, Salford, Leeds and Newcastle city centres - just sucked trade and commerce away from the towns in their periphery. Bradford, Wakefield, Wigan, Oldham, Gateshead watched as the lawyers, accountants, ad men, bankers and consultants all packed up their offices in our towns and moved to Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle. Several of the biggest Leeds law firms were once headquartered in Bradford and this pattern is repeated across every part of the business services ecosystem. The effect of big city success is to strip high added value jobs from smaller towns replacing them with, at best, low value processing (soon to be replaced by AI) and at worst another half empty office block.

Yet if you were to ask for a regeneration strategy for Bradford, Sunderland or Rochdale what would come back would be a plan to invest public money in transformative schemes. Councillors and now elected regional mayors will gobble it up hoping it will bring some national funding and, at last, that scheme to boost the high street will happen. Everywhere - witness the latest round of town funds - will take their bit of investment, will announce how this will change everything and then discover just how far grant or loan funding doesn’t go in stimulating economic growth.

We’ve tried using investment by the state to stimulate economic growth hundreds of times across England. Every struggling town, challenged suburb and crumbling city centre has had millions to spend on getting that growth. And it hasn’t worked. Why on earth do we think that doing the same thing nationally will result in anything other than the same outcome? Britain has conducted a ‘field of dreams’ economic policy since the 1990s, doubled down on this approach after 2008, and now is about to boost it again via Andy Burnham, a man who appears to believe his own political mythos. Every political party in Britain, in as far as there’s any clarity in their economic thinking, has the same economic strategy, a policy approach that starts on Liverpool and London docks in the 1980s where Michael Heseltine announced the first of many schemes based on the idea that investment necessarily begets economic growth. We know now, after 45 years of testing this idea, that it nearly always fails. Quite how an economic approach so manifestly flawed became the policy orthodoxy in Britain is incredible.

21st century Manchesterism is simply a repeat of policies that don’t work. Its birth partly dates back to the aftermath of the 1996 IRA bomb in Manchester city centre but the encapsulation of the policy begins in 2012 with Michael Heseltime’s ‘No Stone Unturned’. When that was published I wrote about how Heseltine was wrong in 1982, wrong in 1992 and still wrong in 2012:

“These tired old policies are accompanied by a familiar litany of how business-style public sector management is needed, how economic development is driven by “innovation strategies” and some ridiculous obsession with “British ownership” as if that is somehow significant in our economy. What Lord Heseltine presents is simply his inevitable dirigiste, managerialist vision of how government should be organised. And it’s presented with panache and conviction.

The problem is that this agenda failed to regenerate the North when Britain was booming. Why on earth does anyone think that this agenda will regenerate the North when Britain isn’t booming? There is nothing at all in Heseltine’s prescription that will take us one inch nearer a more dynamic, entrepreneurial economy. Instead we’ll have an economy designed and run by a closed sect of business managers working hand-in-glove with a closed sect of public sector managers.

In the end these are tired old proposals from a delightful and eloquent old millionaire. They are policies that haven’t delivered regeneration when they were tried before – except for some shiny city centres. But ask yourself this. Those city centres – Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds – have they delivered regeneration for the wider community? Travel a few hundred yards to Newton Heath, to Harehills, to Kensington and look around you. That depressing place of high unemployment, poor education, rampant crime and unshiftable poverty wasn’t changed when Heseltine’s policies were tried before. What makes you think it will work this time?”

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And Britain has been, under the guidance of an old property developer turned politician, doing just this in its efforts to transform the struggling economies of northern towns and cities. It is time to put Lord Heseltine out to pasture, admit he was always wrong and do something different. Some thoughts about that are here and here.

In June 1982 a teenager from Richmond, Virginia called Irving “Bink” Pulling killed himself with his mother’s revolver. Another tragic death except that Pulling’s mother Patricia believed that the reason behind her son’s suicide was the role-playing game ‘Dungeons & Dragons’. Specifically Patricia Pulling said that a curse placed, in game, on Bink’s character was the reason for him shooting himself in the chest that day. Pulling sued her son’s school principal and TSR Ltd, the creators of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’. The lawsuits were dismissed but Pulling remained convinced that the role-playing game was damaging to young people and, to promote this argument, set up B.A.D.D. - “Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons” - to campaign for controls over the game.

Pulling and a collection of enthusiastic Christians including Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore and author of “Raising PG Kids In An X-Rated World”, created something of a moral panic about Dungeons & Dragons with Gore and Pulling appearing on national TV to argue that the game promoted violence, satanism and suicide. Some of the material produced seems bonkers 40 years later but was taken seriously by public authorities, at least for a while. The Escapist, a gamer website, has catalogued much of this panic (there’s a link from this excellent Gizmodo article on the scare):

“Here, a list of suicides are presented, with location, race, sex, and date of death for each. These are the names that were usually the first ones trotted out when the ‘dangers’ of D&D were discussed. Along with them, we get some supplemental data – all were white males between the ages of 12 and 18, three were honor or gifted students, all deaths but one involved a weapon, and – the most curious coincidence of all – half of these deaths occurred on a full moon.”

