I’m trying to get into a better posting cadence, after having been way too sidetracked by my UK foreign policy piece. Usual interesting links below:
- The destruction of local governments’ freedom: https://taxpayersalliance.com/content/files/2026/02/The-statutory-spending-straitjacket.pdf
- A great piece that shows the sheer extent of the central government’s control over local government through statutory requirements, primarily around adult social care and other provisions. This leads to multiple problems, but the most cogent is that we have completely divorced price from inputs. Central government can pile ever more requirements on the local government (what’s left of it), but there is no pushback or filter. Nor is there any real linked support from the central government for these policies.
- It’s a bad situation, and it can only get worse. Local government is completely swallowed up by the central government diktats, with ever less space to manoeuvre and do what it should do – improve its area. Given voters’ unhappiness with the state of the UK, this is going to have to be changed. Either remove these requirements, or link them to central funding/taxation, so we as a society are aware of these costs. But so far that seems unlikely.
- A response to the Ben Judah post on The Chagos Islands:https://open.substack.com/pub/rosskempsell/p/ben-judah-on-chagos-a-response?r=22u0c&utm_medium=ios
- I’m glad that Judah wrote in The Times about the Chagos Islands, even if I thought it was mostly wrong and based on fundamentally wrong assumptions. This post was a good riposte to that in turn, but credit to Judah for actually articulating the case.
- I feel this ties into my longer form UK foreign policy piece – we have too many in our government and civil service who have no idea of how to manage the era of great power competition, and that an over-reliance on international law is dangerous for the national interest
- How to pay for public goods: https://substack.com/home/post/p-189739107
- A short but good piece, going into detail about the eight ways to go about public spending schemes in the UK, with their advantages and drawbacks
- I’m starting to think about our current setup in the UK, and how two of the schemes with the biggest issues, and crucially the most support, are both universal: the NHS and the triple lock. Gut says there is no way to ever fundamentally make these _not_universal, but we have to change these drastically for our future prosperity. Some more thoughts to come.
Random Comments 