The only people who seem to get a free pass, from right wing critics in particular, are current and former senior officers, whose criticisms of the plan are indeed largely taken on trust.

I have written recently about the persistent scepticism the public show about the level of threat facing the UK, and their reluctance to take to heart the case for major spending increases, at least if they involve reductions in popular spending elsewhere. Responses to the Healey resignation also demonstrate how much easier it seems to be to demonstrate cold dispassionate logic about areas you don’t care about compared to those you do.

First there is the whole NATO target of spend as a proportion of GDP. When previous (conservative) governments set a target for the proportion of GDP that should be spent on foreign aid, this was widely criticised as a ludicrous input target that required money to be spent irrespective of what it was spent on. Few who made that point about the aid target did the same about the NATO target, however.

Many critics on the Right attack the left for treating welfare or health spending as goods in themselves, and warn about throwing good money after bad. On the Political Currency podcast yesterday, George Osborne analysed the Healey affair through a strictly political lens. A ‘”smart Chancellor and a smart Treasury can push things and then know when to hold back” when the situation demanded “additional requirement on defence”. Even out of government, Osborne steers well clear of challenging the whole premise of the military’s demands. It fell to Ed Balls to criticise his own party for not having included a sufficient element of efficiency saving in the plan, and to criticise Healey for not having mentioned the need for efficiencies in his resignation letter.

What are we getting for the amount we are spending on defence now? We spend roughly twice the amount that Israel does, yet Israel has demonstrated an ability to fight simultaneously on several fronts, with a world beating army and airforce and a Navy adequate for its requirements as well (allegedly) as a nuclear deterrent.

We spend more than France on defence – on NATO figures perhaps roughly $82–85 billion compared to France’s $64–65 billion. France has bigger armed forces by about 30%, including a fully sovereign nuclear deterrent with both four submarines and an air launched nuclear strike capability. When conflict with Iran broke out, we struggled to get a ship out of port and one of our aircraft carriers (sans aircraft) has broken down again in Norway. It was supposed to be heading to the US to join celebrations for the US’ 250^th birthday.

Where does all the money go?

We have an awful lot of officers, and an embarrassing number of generals/admirals compared to other armed forces. Perhaps 21% of the UK armed forces members are officers, compared to 6-8% during WW2; 18% in the US and 16-17% in France. The UK has about 200-230 higher ranks (one star and above), compared to just over 800 in the US, whose armed forces are ten times bigger. The Israelis have maybe 50-70 in these ranks, and manage to do without any four star generals at all. Iran’s top generals are similarly typically two stars.

This might sound like a petty criticism, with the total sums at stake not huge. But this is to underestimate the enormous ability a bloated senior leadership has to gum up procurement and doctrine. The more cooks there are, the harder it is to cook anything. I did not deal with military procurement projects in my time in government, but know from other contexts how agreeing and sticking to procurement requirements gets exponentially more difficult the more senior ‘stakeholders’ are involved. Seniors will expect to get involved, be consulted, seek to get their way on matters they feel strongly about. The more complicated and long lasting the project becomes, the more senior figures rotate out, and a new player comes along wanting to demonstrate an impact by changing something. With the revolving door between the armed forces and defence companies, many will be also be thinking of their careers after service.

The public would be amazed at what gets counted towards the famous NATO target. And even more so at the cost of parts of defence, notably the pension. A typical private sector employer pension contribution might be 8% for a defined contribution scheme. The much berated gold plated civil service pension requires an employer contribution of just under 30%. The armed forces employer contribution is 73.5%. This employer contribution has roughly doubled since the 2000s.

This is a truly fantastic cost, nearly 10% of MOD’s Resource DEL budget and representing £5b of additional liabilities being incurred every year (and about £1.75b of this represents officers’ pensions). The pension is hugely expensive and yet is rarely valued that much by the scarcest commodity in the armed forces – the ordinary squaddie recruit, who would probably gladly trade most of it for a 20% pay rise, easing recruitment crises and reducing the long term burden on the taxpayer at the same time.

Compared to France, our nuclear deterrent is enormously expensive. The MOD permanent secretary suggested it was costing 20-25% of the defence budget, more than twice the French share, and for a system heavily reliant on cooperation with the US whose long term intentions are increasingly uncertain. We also spend a relatively high proportion of the budget on defence procurement – where the cluttered senior leadership is highly likely to contribute to disasters like the AJAX programme.

Traditionally the UK starts wars with a bloated senior command appointed during peacetime during which ‘good fellowship is the enemy of efficiency’. We usually spend the first couple of years losing battles until more energetic and competent commanders come to the fore.

If the public are to entrust the sort of vast sums the armed forces are demanding, they need considerably more confidence that the money is going to be spent wisely. Allowing fundamental reviews to be conducted more or less internally and then assuring Ministers their conclusions represent best professional advice is an abdication of Ministerial responsibility – the Ministers will certainly be blamed if things really are as dangerous as claimed, and if our armed forces perform as badly in a new style war as is widely feared.

We need politicians with the self confidence of a Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister at the turn of the century. In an exchange of letters with Evelyn Baring, Agent and Consul-General (but in practice ruler) in Egypt, Salisbury commented wryly about Army advice “I would not be too much impressed by what the soldiers tell you about the strategic importance of these places. It is their way. If they were allowed full scope, they would insist on the importance of garrisoning the Moon in order to protect us from Mars”.

Failing that, Ministers might look at galvanising senior command by foregoing the usual reliance on home grown talent. When the country really faced existential challenges in the past, Kings were happy to put foreign generals in charge of large armies. Friedrich von Schomberg, who had previously served as a Marshal of France, was made effectively William of Orange’s second in command in the army that went to Ireland in 1689; he commanded at the Boyne in 1690, where he was killed. Similarly, Charles I appointed Rupert of the Rhine as one of his senior generals.

We currently have General Zaluzhnyi as Ukrainian ambassador to the UK. Since Zelensky does not seem to want his services, for whatever reason, seconding him and appointing him Chief of the Defence Staff to carry out a radical restructure would be a dramatic gesture of our commitment to make the armed forces match fit and prepare them for additional investment once Ministers have worked out where to find the money.

Slava Ukraini ta Brytanii!

Our Lady of the Rosary Donnington – 1967[1]

Wander through any street in the country, and if you come across a building that looks like a civic centre or a fire station, but which has a cross on top, you instinctively know it’s going to be a Catholic church. They are far from the only blights on the landscape, of course. But the Catholic church in Britain went particularly all in on modernism, reflecting, perhaps, a misplaced optimism in its likely place and influence in the modern world.

Numbers are always a bit subjective, but I have seen suggestions that the modernist component of post war catholic church build is as high as 75-80%[2]. By contrast, the New Churches Review Group, a modernist ginger group, complained in 1960 that modern Anglican churches were “well-built and unostentatious, but hardly modern.”, and the number made in modernist style may be as low as a third.

Even more tentatively, it is possible that the proportion of modernist Catholic churches in England was higher than in Germany and Italy, and certainly than France.

There are some good practical reasons for the turn to modernism. Population was growing with the post war baby boom as well as peaks in immigration from growingly impoverished Ireland and some from elsewhere in Europe, seeking job opportunities in full employment Britain. The diocese of Liverpool alone commissioned 150 new churches between 1950 and 1970.

Churches were needed in rapidly expanding suburbs and new towns, and the lifting of rationing of building materials in the mid 50s meant a major backlog. In 1959 at the parish of St Gregory the Great in South Ruislip the parish priest announced the building of a new church, having previously had to make do with a hastily erected chapel in the garage of the house he had acquired as a presbytery. With big housing developments, Ruislip’s population had increased from 18,000 to 83,000 between 1931 and 1951 alone.

It is not surprising that modernist style was chosen for buildings like this. These promised to be quicker and cheaper, using new building methods. Precast panels could be handled by volunteers. New Town corporations allotted prominent sites but frequently imposed height and budget limits better suited to modernist designs.

Of course, all of these factors applied just as much to Anglican churches. The Church of England was earlier to the trend than the Catholics, particularly with Basil Spence causing a sensation in winning the commission to build a new Coventry Cathedral in 1951 with a radically modern design. But generally, responsibility for commissioning, and paying for, new builds tended to devolve to the parish, whose tastes seemed to be more conservative than modernist architects would like. In the Catholic church, by contrast, dioceses had much more influence over the style of new churches that were built. Central design bureaus were more influenced by architectural trends. And church building was rarely the main business of any practice, meaning that the work was often given to younger architects even more likely to be committed to modern approaches.

As for the hierarchy, while the post war period saw hold outs, notably Cardinal William Godfrey of Westminster, who was highly sceptical about modernist trends, there were an increasing number of bishops who supported the shift to modern style. Notable examples were Cardinal Heenan of Liverpool and Bishop Beck of Salford. Beck was far from uncritical. He commented in 1960 that “it has been said that some of our modern churches might be mistaken for factories or swimming pools, and indeed not far from where I live there is a Fire Station with its adjacent tower which might easily be mistaken for a new church”. In practice, though he supported the general direction towards modernism.

Rome, too, gradually softened its opposition to the modern, less than a century after Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors had condemned 80 propositions of liberalism, rationalism and materialism. Pius XII’s Mediator Dei (1947) praised contemporary art; John XXIII convened Vatican II, whose Constitution on the Liturgy called explicitly for architecture “suited to the needs of our time” and left style choices to local bishops.

There are some specific drivers of this, notably liturgical reform and the growing pressure to move from a ‘passive’ congregation to active participation in the mass. At the Second Vatican Council, it was decreed that the priest could face the congregation (rather than facing with his back to the congregation, both facing East). In practice this became the universal practice. Clearer sightlines and more centrally placed altars were a result, with much less enthusiasm for traditional long naves. Increasingly the more Anglo Catholic parishes in the church of England became more ritualistic than catholic services.

There was also an impatience to get moving. Cardinal Heenan sacked Adrian Gilbert Scott from architect of Liverpool – wanted quick build, £1m, precluding traditional materials. The result was the famous/infamous ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’

There was also, however, a deeper theology behind this. The catholic church had gone through a long militant phase since the counter reformation, with a progressive emphases of the very element of theology and practice that distinguished it from Protestantism and, increasingly, liberalism.

The church after the second world war had never seemed stronger. Vocations, and mass attendance were at all time highs. The numbers received into the catholic church had tripled since the 1930s and increased fivefold since the 1910s, with a steady flow of intellectual and cultural figures giving the church an increased intellectual lustre.

The reform movement that led into the second Vatican council softened the triumphalist language considerably. As early as 1952, the Jesuit theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar urged “razing of the bastions” and “descent of the church into contact with the world”. This sort of language was reflected in the documentation of the Council itself, which increasingly talked about the church as ‘in exile’ and “in pilgrimage upon the earth”. In one sense a humbling of language, but reflecting a growing confidence that the catholic church had outlasted its enemies and seemed to be well placed to dominate the modern era.

Things had moved on a long way from the world described so vividly in Henry Chadwick’s The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. For all the church’s strength with the faithful, the collapse in christianity’s intellectual credibility in the face of materialism, biblical criticism and rationalism was terrifying. By the mid twentieth century, the threat seemed to have been largely overcome. Traditional understanding of the bible had stood up well to the onslaught of the most reductive biblical criticism. Scientists’ confidence they were on the verge of explaining all the mysteries of mankind and the world was probably declining, for all the very real progress they had actually made. And, while the Soviet Union occupied half of Europe, Marxism as an intellectual rival was in obvious decline, with communist parties in the West either in headlong decline at the polls or diluted and committing themselves to the Parliamentary route (or, in the case of France, both). The church felt emboldened to come out of its fortress and claim a space in the public square – literally in the New Towns where as Proctor comments; “their sensitivity to non catholic opinion suggests they wanted their church to represent the New Town’s catholic community to others, showing that it was an active and contributing part of the new society that the New Town enterprise sought to create”.

This is perhaps the spirit with which the church went into Vatican Two and the reforms of liturgy and church practice that made such a dramatic difference to the lives of the faithful in the decades ahead. Whether coincidentally or not, Vatican 2 was immediately followed by a plunge in all the metrics that had looked so strong in the 1950s. Vocations halved within a couple of decades, receptions into the church in a decade, mass attendance began to tail off. The catholic church has rarely been further from sitting at the heart of the modern, liberal establishment.

But for those of you condemned to look at or worship in some of the buildings below – it may be some consolation to see them as a relic of an era of high hopes and self confidence.

St Bride’s RC Church, East Kilbride (c Elliott Simpson)

[1] Happily demolished. Picture from Proctor’s book below

[2] I am indebted for much of this piece to Robert Proctor’s excellent Building the Modern Church, Roman Catholic Church Architecture in Britain 1955-75, though I doubt Proctor will approve of the take.

The Ukraine war ought by now to be radically reshaping our understanding the role great powers really have in conflicts - but still not much sign of it.

Some obvious lessons;

The first is the danger of framing conflicts through the eyes of the biggest powers. Both Russian and US conservative (and indeed some liberal) commentators frequently described the conflict as a ‘proxy war’. This has always been the Russian framing. Newly appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio endorsed it, remarking on Hannity in March 2025 that “President Trump views this as a protracted, stalemated conflict, and frankly, it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers: the United States, helping Ukraine, and Russia”.

This is presumably the thinking that lay behind Trump’s repeated claims he would resolve the war in 24 hours. It’s the go to approach used by western journalists and commentators to analyse pretty much any international conflict. It enables them to analyse all conflicts agreeably through the prism of US politics and avoids the need to familiarise themselves with the bizarre local politics of every new country that crops up as a world trouble spot.

The problem with the theory has become starkly apparent in the past year. The extent of US aid was always exaggerated; MAGA critics quoting ‘new for old’ values for US kit that exaggerated the cost of the support, and ignoring European cash assistance in making comparisons. In practice Europe and US aid was broadly proportionate, and several European countries were considerably more generous. The near total withdrawal of US aid has made almost no difference militarily; indeed in recent months Ukraine’s military position has markedly improved, while their strikes deep into Russia are causing increasing economic pain. Over the last four months the Russians are thought to have lost considerably more soldiers on the battlefield than they were able to recruit.

This is despite repeated diplomatic rebuffs by Trump to the Ukrainian position and the cutting off of financial and military aid, with weapons only provided when paid for by the Europeans, and, even then, increasingly subject to diversion to Middle East allies. Supposedly the US is still providing intelligence support. It would be surprising if given Trump’s hostility to Zelensky if the US were going out of its way to do much. It is possible that intelligence material that is being generated anyway, for example by spy satellites, is shared just to provide some pressure on Putin. It is in the interests of Atlanticists in Europe to exaggerate the degree of continued US commitment, to downplay perceptions of a fundamental rift - in the hope of rebuilding relations after Trump’s departure.

Despite the failure of Trump’s pressure, Russia does not seem to have given up on the idea of the US ultimately prevailing; and indeed Putin’s whole world view relies on seeing Russia as a great power capable of contending with the United States. The last thing he wants is to return to Russia being seen as a large but semi-barbaric European power, treated warily but patronised by the chancelleries of Europe. Hence the slight pivot in the Russian position recently. Official statements increasingly focus on Europe as being a major blocker to peace, but cite the ‘Anchorage Understanding’, believing that an understanding between Putin and Trump at the Anchorage meeting in August 2025 will ultimately form the basis for a US imposed peace agreement, in a process in which the European countries and Ukraine will be relegated to observer status.

Trump’s frustration with his allies is also revealing, and echoes the problems of successive imperial powers over the centuries. Instinctively, Trump assumes that the US, being so much more powerful, should get disproportionate influence, and European NATO allies should be spending at least as much on their defence. In Trump’s eyes, and those of his MAGA base, Europe has been freeloading on the US for decades.

Historically, however, the US’ position with regards to its allies is far from unusual. The heartland of an empire typically bears a much higher share of its cost than peripheral or colonial territories, unless the empire is based on raw military force and exploitation. The historian Corelli Barnett famously claimed the UK would have been better off in WW1 if it had never had an empire, given that troops from Australia and New Zealand needed largely to be paid for from the UK, and the numbers sent from there to the Western Front never exceeded the number of UK troops held back to defend the various imperial supply lines, and therefore not available for fighting in Europe[1].

This pattern goes back much further. Castile was by far the most oppressively taxed area of the Spanish empire, far more than the various possessions in the Iberian Pensinsula, Italy or the Low Countries, acquired through marriage or (occasionally) conquest. The Ile de France, the heart of the French monarchy, was much more taxed than further flung areas. Prussia was taxed higher than the other kingdoms in the Reich. This broadly applied in Russia too; the heartlands were generally taxed more heavily, with the exception of punitive arrangements for Jews in the Pale of Settlement and, later, for Congress Poland.

The main exceptions are empires much more explicitly based on conquest and prepared to use overwhelming force in the conquered territories, like Rome (where Italy was lightly taxed). The arrangements for the Athenian Delian league might appeal to Trump. While contributions were relatively proportionate, Athens was able to skim off peacetime surpluses, and built the Parthenon with the proceeds.

The US perception that they massively outspent European partners who they were protecting against the Soviet Union is slightly misleading. The US did spend more, even during the Cold War – between 5-7% of GDP, compared to over 4% in the UK and 3-4% in any other large NATO countries. The really big gap in spending between the US and European NATO members opened up after the cold war, however, when Europe decided to claim a peace dividend. Ironically, the cold war gulf was much bigger between Soviet military spending – an incredible 12-17% of GDP in peacetime – and its Warsaw Pact ‘allies’ who could not be brought to spend much more than 4-6% during the same period.