If we peer a little further back into the history of Dungeons & Dragons we find, from when the game was still wet behind its ears, the case of James Dallas Egbert III:

“Throughout the 1980s, the United States was gripped with what’s been referred to as the “Satanic Panic,” a surge of anxiety that blended such disparate items as reports of cult activity and ritual abuse, Halloween candy tampering, heavy metal music, horror films and novels, and role-playing games. One of the ignition points for this phenomenon occurred in 1979 when a young college student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared. While the reasons for Egbert’s disappearance would become clear later, some observers and media personalities knew exactly what to blame: Dungeons & Dragons.”

We know now that the game had nothing to do with the suicides of Pulling or Egbert (indeed the private investigator in the latter case deliberately withheld information about drug abuse and struggles with sexual identity) but this didn’t prevent influential public figures from demonising D&D, resulting in fear, confusion and purposeless attempts to ban the game. It is this process, the making of moral panics, that leads again and again to adults seeing as bad the odd, occult, geeky and nerdy (or strange and unhealthy to the moral panickers) interests of teenagers. A panic made worse when something terrible and tragic - suicide, murder, madness - occurs.

I don’t know how many people were playing D&D back in the 1970s and 1980s, a few million worldwide at most. Some took it more seriously than others but for most of us it was a slightly geeky game that wasn’t like other games: more immersive, not a win or lose game, creative and original. I guess, however, that most people thought us mad. Today, we are watching another moral panic play out filled with the same tragic stories of death, self-harm and madness. A panic about teenagers and something they do that we sort of understand (Dungeons & Dragons is a game, we understand games, yes?) That panic gives rise to these beliefs:

“Their effects 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.”

These are familiar words to those who recall past moral panics - the Dungeons & Dragons example I describe above but also computer games, song lyrics, films and TV shows. Those who paid attention during the 1970s will remember Mary Whitehouse (for Americans reading she was an English 1970s version of Tipper Gore) and her ‘Viewers and Listeners Association’. And historians will point to 18th century worries about how that terrible new thing, the novel, was corrupting young women, stopping them doing “...healthier activities such as outdoor play or in-person socialising with others.”

The quotation above comes from an article entitled “Social Media Ban: Responses to 10 common objections” which is, once it calms down, a very clear presentation of the case for a ban. The problem, and it is a real one, is that the context for the argument is, quite simply, that the content and availability of media is harming young people. It is exactly the same argument as we read here in a 1974 Spectator article:

“(it) may teach self-interest rather than philanthropy, violence rather than gentleness, a disregard for human dignity rather than a respect for it. It may not always teach the truth but teach it does, and it is more than time that responsible people both within and outside the broadcasting professions said boldly what is so obvious in commonsense terms — we cannot understand what is happening in international, cultural, economic, political and social affairs without coming to grips with the way in which television influences virtually all our behavioural and thought processes.”

Just as there was no evidence linking TV to teenage mental health, no evidence connecting Dungeons & Dragons to suicide, and no evidence showing violent video games spawned more violence, there isn’t evidence connecting social media use to the traumas of modern adolescence. Here’s a meta-analysis from 2025:

“This was investigated in a meta-analysis of 46 studies of youth social media use and mental health. Results indicated that the current pool of research is unable to support claims of harmful effects for social media use on youth internalizing disorders. Some types of methodological weaknesses, such as evident demand characteristics and lack of preregistration, remain common in this area. It is recommended that caution is issued when attributing mental health harm to social media use as the current evidence cannot support this.”

That’s about as blunt as social science research gets yet here we are using anecdote and parental worry to argue for a ban that is wholly unsupported by evidence. All because of these same tired old fears about novel media and its impact on children (and indeed adults). There is an argument for looking at the impact of the smartphone on our lives but that’s a case for setting the terms - as we did with TV (and before that radio and books) - for wider culture to catch up with technology. Bans don’t do this. Bans tell us something is bad. Worse bans don’t work (unless you think putting 30-40% of young people at greater risk is some sort of harm reduction).

I appreciate that I’m shouting at the oncoming storm here by opposing a social media ban for teenagers. But we are about to take away a load of social fun and entertainment from teenagers for the very same reason that Patricia Pulling and B.A.D.D. tried to stop my generation from rolling dice to see if we’ve killed the goblin. It is always terrible when tragedy happens but we should look at individual cases as individual cases not try to find a wider societal reason for bad things happening. A social meda ban really isn’t necessary. Maybe we need some robust public communications about moderating use, better support for parents, and a little bit more guidance on safe use from the companies. But above all let’s remember Anna Karenina’s advice:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”