The USA is following Britain on the road to decreased productivity and rising working class poverty. We stopped building nuclear power plants after Three Mile Island (I was in school less than 75 miles away at the time and never felt endangered; it was no Chernobyl) and began decommissioning them. Bureaucratic red tape, endless reviews and onerous restrictions on who can be hired for infrastructure projects mean building anything costs vastly more than initially projected. A new tunnel to Manhattan? Forget about it.
There was an interesting tweet the other day adding up all the early deaths that have been caused by abandoning nuclear, compared to the small number harmed by nuclear accidents.
People seem to miss the lesson of Chernobyl that the problem wasn't nuclear power, but communism.
I love nuclear, and I agree that Communism wasn’t particularly the cause of the Chernobyl (which is not in Russia but in Ukraine) accident. Also, it wasn’t all that bad - pretty textbook in fact. There was a fire which needed to be put out, and it was. The heroic ‘first responders’ were fatally irradiated with gamma rays, but that was about it. A rapid evacuation protected people living nearby. The surrounding area is now a natural paradise, with even some humans living there happily. Some day, I too will visit…
"Such a culture takes centuries to build: it is the most precious inheritance that we have received from the generations that went before us. "
Centuries to build, but only decades to trash with the policies of mass immigration of people from alien and sometimes hostile cultures and the deliberate denigration of our history and culture.
I (obviously) agree that this is a problem, but I think it's also worth focussing on the economic problems we face. Getting richer would alleviate our social problems a great deal.
Yes, we seem to be opting for the worst of all worlds. The US has plenty of problems but a lively economy, at least anywhere Musk is operating, whereas, we have economic sclerosis. But rather than maintaining a cosy if out of date England, we've added relentless cultural change and chaos to our flailing economy, while our politicians and moral betters argue about the increasingly irrelevant EU.
As an American I certainly think our economy is in decent shape (though not without its problems). Elon Musk has very little to do with that. Just another self-preening, showboating billionaire.
Innovative sure, but it's not driving the US economy. Meanwhile that "innovative" Tesla car has been an utter flop (and is the subject of more jokes than the old Edsel)
That is hardly true. Many of the social problems stem from the luxury beliefs that seem to inevitably result from wealth.
Regardless, the economic problems are symptoms of cultural problems. The rule of law is much less respected, the regulatory burdens on construction are nigh impossible to overcome, and the human capital is declining.
Great article Ed. Please get it published in a national newspaper. We need a short, efficient national debate and then planning reform. It won’t even cost much and the rewards will be enormous.
I read Foundations yesterday, as it happens, and I find its conclusions convincing. However I don't think the authors fully defined our national malaise which also encompasses the destructive Luxury Beliefs embraced by our elites - beliefs in multiculturalism and Net Zero coupled with a debilitating desire to gold-plate any edict handed down by a supra-national authority.
Unless I'm missing something, isn't one obvious problem with comparing Britain and France the fact that France has twice as much land area? As such, more building, expansion of cities etc has less impact on the country's green spaces, sense of overcrowding and general population density. Before WWI there were virtually no planning restrictions, and indeed no passports - a fact I find quite nostalgic. But the country also had a total population of less than forty million, whereas we're heading fast towards twice that number.
That is a valid point; on the flip side, higher density allows for more efficient use of shared infrastructure, the high speed rail lines to connect major cities don't need to be as long, etc.
Yes, higher population doesn't mean less can be done. As you say, in some senses it ought to mean things can be done more efficiently. But there is less space to do the things in, and in my view it means they ought to be done more sensitively. Curiously, Britain has also been very bad at doing this. I am always truck by how much better the French have preserved their traditional urban centres, while the British have demolished theirs and replaced them with concrete brutalism. Something else to blame left modernism for.