It seems that a genuine shared purpose is the most likely way to get smaller allies to pay a reasonably proportionate amount, but even then, free riding remains a thing. Another irony is that Trump’s attacks on European NATO allies seems finally to be achieving what polite protests from US Presidents since at least George W bush have failed to do; getting European countries to start increasing their military spending. But the US looks unlikely to benefit from it. US continuing controls over their technology have caused plummeting orders even as Europe goes on a huge military shopping spree. In the last few days, Canada has announced it will buy European (SAAB) early warning aircraft rather than US models, for example. Since Trump’s inauguration, US defence majors have seen their share prices dramatically underperform European ones

US realists and conservatives’ sympathy towards Russia’s claims perhaps reflect a certain fellow feeling about large countries’ claims over weaker ones. The third major lesson that the war ought to teach us is that claims to spheres of influence are only credible when the claiming state has both the will and the ability to impose themselves.

Mearsheimer and other realist commentators point to ‘buffer zones’ as an important feature in preserving peace between great powers. They criticise both the European Union and Ukraine itself for provoking Russia with a clear plan to join the Western alliances. Others build this further and point to Russia’s geographical vulnerability to invasion and its preoccupation with both the North European plain and the Pontic/Caspian Steppe regions which have been the main routes for invasions historically. These explain Russia’s historical desire to press as far West as possible to choke off invasion routes, and to move South to secure the Crimea/Black Sea coasts.

Taken to extremes, this is an exercise in drawing lines on a map. How far is Russia looking to go for safety? The English channel? There are certainly plenty of examples historically of buffer zones. They are, however, inherently unstable and prone to be absorbed when one of the neighbouring powers felt strong enough to do so. The kingdom of Armenia was a buffer state between Rome and Persia because its permanent occupation was generally too costly; the rulers alternated as puppets of one side or the other. Plenty of other borders between hostile empires were much starker, or saw the balance of power constantly fluctuating across a grey zone, like the cities of North Eastern Italy in the sixteenth century, each divided between a pro Venetian and a pro Spanish faction vying for control.

What is peculiar about commentators like Mearsheimer (and indeed Cummings) is their apparent willingness to concede great power rights to a country like Russia that is unable to live up to them; far from realism there seems to be a fearful nostalgia for the country’s past greatness and the apparent stability of the Cold War era. Nobody in history has been able to assert a sphere of influence in the absence of the ability to seize the territory altogether, by force if necessary. But today, the Russian armies, which, when I was growing up, were supposed to be capable of reaching the Rhine in weeks, are being consumed in hopeless attrition in the coalfields of the Donbass. Relatively modest cash contributions from Europe are apparently sufficient to bolster determined Ukrainian resistance to a level capable of holding the line and imposing growing pain. As Russia’s conventional power fades away, its nuclear armoury looks like its final card; prayed in aid as its last remaining claim for dominance over neighbours it seems unable to master on the battlefield. Perhaps there is some hope for the UK and France after all.

[1] The Collapse of British Power

has popularised the saying of Col Boyd “Men, Ideas, Machines – in that order”[1]. I’ve always thought the order is wrong, however.

The UK can never have had a more impressive cabinet on an individual basis that Harold Wilson’s from 1974-6. Wilson himself, a brilliant former Oxford don, winner of four out of five elections he fought. A top team of James Callaghan as Foreign Secretary, subsequently Prime Minister and holder of all three great offices of state, Denis Healy as Chancellor and Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, repeating the role in which he had transformed the country with legislation bringing in the ‘permissive society’. The lesser cabinet roles still includes impressive figures like Barbara Castle at Social Security. Michael Foot at employment (highly effective as a cabinet minister whatever his subsequent reputation might lead you to expect) the former academic and brilliant theoretician of socialism Anthony Crosland at the Environment and Roy Mason at Defence and Peter Shore at Trade and Tony Benn at Industry. Even in the most junior cabinet roles, figures like Shirley Williams at Prices and Joel Barnett as Chief Secretary all left a lasting impact (though not necessarily in those roles, in Williams’ case at least).

And yet this cabinet is widely remembered as disastrously floundering with Britain’s terminal decline, as Britain slid towards its IMF bail out. So politicians of individual genius only get you so far.

It is all the more interesting to compare this to the two governments largely seen as radically reforming in the post war period – Attlee’s of 1945 and Thatcher’s of 1979. The Attlee government undoubtedly had brilliant figures, with Bevin at the Foreign Office a towering presence and the legacy of Bevan at Health with us today. Herbert Morrison dominated much of domestic policy, for all his failure to protect the local government role in health against Bevan’s NHS.

But it’s hard to make much of a case for either Dalton or even Cripps against Healey. I must in the Home Office have passed the photograph of Chuter Ede, Attlee’s Home Secretary dozens of times outside the Home Secretary’s Office – but I had to look him up here. Apart from confirming the death sentence of the innocent Timothy Evans and absent mindedly granting British nationality to hundreds of millions of people throughout the Empire, his tenure was pretty unmemorable. Manny Shinwell was widely blamed, including by Attlee himself, for poor preparation leading to the fuel crisis in 1946-7, George Isaacs was a forgettable secretary for Labour, while Ellen Wilkinson disappointed her radical base in a quiet tenure at Education.

Mrs Thatcher’s 1979 cabinet was also surprisingly mixed. She had from the start allies like Geoffrey Howe as chancellor and Keith Joseph at Industry – ideologically strong, but inept as a departmental Minister. The upper echelons were packed with figures like Lord Hailsham – heavyweight but by this stage largely decorative as Lord Chancellor and various patricians of varying effectiveness like Willie Whitelaw, Lord Carrington as Foreign Secretary and Francis Pym. It is hard to imagine why she thought Norman St John-Stevas would be an effective Leader of the House. She was surprisingly heavily outnumbered by ‘wets’ who had served under Heath and were highly sceptical about the direction she was determined to take the country in.

It is also easier in early periods to exaggerate the calibre of Ministers and indeed MPs. I write in the book with huge admiration about Sir Robert Peel, the most consequential Home Secretary we have ever seen, as well as a highly impactful Prime Minister. But his biographer Gash notes the enormous amount of strain Peel was under during the Wellington administration when he had to carry Government business in the House of Commons almost single handed, acting as both Home Secretary (which covered most of the business of today’s Whitehall) as well as Leader of the House, with a handful of fellow Ministers in the commons and most of the cabinet ensconced in the Lords. This golden age of politicians apparently couldn’t find more than a handful of MPs suitable to sit on the government benches.

Even further back, the debates in Parliament during the Exclusion Crisis of the 1670s give an interesting picture in the parochial nature of MPs. As Louis XIV threatened Ghent, a major commercial town close to the channel and nearer to London than many English provincial cities, one backbencher commented “I know not this Gent, but ‘tis said to be a great place”

The point is surely that Boyd has his order the wrong way round. The most important thing is a vision and a plan; then the people to execute against it, and then the technology at hand. Thatcher was able to cow the majority of her cabinet into action because she had a clear explanation for what had gone wrong and what needed to be done to fix it – something the much larger group of sceptics were unable to match.

A strong vision needs an element of pragmatism too. We tend to read more radicalism into reforming governments retrospectively. Mrs Thatcher’s first term basically concentrated on trying to get inflation and spending under control. Only at the very end was trade union power, a major theme in the 1979 election, tackled through legislation. Privatisation was a matter for the second term, and serious public sector reform barely started in her third term.

Similarly the Attlee government disappointed some of its radical followers with its caution in areas like social policy, housing, and education. Attlee understood well that there were only so many things that could be done at once, and put his biggest players where they could have most impact.

This is a general lesson for politics. I once talked to a senior politician from abroad, who commented there had only ever been 3-4 members of any Cabinet he had sat in who were really making a difference – the rest were largely there to keep the seats warm.

It is easy to look at the current crop of Ministers and MPs and believe they are uniquely incapable, views increasingly accompanied by mistrust and hostility. As Walter Bagehot, the great theorist of the English constitution suggested, however “the peculiar marks of semi-barbarous people are diffused distrust and indiscriminate suspicion”. If we were really concerned about the calibre of politicians, it would be more productive to wonder what it is about the toxic culture that makes people not want to go into politics in the first place? If we have to be cynical, it would only be balanced to show the same degree of cynicism about the motives of some journalists or the alternative media who have made a good living for themselves playing up public scepticism about politicians and their motives.

Most of all, the most likely reason why politicians have not been keen to take dramatic risks to undergo bold ventures is that they do not believe we, the voters, are prepared to accept the sort of tough choices that lie ahead. Nobody broods over polls and focus groups more than politicians. If they believed there was an untapped demand from the public for brutal honesty and tough choices, plenty of politicians would have stepped into fill the gap.

In my experience there are plenty of impressive figures in political life, even now. Organisations like Civic Future are doing their best to identify and train up future leaders from all backgrounds. But we simply don’t know how our current crop of politicians will react in a crisis, if the public finally wake up and accept the need for major change. Perhaps, as Churchill is supposed to have said about Attlee once he demonstrated unexpected Prime Ministerial qualities, ‘feed a bee Royal Jelly and she becomes a Queen’.

[1] This is a very funny and somewhat surreal critique of Boyd’s claims (and the ‘OODA loop’). I don’t know, or care, enough about post WW2 fighter jet development to judge the claims, but it’s certainly a different view.

‘Later I saw him on the floor, staring at a map, saying: “Fuck me, look how big Scotland is. This is just fucking mad, man”’1

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Hilton’s involvement in the partially successful 2010 election campaign is often criticised too. Many blamed him for the Tories’ inability to win a clear majority against one of the most disliked governments of modern times. The campaign seemed to have a split personality, between hard hitting adverts attacking the Labour government for the level of debt, sitting oddly with huge projections on London buildings promising ‘An Invitation to join the UK Government’, Hilton’s attempt to raise interest in his ‘Big Society’ project.

Ultimately, there is no doubt Hilton was the most interesting thinker in the Cameron system. He was hard to pigeonhole. Even then there was a strong populist streak to him. He was extremely socially liberal, pro immigration (his parents were refugees from the Hungarian Uprising) and had a strong distaste for much of big business.

His shift from a committed Tory moderniser to Trump endorsed Republican candidate for Governor doesn’t actually involve much policy inconsistency. Hilton has remained as socially liberal as ever on gay rights – but he always combined support for gay marriage with a strong endorsement of financial incentives for marriage in general, a shocking position for progressives generally. He sees nothing inconsistent in support for immigration in general while taking a hard line on illegal immigration. And his position on waste and corruption within the Californian democrat establishment is all of a piece with his UK policies too.

Hilton’s thinking is outlined in his books More Human and Positive Populism. There is a strong streak of ‘light populism’, attacks on ‘elites’ and ‘insiders’, and a ‘self serving ruling class’. He is passionately in favour of devolving power, to communities, breaking up cartels and oligopolistic businesses (including, interestingly, the main Californian tech companies). His test is about making institutions more human, serving the needs of citizens, rather than the ‘factory hospitals’ and welfare bureaucracies that bog it down at present.

Hilton’s outspoken attacks on big business actually put him in a similar space to much of Robert Kennedy Junior’s circle, the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ (MAHA) crowd. Hilton attacks factory and intensive farming, ‘big food’ as well as the culture of overdiagnosis in the medical system driven by pharmaceutical industry. Back in 2015 Hilton noted in “key themes in More Human could apply equally to, or be adopted by, both left and right. Some suggested I should have run for Labour leader. I took it as a compliment”.

Not surprisingly the platform he is currently running on in California looks a bit different, tailored to the particular needs of the state after decades of Democrat one party rule. His core message centres on affordability — branded “Califordable”: $3 gas, halving electricity bills, the first $100,000 of income tax-free, and affordable home ownership. He would suspend environmental regulations to lower gas prices, open natural spaces for suburban single-family housing, and cut income taxes for middle-class and higher earners. He has also launched a California DOGE operation to root out what he claims is at least $250 billion in corruption, fraud, and waste.

Can he win? My US readers will have a much better feel for this than I do. California has a curious ‘jungle primary’ system that throws together candidates from both sides, with the top 2 going through to the run off. Normally this allows the leading republican candidate to finish a distant second and advance to get crushed in the run off. This year, however, there are so many Democrat candidates standing, there is an outside chance that both republicans advance to the run off, shutting the Democrats out altogether. So Governor Hilton isn’t an impossibility.

So how would he rule if he got there? This is where I would have some concerns if I were hoping for a figure capable of taking on entrenched and hostile interests in Sacramento.

Hilton prides himself on operating outside normal left/right constraints. In More Human he repeatedly cites his role as cofounder and CEO of Crowdpac, a “Silicon Valley political tech startup” which he notes in the book he was planning to bring to the UK. Hilton resigned as CEO of Crowdpac in May 2018, amidst concerns that his role at Fox News was calling into question Crowdpac’s non partisan role. This looks something of a pretext when his departure also saw Crowdpac suspend fundraising for Republican candidates. Hilton appears to have been airbrushed out of the organisation’s history on Wikipedia, while Crowdpac, now rebranded CrowdBlue has become a straight down the line progressive outfit, testimony perhaps of Hilton’s struggle to prevail against entrenched ideological opposition – or rather, his tendency to storm off and leave his enemies in control of the field.

Hilton’s books are full of inspiring examples of teachers; farmers; health providers and small businesses, illustrating his vision of bringing a more human approach to services. The problem is converting these ‘points of light’ into all encompassing policies. These sort of approaches are notoriously prone to the ‘pilot problem’. Pilot programmes tend to have slightly more resources; to be staffed by the most committed people, and to be sited in circumstances where they are most likely to succeed. Often what look like compelling examples simply do not scale when rolled out wider.

Indeed Hilton’s book More Human cites an example I know personally from my experience as a civil servant. Louise Casey’s Troubled Families initiative under Cameron was given nearly £500m to roll out approaches that had been piloted and evaluated rather generously – I seem to remember there were claims of improvement in alcoholism as a side effect of these interventions that surpassed any robust results of interventions targeting addiction specifically. Evaluations frequently seemed to consist of programme staff marking their own homework. But the programme had caught the imagination of Number 10, and my attempts to point to its flimsy evidence base were never likely to interest Casey or the then Cabinet Secretary. Ultimately an official evaluation of this programme came up with the embarrassing conclusion that “Any changes (positive or negative) cannot be attributed to participation in the programme, because similar changes were observed for comparable non-participants,”2

Hilton has a breezily optimistic vision of the public’s appetite for responsibility and trust. He generally sees this lack of humanity as something that institutions unaccountably do to citizens. A harsher interpretation is that the public actually prefer a soulless bureaucracy than one with any discretion that might be letting other people get a better deal than them. As Weber noted “bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is ‘dehumanised’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation”.

Elsewhere his trust in experts might prove quite a handicap in Californian circumstances. In More Human, he lauds the Finnish education system in which “all Finnish teachers must add a masters level degree that includes theories of pedagogy and is research based”, a pretty remarkable reason for praise given the sort of ideology that underlies teaching degrees and research in universities all over the West (and flatly contradicting the Coalition government’s attempt to create routes into teaching for exceptional characters without any degree at all, let alone an education one). One suspects he has moved on, but this is certainly a policy Californian teaching unions could get behind.

A couple of years ago, Hilton appeared on the podcast to reflect on his time in the UK government, with the title ‘Are politicians even in control?’ Amongst the examples he gave was a deregulation initiative, where officials were brought into Number 10 with a mandate to colour code all the regulations in their area with a presumption that regulation should be got rid of unless there was a compelling reason to keep it. Of course they coded all the regulations as essential to be retained. Hilton described how the entire meeting ended up with a discussion of fire safety regulations for nightwear, and why existing regulations had different safety standards for male and female garments. The officials concluded that, if anything, the logical change would be to equalise the standards by tightening requirements to the higher level.

Hilton, to the strong approval of the Triggernometry hosts, presented this as an example of how the entire system works “they know how to grind you down..they can always generate more paper”. You can interpret the anecdote differently, however. Quite apart from the unfocused chairmanship, the anecdote has all the hallmarks of someone desperately trying to persuade officials to agree with him. Did Hilton really think that if Number 10 noted officials points and told them to get on with it, that they would flat out refuse? Or did he lack confidence in his own arguments - secretly intimidated by the information gaps?

The second interesting feature of the anecdote is the strange way the initiative worked, which suggested Hilton only had a hazy understanding of the UK constitution. Bringing departmental officials into Number 10, not accompanied by their Ministers, was an odd tactic. In the UK system, officials’ loyalty is owed to their departmental Secretary of State not to the PM direct. They would have had no remit to concede on policy issues like this on their own anyway. Reading between the lines, one suspects Ministers were glad to send their officials to bat on a subject they either didn’t care about or had no intention of conceding anyway (because it would be the departmental Minister who had to take the flack from lobby groups, not Hilton).

Anyone can struggle on first contact with the government machine. But fifteen years’ reflection does not seem to have led to an improved plan for making things work better in future. Hilton is definitely someone you want on your side as a thinker; perhaps with a budget to pilot initiatives too. But he seems an implausible figure to fight the long battle through the institutions that any Republican somehow being elected to statewide office in California is going to face.

