Bit of a Digest...
Lefty conspiracies, families, housing policy and managerialism in government
Thought I’d share a few substacks (and a couple of other sources) that I think are interesting and possibly important.
“Blimey, what had this army of hacks unearthed? Team Jorge, a secretive disinformation specialist team from Israel who claim to have ‘meddled’ in more than 33 presidential elections across the world.”
It turns out, so Skulthorpe reports, that this major investigation had turned up a sort of internet wide boy who claimed to be able to fix elections while not being able to demonstrate any actual success fixing any actual elections. Unsurprisingly Skulthorpe reports familiar names from recents years, most notably Carole Cadwalladr and her popular join-the-dots conspiracy theory about Cambridge Analytica, Brexit and Trump.
“What we have here isn’t a sinister conspiracy but just a set of marketing tools applied to politics. Does it work? Yes – but it’s not a silver bullet. We’d reckon on uplift in response of around 2X or maybe 3X compared to a random selection. Great until you realise that the response to random was around 0.2% - all that clever technology means that, instead of getting ignored by 998 out of 1000 people, you only get ignored by 994.”
Moving on from the world of high status conspiracy theories (the Team Jorge one is slightly worrisome because the main protagonist is in Israel and this feeds the growing antisemitism that is a feature of even the moderate left), I was struck again by Aaron Renn’s reminder that cities need suburbs as much, maybe more, than suburbs need those cities.
“For example, it’s said that the suburbs are dependent on the city for their health and prosperity. Or that, at a minimum, the way to grow a region is to invest in the urban core. But it’s equally true the other way. The city is dependent on the suburbs, too. For example, the planning firm Urban3 has become famous for its maps showing the value per acre of properties in urban areas, showing how much more assessed value and tax revenue come from high density vs. low-density development. This is true at some level. But the high values in city centers are not primarily a product of density per se, but of their ability to concentrate activity from a vast catchment area.”
The progressive wing of the YIMBY movement aren’t merely keen on building new houses (yippee!) but think all those new houses should be built at high density largely within existing cities (boo!). This not only gives succour to suburban NIMBYs but boosts the fortunes of those elite corporate landowners in the major urban areas.
Renn also writes, from a mainstream Christian perspective, about family policy and the importance of men in families. These questions should be at the heart of conservative thinking, indeed the objection to what gets called culture wars or ‘woke-ism’ is really an objection to the currently dominant hyperliberal rejection of traditional family structures and its belief that the only thing of value people do is paid work.
Here’s Ed West talking about this culture war as a mating strategy:
“In this game, conservatives favour a ‘large-family, early marriage’ strategy, with long-term monogamy and high total parental investment, spread over several children; liberals favour the ‘delayed strategy’, which involves serial monogamy before later marriage, fewer children and even higher parental investment per child; helicopter parents, as they’re called. There is a third strategy of ‘opportunity mating’ without marriage and low parental investment, especially by men.”
The first group - ‘large-family, early marriage’ - are increasingly marginalised (except among the business and economic elite who live a more conservative family life than their public personas suggest) as the dominant culture is the ‘delayed strategy’. The problem is that, while the children of the elite are born in marriage and raised by two parents, this isn’t true of much of the working class where pushing 50% of children are born outside marriage and nearly a third born to a single mother.
Back to housing for perhaps the most important thing published this last week - Samuel Watling and Ant Breech’s detailed look at the history of housebuilding in Britain. Published by Centre for Cities, the research shows that a lot of the presumptions about building new houses in England (chiefly that the problem of too few houses was caused by the lack of new council housing) are false.
And that we don’t have enough houses:
“Compared to the average European country, Britain today has a backlog of 4.3 million homes that are missing from the national housing market as they were never built.
This housing deficit would take at least half a century to fill even if the Government’s current target to build 300,000 homes a year is reached. Tackling the problem sooner would require 442,000 homes per year over the next 25 years or 654,000 per year over the next decade in England alone.”
All the usual naysayers will respond and we’ll still hear the convenient cry of ‘brownfield first’ from MPs and councillors but we now have a realistic understanding of the housing crisis’s scale. Those of us who have banged this drum for a while feel vindicated by the findings - I spoke at this year’s Battle of Ideas and said we were 4 million homes short right now and unless we close the gap between the homes we need and the homes we have, the rents and prices people pay will carry on rising and this will continue to damage our economy, perhaps more than any other factor.
Tom Jones meanwhile, in a two-part article about how Cameron and Osborne created a managerialist mindset in government missing the chance to deliver substantial reform to the way government works.
Tom also comments about housing as one of those missed chances:
“Since 2010, the Conservatives have been the party of homeowners, not home ownership. The effect of pursuing a short-to-medium term economic and political rally by both restricting supply and increasing demand for homes had long term effects, however. On top of the cost of delivering the Help to Buy Scheme, Government now spends £23.4bn a year on housing benefit. That’s more than the MoJ, DfT or the Home Office – simply to enable people to live in a housing market that doesn’t function properly.”
The whole piece is a reminder that the period since 2010 (perhaps, in truth, since 2008) is a period of lazy government and complacent business. This helps us understand Brexit (I don’t think Cameron thought there was any chance of people voting to leave) as well as the frenetic nothingness of government since 2015. There doesn’t seem to be any prospect of much changing if, as seems likely right now, Keir Starmer becomes PM.
Enjoy these reads and I’ll be back with some of the usual commentary - why we need a new suburbia, why football doesn’t need a regulator, and some sort of ramblings about a new Test Act and local leadership’s fearfulness at muslim community activism.