I was about to make this same point, but I can tolerate having been beaten to it by Paul Kingsnorth. We are an odd mix as a country because for the most part we have an urban or industrial economy and most of us live in towns or cities, but we revere our countryside, our landscapes are famously beautiful, and we have a deep psychic need to have a lot of open countryside and farmland OUT THERE even if we don't see it that often. Hence all the people who live within commuting distance of London but still want to put their wellies and Barbour on at the weekends and have a muddy walk in the woods followed by a pint in a pub with horse brasses over the fire.
There's also the little matter of having to feed ourselves, and farmland comes in rather handy for that.
Foundations seems to put its finger on some very important points (if one finger can be on multiple points) but when we talk about building more houses etc. we do need to remember that land is a precious and very limited resource, that we can't replace swathes of open country once they have been developed, and that every Englishman will Spode-ishly proclaim his inalienable right to a couple of fields and a nice little wood to walk the dog in.
I think the point about the psychic need is a good one. The British were torn from their land by the industrial revolution before anyone else, and I see that as one of the sources of the English love of the countryside. We may be trapped in the cities, but we long for something else, however realistically. The notion that we should simply pave the lot over for economic reasons goes up against something very deep in the English psyche in particular. And of course it is always the English - as opposed to Scottish or Welsh - landscape which ends up getting paved. 'Progressives' and money-grubbing Tories have done a good job representing this psychic need as 'Luddism' or 'Romanticism', but that just goes to show how little they understand the country, IMHO .
Yes, quite. In my optimistic moments I look forward to the point at which our population will start to decline again - I like to think to think we will let a lot of the newer and uglier buildings just fall down as the need for them passes. As I understand it the world's population is expected to peak around now and start to fall (possibly quite fast), so in that sense we may be nearing the high-water mark for development, once we kick the habit of swelling our population for short-term advantage. That's not to say that the authors of this report are wrong, as things stand, but I don't think we should assume that the trend will be towards ever more building.
Thank you. It’s an interesting article and report.
Providing low cost energy (to the consumer) would go a long way to making people better off and the country more investable.
A good illustration of the points in the article is that the first small modular reactor made by RR will be in the Czech Republic.
Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic https://on.ft.com/3BivqNi
I just don’t understand why these are not being rolled out on former coal and nuclear power stations as a matter of national priority.
As an aside, the focus on the planning system as a major break on development disguises wider issues and is a substitute for some hard thinking and more importantly doing things.
The amount of paperwork in the planning system is too much (and could be limited) but the key issue is that the system is underfunded and there is a shortage of planning officers. Time limits for decisions could also be made mandatory.
This planning system worked relatively well in the 80s and 90s and indeed up until 2008. Since 2010 there has almost been an Act of Parliament every year reforming the system. That coupled with the cuts to Council funding has seriously hampered the system.
In addition, housebuilders will not sell into a declining market or release houses if it means prices will drop. They are also the only industry that has to provide a product for “free”. The costs are of course added to the market product.
National and local government does not build houses as they used to do. MacMillan delivered a million homes in the early 1950s. See also Milton Keynes more recently.
Construction costs are an issue as has been pointed out. On trams and trains rather than getting French and German contractors to build them we decided to design and procure everything from scratch. HS2 is a classic example of this. Rather than using the French and Spanish technology we designed a system that was faster and too highly specified.
Ultimately, it’s a failure of imagination and will. I saw your articles on Japan. We need to look at the best of other countries and systems and act.
Ask yourself if you had to £25m to invest, where would you do it? Work back from that.
Politics is a very unfair business. The Attlee government still has a glowing halo over it in the popular imagination, and yet you can trace so many of our structural problems back to it. I remember reading your piece a while back on Birmingham, and being amazed at its deliberate post-war sabotage. Even now, rolling back environmental rules or curtailing judicial review provoke huge pushback, not just from the respective vested interests, but from a lot of motivated, well-resourced middle-class voters. A lot of the things that drag this country down are, regrettably, pretty popular, at least with those sections of society prepared to make a fuss. I agree with much in this report, but - though I'd love to be surprised! - I don't think we have a political class that's going to be very receptive to it.