Fanny Price is undoubtedly the least favourite heroine of Jane Austen’s novels, and this has dragged down the popularity of the book, surely Austen’s masterpiece. Price is criticised as, prim, lacking in the spark and courage of Austen’s other heroines

There is no doubt Fanny would probably be one of the characters you would least like to sit next to at a dinner party. But seeing her as weak, or ‘wet’ involves ignoring the entire working through of the plot, which surely involves the most dramatic shift in power relations of any Austen novel.

In Mansfield Park Fanny Price, a poor girl is to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams. Timid, frail but morally serious, Fanny is neglected by most of the family but protected by her cousin Edmund, whom she quietly loves. The mother is friendly, but self absorbed and indolent. The father cold and distant. The Bertram daughters, Maria and Julia, are vain and spoiled; their brother Tom is spendthrift. Fanny is is tyrannised over by her aunt Mrs Norris, always determined to rub in her dependent status.

The household’s moral weaknesses become clearer when Sir Thomas Bertram leaves for his Antigua estate. The arrival of the charming Crawford siblings, Henry and Mary, disrupts Mansfield. Henry flirts with both Bertram sisters, even though Maria is engaged to the dull but rich Mr Rushworth, while Fanny’s beloved Edward is attracted to Mary Crawford, despite her worldly and cynical attitudes and disdain for the church. The young people stage a private theatrical, Lovers’ Vows, against Fanny’s instincts; a play with some themes highly transgressive for the era whose staging is disturbed by Sir Thomas’ unexpected return home. Maria marries Rushworth anyway, Julia remains unsettled, and Henry, after amusing himself with Fanny, unexpectedly proposes to her.

Fanny refuses Henry despite pressure from Sir Thomas, partly because she senses his moral shallowness, but mainly because of her love for Edmund. Sent back to her poor family home in Portsmouth to reconsider her decision, she observes from a distance the catastrophes that hit Mansfield Park, with Maria running off with Henry Crawford, and Julia eloping in turn with Mr Yates, a fellow participant in the theatricals. Tom Betram has fallen heavily into debt and living in a dissipated manner, falls seriously ill and returns to Mansfield Park with his life in danger. Meanwhile, Mary Crawford reveals her defective moral sense to Fanny but, more importantly, to Edmund by treating the scandal chiefly as a matter of management and concealment. Edmund finally sees Mary clearly, turns back to Fanny, and marries her;

At the end of the book, Fanny is ascendant, having demonstrated an iron will throughout, enduring disapproval and the exile from Mansfield Park back to the impoverished and chaotic family home. Restored, not only has she married Edmund, but, shaken by the disasters in his family, Sir Thomas Betram increasingly relies on her. Fanny’s enemy Mrs Norris is sent off to look after the disgraced Maria. Julia is forgiven her elopement but has lost her influence. Tom is chastened and somewhat reflective after his illness. Fanny even manages to import another sister to take her role looking after Lady Betram.

There are some interesting echoes here with Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela which caused a sensation in eighteenth century London. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded sees Pamela Andrews, a young maidservant, resist repeated attempts by her master, Mr B, to seduce or assault her after his mother’s death; through letters to her parents she records his advances, her imprisonment, her fear and her insistence on preserving her chastity, until Mr B is morally transformed, proposes marriage, and Pamela rises from servant to gentlewoman as his wife.

The novel rapidly spurred a brilliant parody by Henry Fielding, the novel Shamela.

Shamela Andrews, a servant girl, pretends to be innocent and virtuous while deliberately trying to entrap her master, Mr Booby, into marriage. Where Richardson’s Pamela resists her master’s sexual advances and is rewarded with marriage, Fielding’s Shamela cynically uses displays of chastity, tears, fainting, and religious language as tactics to increase her bargaining power, while having an illicit affair. Mr Booby, infatuated and foolish, eventually marries her, believing her to be virtuous. The brilliance of the style is essentially to run the same story but using a different set of letters to reveal a radically different character.

It would be amusing to give Mansfield Park a similar treatment. What additions would need to be made to the plot to transform the story in the same way Fielding did with Richardson’s? Surprisingly few.

Fanny arrives as a poor relation, with the sharper powers of observation that the dependent have on the world around them. If power is her main aim, why select the rather dull younger son Edmund rather than seeking a way to Tom’s heart? Fanny will have sensed Tom’s weakness, but he nonetheless remains heir to the estate. Perhaps she has some reason to sense Tom will not be able to bear children. You could imagine Tom has a history with young women in the area. Fanny as the prim poor relation doing errands in the village for Lady Betram could run into some of the women he has had assignations with – and you could well imagine the pleasure these might take in scandalising the prim poor relation who is nonetheless an excellent listener. Why has he never made any of these pregnant. Perhaps she remembers stories at Mansfield Park of Tom having a bad attack of childhood mumps, and puts two and two together.

On the face of it, Henry Crawford’s proposal might give a cynical operator some pause for thought. Indeed, Fanny keeps him interested long enough to exploit his extremely useful patronage to secure her brother a lieutenant’s position through his contacts in the Navy. But a weak and spendthrift character is less of a catch than the ultimate heir to Mansfield Park – perhaps Fanny senses he will be hard to subdue.

Doesn’t Fanny experience a remarkable amount of luck, with the disasters overtaking her rivals and enemies? The book makes it clear how naturally people turn to Fanny and confide in her, often for the sake of having someone to complain to. Her advice in the book is always described as quietly diplomatic and full of good sense. What might she, however, have achieved with the ‘insinuating manner’ of a Mrs Clay in Persuasion? Could she use this power to help steer people to their own destruction?

Sometimes her advice might be sought and followed. At other times, she might use misdirection, apparently criticising an option in such a way to make it appear even more attractive to the headstrong characters she was dealing with. Fanny might sense that a marriage between Maria and Mr Rushworth would end disastrously, and use her conversation artlessly to keep the benefits of such a match in front of Maria, particularly his great wealth. In the meantime, warning Maria of the fascination she was exerting over Henry Crawford; hinting to Henry her fears for Maria’s marriage for the same reasons might lead both to behave even more recklessly than they would have done anyway.

Even in exile in Portsmouth, you could imagine Fanny having made allies in the servants quarters and getting her own sources of information as to what is going on, with potential routes to influence there too.

It would be amusing to have an alternative version of the book along these lines, with a ringing introduction

It is with no small reluctance, and with a sensibility much affected by the duty thus imposed upon me, that I lay before the public this amended edition of Mansfield Park. The circumstances which have rendered such an undertaking necessary are, I trust, sufficient apology for an interference which would otherwise be deemed an impertinence of the gravest order. Among the papers lately recovered from a writing-desk at Chawton — long believed empty, and only opened upon the dissolution of a collateral estate — were found upwards of forty letters, in a hand indisputably Miss Price’s own, the contents of which place that lady’s conduct at Mansfield in a light so wholly at variance with the version hitherto received, that no person of feeling could read them and afterwards permit the original narrative to stand. That Miss Austen, in composing her novel, relied very materially upon Miss Price’s own account of events — communicated, as we now perceive, with a particularity of detail and a modesty of self-portrait which were themselves the chief instruments of the deception — admits of no rational doubt; and the editor is persuaded that, had the truth been disclosed to her in life, no author would have suffered more acutely under the discovery, nor laboured more zealously to set the record right. It has therefore been thought a tribute, rather than an affront, to her memory, that the work should be reissued in a form answerable to the facts as they now appear:

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The article from the Quarterly gives a taster for my book, hopefully out after the summer from Polity Press. Do check out the other great material from the Quarterly here; https://heywoodquarterly.com/

Whitehall is in a beleaguered place. The appointment of Antonia Romeo as the new Cabinet Secretary had barely been announced before Reform spokesman Danny Kruger declared that Romeo’s job would be split into three should Reform come to power. This was accompanied by an indictment of the permanent secretary class as “a pool of senior civil servants who have presided over broken Britain”.

It might have been easy in the past to dismiss some of this as hostility from a political quarter that has always had a deep suspicion of the Civil Service. But that would be dangerous. Such criticisms have more resonance than we have heard for decades. When asked in a recent poll to choose between “our political and social institutions are worth preserving and improving, not destroying” or “when I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn’”, the public only opted for ‘preservation’ by 62 points to 38. Among those aged 18-24, there was a clear majority for burning it all down.

Condemnation of the failings of the state used to be seen as ‘right-coded’, driven by paranoia towards the ‘deep state’ or a distaste in principle for the public sector. But it did not take long for ministers and officials in the current Labour Government to begin making similar complaints about Whitehall’s performance and responsiveness.

Much of what has been written in this area fails to explain why the administrative state operates as it does. In recent times, for example, its most dysfunctional aspects like grade inflation and constant job churn can arguably be explained by individuals’ perfectly rational responses to civil service reforms championed by both main parties since the 1990s.

For all the enormous leverage a developed bureaucracy can give political leaders, however, the relationship between governments and their officials has never been straightforward. As far back as you look, even to the first ancient empires, there was an inherent tension between rulers and the administrative class, beset by misaligned interests and different time horizons.

At the same time, British people aren’t wrong to feel we used to be able to govern far more competently than we do now. Over a range of periods, roles and circumstances, you can find case studies in which the British state has performed remarkable feats: from Thomas Cromwell in the reign of Henry VIII to great ‘proto civil servants’ like Samuel Pepys, father of the Royal Navy and the administrative machines supporting ministers like Robert Peel in the Home Office, David Lloyd George delivering the first social insurance and Aneurin Bevan founding the NHS.

Then there’s the Admiralty’s blockade of French-held ports, direction of fleet movements, and general logistical support for the Navy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, and the great local government reforms of Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham. Given our current preoccupation with operational delivery and infrastructure, it’s salutary to recall the Regency Post Office and the first ‘communications revolution’ provided by the mail coaches.

Nothing preoccupies critics today as much as our inability to build. Yet during the early build-out of the UK’s civil nuclear programme, the UK led the world. In its 18th century struggles with France, that strange and brilliant hybrid organisation the Bank of England was described by Adam Smith as “not an ordinary bank, but a great engine of state.”

Citing case studies where the heat of the policy battles has faded makes it easier to set aside our personal prejudices and concentrate on understanding the conditions that made previous achievements possible. For the most interesting questions here are, what is it about the way we governed then that we don’t do now, and is it really not possible to return to approaches that bore such fruit in the past?

History offers some common themes. The first is the clarity of purpose that high functioning organisations enjoy. We have a habit of describing government in mechanical terms – the Civil Service as a ‘Rolls Royce’ (or a less flattering make). The implication is that if we design and build the machine properly, it will serve us well, irrespective of the task. But institutions are composed of humans, with human motivations. Not even the best organised civil service will perform if neglected, subject to constant change or directed at confusing or trivial ends.

It is also striking how little attention great reformers tended to pay to the workings of the administrative system itself. They did not see themselves as ‘government reformers’ as such, being preoccupied with bigger strategic goals. Typically they would do whatever was necessary to the administrative system to land their immediate strategic aims, with little concern for consistency.

Even the lauded Northcote-Trevelyan reforms and their counterpart, the Pendleton Act in the US, were arguably motivated more by political and cultural factors than by compelling evidence of the failure of the systems they were looking to reform. For all its limpid prose, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report puts forward very little actual evidence for the supposed poor performance of existing departments. Historians vaguely point to the administrative shortcomings demonstrated in the Crimean War. This would be ironic, as one of the main bodies criticised, the Army Commissariat, fell under none other than Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury. Rather, the move to a strict merit-based system and the end to patronage was a stake demanded and secured by the rising middle classes in the running of the country. Similarly, in the United States, civil service reform was a push back by the WASP classes on the (then) semi-literate Irish, Southern and Eastern European immigrants who were accused of selling their votes to the corrupt party machines in return for jobs.

A second theme is just how much used to be achieved by so few. While the modern Treasury has about 3000 staff, Lloyd George passed the People’s Budget with 26. Peel ran the business of most of modern Whitehall from the Home Office with 17. The process of drafting Lloyd George’s National Insurance Bill seems astonishing now. Braithwaite, an assistant secretary (deputy director in modern civil service terminology) led the drafting with a single assistant, dealing with a single Parliamentary draftsman and close cooperation with one Treasury official. He dictated drafting instructions on the Bill to a team of typists between 4–8pm and then at home to his wife, finishing on one occasion at 2am. An exercise that would nowadays easily involve 60–100 staff was being carried out by a handful.

Thirdly, the case studies suggest that, at its peak, British administration seemed to strike a balance between recognising the importance of process, for example on appointments by merit and on procurement and audit, but without allowing the processes to become ends in themselves. Lloyd George’s civil service combined the first outstanding generation of senior officials who had come up through the exam route with brilliant mavericks like Beveridge, appointed on a more old-fashioned patronage basis. Procurement was characterised by multi-decade contracts, huge degrees of reward for success and an ability to set process aside when the situation demanded it.

Today, in contrast, all the pressure from organisations like the Institute for Government and the good government lobby is to take codification and processes through to their logical conclusion. Perhaps the good working of government resembles our perceptions of the human face. We appreciate growing symmetry but only up to a point – perfect symmetry can even be offputting, just as a fully codified and rules-based system risks stagnation and unresponsiveness.

The final striking difference between then and now is just how comfortable government used to be in conducting operations, building things and striking long-term symbiotic relations with private sector entities. Eighteenth and nineteenth century governments were small, but included large and effective operational arms like Excise, the Post Office and the naval dockyards. These organisations were frequently pioneers in the industrial revolution, as with the first introduction of mass manufacturing techniques in the Navy yards. Chamberlain railed against private ownership of the utilities, while the 19th century Post Office pioneered some extraordinary risk and profit share arrangements impossible to imagine today.

My generation grew up on a diet of New Public Management, of consultancy-driven dogma about government needing to withdraw from operations and acting instead as the ‘intelligent customer’ with a web of contractual based relationships with the private sector. But once you no longer know how to do something yourself, your ability to be an intelligent customer rapidly decays.

If this is strong meat for some, applying the lessons learned to the problem of administration and setting out remedies may be even harder. Given the critical policy challenges ahead, the trend of recent decades to give power away needs to be reversed. We have seen ministers and Parliament setting policy aspirations in statute, inviting judges to act as arbiters of what is proportionate. Arm’s-length bodies have been set up with broad powers in their specific areas, but with neither the political mandate nor the legal duty to take decisions in the round. Critical decisions are increasingly given to independent bodies or overseen by statutory oversight groups, justified by the competence that technical expertise supposedly guarantees but questionably demonstrated by many of these organisations’ performance over recent years.

The remedy to this is to bring power home to ministers, restoring the Westminster System which enabled democratically elected governments to make radical change rapidly and taking advantage of a strong but independent civil service. There is a ‘cultural cringe’ on both the Left and Right towards the US, with its separation of powers and the grandeur of its presidency – but who, looking at the challenges we face now, really wants to replicate the federal gridlock in the UK?

Restoring authority to ministers is part of the story, but anyone who loves public service and does not want to see it burnt down needs to recognise the poor state the administrative class has got into. Few have fully grasped the eye-watering scale of senior and, particularly, middle management grade inflation, while the decay of subject matter expertise is attributable in part to a pay system that is increasingly uncompetitive at senior grades even while the pension costs for the wider service are becoming unsustainable.

A stronger government would actually benefit from a stronger Parliament, too. It is no longer controversial to lament that parliamentary drafting and scrutiny of legislation is not what it used to be. Few are prepared to question whether the Cook modernisation reforms, the Nolan Principles and the growing layers of scrutiny by unelected bodies on standards and expenses are part of the problem, rather than the solution.

Indeed the focus on integrity and ethics, while obviously desirable, would have had a pretty devastating impact on otherwise great figures from history. Pepys’ sexual misconduct, corruption around Lloyd George, Bevan perjuring himself in a libel trial, the whiff of political violence around Chamberlain – modern standards of behaviour would have finished them all off. The only one who would have survived was Peel, which is perhaps why so many of his colleagues thought him a bit of a prig.

Analysing polling in this country and abroad suggests that the crisis of trust in government and politicians has less to do with behaviour than competence, and their ability or even intention to deliver what they had promised. If the system cannot be reformed to enable political leaders to match deeds to promises, we can expect a further groundswell of support for the ‘burn it down’ option.

Stephen Webb has worked in senior roles in the UK Civil Service, is Director of Programmes at Fix Britain and writes the Wallenstein’s Camp Substack. His book Make Bureaucracy Great Again is due out from Polity Press later this year.

Masses of pixels are being consumed (if pixels get consumed) with learned debates about who has the right to approve or decline vetting decisions. With our unerring ability as a country to grab the wrong end of the stick, I can see the government desperately seeking to buy off the political pressure by declaring that nobody – Ministers or permanent secretaries, should be allowed in future to override the decisions of the vetting authorities. This would no doubt be welcomed by the usual suspects, enthusiasts for transparency, process and codification like the Institute for Government or the UCL Constitution Unit, always anxious to bear down on any remaining areas of executive discretion.

So who are these people who should be left to make the judgement of Solomon? Having been through the Developed Vetting process several times, it’s hard to be too impressed by the system. No matter how many times you have done the process already, forms need to be started again from scratch. Even when they finally moved from paper forms to online, it was apparently too much to link them to previous applications, which meant endless double entry of information already given. As one irritated colleague complained to them ‘My parents’ date of birth hasn’t changed since the last time I filled in this form’.

The vetters themselves are quite the mixed bunch. Even when I had my first involvement in vetting back in the 1990s it was pretty quaint being asked if one colleague was ‘courting’ at the time. During one renewal interview, I and the vetting officer went into my office, only for the people in the next room to be startled 30 minutes later by the gales of laughter coming from inside. My interviewer had obviously got bored with my life story and started regaling me with very funny stories about his misadventures during the Falklands War.