Good one Ed - thank you for highlighting the report and its authors. I dearly wish there was an effective way of raising its profile among the general public. I for one have never seen the causes of our national downturn so clearly explained!
Over a year ago, our local sports centre applied for planning permission to turn a petanque court where we play weekly into an illuminated pickleball court which would be roughly the size of a tennis court. As I enjoy my game of petanque, I decided to object, and the council have since advised me whenever there is a development in the application. I was amazed earlier this year to find there were already FIFTY documents associated with the application, and the council have contacted me since (I am now past caring) so that number is presumably even higher. I wonder if Blair's aim of producing a population half of whom have been to university was intended so that they could all gain employment from pointless pseudo-scientific activity like writing useless planning documents?
Nearly 20 years ago, when Blair was still PM, I moved to a rural part of Yorkshire where they were short of voluntary fire fighters. I had just left the navy at the time, thought it would be exciting and useful, and sent off for the application form. What I got back ran to 50 pages and seemed to be pre-occupied with race relations! “Give examples of when you have challenged out-dated cultural stereotypes in the workplace” and that kind of stuff. I chucked it in the bin.
Interesting points from this report but I can’t get away from the nagging feeling that the hidden proposal is to just build all over the remaining countryside in the south east (already one of the most densely populated regions in Europe) while our population rises by 10 million in just over decade.
I worked out that the SE of England is much more densely-populated than any other area of Europe of similar size, the comparisons being with North Rhine-Westphalia, THe Netherlands and Belgium. (I ajusted which English counties I included in the SE in order to get almost identical areas with each of those countries/ regions.)
“Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through” by economic journalist Duncan Weldon reckons in the years of peak production combined with peak oil prices, it was as much as £100billion a year in today’s money! I believe it was a substantial factor, running from 1975 or thereabouts until fairly recently.
Although ultimately we need to look forward rather than back, we can’t ignore the fact that WWII was a catastrophe for the UK. We were the only state to be in it from start to finish, with a bill to match. The weird pact between the TUC leader, Ernie Bevin, and Winston Churchill led to the preservation of largely obsolete industries for another three decades, at the expense of more modern and innovative projects. We lost an empire, there was a brain-drain and a youth drain to Canada and Australia, and our governments squandered North Sea oil revenues while selling off essential infrastructure, including the National Grid! Look at our PMs since Chamberlain: a bunch of weirdos or lightweights, and yes I include the eccentric and hapless Churchill in that, good journalist though he was.
I think you may be right, we are paying the price now for 80 years of assuming we’d won the war and didn’t need to earn our keep. Post-war socialism was built on the assumption that we deserved a fair and equitable society without wanting to pat for it.
"Get Britain building by removing barriers and lowering costs." Amen to that.
One might hope that at least one of the candidates for the Tory leadership gets this message, and, rather than just talking about it, has the necessary determination (ie ruthlessness) to see it through.
Yes, I have always found it intriguing how Blighty has perhaps the crappiest 1920s, with a regular unemployment rate between 10% and 20% and a debt to GDP hovering around 180%, but one of the best 1930s of any developed nation (as we would call them today).
The USA is following Britain on the road to decreased productivity and rising working class poverty. We stopped building nuclear power plants after Three Mile Island (I was in school less than 75 miles away at the time and never felt endangered; it was no Chernobyl) and began decommissioning them. Bureaucratic red tape, endless reviews and onerous restrictions on who can be hired for infrastructure projects mean building anything costs vastly more than initially projected. A new tunnel to Manhattan? Forget about it.
There was an interesting tweet the other day adding up all the early deaths that have been caused by abandoning nuclear, compared to the small number harmed by nuclear accidents.
People seem to miss the lesson of Chernobyl that the problem wasn't nuclear power, but communism.
Incompetence isn't restricted to communist societies.
Nuclear accidents can happen anywhere.
I love nuclear, and I agree that Communism wasn’t particularly the cause of the Chernobyl (which is not in Russia but in Ukraine) accident. Also, it wasn’t all that bad - pretty textbook in fact. There was a fire which needed to be put out, and it was. The heroic ‘first responders’ were fatally irradiated with gamma rays, but that was about it. A rapid evacuation protected people living nearby. The surrounding area is now a natural paradise, with even some humans living there happily. Some day, I too will visit…
"Such a culture takes centuries to build: it is the most precious inheritance that we have received from the generations that went before us. "
Centuries to build, but only decades to trash with the policies of mass immigration of people from alien and sometimes hostile cultures and the deliberate denigration of our history and culture.
I (obviously) agree that this is a problem, but I think it's also worth focussing on the economic problems we face. Getting richer would alleviate our social problems a great deal.
Yes, we seem to be opting for the worst of all worlds. The US has plenty of problems but a lively economy, at least anywhere Musk is operating, whereas, we have economic sclerosis. But rather than maintaining a cosy if out of date England, we've added relentless cultural change and chaos to our flailing economy, while our politicians and moral betters argue about the increasingly irrelevant EU.
As an American I certainly think our economy is in decent shape (though not without its problems). Elon Musk has very little to do with that. Just another self-preening, showboating billionaire.
Space X seems innovative to me. Perhaps you haven't heard of it?
Innovative sure, but it's not driving the US economy. Meanwhile that "innovative" Tesla car has been an utter flop (and is the subject of more jokes than the old Edsel)
That is hardly true. Many of the social problems stem from the luxury beliefs that seem to inevitably result from wealth.
Regardless, the economic problems are symptoms of cultural problems. The rule of law is much less respected, the regulatory burdens on construction are nigh impossible to overcome, and the human capital is declining.
Easier said than done when we have lost the individual and collective impetus to create wealth.
Great article Ed. Please get it published in a national newspaper. We need a short, efficient national debate and then planning reform. It won’t even cost much and the rewards will be enormous.
thank you!
I read Foundations yesterday, as it happens, and I find its conclusions convincing. However I don't think the authors fully defined our national malaise which also encompasses the destructive Luxury Beliefs embraced by our elites - beliefs in multiculturalism and Net Zero coupled with a debilitating desire to gold-plate any edict handed down by a supra-national authority.
I personally don't doubt there are cultural issues, but I think it makes sense for the authors to just focus on economics.
The baleful economic impacts of multiculturalism and Net Zero are substantial and growing. However that does not invalidate the authors' basic thesis.
Unless I'm missing something, isn't one obvious problem with comparing Britain and France the fact that France has twice as much land area? As such, more building, expansion of cities etc has less impact on the country's green spaces, sense of overcrowding and general population density. Before WWI there were virtually no planning restrictions, and indeed no passports - a fact I find quite nostalgic. But the country also had a total population of less than forty million, whereas we're heading fast towards twice that number.
That is a valid point; on the flip side, higher density allows for more efficient use of shared infrastructure, the high speed rail lines to connect major cities don't need to be as long, etc.
Yes, higher population doesn't mean less can be done. As you say, in some senses it ought to mean things can be done more efficiently. But there is less space to do the things in, and in my view it means they ought to be done more sensitively. Curiously, Britain has also been very bad at doing this. I am always truck by how much better the French have preserved their traditional urban centres, while the British have demolished theirs and replaced them with concrete brutalism. Something else to blame left modernism for.
I was about to make this same point, but I can tolerate having been beaten to it by Paul Kingsnorth. We are an odd mix as a country because for the most part we have an urban or industrial economy and most of us live in towns or cities, but we revere our countryside, our landscapes are famously beautiful, and we have a deep psychic need to have a lot of open countryside and farmland OUT THERE even if we don't see it that often. Hence all the people who live within commuting distance of London but still want to put their wellies and Barbour on at the weekends and have a muddy walk in the woods followed by a pint in a pub with horse brasses over the fire.