I once had a business meeting with the then Defence Vetting organisation and was amused to find they were based at the time at the Metropole building on Northumberland Avenue. I imagined the ghosts of Mr Eugenides and his assignments troubling the vetters’ slumbers.

Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f London, documents at sight

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole

Overall I never found the experience of vetting particularly distressing, but much depends on having a commonsense strategy for answering questions. As one colleague of mine realised too late, the correct answer to the question ‘do you have any bizarre sexual preferences’ is ‘No’. Not ‘it depends what you mean by bizarre’.

Vetting is one of those parts of the system that has grown up incrementally and without a lot of thought. The British realised that some cursory checks on the staff in Dublin Castle might have avoided much of the RIC Special Branch being murdered in their beds by the IRA, and vetting checks began to be instituted. The great spy scandals of the 1950s unveiling the Cambridge Five and other Soviet spy rings gave the process new impetus.

Before long, the process gained a life of its own. Whole organisations in the secret space required full vetting for all their staff. They then demanded those they dealt with be vetted too. The process became so time consuming that any civil servant who had ever had Developed Vetting had a strong incentive to renew it even if they were unlikely to see secret papers in the immediate future, because lack of clearance reduced the range of possible jobs they could apply for in future. Vetting adds months to every programme timescale, and departments infuriatingly hardly ever recognise eachothers’ decisions. I was once confronted by Home Office vetting team demanding to redo vetting on a member of staff who had just come from the private office of the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence.

In Northern Ireland I once conducted a review of the local vetting process in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement and the introduction of the Human Rights Act. This review, submitted, ironically enough, to Peter Mandelson as Secretary of State (incidentally, by far the most impressive Minister I ever worked for) noted the staggering proportion of the local workforce that were subject to security vetting of one sort or another – and the fact that most of the vetting approvals were not portable, so needed to be rerun if someone moved from the Army to the Civil Service or the police.

The vetting officers are supposed to come to a judgement based on vulnerability to pressure. As the public tolerance of sexual practices has broadened, and thus the threat of blackmail recedes, the questions on this area become fewer. Sensibly enough the focus seems now more on finances and other means of pressure.

There will be some cases where an individual is so vulnerable to pressure or supportive of forces hostile to the country that turning down approval is a straightforward matter. In plenty of other cases though the decision is finely balanced, and sensible mitigations can deal with conflicts of interest or allow an otherwise useful candidates to work in some areas or simply not see certain limited papers.

But this is a judgement in the round. Managers with a sense of the quality of the individual in question (and therefore the impact of refusing vetting in that case) and the practical options for mitigation, are in a much better position to make the final decision than relatively junior vetting officers. If we end up giving the final decision to vetters, they have no incentive to take risks or show flexibility, and we simply guarantee a lot of inappropriate refusals, no doubt with endless litigation to follow.

Rolling back the endless creep of vetting requirements would certainly help get things done in Whitehall, particularly where departments need to employ lots of external contractors. Vetting requirements have become so ubiquitous and the process so slow, that it has become a useful tool for the Whitehall machine to shut out alternative voices that Ministers might want to consult. A sensible Minister might want to create a ‘kitchen cabinet’ of external advisors to share official advice (‘submissions’ in the Whitehall jargon) and get a fresh perspective. Permanent Secretaries can easily quash this with a regretful indication of the need for security vetting, making sure it is treated with normal priority - ie low - and kicking the whole idea a year down the track, by which time the Minister has hopefully forgotten about it or moved on.

The basic principle that elected politicians cannot and should not require vetting is an important one that is still maintained – it is not for unelected officials to decide whether democratically elected Ministers can see their material. This must have given the security services nightmares in the run up to the 2017 and 2019 elections when there was a prospect of Jeremy Corbyn as PM. But all’s well that ends well.

There remains an ambiguity, however, about political appointees like Mandelson, or indeed special advisors. There is inevitably going to be tension in a system when Ministers demand to make the appointments and expect the system to facilitate their choices, including in the vetting area, piling the responsibility for making occasionally difficult calls onto civil servants, rather than shouldering them themselves. There are analogies here with the Extended Private Offices of the 2010s - beefed up private offices with directly appointed policy experts to support the Minister. Much of the friction between the Civil Service Commission and the Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude stemmed from the fact that the conservative government wanted Ministers to have the freedom to make appointments, but for the appointees still to count as civil servants.

In my view, for political appointees there should be a process for information and assessments from the vetting authorities to come up the political chain for the final decision to be made. This might be the appointing secretary of state personally or somebody like the PM’s political chief of staff. This would allow the appointing officer to take the decision in the round and require them to stand by the decision in the event of things subsequently going wrong. I would be perfectly relaxed with more risks being taken in this area - however fun the idea of a senior Blairite Minister failing vetting, Robbins’ decision on the facts of the Mandelson case sounds perfectly sensible in purely security terms. Ironically, however, I suspect the outcome of a reform like this would be a major dampening in Ministers’ enthusiasm for taking risks on appointments when they have to shoulder the risk themselves rather than pressurising civil servants to take them on Ministers’ behalf.

Gen X is the most ineffectual generation politically. The US Presidency remains gripped by the Boomers, with the sole interlude being a sudden incursion under Biden of the, even older, Silent Generation. In the UK we Gen Xers have to make do with claiming Cameron, Truss and Sunak, with the Boomer Supremacy now restored under Starmer. No wonder how polls consistently show mid 50s Gen Xers as amongst the angriest of all voters – and , notably, the only age group in the last Presidential election to give Trump a clear majority.

The luckiest among us have been able to enjoy skiing since it first became really mass market in the late 70s and 80s, however. The skiing experience has changed a lot. No more skis taller than us, attached to our ski boots with ties to stop them going down the whole mountain, older skis lacking the modern brakes that engage automatically when the bindings open. Fewer monoglot ski instructors with mahogany coloured faces and wrinkles as deep as crevices from spending their entire lives outside.

The headlong rush to homogenous modernity continues. This year in the Dolomites there were signs up that ski helmets were compulsory; and even the Italians were complying, with barely a cigarette in sight. Small but disturbing signs of civilisational collapse. But there is one place at least where we can always feel at home. Every year the knees ache a bit more, but a return to the ski slopes and its restaurants and cafes means the same songs we have heard every year on the slopes since our own childhood. Abba. Queen. Boney M. Dire Straits. Even, God help us, Men at Work.

What is going on here?

There is clearly something about familiar songs you can sing along to that people find comforting. They play to the international audience. Maybe anthem based music cuts through better when its noisy and windy. The songs are high energy.

Maybe there’s an even simpler solution - it’s because we are now paying the bills? I have no idea what they are playing the apres ski bars because I’m generally too tired to want to find out, and curling up on the sofa wearing base layers and enjoying a glass of wine and some paprika crisps seems much more appealing. If we’re paying for lunch, however, we want something we like. The odd thing is that none of these factors saw our own parents imposing Bill Haley and his Comets or Elvis Presley on us when they had the chance, which might have worked just as well.

There is a lurking suspicion that the answer might be just how much broad minded our children are than we were at their age. Kids seem to listen to music from multiple decades now, from Bob Dylan onwards. A few years ago I was in a student union bar when an undergraduate walked in wearing a Led Zeppelin T Shirt. I wondered what the reaction might have been if I had gone into a bar in my student years wearing a T shirt for Buddy Holly, Glen Miller or a random skiffle band – all of which would have actually been relatively more modern than Led Zeppelin is now.

I’ve found it hard to get kids to believe just how fashion conscious my generation was. I remember the scorn I received in my first year at secondary school on saying I liked Bowie – who at the time was in a temporary lull in popularity with his respected rather than listened to Berlin period. Bowie was history; replaced by any number of now half forgotten post punk bands. There is something magnificent about the sheer variety of styles that came and went in the 70s and 80s, achieving a couple of years of dominance only to be replaced by something new. Bands reached stardom, enjoyed it for a year or two, broke up or just disappeared for years, only to reform and go back on the road for decades benefiting from the nostalgia of their increasingly affluent former fans. Nothing could seem deader than a style that had passed – Whit Stilman even directed a marvellous film The Last Days of Disco whose plot line takes in the regret disco’s demise

caused to its fans as they were suddenly caught out by one of the era’s brutal changes of direction.

So maybe the story is even simpler. Were we in Gen X the last generation to be so intolerant to refuse to listen to any music that came before us, setting the year zero from which every subsequent playlist grew?

Fondue anyone?

There is a hardening consensus among political parties and commentators that Britain needs to increase its military spending. The public, however, seem unimpressed

The last Conservative government made vague promises to increase from the current 2% of GDP to 2.5% when the fiscal position allowed. The current government have committed to 2.5% by 2027 with an aspiration to go further, to 3% during the next Parliament. Even the LibDems are in favour of more spending in this area – perhaps only the Greens see this as a lower priority. But the public rarely see defence as an important issue; there is only a minority support for more spending even in the abstract; even less when trade offs between other areas of spending are suggested.

2% of GDP is, to be fair, not a lot in the modern era (though it is broadly what we spent during the peak of the Empire). The figure includes all sorts of spending in areas like armed forces pensions which wouldn’t be directly useful in combat. And a huge proportion of the budget goes on the nuclear deterrent which Cummings and others warn is a disastrous money pit.

So what is the public thinking about? The threat of a massive land war in Europe and another in the Middle East and the struggle Britain has had to put even a single ship into the combat zone certainly suggest Britain’s ability to project force is at a centuries long low. The proponents of more spending need, however, to take the ‘little Englander’ scepticism rather more seriously.

First, there needs to be more clarity about what additional spending is for. Is it to help the country reindustrialise? Is it a precaution for the future – if we do not spend enough to keep our military industrial base going now, we will not be able to ramp up spending at all in future? Or are we talking about imminent threats?

If the latter, there is a lot of work needed to explain just what these threats are. Is it Russian expansionism into Europe or its military blackmail? The threat of military intervention on critical cables and pipelines? Chinese hard military power against Taiwan or other neighbours, or a cyber warfare on our systems from them or other hostile actors? Or the ability to project British power on the world stage?

The most recent defence review, in 2023, called out Russia as the most ‘acute threat’. The Ukrainian war has put the Russian threat into perspective, however. As the historian and commentator Kamil Galeev has pointed out, the war expected to take place on the Rhine is now wearing itself out hundreds of miles East in the decaying coal cities of the Donbass. OSINT (open source intelligence) analysts like Covert Cabal meticulously record the disappearance of the massive Soviet era stockpiles of heavy weaponry. The Russian Navy has taken heavy blows and almost been driven out of the Black Sea, while Russia is largely excluded from its air and sea bases in Syria, reducing its ability to project power in the Med or in Africa. Growing Ukrainian success with long range missile strikes testify to the degradation of Russian air defence, while even major investment in aircraft manufacturing does not seem to be able to keep pace with losses, meaning Russia might find it increasingly difficult to keep up the attempts to infringe NATO airspace with their lumbering 1950s Tupolov Tu-95 ‘Bear’ bombers.

It is hard to see any direct threat from China. While the world is painfully dependent on Taiwan for high end chip manufacturing, the process of offshoring this is already underway, and it is hard to see any circumstances where the UK could have any plausible influence on the military balance of power in the Pacific.

As for cyber threats, the failure of these to make much impact in Ukraine was for me almost as surprising as the weakness of the Russian army. There is no grounds for complacency – but of course defence against cyber attack requires totally different capabilities from the sort of military hardware current and former generals and arms manufacturers are calling for.

A sceptic could say it is harder to make a plausible case for a military threat to the UK now than at any time in England’s history. The twentieth century saw two wars with Germany, but long before then the English and then British priority was to guard against the threat of invasion firstly, but also to prevent any one country dominating the continent and, at times, to protect vital trade routes and links with our colonies.

Over the past centuries, the main threats have varied from Russia, Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands, and in the early medieval period Scandinavian threats. Typically the fear was from France, which for most of our history has been far richer and larger, with a population typically five times higher than England’s. Until the Union of the Crown, the French threat was combined with alliances with Scotland and later with Irish rebels, threatening a second front.

As recently as the mid nineteenth century when we were the biggest global power ever seen, we were still building coastal fortifications against a possible French threat, which was obviously most acute during the Napoleonic period, but a consistent fear for the previous two centuries too, particular as France expanded remorselessly towards the low countries, dominating the opposite coast and threatening the ability to strangle English trade. The Dutch successfully invaded in 1688; the history of the Spanish Armada is well known, but even during the medieval period we faced threatened and actual invasions or landings on several occasions.

So what is the threat we face now? We have no border disputes. We are currently in a military alliance which encompasses every country within thousands of miles with the exception of Ireland and Switzerland. The only hostile country anywhere near us is Russia.

Russia is a country with an economy smaller than that of Italy. It clings to its position as a great power largely on the basis of its significant nuclear arsenal and its huge conventional forces largely left over from the Soviet period. The war with Ukraine holds out the prospect of gradually attriting Russia back to the sort of significance it had in the seventeenth century.

Ukraine is burning through the stockpiles at an absolutely fantastic rate. There are lots of theories about how many tanks, APCs and air defence systems Russia might have left, but there is no question that it cannot build anything like the number it is currently losing, and is relying on refurbishing increasingly ancient equipment brought from storage.

OF course Russia is significantly bigger than Ukraine. For Ukraine to be able to hold the line, it needs to be able to inflict casualties in people and equipment on perhaps a 3-1 ratio. It may even be achieving this.

The end game of the war isn’t clear. Reconquest of pre 2022 territory now looks ambitious given the huge investment Putin is obviously prepared to put into the fight. Freezing the current borders with some push back seems more likely. Russia will end as a vassal of China, a small captive market for Chinese goods and provider of raw materials on probably very unfavourable terms.

This isn’t great, but it holds out some prospect of stability. The huge growth rate of Eastern European economies like Poland’s, and their parallel building up of a military suggests a prospect of rebuilding something like the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth – an alliance of nations on Russia’s western border capable of holding Muscovy in check conventionally, while other powers provide a nuclear backdrop.

For the next few years, investing in supplying Ukraine looks a better bet than our own armed forces. Because the second reasonable grounds for scepticism that the public have in higher defence spending is the fear that it will largely be wasted on kit like the aircraft carriers and AJAX armoured vehicles which come in late and massively over budget, and therefore never in the sort of numbers needed to make an impact – Ukraine having reminded us once again that quantity has a quality all of its own.

Both Ukraine and Israel have shown the astonishing amount that can be achieved with military budgets smaller even than the UK’s. Even Iran holds out some interesting lessons. It is striking how modestly ranked the top generals killed by the US and Israel have been. The head of the Iranian revolutionary guards and the chief of staff of the armed forces, the two most senior figures in the Iranian hierarchy have both been major generals. There are dozens of officers in the UK armed forces more senior than that but without a fraction of the influence.

This is a serious point. The proliferation of senior officers makes decision making and strategy formulation more difficult. It holds out perverse incentives as so many later go on to work for defence suppliers.

Some argue the ability to project power is essential to protect our interests globally. It is, however, a very long time since we projected power to protect our own interests – arguably not since Suez (the Falklands being in defence of our own territory). For the last 40 years or so, we have mainly been in the business of projecting power in order to improve the lot of the various countries where we have intervened, with highly mixed success, from Lebanon to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sierra Leone or Kosovo. We need a bit more humility and to recognise that we are not going to transform other people’s countries with a rapid intervention and departure, and we lack the will or interest to engage in a thoroughgoing process of colonialisation.

Some argue we need a serious military with global reach to justify our position on the UN security council. Just looking at the issue objectively, the UK is a large economy with significant cultural reach. Of the five permanent members of the security council, we have at least as good a case to be there as France. And with the sort of decline Russia is facing, we will soon have a better case for them, with their only real claim being based on large numbers of nuclear missiles. And anyway, who says we need to have a reason? We have a veto which prevents us being removed anyway. It is certainly significantly less absurd that the UK is on the security council than that Sudan and Cuba are on the UN Human Rights Council or Saudi Arabia chairing a UN forum on women’s rights and gender.

Only when the sceptics’ questions in areas like this have been answered are the public likely to support significant increases in military spending, particularly in the face of the dire economic and fiscal challenges ahead. Even the most optimistic scenarios for spending will still see the UK increasingly focused on its role in Europe as our power is inevitably waning relative to rising economic areas like India and China’s growing investment in its military. But our geography is an extraordinary blessing, and the best guarantee of long term military stability is to build our domestic economy, including scaling back our reliance on energy imports and our ability to build at home.

I’ve written about the technological stagnation that I still think we are in – AI notwithstanding. And about the poor record government generally have trying to kickstart innovation. Perhaps the most surprising answer, however, is does this matter? Is technology as important as we tend to assume?

Given the challenges of an ageing population and environmental risks, I certainly hope I’m wrong in fearing that technological progress is slowing down. Closing of technological horizons and shrinking ambitions for humanity is a cultural challenge too. But is it necessarily true that technological stagnation automatically means economic malaise?

Technical innovation is normally a proxy for economic success – but in most ages good government is at least as important. Today innovation is heavily concentrated in the US, but per capita GDP is higher in plenty of countries like Switzerland, that have a far weaker record of technological innovation, at least if patents are taken as a reasonable proxy. Countries in ‘catch up’ mode like Germany to the 1870s and Japan and Korea in the post war period have demonstrated the ability to grow much faster without yet producing much new (though innovation came in turn with success).

There has been societies that saw huge technological innovation in the past without, however, this leading to major economic breakthrough. The classic example of this is Song dynasty China. This era saw extraordinary inventions, including printing, gunpowder, the compass, advanced metallurgy and hydraulic engineering. This did not make its way into the wider economy, however, stifled by state dominance, uncertain commercial protection of innovation and limited property rights, as well conscious decisions on the later regimes to suppress certain innovations, notably the Ming dynasty’s complete bans on ocean voyages.

Another example of this was the Soviet Union. Intense state effort did lead to significant progress in limited areas like space, missiles, nuclear technology as well as whole areas of theoretical science. The Soviet economy was hampered, however, by the lack of incentivisation, price and quality signals in the market and the government’s consistent capital misallocations, leading to an economy that failed to take advantage of these breakthroughs.

Rather more common have been jurisdictions that have flourished without having any obvious technological edge. The most striking of these was the classical world, particularly Greece, which arguably provides an example of an age of significant economic success during a period of highly limited technical innovation^[1].

Taking the period say between sixth century BC and the fifth century AD there are surprisingly few inventions. Oil lamps, ceramic roof tiles, certain types of concrete. More recently there has been a revisionist push back from some historians, who are particularly keen to emphasise that water mills were more widely used in the ancient word than had previously been claimed.

The revisionism isn’t particularly convincing however. Compare this with the previous millennium which saw the revolutionary mastering of iron working. Or the shorter ‘Dark Ages’ period between around 500-1000 AD, which saw a huge expansion in water mills (6500 in England alone by the time of the Domesday book), the invention of horse shoes, the horse collar, the heavy iron plough and the stirrup. The classical period’s inventions look surprisingly thin in contrast, particularly given the long periods of peace that prevailed.

So how was this managed? The classical Greek period saw flourishing and stable trade networks allowing each area to concentrate on its area of relative advantage, with Athens, for example, exporting silver, olive oil and pottery while importing a large proportion of its grain from Sicily – possibly one quarter of all grain was imported into Greece.

Greek cities had well established rules of contract right up to early futures markets with fairly reliable courts to enforce them, while naval empires like Athens suppressed piracy.

During the flourishing classical period in particular, Greek cities were surprisingly egalitarian. The Gini coefficient for Athens has been estimated as 0.382-6, with the middle 70% of the population owning 60- 65% of the land. Not only was it equal, however, it was far above subsistence.

In population terms, classical Greece had four times the population of the early Ottomon period; by the seventeenth century the population of the Peloponnesus was approaching the early iron age numbers. Rates of urbanisation did not approach the levels of the classical Greek period until the 1920s, Possibly as many as half the population of Athens lived above subsistence (compared to perhaps 10% in the Roman empire and less in most of medieval Europe), in large cities enjoying growing life expectancy.

Medieval Italy during the Renaissance was not the most technically innovative part of Europe. The Low Countries were seeing major urbanisation and a proto industrialisation of the cloth trade. Metallurgy and heavy industry were flourishing in parts of southern Germany, where the best weapons and armour were forged. What the Italian cities did have, however, was outstanding financial and trading talents, which brought the city states of the North to a GDP per capita probably 30% higher even that the low countries.

The Netherlands took the lead towards the end of the sixteenth century, supported again largely by its ability to dominate maritime trade both to the Baltic and on the new Atlantic routes, and underpinned by remarkable innovations in finance and the stock market.

The seventeenth century saw a fascinating microcosm of how a flourishing principality could be created in remarkably short time, with a determined ruler and strongly pro growth policies.

The Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II rewarded his Generalissimo Wallenstein for his services during the Thirty Years War with a semi independent Duchy of Friedland carved out of Bohemia. Wallenstein created a tight administrative structure and developed the economic enterprises of the country, most of which belonged to him, bringing in craftsmen, right down to sending to Parma to learn the technique for making Parmesan cheese. He built roads, replaced random tolls across the territory with a single external tariff, preserved the currency, enforced standardized weights and measures, and encouraged Jewish merchants. Within a few years, Ferdinand’s advisors were lamenting the contrast between the terra felix of Friedland compared to the terra deserta of the emperor’s own lands.

It required a relentless attention to detail; even when he was on campaign, Wallenstein’s officials in Friedland could expect meticulous and baleful scrutiny of their work. Few rulers of his time or since had the patience. But he focused on things that were within his control.

Friedland’s prosperity was, of course, turbocharged by Wallenstein using it as one of the main sources of supplies for his own armies (and protecting it from excessive taxation or having to billet troops). The contrast between the wealth of Friedland and other neighbouring areas ravaged by war is striking. In 1627 Wallenstein was granted the Duchy of Sagan in Silesia, a duchy of similar size to Friedland. This was independently valued at 150,000 gulder – a third of the price paid to Wallenstein for one large grain delivery from Friedland to his armies. It is no surprise that after his fall, Friedland was valued at a minimum of 9.5m gulders. After Wallenstein’s death, in less powerful and conscientious hands, Friedland soon shared the fate of the rest of Bohemia.

This sort of ‘Smithian’ growth is unspectacular.With public confidence in the ‘neo liberal’ economics of the 80s and 90s fading, industrial and economic strategies are back in fashion, and good government is a lot less glamorous than nuclear fusion, AI or graphene. Smithian growth is traditionally assumed to hit a ceiling at some point, unlike technology driven growth.But simplifying and making more consistent the tax code, reducing and making more predictable the regulatory burden, enabling build and improving infrastructure holds out significant prospects for the medium term. The UK has fallen so far, we have the opportunity for a decade or so of catch up growth. Getting this right just takes a lot of effort, political capital and time. If I’m wrong and technical growth is on an accelerating path again – well all of these government reforms are vital for that too. Conversely, if governments can’t fix the things directly under their control, there isn’t much credibility in anything they say about picking winners at the cutting edge of science and ensuring progress is properly exploited either

[1] Ober, Josiah: The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton 2015

The need for a long term plan is a commonplace of modern politics. Politicians and officials in democracies are frequently criticised for the difficulties they find making such plans, prioritising them and sticking to them. Western democracies, and indeed developing democracies like India, are contrasted unfavourably with countries like China where the whole resources of the State have been deployed rapidly and at massive scale.

The classic free market counter to this is pointing to the impossibility of central planners having sufficient information to come up with a plan better than developments that will emerge naturally as a result of market signals. The Soviet Union famously lacked food in the shops, and a visiting delegation to the UK under Gorbachev is supposed to have asked

Please take me to meet the person in charge of supplying bread to London. I must learn his secret.[1]

The counter to this is the risk of market failure, the need for planning in some areas that the market will never provide (eg defence), areas where state intervention is required at a minimum to resolve issues over property rights (eg major transport infrastructure) and where planning is needed for services provided or paid for by the state (eg health and education)

Even where the state’s role is fairly clear, the information challenge remains vast. We tend to focus on the problems the British state has delivering major projects. But the need for the project in the first place depends on forecasts about demography, technology, key input prices and in some cases external factors like climate or the likely intentions from hostile actors over a period of decades.

It is astonishing how often we get demographic forecasts wrong even 30 years ahead when the vast majority of people who will be alive then are already born. Subtle changes in birth, death and migration can make a huge difference. The UK Government Actuary’s Department’s projections for the size of the UK population in 1991 rose from 52m in the 1955 projection to 67m in 1965 before settling back down to the (accurate) forecast of ca 56m in the 1975 forecast.

This can have dramatic consequences that we live with today. For decades after the second world war planners worked on the, apparently reasonable, assumption that inner London’s population was in terminal decline. Islington’s population peaked in 1901 at over 400,000. It was 330000 before WW2, and continued falling into the 1990s, reaching a low of barely 150,000. This explains the low rise council housing and now jaw dropping proposals to cut dual carriage ways through inner London and turn popular canal basins into lorry parks. Suddenly during the 1990s the trend bottomed out and reversed, with the population now back well above 200,000.

The whole structure of rail privatisation in the 1990s suffered from a similar problem. All the experts forecast a continuation in the decline of rail use which had more than halved since its WW1 peak. This was reflected in the design and funding of the successor bodies. Railtrack got a fairly flat amount of money irrespective of the number of journeys. This hugely incentivised train operating companies to put on as many new routes as possible, which involved no higher fees to reflect increased damage to the track. Instead privatisation was immediately accompanied by (but, given given the timing, can’t realistically have caused) a huge reversal in this trend, with train journeys rocketing past the previous high in just 20 years and continuing to rise.

It is surprising how often technology steps in quite late in the day to solve problems that would otherwise have seemed intractable. The ‘Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894’ might be mythical but the idea of an international conference of experts baffled about how to cope with the spiralling quantities of horse manure and predicting cities would be overwhelmed within years is an amusing example of how an increasing problem (disposal of manure) is suddenly removed as an issue within a couple of decades by a previously unforeseen technology of cars.

Similarly, the shortage of whale oil as overhunting drove down numbers risked extinction, only for demand to be reversed by the development of petroleum products.

Clearly it is a high risk approach to assume the market will save the day; it did not help the passenger pigeon after all. But it is also worth considering where we are currently investing in technology that could be rendered unnecessary through future developments. If there is no pressing current need to act, waiting might well be the better option – the disposal of nuclear waste and building of repositories is a possible example. HS2 may be another – within a couple of decades aren’t we going to be concreting over railway lines and running convoys of self driving buses instead?

If we turn to China, the grandeur, duration and scale of its major projects impresses those with a taste that way. But another way of looking at it is that China has implemented a series of disasters. The one child policy was aiming at a demographic outcome which was disastrous for China as is now becoming clear. Given demographics of the neighbours, the outcome might have happened anyway, but at a minimum the policy involved coercion and horrible human tragedies even if we assume it made no difference to the underlying population trends. Yet until quite recently it was widely supported in parts of the West.

The covid lockdown was similarly more thorough and longer, and inspired incipient authoritarians like Professor Ferguson , yet the policy caused huge suffering and only delayed the onset of the disease, with an inevitable huge exit wave when it eventually had to be lifted.

Time will tell if the vaunted Chinese high speed rail network is as huge a capital misallocation as it appears. We have certainly seen a massive overinvestment in housing. There may be 50m houses on sale, tens of millions paid for but not completed. The former deputy head of the Chinese statistical bureau remarkably claimed that the quantity of unused housing in China would be sufficient on its own to house China’s entire population. If this is remotely true, this is the largest housing bubble in history, with catastrophic implications for the 70% of Chinese consumer wealth tied up in housing.

This isn’t a plea to do nothing. It’s more a plea for sympathy for politicians and my former colleagues in the Civil Service. This stuff is really hard!

Major projects can be transformative – the Indian national identity scheme is a good example which has enabled huge efficiencies and the elimination of a lot of corruption and the start of a welfare state previously unimaginable in a still largely peasant society. The quicker the payback period, the more confident you can be.

Plans work best when you can be very confident that the need you are addressing is going to remain consistent over a long period. The classic example of this traditionally was military. Some argue the walls of Theodosius in Constantinople were the investment with the greatest single return in the entire of history. The walls protected Constantinople and hence the Byzantine empire from near certain destruction on multiple occasions over a thousand years, including near death experiences against the Avar-Sassanian coalitions, the Arabs, the Kievan Rus and the Bulgars. Ultimately Constantinople fell when it lacked men to man the walls.

These examples suggest is makes sense to think very hard about the complexity of delivery plans, and how vulnerable these might be to radical changes in the underlying assumptions. One of the problems with strategic thinking in government is how old fashioned it tends to be – influenced by the Sloan ‘classic’ approach to strategy which emphasises the framework, objective, inputs and a detailed long term plan. The difficulties government has developing more flexible strategies that recognise emergent issues is all the odder given how acutely civil servants are conscious of ambiguity and complexity in their working environment. It is almost as if strategy is treated as a desperate attempt to impose order onto chaos. This is only strengthened by accountability mechanisms like the National Audit Office and indeed the media, whose default approach is to compare outcomes to precise forecasts years ago. Neither are very sympathetic to arguments that the underlying facts have changed.

During the 80s and 90s, the UK was particularly prone to ‘financialising’ solutions, breaking things up into internal markets, or splitting large organisations and putting commercial or regulatory relationships in place of internal ones. The rail example shows one of the risks of this. In public private partnerships (PFI in the UK) the ones that were most successful were areas where the offering was simple and predictable. Roads are roads. We can be pretty confident that the purpose of a prison will still in 50 years’ time be to keep someone in a room against their will. But more complex organisations like hospitals have been a nightmare, with any change in delivery incurring major contractual penalties.

There is a general lesson here about flexibility. Sometimes it might be right to go all in – then to screech to a halt when the facts change. The Plan for Coal of 1974 was a response to the oil price shock, and involved a major capital investment in the UK coal industry – at the very time that huge discoveries of North Sea oil and gas were changing the energy equation. There can’t be many economic theories more unpopular among politicians than the ‘sunk cost fallacy’. In politics, the fact that a lot of money has been spent on something makes it hugely difficult to stop.

Democracies do however have the self correcting mechanisms of elections and changes of power – enabling a new set of Ministers to blame their predecessors and cancel initiatives that are going nowhere. Annoying for those with a taste for grand projects – but a feature of our system that the Chinese may soon have cause to envy us for.

[1] See Yuval Noah Harari’s book entitled Homo Deus. Though I suspect apocryphal.

The government is upping the volume on the importance of a deal with the EU, and closer links to the EU, with the chancellor Rachel Reeves reiterating the objective in her Mais lecture last week - . closer links to the Single Market, with the help of some brand new claims about the cost of Brexit. In 2024 she confined herself to quoting the OBR’s claim that long term Brexit could cost the UK economy 4% of GDP. This time, she cited ‘independent studies’ claiming the impact could be as high as 8% - which would imply the UK would, somehow, have been forging ahead way above the rate of any of our EU competitors had Brexit not happened.

Reeves set out a bold, but vague, plan for much closer alignment – while still holding out the prospect of areas where regulatory ‘autonomy’ was still going to be needed. Which sounds rather like the ‘cherry picking’ that EU negotiators so disapproved of last time round.

The government is giving off distinctly needy and desperate vibes, and, on past performance, we can expect this to lead to the EU hardening their position. They have already been fairly clear that the UK cannot expect a privileged position. The EU played hardball on the research programme Horizon; forced the UK government to pay an astonishing price per student to rejoin the Erasmus student exchange programme, and are still keeping the UK out of the defence procurement programme, despite all the close cooperation on Ukraine. Expecting a rapid deal on any kind of acceptable terms seems like the triumph of hope over experience.

The specifics for the reset are a bit unclear. They seem to build on the long standing objectives, which include generally closer links and specifically a veterinary agreement which would allow the free flow of food in both directions without the need for Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) checks at Border Control Posts (BCPs). This might be more difficult and come with tougher conditions than the government would like.

Most trade experts and indeed Chief Vets over the years have commented they expect the process of negotiating such an agreement to take many years. The EU will demand ‘dynamic alignment’ in return; a commitment by the UK to abide not only with current EU regulations, but adopt new regulations as they are passed in future.

There is no doubt that the introduction of controls by the EU created short term disruption and longer term costs for UK food exporters, and it would be helpful if they could be removed. Given that food products have moved freely in both directions for 40 years, it is hard to see any pressing biosecurity logic for having controls at all.

During the original negotiations, the Government sought a veterinary agreement in the hope that the large EU trade surplus in food would make them concerned about the heavier burden their exporters would face than the UK’s. But this was always a misreading of the EU position. Legalism and the importance of stressing the downside of Brexit to the UK outweighed any impact on EU exporters or consumers of introducing controls where there had been none before.

The UK delayed many of the controls as a result of leaving the EU. While customs and VAT checks were seen as essential for fiscal reasons and were introduced promptly, SPS and Safety and Security (S&S) checks were also repeatedly delayed, and have still not been fully introduced at least for imports into the UK (the EU imposed them on day 1 for UK exports). The delays were justified by the wish to avoid economic disruption during the pandemic; the supply chain problems and the cost of living crisis.

Even the scaled down check regime proposed in the UK Government’s Border Target Operating Model costs about £500m pa more than the position before EU exit, with S&S declarations adding over £100m pa on the import side alone (and a similar amount for exporters), with SPS controls adding around an additional £400m to the cost of imports.

The ‘biosecurity’ arguments for these checks is highly dubious. This trade was free for forty years. At no point during the referendum did the Food Standards Agency or any of the other agencies involved suggest EU trade posed a biosecurity risk – it would have been a material fact for the campaign if they had. Once Brexit had happened, demands for the full checks were shrill within government. But now apparently a veterinary agreement will negate the need for them, with nothing changing except for restored access to some EU databases.

Nor is there much apparent point to the checks. Additional paperwork and the provision of vets certificates for every consignment -but the vet in practice just looks at consignment of prepacked cheese and signs the certificate. There is no testing involved, and yet every consignment need a new vet’s certificate, at the estimated cost of at least £150m pa.

On the UK side of the border, we have set up BCPs to do our own physical inspections, costing of around £40m pa in the short straits alone which will be recovered from importers and passed on to consumers. These checks are generally pretty high level and it’s not clear what if anything there are likely to detect. DEFRA and FSA talk about the pressing need to tackle biosecurity threats like foot and mouth. But the BCP checks are hardly relevant to that. Of the two foot and mouth outbreaks we have seen in the UK, one probably came from illegally imported produce, the other was a leak from DEFRA’s own laboratory.