There's also the little matter of having to feed ourselves, and farmland comes in rather handy for that.
Foundations seems to put its finger on some very important points (if one finger can be on multiple points) but when we talk about building more houses etc. we do need to remember that land is a precious and very limited resource, that we can't replace swathes of open country once they have been developed, and that every Englishman will Spode-ishly proclaim his inalienable right to a couple of fields and a nice little wood to walk the dog in.
I think the point about the psychic need is a good one. The British were torn from their land by the industrial revolution before anyone else, and I see that as one of the sources of the English love of the countryside. We may be trapped in the cities, but we long for something else, however realistically. The notion that we should simply pave the lot over for economic reasons goes up against something very deep in the English psyche in particular. And of course it is always the English - as opposed to Scottish or Welsh - landscape which ends up getting paved. 'Progressives' and money-grubbing Tories have done a good job representing this psychic need as 'Luddism' or 'Romanticism', but that just goes to show how little they understand the country, IMHO .
Yes, quite. In my optimistic moments I look forward to the point at which our population will start to decline again - I like to think to think we will let a lot of the newer and uglier buildings just fall down as the need for them passes. As I understand it the world's population is expected to peak around now and start to fall (possibly quite fast), so in that sense we may be nearing the high-water mark for development, once we kick the habit of swelling our population for short-term advantage. That's not to say that the authors of this report are wrong, as things stand, but I don't think we should assume that the trend will be towards ever more building.
I'm with you on that vision!
Thank you. It’s an interesting article and report.
Providing low cost energy (to the consumer) would go a long way to making people better off and the country more investable.
A good illustration of the points in the article is that the first small modular reactor made by RR will be in the Czech Republic.
Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic https://on.ft.com/3BivqNi
I just don’t understand why these are not being rolled out on former coal and nuclear power stations as a matter of national priority.
As an aside, the focus on the planning system as a major break on development disguises wider issues and is a substitute for some hard thinking and more importantly doing things.
The amount of paperwork in the planning system is too much (and could be limited) but the key issue is that the system is underfunded and there is a shortage of planning officers. Time limits for decisions could also be made mandatory.
This planning system worked relatively well in the 80s and 90s and indeed up until 2008. Since 2010 there has almost been an Act of Parliament every year reforming the system. That coupled with the cuts to Council funding has seriously hampered the system.
In addition, housebuilders will not sell into a declining market or release houses if it means prices will drop. They are also the only industry that has to provide a product for “free”. The costs are of course added to the market product.
National and local government does not build houses as they used to do. MacMillan delivered a million homes in the early 1950s. See also Milton Keynes more recently.
Construction costs are an issue as has been pointed out. On trams and trains rather than getting French and German contractors to build them we decided to design and procure everything from scratch. HS2 is a classic example of this. Rather than using the French and Spanish technology we designed a system that was faster and too highly specified.
Ultimately, it’s a failure of imagination and will. I saw your articles on Japan. We need to look at the best of other countries and systems and act.
Ask yourself if you had to £25m to invest, where would you do it? Work back from that.
Politics is a very unfair business. The Attlee government still has a glowing halo over it in the popular imagination, and yet you can trace so many of our structural problems back to it. I remember reading your piece a while back on Birmingham, and being amazed at its deliberate post-war sabotage. Even now, rolling back environmental rules or curtailing judicial review provoke huge pushback, not just from the respective vested interests, but from a lot of motivated, well-resourced middle-class voters. A lot of the things that drag this country down are, regrettably, pretty popular, at least with those sections of society prepared to make a fuss. I agree with much in this report, but - though I'd love to be surprised! - I don't think we have a political class that's going to be very receptive to it.