If we enter into a veterinary agreement, we will be able to abolish our own checks and free exporters from theirs too. In return, we will no longer be able to relax on a risk based approach checks on imports from other non EU countries with high standards. We may not be able to implement government policies like the banning of cruel products like foie gras. And we may not be allowed to press ahead with technologies like gene editing, for which Labour voted when the legislation was before Parliament.

The Safety and Security regime is equally odd. It’s basically just another set of paperwork which border enforcement agencies review and which may potentially give them additional leads. The Home Office in the TOM claimed the introduction of these checks would lead to very significant increases in seizures of drugs, guns and cash. The information won’t lead to results on its own – it will need processing and ultimately physical examination. Given flat resources to be dedicated to checking trade from the EU and the Rest of the World, the Home Office claims are only logically possible if you believe that trade from the EU is actually on average higher risk than that from the rest of the world. Again, this is not something that senior police officers revealed during the referendum campaign. It would have been interesting to know, if true, but the strong likelihood is that it is nonsense.

The country is facing a renewed cost of living crisis, with the war in the Persian Gulf threatening long term chaos not only for petrol and gas prices, but throughout the supply chain. If the government wanted to make a difference, it could do so through rapid and unilateral scrapping of controls on the UK side, saving the entire additional cost to UK consumers and perhaps bringing back some of the small traders who have stopped importing because the burdens are simply disproportionate. £400m of cost across the entire food supply chain is not enormous – but it’s completely pointless.

The food industry and farmers unions will object to this. The UK would be giving away negotiating leverage, and allowing access to our markets on better terms than UK exporters are getting in return. But, so what? We tried to use this card for negotiating leverage during the Brexit negotiations and it got us precisely nowhere. In practice, all we are doing is hitting our own consumers with pointless additional costs.

If in addition to the wider security agreement Starmer is proposing UK negotiators prioritised a focused agreement on safety and security in the customs space, we might expect to rid importers and exporters alike of a burden which could easily approach £250m pa.

It might stick in the throat to welcome EU trade into the country while our own gets stuck in bureaucratic processes going in the other direction.But ultimately the EU is only harming its own consumers, and there is no need to replicate them for mercantilist reasons.Unilateral action would get the benefits for the UK consumer of a veterinary deal, relieve an big administrative burden on trade in the form of S&S declarations, and leave the UK free to diverge from EU regulations in areas like animal welfare and gene editing.

The government, and even Miliband’s department DESNZ could do with £3.8b at the moment. It would go most of the way needed, for example, towards extending the cap on energy bills for another year, which is estimated to cost £6b.

But the transfer has repeatedly been described as righting a historical injustice, and so presumably we wouldn’t want to use money unjustly acquired for this purpose? As Rachel Reeves said when announcing the MPS deal last year

“Today we are keeping our promise so that working people who powered our country receive the fair pension that they are owed.”

I would argue the Government move is unjustified in its own terms, and a strange priority for spending, particularly given the cost estimates for net zero investment and the other financial pressures piling up on the government.

I should declare an interest here, having worked in the Treasury some 30 years ago on the analysis and negotiation of the mining pension deal in question and getting it approved by ministers.

When British Coal (formerly the National Coal Board) was split up and privatised in the 1990s, there were fewer than 20,000 working miners left but a huge pension fund covering hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries, most retired.

Historically miners’ pensions had not been generous. This changed, however, in the second Wilson government, which introduced a scheme which basically replicated the terms enjoyed by civil servants and many other public sector workers. Unlike those schemes, however, this was funded by British Coal.

Running a funded scheme was practicable when the employer had hundreds of thousands of workers. Following the massive downsizing, the pension funds dwarfed the value of what was left to be privatised. Clearly the companies that bought what was left of the coal industry were not going to be financially robust enough to stand behind the pensions schemes and their liabilities.

The decision was made instead to make the new companies responsible only for pensions related to future service, while placing the responsibility for paying pensions due to past workers, and for those who worked pre-privatisation, into two legacy schemes, for miners (MPS) and staff workers (BCSSS).

There were plenty of tensions around pensions in industries due to be privatised. On the rail side, the trustees were so alarmed about suggestions the government might claim the scheme surplus, they promptly distributed the surplus leaving the government with a headache about how to guarantee what was now even bigger pension liabilities. After negotiations, the Government and the trustees of the coal schemes agreed to establish a government guarantee. The two sides took the existing surplus, improved benefits with the employees’ share and transferred the government’s side into an ‘investment fund’ to stand ready to fund any future deficits in the scheme, or to be paid to the Treasury once the prospect of the guarantee being needed was sufficiently remote.

Any future surpluses generated by the pension funds would be held until it was clear they would not be needed to plug any subsequent losses.

The guarantee was triggered after deficits in 2002 an 2003, but this was repaid in 2006. Significant surpluses have been generated, partly as a result of the ability to take a slightly riskier approach to investment given the existence of a guarantee. Across both funds, so far the Government has received over £7.9n in payments, with a similar amount being paid out in additional bonuses to beneficiaries.

For years now, the mining unions and others have launched a campaign to redress what they feel is the unfair treatment of surpluses, calling for a much larger share to go to beneficiaries. Unions claim there is a huge injustice at the expense of relatively badly off pensioners, with the median pension received by a beneficiary as low as £85 a week.

This median pension sounds low – but this is no more valid evidence of an unfair scheme than civil service union claims that the Principal Civil Service Scheme is not really generous because the median pension is around £4,000 a year – or almost £77 a week.

The median pension paid depends on the median length of service – a point that journalists never put to the lobbyists when they appear. The mean payment received by miners is 50pc higher than the median, suggesting we are talking about a lot of people receiving small pensions that reflect short periods of service (or service spanning pre and post-privatisation, with post-privatisation service covered by a different scheme).

Historically, up to the mid 1970s, the miners’ pension scheme was very limited. But after then, the pension entitlements were comparable to the best in the public sector – eventually accruing at 1/60th per service year with retirement at 60.

Subsequent bonuses have added 33pc to the value of the pension benefits, which makes this proportionately one of the most generous schemes per annum even in the public sector, and beyond the wildest hopes of private sector workers. Reeves’s 2024 announcement for the MPS led to a further 32pc increase on top. The BCSSS will get an even more stonking 41% increase in pensions paid.

There is a sense from the campaigners of having your cake and eating it. Most of the money in the fund was put there by the employer, British Coal, at a time when it was losing money hand-over-fist for the taxpayer. In retrospect, British Coal injected more money into the scheme during the 1980s than was necessary to cover liabilities. Had too little been paid in and a deficit appeared, the Government would have stood behind the liabilities and made up the gap.

You could make a perfectly good case for arguing that all surplus resulting from employer contributions should be paid back to the Government, and that the 50/50 split was already too generous.

The New Labour government held a firm line on this right up to 2010. Subsequent conservative governments generally sought to defend the scheme, though the passage of time clearly hasn’t done much for the civil service’s corporate memory in defending the agreement. In 2018 the then Minister Claire Perry responded to a PQ asking about what actuarial advice the Government had taken on the guarantee with the bland statement “No such advice was obtained. The arrangements were agreed between the Government, in its role as Guarantor, and the Scheme Trustees.”. In fact, I vividly remember long sessions with the Government Actuaries Department modelling options for how much the guarantee might cost in different scenarios. This is another example of the meltdown in government filing that I have discussed before.

So as the fiscal situation gets worse, we have a government that seems happy to give away nearly £4b cumulatively for no apparent reason. For those who resent my own public sector pension entitlement built up over 30 years, I would like to point to my role in the £7.9b of payments the taxpayer has received so far. But it would have been nice for the original deal to have broken the £10b mark instead of being discarded.

The incongruous combination of illegality and violence with the mundane problems of running a business – logistics; personnel challenges and internal bickering are perhaps what makes organised crime a subject of perpetual fascination.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change recently came up with a paper on the organised crime threat to the UK. It follows a long line of official strategies dating back to the white paper One Step Ahead in 2004 which have come up with a very similar diagnosis; the scale of the threat and the relative lack of attention compared to terrorism; the need to focus on intelligence rather than just numbers of prosecutions; the importance of using a wider range of disruption tools especially asset recovery, and the case for targeting weaker links in the chain like facilitators, who might be operating in the legitimate or at least the ‘grey’ economy and be more susceptible to pressure.

As a policy official responsible during most of the 2000s for UK policy on organised crime, and the main author of One Step Ahead, this rather makes me wonder – if this strategy has been pursued for 20 years, is it the right one, and, if so, why are we not making more progress?

Any good strategy needs to start with knowing the enemy; in this case a theoretical framework for how organised crime operates, constantly tested and refined against practical operational experience and, where possible, direct feedback from the criminals themselves. There are many motivations for crime, but of all types, organised crime seems most likely to fit the crude economic ‘rational actor’ model, with law enforcement’s objective being to raise the costs of participation to higher than the likely benefits. With some actors at least able to choose their country of operation, effective enforcement might be expected to reduce the number prepared to operate in the UK.

On the theoretical side, Fiorentini and Pelzmann’s The Economics of Organised Crime is thought provoking here. It is particularly insightful on the problem that trust poses within criminal organisations. Lacking the ability to use official routes like the courts to enforce agreements, they are forced to rely on violence, the ability to deploy which has severe limitations geographically and logistically. The shortage of trust leads to relatively senior organisational figures getting involved in very hands on criminal work because they can’t trust enough people. This explains the inherent advantage family and clan based organisations have in scaling up. But even this has its limits.

There is more than you might think out there covering criminals’ own perspectives, including studies out there interviewing incarcerated organised criminals to understand their motivations, and their perceptions of risk and law enforcement. Prison is a boring place and it is surprising how ready subjects are to talk (except on the question of money of where the money goes). There was a good study from Canada and we commissioned our own work in the UK with drug traffickers and those convicted of organised immigration crime

These studies suggested there were indeed elements of business thinking among the major criminals; though measuring the actual risks was pretty subjective, and interviewees tended to be highly self confident and perhaps prone therefore to underestimate the risks they were undergoing (alternatively the very fact they had been caught in the first place left open the question of whether there were better actors we had never come across)

Analysis of the economic and social costs of various types of organised crime demonstrated the largest harms were indeed from class A drugs – mainly the crime committed in order to feed habits, but noted even then the growing scale of organised immigration crime and fraud. The classic model of organised crime includes domination of communities and even state agencies through extortion and corruption. While we did not think this was a major factor in the UK, the FBI for decades denied there was such a thing as La Cosa Nostra either. Some research was commissioned on the ground in likely local areas, broadly confirming the perception that this was more localised as a problem, though worth keeping an eye on.

It was less easy than you might think to get a sense of what proportion of law enforcement resource was going against which targets. But overall the exercised confirmed our general impression that, although class A drugs were the largest threat facing the country, resources were focused disproportionately in that area, with a case for shifting towards organised immigration crime and fraud. The strategic direction for the new agency SOCA indicated a shift towards an intelligence focus and somewhat towards the new threat areas. SOCA itself involved a merger of a police agency the National crime Squad, an intelligence one, the National Criminal Intelligence Service, and elements of HM Customs and Excise who brought a particular expertise analysing and seeking to undermine criminal markets.

The question was what action to take on the different threats. There is a potential distinction here between threats which involve theft (like fraud) and those with a market element (like drugs or counterfeiting). Particularly for drugs, there is an eternal debate about whether law enforcement efforts even want to drive up the price of drugs if this actually leads to a net increase in harms as users commit more crimes to feed their habits.

For illicit markets, this depends on the “price elasticity” of the product. If higher prices will simply be absorbed by consumers, enforcement success could lead to a net increase in harms (though, equally, if users commit more crime they are more likely to be caught in the process too, perhaps increasing the opportunity to get them into treatment or motivate them to get off drugs). Some limited evidence on US cocaine markets suggested there is sufficient elasticity for consumption to drop proportionately to price or slightly more so. This was borne out by the experience of some temporary shortages, for example the heroin drought following the first Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.

The question was, what would it take to have the material impact on prices we were looking for? Price data has always been spotty (and impacted by purity levels), but there were some interesting indications. There seemed to be a consistent wholesale price premium in the UK compared to continental Europe, suggesting the geography and/or law enforcement made the UK a tougher market. But the long term trend was also for prices to fall.

Even arresting the fall in price might represent a relative success, but there was very little sense of what the natural floor of prices might be. Building again on some useful RAND work in the US on drug Risk and Pricing, we sought to quantify traffickers’ business costs to work out to what extent there were excess profits in the drug market. Costs of purchase, transportation and a financial value for the risk of prison time and asset recovery, as well as of serious injury and death at the hand of rival gangs still suggested an ample profit margin, and just how difficult driving prices upwards was likely to be.

What level of risk are major traffickers facing at the moment? HMRC back then did useful work to estimate the overall size of the the drug market in the UK (occasionally published in academic or Home Office analysis papers), and a broad schema of what the supply chain looked like – say street level, ‘middle market’ in the multi kg range and large scale drug traffickers capable of importing multi hundred kilos of class A drug annually. The lower levels of the chain involve lots of overlap and complexity, but at the top end, sentencing guidelines are fairly closely related to the quantity of product involved, so it is possible to take sentencing data to estimate the number of convictions for drug trafficking at this scale and compare it to the estimated number of actors. The results were pretty sobering, suggesting back then a less than 4% pa chance of being convicted as a top end heroin trafficker.

This suggests that seriously impacting the market through prosecution alone would need a many fold increase in the number of cases taken (or, perhaps, a huge improvement in the quality of the average target)

An increase of this scale would require huge additional resources and/or dramatic productivity improvements in investigation and trials, and assumes there is sufficiently good intelligence to initiate new high quality investigations at this scale in the first place. On the latter, we sought to assess the total capacity of the players we were aware of. Following a confidential briefing to senior police officers, the newspapers reported the Home Office believed we probably only had visibility of players responsible for 30% of the wholesale heroin market, which was probably the area where our intelligence was best.

Why is this? The contrast between the Canadian and UK debriefing reports was striking. In Canada, the major traffickers split 50/50 between those who had always been criminals, and businessmen , usually in import/export who had been tempted into drug trafficking perhaps in response to financial crisis. The UK subjects, by contrast, were pretty much all career criminals. Was crime different in the UK, or was there a whole category of market player that we had no coverage of?

Police themselves suggested there was a tendency for ‘chain smoking’ in operations – lighting the next one off the butt of the last, targeting peripheral (or major) players who had not been successfully prosecuted last time. Given law enforcement tend to target the biggest players first, this risks diminishing returns. It sometimes seemed that intelligence was rationed to the number of targets the operational side could realistically cope with – intelligence was generally a lower status job in law enforcement, and often seen as an overhead compared to the investigation. Even financial intelligence was relatively under-resourced, demonstrated by the disproportionate amount of recovered assets deriving from property. It would be uncharacteristic for people with the sort of wealth law enforcement are targeting to have such a high proportion of their wealth invested in property, suggesting much goes undetected.

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The US election and the roll back in areas like trans have given some the feeling that what and others have called the ‘Great Awokening’ may be past its peak. In the UK, anyway, the ‘culture war’ was a strange conflict – its existence was either flatly denied, or those on the left and liberal Right constantly warned against the dangers of fighting it, even as the wave of change was at its peak.

There may be slightly less overt enthusiasm now, but the woke or perhaps identity politics remains firmly embedded in the system. ‘Woke’ is a vague term, personally I think identity politics catches the essence of the challenge. A sense that people are identified not by their individual characteristics, but by their group identity, with life and history a constant power struggle between these sometimes overlapping identities, and a hierarchy of victimisation and moral value being inversely proportional to the level of power (or ‘privilege’) exercised. If you ask the public, few actually share this view of life and society.

The progressive side tends to treat conservative critics as being obsessed and borderline deranged seeing conspiracies everywhere. The online right rather plays into this with attacks on ‘cultural Marxism’.

There is a decent intellectual descent from Marxist thinkers to identitarian post modernists. Both share an obsession with power and group identity. But this sort of genealogy is a pretty niche area of interest, and its importance is overrated in academia. Fundamentally, talking about communism in the 2020s risks sounding like some drink sodden MI5 former colonial policeman in the 1970s muttering about how the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a KGB spy.

There is no direct line of descent. There is no woke ‘leader’, ‘central committee’ or ‘party’ organising entryism along the lines of the communist party in the post war era. But given the right underlying attitudes, you do not necessarily need a conscious plan to achieve similarly outsized levels of influence. The communist parties in the Eastern bloc immediately after the war understood they did not need to control every Ministry in the coalition governments they imposed. Once you had Interior and Justice, the rest tended to follow.

If you break down the characteristics of the ‘progressive activist’ group as described in the excellent work by More in Common, their behaviour and its influence becomes predictable and entirely understandable.

More in Common describes Progressive Activists as “A powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity, and who seek to correct the historic marginalisation of groups based on their race, gender, sexuality, wealth and other forms of privilege. They are politically engaged, critical, opinionated, frustrated, cosmopolitan and environmentally conscious”

Progressive Activists are one of seven groups identified by More in Common1, and at 13% of the population, one of the smaller ones.

They are extremely on line – with 55% posting political content compared to around 9% for the other groups, there are probably nearly as many PA political posters as all the other groups put together (and they probably post more).