Good one Ed - thank you for highlighting the report and its authors. I dearly wish there was an effective way of raising its profile among the general public. I for one have never seen the causes of our national downturn so clearly explained!
Over a year ago, our local sports centre applied for planning permission to turn a petanque court where we play weekly into an illuminated pickleball court which would be roughly the size of a tennis court. As I enjoy my game of petanque, I decided to object, and the council have since advised me whenever there is a development in the application. I was amazed earlier this year to find there were already FIFTY documents associated with the application, and the council have contacted me since (I am now past caring) so that number is presumably even higher. I wonder if Blair's aim of producing a population half of whom have been to university was intended so that they could all gain employment from pointless pseudo-scientific activity like writing useless planning documents?
Nearly 20 years ago, when Blair was still PM, I moved to a rural part of Yorkshire where they were short of voluntary fire fighters. I had just left the navy at the time, thought it would be exciting and useful, and sent off for the application form. What I got back ran to 50 pages and seemed to be pre-occupied with race relations! “Give examples of when you have challenged out-dated cultural stereotypes in the workplace” and that kind of stuff. I chucked it in the bin.
Interesting points from this report but I can’t get away from the nagging feeling that the hidden proposal is to just build all over the remaining countryside in the south east (already one of the most densely populated regions in Europe) while our population rises by 10 million in just over decade.
I worked out that the SE of England is much more densely-populated than any other area of Europe of similar size, the comparisons being with North Rhine-Westphalia, THe Netherlands and Belgium. (I ajusted which English counties I included in the SE in order to get almost identical areas with each of those countries/ regions.)
How much did North Sea oil contribute to us becoming prosperous again in the 80s and 90s?
I don't know, to be honest. They argue that it wasn't a crucial factor. I'm not sure what the consensus is now in the fake science of economics.
(little Taleb joke there)
“Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through” by economic journalist Duncan Weldon reckons in the years of peak production combined with peak oil prices, it was as much as £100billion a year in today’s money! I believe it was a substantial factor, running from 1975 or thereabouts until fairly recently.
Although ultimately we need to look forward rather than back, we can’t ignore the fact that WWII was a catastrophe for the UK. We were the only state to be in it from start to finish, with a bill to match. The weird pact between the TUC leader, Ernie Bevin, and Winston Churchill led to the preservation of largely obsolete industries for another three decades, at the expense of more modern and innovative projects. We lost an empire, there was a brain-drain and a youth drain to Canada and Australia, and our governments squandered North Sea oil revenues while selling off essential infrastructure, including the National Grid! Look at our PMs since Chamberlain: a bunch of weirdos or lightweights, and yes I include the eccentric and hapless Churchill in that, good journalist though he was.
I think you may be right, we are paying the price now for 80 years of assuming we’d won the war and didn’t need to earn our keep. Post-war socialism was built on the assumption that we deserved a fair and equitable society without wanting to pat for it.
"Get Britain building by removing barriers and lowering costs." Amen to that.
One might hope that at least one of the candidates for the Tory leadership gets this message, and, rather than just talking about it, has the necessary determination (ie ruthlessness) to see it through.
Foundations offers just the tried and failed Capitalist remedies, minus bureauucratic paperwork.
You can't eat money - Foundations seems to think we can.
Whether we starve, whether we freeze, is now 50/50 in both cases. Sane people would have prepared a study of food and energy supplies and security.
Britain has been on a Rake's Progress of pursing Money, whatever the risks since about 1750. Now it's payback time.
It's time for us to forswear economic growth, and the Immigration and Inequality making it possible. We must embrace frugality.
This will require a drastic change in mindset on the part of all races and classes.
But still more, it will require a drastic Levelling of incomes and wealth.
Yes, I have always found it intriguing how Blighty has perhaps the crappiest 1920s, with a regular unemployment rate between 10% and 20% and a debt to GDP hovering around 180%, but one of the best 1930s of any developed nation (as we would call them today).
Strong leadership required.