Progressive Activists are more likely to consider inequality a problem, and twice as likely as any other group to consider it a serious problem. They are far more likely to consider racism a serious problem – 98% hold this belief. They are far more likely to hold the belief on history that ‘we cannot move forward as a nation if we don’t acknowledge the mistakes during the period of the British Empire’ agreeing with this 84-16 compared to the average 41-59

They are far less likely to consider political correctness a problem – 26% compared to 72% for the whole population.

They are most likely to believe the system is ‘rigged for the rich and influential’ – 95% believing this against 67% for the whole population. Progressive Activists are much more likely to believe people’s ‘outcomes in life are determined largely by forces outside of their control (67% compared to an average of 31%)

Progressive Activists feel the country is divided more than any other group, and 58% feel it is very divided, more than twice as high as the next highest group.

They are marginally more likely than any other group to say they are ‘exhausted’ by the division. At the same time, they are most likely to believe that people they agree with politically need to stick to their beliefs and fight (35% compared to 22%)

Highly politically engaged, they are very suspicious of strong political leadership however. They are far less likely to consider the UK needs a leaders who is willing to break the rules (14% against 39%) or to feel we need government to be able to make decisions with fewer constraints (5% compared to an average of 43%). The fact the poll was taken early in the Boris Johnson government may have coloured this.

If you believe this, what are your natural career inclinations and preferences going to be?

It wouldn’t be surprising if Progressive Activists were disproportionately interested in getting involved in politics and policy, exercising power over others to promote the common good. There is a ‘hive mind’ element to the ideology. With no central control, developments in doctrine might be signalled by an intellectual vanguard in academia, but the actual boundaries will be thrashed out, particularly on line, with peer pressure and occasional pile ons as the main enforcement mechanisms.

Being suspicious of the idea of strong political leadership (as well as probably realising their views are some way from the mainstream on many issues), they are likely to be attracted to non elected institutional roles that enable them to exercise influence. Their pessimism on issues like equality and injustice means they are more likely to believe central intervention is needed and gravitate to roles where power can be exercised.

Intellectual and engaged, while determined to uphold what they see as the right view of history and society, they are likely to be interested in cultural industries that set the narrative, universities where ideas are generated and schools where they are inculcated. The area where the narrative can be most influenced is where the teachers themselves are trained and indeed the world of training more generally. By analogy, policy, best practice and professional standards are roles with significant leverage over entire professions

A strong commitment to justice and a relatively high combative streak means that gatekeeping functions like HR and recruitment will be popular, as well as bodies where discipline can be exerted like regulators and professional standards.

You do not necessarily need very large numbers of committed activists gravitating to these sort of areas to have an outsized influence on the professions and the wider public sector. Armed with apparent academic backing, moral persuasion, the hint of coercion in the background, even relatively small numbers in these areas have been able to influence and police discourse and policies, particularly in areas like the civil service where the general culture is consensual and non confrontational.

The politics of pushing back on ‘woke’ identity politics are frequently discussed. The underlying views of the progressive activists are not that popular, and constant drawing attention to its group based nature, its negativity and pessimism about individual autonomy, the threat of coercion and the structural bias particularly against white men implied in it, should be a useful strategy. Trump’s attack adverts “Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump’s for you” were amongst his most impactful.

This sort of approach only works, however, if progressive points seems unduly to be dominating your opponent’s platform, frustrating ordinary voters who have very different priorities. This was a much more credible criticism of the Harris campaign than it could be of the current government in the UK. And for all the noise from the online right, there is no significant anti -woke activist constituency in this country either.

What we currently face instead is a period in which contentious DEI thinking is no longer high in the public discourse, but has been embedded in the law and in our institutions, influencing policy and operations in a quieter but persistent way. The recent Arch10 report Two Britains2, which I co-authored, showed shocking divergences between the attitudes of public sector workers and the general public on a whole range of issues. Public sector workers were more likely to think political violence was acceptable in some circumstances; more likely to sympathise with their country’s enemies, and more likely to believe untrue facts if they reflected badly on their country. The position was bad for civil servants, worse for teachers and worst of all for NHS workers – nearly one third of whom expressed some or considerable support for Hamas, for example.

Every now and then, an issue reveals the stark implications of DEI thinking in practice and sets off a storm. The recent suggestion that the Nottingham murderer was not sectioned because of health professionals’ fear of being accused of racism is a reminder how deeply rooted this sort of thinking is. All of this comes from a DEI commonplace – that disparities in outcome are almost by definition the result of racism and need to be acted on. Baroness Amos’ recent report on the country’s maternity services seems to have worked from similar assumptions.

This suggests a careful approach deploying a scalpel rather than an axe. It is easy to portray a full frontal assault on DEI as both ideological and a distraction when the general public are more concerned about the cost of living. A strategy should concentrate particularly on the public bodies that pose highest risk, prioritising them for the sort of reforms I have discussed elsewhere3 – including greater power for Ministers to set strategic direction, compelling a broader range of opinions on boards, and bolstering the duty to respect freedom of thought. Incoming Ministers should demand departments audit their teams’ views, not to pursue individuals, but to help the senior leadership understand just how different staff are from the wider public, and what sort of blind spots this may be leading to. Elsewhere, the coming fiscal crisis holds out an opportunity to strip away wasteful and counterproductive spend of this sort, including the bloated public sector HR teams. In the UK, at any rate, the sensible approach for the anti woke right is not to put off the public by talking about ‘woke’ as a conspiracy or go on about a culture war. But act quietly as if it is.

The book is a remarkable portrait of the gilded age, the golden age of the rentier in America, Britain and France. The data on the sheer number of rentiers in these societies is remarkable. It may explain all sorts of things that puzzle us now, such as how on earth county and Test match cricket -taking place over five days - was ever invented. The economics of the game made a lot more sense when you think that wealthy enthusiasts played as amateurs and large number of people had plenty of time on their hands to watch the spectacle. Country cricket has more or less been in financial crisis ever since the First World War.

Piketty’s advocacy of a wealth tax inspired a lot of policy on the left-populist side, including in the Jeremy Corbyn era. The theories and the evidence base for them remain contested, including the assumptions Piketty made about capital/labour elasticity and assumed investment returns.

Fascinating though this debate is, it has all the hallmarks of an economics debate focused on formulae and assumptions. Underlying it is the fear of a self-sustaining societal elite becoming ever richer and more distant from the rest of society. British politics is becoming increasingly divided now between those who are still preoccupied with this fear and others more anxious about the rapid exodus of the super rich from Britain in the face of successive governments’ tax raises.

How realistic is the fear anyway? Few of the families of the gilded age dominate the economy now. Who looks up now to the later generations of the Vandebilts, Rockefellers and Fords? Piketty’s book stresses the measures that helped break up wealth, including in particular death duties, higher taxes and periods of inflation which ate away at fixed income.

But how sure can we be that these families wouldn’t have fallen into relative decline anyway? Wealthy families burning through their wealth and falling into decline is a stock feature of literature from Austen to Tolstoy to Thomas Mann and then, itself reflecting twentieth century cultural decline, through Agatha Christie to Downton Abbey. Until the twentieth century they had very little to fear from the Government, but altogether more from a gambling habit or a taste for art.

The British Prime Minister’s grandfather ‘Parsley Peel’ died in 1795 leaving £140,000. Invested in the ubiquitous 3% consols (UK Government debt) at war prices, this would have secured an income similar to Mr Darcy’s in Price and Prejudice. His son, the first baronet did even better being one of the ten known British millionaires a few years later.

A couple of generations of politics, expensive country houses, art collections and large families later, the Peels were back in the upper gentry (even with a peerage). Downton Abbey faithfully reflects the financial position of the upper British aristocracy. Basically they were never wealthy enough to support the enormous expenses of the grand country houses, requiring every generation a huge injection of new wealth – in the late nineteenth century from American heiresses.

The Rothschilds were richer in the time Piketty documents than they are now, but a shadow of their influence and wealth in the 1810s. Going back a little further, Jakob Fugger II is estimated to have been worth $400b or 2% of the GDP of Europe at his peak. Within a couple of generations, unfortunate exposure to the debts of Charles V and their own declining powers meant the Fuggers were wealthy and respected minor princes of the Empire, but not a patch on their previous dominance.

So even if Piketty’s financial theories hold water, the basic human ability to spend money far quicker than it is earned will ensure that single families do not really occupy the top of the wealth tree generation after generation. While distressing for the families themselves, this is a powerful mitigation to the sense of injustice Piketty portrays (though these days we are perhaps too impatient to wait this long).

There is really only one category of wealth capable of following the trajectory that Piketty forecasts – corporate organisations where those in charge do not have the right to alienate the capital, and instead have a fiduciary responsibility to preserve and grow it.

The best example of this in European history was the catholic church, in particular the monasteries. Priests, bishops and abbots were bound by oath to preserve the church’s holdings. Indeed one of the main reasons for the requirement for clerical celibacy was to remove the temptation to alienate church land to support clerics’ children.

By the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, some estimate they held a quarter or even a third of all land in England, following centuries of unbroken growth. Monasteries had learned to protect their wealth, preserving (and sometimes forging) documents to prove their claims and aggressively promoting their rights through legal action.

On the continent, disputes were more often settled by arms. Some prelates were noted warriors themselves, but even in medieval Europe this was frowned upon, except for the monastic military orders like the Knights Templar or the Teutonic Knights. But abbots and bishops made full use of the ‘ministeriales’, a class of people raised from serfdom and trained in military skills to serve their clerical overlords.

The Reformation saw a massive transfer of land away from the church to kings and nobility in all protestant areas. In catholic countries, the church continued to grow until Enlightenment monarchs declared enough even in staunchly catholic countries like the Austrian Empire (Joseph II) and Spain in the 1830s. And of course the French Revolution saw a similar sweeping away of church wealth and privileges.

What might be the modern analogy to the church? Charities obviously have trustees with similar corporate responsibilities, but their duty is ultimately often to work the assets down if they are to retain charitable status. Large charitable foundations like Ford and Carnegie have some of the monasteries’ characteristics of self selection, but are not vast any more. It is too early to say what will become of the new foundations of the tech billionaires The best analogous institution now would be private universities, particularly the great endowments of the US Ivy League.

While not quite at the Fugger level, endowments are very significant. The largest university endowment is Harvard’s at over $50b,which has grown from about $4b in 1990, comfortably outpacing the S&P. The total of the top 15 endowed universities exceeds $300b. This still isn’t a particularly large proportion of total US wealth, but the kernel is there for a series of institutions which could grow in power over time.

There are two factors which make this slightly less likely. Monasteries had informal but effective caps on their spending. Given the wealth and comfortable living which was possible once the original austerity was relaxed, even allowing for the need for celibacy, one might have expected a lot of demand for places. In practice, most monasteries were highly selective on class grounds, so the actual number of monks at the richer institutions was never high, with those with a vocation having to be satisfied with the lesser ‘lay brother’ status.

In universities, by contrast, those administering the endowments have a short term personal incentive not only to increase their own salaries, but also to expand the size of the administrative staff which now considerably exceeds the number of students in many institutions. The lack of a celibacy requirement means even greater temptation to find spaces for family members. This means that university spending is also growing, slowing the growth in the total endowment.

Secondly, the size of the endowments has already begun to attract the jealous attention that the monastic holdings had in the 1500s. the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) introduced a 1.4 percent tax on university endowment income for universities with at least 500 students and endowment assets above $500,000 per student, a small tax that raises minimal revenue but is potentially a sign of things to come.

One of the reasons the monasteries were particularly targeted (rather than other church lands) was the sense that monasticism had passed its peak and no longer supported the spiritual needs of the population in the same way it did earlier in the middle ages. Order of friars like the Franciscans and Dominicans were more mobile, preaching and teaching in the wider society, and as the medieval period came to an end groups like confraternities or groups of lay people living a religions life in society became increasingly popular.

Universities may face a similar danger, if they are seen as mired in intellectual stagnation and an ideological monoculture, though perhaps the ruins of Harvard and Stanford will provide inspiration for future generations of poets.

As we count the number of discredited public institutions, imagine a world where the Post Office is the most admired institution in the country – and indeed the only arm of the State most citizens ever came across. Welcome to Regency England.

In Jane Austen’s Emma, Jane Fairfax exclaims

“the Post Office is a wonderful establishment” said she. “The regularity and dispatch of it! If one thinks of all that it has to do, and all that it does so well, it is really astonishing…So seldom that any negligence or blunder appears! So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the kingdom, is ever carried wrong – and not one in a million, I suppose actually lost!”

Yet for all the smooth service enjoyed by its customers, the internal history of the organisation is less a story for Austen than for Sterne or indeed Trollope (a former senior employee), given the sometimes farcical degree of feuding. The Post Office seemed to veer between high efficiency to absurd complacency . The overall service combined slow moving bureaucracy periodically galvanized by some remarkable commercial arrangements with private individuals, sometimes imposed on a highly unwilling organisation.

We are preoccupied today with the communications revolution that the internet and social media represent. The improvement in the postal service doesn’t get much attention compared to the more picturesque inventions of the industrial revolution. It did, however, play an important role both in economic development and in mitigating the human cost of dramatic population migration.

Letters from the London based management of Dowlais Iron Company and their managers at Merthyr Tydfil testify to the tight control over distance that the mail service provided. In October 1816, Keats wrote a draft of On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer at dawn, put it in post at Southwark and it arrived at a friend’s breakfast table at Clerkenwell by 10.

The Post Office was an odd hybrid beast during this period. It was an arm of the state, and an important source of revenue. This itself was a slightly accidental by-product of Elizabethan parsimony. Lacking enough funding to run the royal message service exclusively, mail services were increasingly offered at a higher price to private citizens, initially a legal grey area but tolerated and then formalised.

The post service was a monopoly, both to protect revenue grounds and (covertly) because it was an important source of intelligence. The Post Office included teams who opened the mail of subjects of particular interest. The foreign mail did the same for the surprisingly large number of foreign embassies who used the service, apparently not imagining that anything so underhand would be attempted.

The Post Office was headed politically by a pair of Postmasters-General, normally a well paid but unexerting sinecure for obscure politicians. It then had a series of permanent officers, the numbers limited by convention but surprisingly well paid. Given the importance of getting the mail out, London staff tended to live at the Lombard Street ‘inland office’ headquarters, leading to a strong esprit to corps and attachment to the ‘custom of the office’. In the early nineteenth century, a reform of the Irish post office saw the dismissal of all who’d never set foot in the building which impressively cut the total number of staff by half.

The first great revolution to hit the Post Office in this period had been in the 1720s. The postal service had developed along the main roads out of London. Mail from a location on one route to one another (‘cross posts’) was supposed to travel via London, while mail to further destinations beyond the main highways (‘by posts’) were in practice often dealt with privately.

In 1719, the Postmasters General received an astonishing offer from Ralph Allen, a twenty five year old postmaster from Bath, offering in return for £6000 payment to take on a monopoly of cross and by posts for the entire West country. His strict system of supervision and cross checking improved efficiency and eliminated fraud, and made him exceptionally rich. Having initially been granted the contract for seven years, it was successively extended and expanded until it covered most of England and Wales. Allen became both fabulously rich and memorialised by his literary friends – in a famous couplet by Pope and as the model for Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones. After his death, his service was brought in house.

By this time, the post office service was seen as falling behind again, with stagecoaches increasingly eating into the Post Office’s share of the market. At this point Pitt the Younger got an even more ambitious offer.

John Palmer, as a former theatre impresario, travelled a huge amount. He saw how the cross post system was becoming obsolete and slow. The prosecution of robbers was costing thousands annually, with the Post Office reduced to encouraging people to cut up banknotes and send them by different posts.

Palmer noted the opportunity promised by the improvements made by such as Metcalfe, Telford and McAdam which had led to hard surfaced highways on the new turnpikes. He proposed switching the post service to mail coaches with armed guards, to replace “the idle boy without character, mounted on a worn out Hack, who so far as being able to defend himself or escape from a robber is more likely to be in League with him”. A strict timetable would mean the coach’s very lateness would rapidly lead to a hue and cry to find what had happened to it. This would be partially funded by higher charges. Palmer was convinced this would lead to a huge increase in traffic, and sought 2.5% of the enhanced revenue after allowing for higher post charges.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer Pitt the Younger liked the proposal and invited views from the Post Office. Showing little changes in bureaucratic culture over the years, the response came back as three volumes of objections, including the comical claim from one surveyor that a ‘constant eye’ for improvement had made the ‘post now almost as perfect as can be’

Pitt announced he was overruling the Post Office’s objections, and verbally agreed to Palmer’s terms – a pretty remarkable example of an oral contract.

In August 1784 Palmer launched the first service between Bristol and London, which halved journey times and doubled the frequency of the mails. This involved huge effort , travelling over 5000 miles in 4 months to negotiate agreements. Palmer negotiated a deal to make the carriages and with a series of businessmen to operate them. He had to bargain with postmasters who had to put up with night disturbances and feared for private income they were losing. It also needed changes to sorting office routine and timetables for the various cross routes to ensure the service flowed efficiently.

The Secretary to the Post Office, Todd, was determined to thwart this imposter. As one historian put it “with natural zest, great influence, experience and obstructive capacity, he determined to ruin Palmer”. Todd resorted to extraordinary measures, including countermanding changes to the timetable and setting up a competitor service. The Post Office closed ranks against Palmer, with Todd even securing cooperation internally from the relatives and supporters of his great enemy and predecessor Potts. Eventually the Prime Minister himself had to step in and order Todd to cooperate and allow the successful Bristol experiment to be repeated. Palmer could never understand how Todd got away with defying Ministers like this, not knowing about his power base in the Secret Office.

Palmer had a few years relatively unchallenged in the Post Office, and the next few years were dominated instead by a bizarre feud between the two Postmasters General Lords Carteret and Tankerville. The latter, now mainly famous for having invented the lbw law in cricket, demanded to know the identity of a recipient of a pension. Lord Carteret refused to disclose the name, and ultimately Pitt the Younger got fed up with the arguing and sacked Tankerville. A few years later a Parliamentary commission was able to get to the bottom of the pension, and were surprised when a Jewish foreigner cheerfully admitted to be receiving the annuity in return for no particular services but “for friendship entirely”.

Palmer’s dominance ultimately only lasted seven years. A new Postmaster General Walsingham arrived. Walsingham, a stickler for procedure, clashed with Palmer who treated governance with contempt, routinely ignoring summonses to meetings or to explain his decisions. Palmer had put an actor friend Bonnor into a senior role. Bonner soon got into financial difficulties, Palmer was losing patience with him but did help him forge some paperwork in order to help him balance his books. In a comic scene, Bonner and Palmer made the forged journals look suitably aged by kicking them around the room. Palmer also sought his help leaking some information to the press to discredit Walsingham’s controls, blaming them for delays in the mails.

Bonner, sensing Palmer was going to get rid of him, took the whole story to Walsingham. Palmer then fired Bonner, only for Walsingham to point out he didn’t have power. Palmer then locked Bonnor out and threatened arrest, only to be suspended and for Walsingham to attempt to put Bonnor in charge.

Given the clear evidence of conspiring against his political superior, Pitt was no longer able to protect Palmer, and gave him a pension of £3000 a year. He remained a celebrity, being returned four times as MP for Bath and in 1813 finally getting a huge settlement approved by Parliament, including the 2 ½% profit share originally agreed compensated for with a £50,000 one off amount – five times Mr Darcy’s annual salary. While Bonnor remained in post, he was a thoroughly discredited figure and was ultimately forced out himself over allegations of the sale of offices.

Palmer’s legacy remained in good hands for a while, with successors rolling out the mailcoach service throughout the country. New interesting ventures were undertaken, for example the invention of money or ‘postal’ orders. Here too the management was sceptical, so the service was actually run inside the Post Office but as a private venture controlled by the clerks of the road.

The Post Office in this period could be seen as a classic example of Adam Smith’s maxim that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. Despite the feuding, from day to day an outstanding service was provided. It’s not fanciful to suggest there is already a gap opening between the sort of state servants emerging in the proto bureaucracies of France and Prussia who saw their duties entirely to the governors and an organisation like the Post Office that had a real sense of its responsibilities to the public. As Mr Knightley replies cooly to Jane Fairfax’s enthusiastic praise of the service “the public pays, and must be served well”

Over time, once again the arteries started hardening. High postal charges, insisted on by Treasury for fiscal reasons, once again drove a huge proportion of mail – some estimated it at 5/6 - into illicit alternative services. The pattern was being set for yet another revolution – the imposition of Rowland Hill and his penny post idea, once again in the face of bitter opposition of the Post Office.

, having done much to popularise the idea of technological stagnation, now believes this era stopped in the early 2020s, in particular thanks to the enormous progress made since then in Large Language Models as well as biotechnology, as demonstrated in the development of the Covid vaccines.

While I love LLMs and can see enormous productivity opportunities from them, I am sceptical that they are enough on their own to turn around a century of slowing technological progress. And if it is true more widely that technological advances are stagnating, what can Governments do about this, given the widespread view that technological progress is the main basis for economic growth?

This is a question that preoccupies the modern age- though the idea that government could do much about this is pretty recent. We have come a long way from the Thatcher era when the very idea of ‘picking winners’ fell massively out of fashion. Industrial strategy is definitely getting a hearing again.

There are really two questions here. First, whether Governments can successfully promote scientific innovation in their country. Secondly, if it could do so, how much would that necessarily transform the economy.

It seems to me that Government can foster science in three ways

First, seeking a technical answer to a practical problem. This might make sense in cases of ‘market failure’ where there is a common problem but it is potentially too large for any individual entity to solve, particularly given the risk of free riding. Prizes have been a typical way of pursuing this.

The most famous example was the reward offered under the 1714 Longitude Act: ‘An Act for providing a Publick Reward for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea’. The Act noted this was vital ‘for the Safety and Quickness of Voyages, the Preservation of ships, and the Lives of Men’. While ships had long been able to determine their latitude, getting their longitude wrong was just as effective in getting them sunk.

The Longitude Act offered rewards of up to £20,000 for a method of finding longitude at sea to within half a degree (equivalent to 2 minutes of time) after a six-week voyage to the West Indies. These were ultimately won by John Harrison for his work designing the marine chronometer- disappointing many who thought this was a mechanical solution to a problem that would ideally have been solved more elegantly through advances in astronomy.

In France, Nicolas Appert ultimately won the prize offered by the army for his method of preserving food – the forerunner of modern canning. While not a government prize, Colliery owners similarly offered prizes for the development of safety miners lamps in the early nineteenth century, with Davy’s lamp the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first non stop flight from the US to France stimulated massive investment, ultimately being won by Lindburgh in 1927.

Of course in setting the prize there is no certainty whether science or technology will be advanced by the winning solution – an ingenious recycling of existing ideas is also a possibility. Indeed the most successful prizes have a precise and practical target in view. While not ultimately identifying a single winner, the NESTA run 2014 Longitude Prize sought a rapidly deployable cheap test to find out in real time whether an infection was bacterial or viral – a test that combined a hard scientific challenge with the challenges of deployment.

In a sense, all military research falls into this category too. There is a compelling feedback loop on whether the new weapons answer the immediate problem in wartime. How materially they advance science and technology and how much commercial spin off they then enjoy is a very different question.

Of the great investment programmes during WWII the long term returns were fairly uncertain. The best known was the Manhattan project, giving birth to both military and civil nuclear use. The latter never really lived up to its early promise and rarely amounted to more than a few 10s percents of electric power generation in any country other than France 30 years later.

Comparable to Manhattan in spend was the German V2 rocket programme. This was a technical marvel but, lacking accurate guidance, was fairly useless as a weapon. The total payload from all the V2 at 3000 tonnes was equivalent to one large raid of Lancaster bombers, and was probably even less accurate. Ironically, the technology proved itself in the hands of Germany’s enemies, powering the space race and ultimately getting a man on the moon. Only now, 80 years later, is space proving a rich field commercially and economically.

The second approach is to choose and fund particular technologies.

Particularly in the post war era, governments have had their imagination caught by pushing technological boundaries and giving their countries a lasting lead in the process. The tendency seems particularly strong in countries that sense they are falling behind economically (like the UK) or strategically (like France) and hope that a sudden technical breakthrough would enable them to restore their place. In many cases the routes chosen made sense at the time. Magnetic Levitation Railways (Maglev), the Concorde supersonic airliner, hovercrafts and Minitel, the French messaging system, all involved major technological breakthroughs yet turned out to be dead ends

The third approach is to bet on individuals, giving them the freedom to work autonomously, in the expectation that this will lead to breakthroughs. In a sense, this is the thinking behind funding research universities at all, though most recently it has become most closely associated with DARPA.

The Economist has called DARPA the agency that shaped the modern world, with technologies like “weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim at least partial credit.”. Dominic Cummings is a huge fan, and sought to bring some of the same innovative spirit to the UK through ARIA

Picking winners ultimately requires human judgement – you are identifying individuals who with support are likely to produce work of outstanding quality and which in turn is likely to lead to technical progress.

This is always going to be a tough model to sustain. It requires real self confidence in those funding the organisation and those running it, the avoidance of group think within the organisation or external pressure to channel funding in particular directions, and a government prepared to tolerate long term bets on brilliant individuals and the ability to defend them in the face of the inevitable failures. One wishes them well.

Underlying all of this is perhaps a naïve sense that technology moves forward through game changing breakthroughs capable of giving first mover companies or countries a built in advantage. ’s brilliant book How Innovation Happens challenges this idea, pointing out that innovation in practice spreads steadily and incrementally, with major breakthroughs having a habit of taking place in one than one places unrelated at the same time. Ridley argues that the patent system, designed to reward inventors, is actually a deterrent to innovation with inventors’ energies devoted to lawfare rather than improving the product.

In any event, many of the most successful technological companies got there through perfecting breakthroughs originating elsewhere. In every era, industrial espionage has been a potent force for preventing any country getting a lasting technological lead.

In any event, for new inventions to transform the economy, there also needs to be an industrial base capable of exploiting them. In the UK we have a fond national myth that we are good at inventing things but poor at exploiting them later. This was certainly true after WW2, but the more recent examples are getting a little tired (MRI scanners etc).

If Nobel prize winners per capita is a reasonable proxy for innovation, recent history suggests the UK isn’t bad, but isn’t a major outlier. If in fact we were brilliant at inventions but the economy was doing as badly as it is, this would cast even more doubt on why we think doubling down on innovation is the way to fix things. It seems more likely that we are averagely good at inventions, keen on adoption, but let down in securing capital to invest and adopting the management techniques to exploit new ideas effectively.

If then we are actually a just averagely innovative society, an alternative strategy would be to gain a marginal benefit by exploiting to the limit our new post Brexit freedoms on patent law as far in a permissive direction as is compatible with our international obligations. This would maximise the number of incremental cases of local innovation. It would of course annoy both the EU and the US, but there seems little point having freedoms if we don’t seek to exploit them.

The Home Office paper From Local to National sets out a vision for policing reflecting Home Office received opinion for the last 30 years at least. Force mergers delivering stronger capability in specialist functions and economies of scale; a national police service combining counter terrorism, organised crime and other national functions combined with a somewhat less defined increased emphasis on neighbourhood policing. The Home Secretary even describes policing as the ‘last, great unreformed public service’

There is a sense that the lack of progress in consolidation is felt as a bit of a reproach by Home Office officials who have been pressing for this for over 30 years now. Why are they so much less successful than their predecessors? The 1946 Police Act reduced the number of forces from around 200 to 117. The 1964 Act reduced it again dramatically to 49, with some minor tidying up in 1974 bringing the force numbers to the current 43. The paper rather plaintively takes as read that a system designed in the 1960s cannot be suitable for today’s needs.

This looks like a slow burn reform, with some aspects (eg the full transfer of CT (counter-terrorism) responsibilities and the force merger process) likely to run well into the next Parliament. It’s worth kicking the tyres of the underlying assumptions, as well as pointing out just how difficult this reform plan is going to be to deliver.

The first is the underlying problem to which this is the solution. Whenever this used to come up in the Home Office, I speculated “what could the problem possibly be to which the answer is to have 10 Metropolitan Polices?”.

The paper talks about declining confidence in policing. This is very true – but the paper oddly fails to look deeper at the data in the ONS figures to which it links. The three forces with the highest confidence are Cumbria, North Yorkshire and Wiltshire; three of the smallest forces. Large metropolitan forces tend to have below average levels of confidence, with confidence in London cratering particularly badly over recent years.

Large metropolitan forces have also been at least as much in trouble with the inspectorate. The Met police has been in special measures for most of the last 5 years, for example.

There are claims that small forces lack financial resilience – though again the numbers on average reserves paint a mixed picture. Smaller forces are amongst those with both the largest and the smallest levels of reserves. The paper claims that small forces struggle to deal with specialist and serious crimes and public order, relying on mutual aid. But there is little attempt to quantify this (eg varying clear up rates, or examples of problems). Mutual aid is always going to be appropriate in some circumstances, as nobody can have sufficient resources to deal with anything that hits them – even the Met calls for aid in cases of major public order.

Specialist capabilities have been somewhat of a preoccupation with senior officers and the Home Office for decades now, but it’s not clear it has the same kind of priority for the public. Public order, strategic roads policing firearms and police divers etc have important roles, but the public seems more frustrated by the sense that certain low level crimes are barely policed any more.

The proposals are full of assumptions about the gains to be made by economies of scale. This is a general Whitehall obsession. I’ve worked on merging several organisations in Whitehall and in my experience economies of scale are a massive delusion. Famously the FCO-DFID merger ended up with a combined organisation with more staff than before.

The paper talks about the burden of democratic accountability through the Police and Crime Commissioners, with a combined total of over 1000 staff supporting them. Actually this doesn’t’ seem a vast number compared to over 250000 officers and staff. Moreover, it’s certainly dwarfed by the number of staff in the policing and CT areas of the Home Office.

Once you get into the nuts and bolts of mergers, supposed savings melt away and unexpected costs arise. Whenever terms and conditions vary between the component organisations, the pressure is always to level them up. And merging IT systems often results with a clunkier, less flexible system than before.

Indeed when I dealt with policing in the Home Office, visits suggested that the quality of IT was often inversely proportionate to the force size. There used to be a wiring diagram setting out the process for recording and handling a domestic violence case in the Met, showing the need to retype offender and victim details about a dozen times on multiple different systems (and back then quite a number of cases of having to record details in writing, but hopefully this has been resolved by now).

This is not a swipe at the bigger forces. It’s not that their IT leadership is incompetent, rather that problems get exponentially more difficult the larger the organisation and the greater number of legacy systems there are to handle. When Police Scotland was formed out of the merger of 8 forces, the shiny new IT system promised collapsed basically when the vendor realised they were replacing not one but 8 systems with major constraints on the changes they could impose in the interests of rationalisation.

Charles Clarke’s merger programme failed largely on financial grounds, Gordon Brown refusing to provide any support either in funding or allowing flexibility to increase the precept. Tedious though it sounds, every force has different levels of local funding through the precept (council tax) which sits on top of the police grant which is supposed to be allocated on a needs basis. In any given proposed merged force areas, local politicians will be hostile either to seeing large precept increases, or suspicious of capability that has been paid for by one area’s higher precept levels being sucked away to fill gaps in lower tax neighbouring areas.

This is a fraught local political issue, and the losers inevitably make a lot more noise than the winners. Force mergers would be easier to deliver if they had the strong backing of police leadership. As in 2006, however, there are cautiously favourable noises from police leadership which risks falling away completely when local rows blow up. If I were Shabana Mahmood, I would be pressing for support in blood from senior police figures.

I’m in no doubt senior police have been lobbying for most of these changes behind the scenes. Looked at cynically, 10-12 forces is the perfect number for police chiefs. Too many to be managed day to day by the Home Secretary, but too big to have real political accountability locally (except perhaps in London). I remember a metropolitan police chief once pointing out to the map of his force area which included both urban and rural elements, and suggesting that no politician was going to be able to represent so diverse a community – though apparently he was capable of making the same complex trade offs as a police chief.

As for the new National Police Service, this is supposed in due course to handle all national policing responsibilities, “creating a world-class force focused on counter-terror, serious and organised crime and fraud”. In addition, “by setting stronger national standards, it will ensure a more consistent service is received by the public regardless of where they live. The NPS “will be empowered to set mandatory standards in areas such as professional practice, training, technology, data and workforce planning”

This is quite a mixed role. The NPS is supposed to set out ‘doctrine’ on behalf of policing as a whole – taking over the role of the current College of Policing. But as an organisation it won’t actually be engaged in the policing tasks that occupy most policing time. This poses challenges for the credibility of the standards it designs.

The cultural challenges of the new organisation are massive too. The plan is to bring together CT policing and a whole range of other national functions with the National Crime Agency. This involves bringing in some of the most troubled areas of policing. Baroness (Louise) Casey was brought in to report on successive scandals in the Met. Her report commented that these specialist areas included “some of the worst cultures, behaviours and practices’ where ‘normal rules do not seem to apply or be applied’.

This headache will be combined with the challenge of working out how to incorporate the National Crime Agency. NCA and its predecessor SOCA were set up not as police forces, but as mergers of police, Customs and immigration forces with the power to designate officers with any of the powers of those agencies. The idea was to create a stronger intelligence based culture capable of using a wider range of state powers not just to prosecute individuals but to disrupt organised crime markets more broadly.

It is fair to say the police have never liked this model, and now the plan seems to be both to merge NCA into an explicitly police organisation but somehow to maintain its culture and its distinct statutory basis. On top of all the usual pain in a merger (and the paper notes that NCA terms and conditions have fallen behind those of policing), this introduces a potentially massive cultural problem. If Ministers are actually satisfied that a conventional policing approach can deal with the full range of problems we face, they should consider what it would take to convert NCA into a police force, which involves lots of tedious work particularly around pensions.

Some might say it is easy to snipe at other institutional plans in a complex area, harder to come up with a sensible design. The response is why institutional change is assumed to be the priority in the first place? A better route might have been to conduct intensive focus group work with both the public and frontline officers to understand the drivers both of falling confidence and of morale.

It this exercise were undertaken, I suspect institutional structures would be nowhere in the list of priorities. What makes officers’ lives impossible and crime, particularly low level crime, so difficult to handle might be the ever ballooning paperwork, processes and safeguards. Officers often say you could book an arrestee into a custody suite in 15-30 minutes in the 80s and it now takes 2 hours (some say longer). Successive reviews of the paperwork required for prosecution only seem to lead to increases. And looming in the background is an IOPC that many officers feel measures itself on the number of successful disciplinary cases it completes.

This sort of review would be unpopular and controversial work. Safeguards always have an underlying purpose and justification. But like all good things there comes a point at which they get counterproductive, and actually put the public in danger. This is only a hunch at the moment; what is disappointing is yet another phase of police reform is passing by without this question apparently even being asked.