Some early signs for concern from the Burnham team, with reports in the Financial Times that his team don’t see the point of Waymo, and he is apparently set to ban Palantir from the NHS. This, in addition to not taking any questions from the press and his Reddit thread (where he said HS2 was down to local concerns not being taken into account, despite the tens of billions spent on precisely this), doesn’t bode particularly well.
Still, we can only hope there is more to come.
https://gbtt.info/guest-opinions/the-price-of-playing-it-safe/
- Kathryn Porter writes for Great British Think Tank about how the UK and much of the Western World refuse to accept that risk and discomfort are part and parcel of life and necessary .
- While she initially talks about the Online Safety Act and COVID, she also references Hinkley Point C’s fiasco:
- Natural England disputes the caricature, arguing that mitigation requirements were part of the original development consent and that it is not currently delaying the project.
- But even that dispute proves the deeper point. A country serious about energy security and decarbonisation cannot allow nationally significant infrastructure to become trapped for years in technocratic argument over marginal impacts, uncertain modelling and ever-expanding process.
- We refuse to accept that this is a trade-off – we are prioritising minor environmental issues at the real cost of our economy and lives. This has been compounding for decades, and we cannot get out of this without reckoning with the tradeoffs to date.
- Furthermore, she mentions the financial markets, which I’ve touched on in my early post on the UK. We have exacerbated this with the recent changes to the UK job market through much greater protections for workers – again, an attempt to protect workers from real downsides, but refusing to acknowledge that this makes our economy much less dynamic, and so we all suffer in the long term. Furthermore, early signs are that the Burnham government want to focus on UK independence in AI, and ensuring British sovereignty. Great – how are you going to do that with high energy prices, a static labour market, and an inability to build domestically? Taking some risks could be beneficial…
https://spectator.com/article/devolution-has-failed-try-telling-andy-burnham/#comments-container
- Stephen Daisley in the Spectator has a punchy argument about how devolution has failed, and will continue to fail in the UK. Given I’m more sympathetic to devolution than most, I thought this was quite a good, challenging read.
- Focusing on Scotland:
- Since control of most domestic policy was transferred from the Westminster political class to its Holyrood rival, Scotland has become the drugs deaths capital of Europe, has seen educational outcomes plummet, emergency and cancer care targets missed for years on end, and a shipbuilding nation has spent more than a decade building two fault-ridden ferries at several times their original budget.
- I don’t think there’s any denying that devolution, on the terms first set out by Blair, has not succeeded. The SNP have dominated Scotland for nearly two decades, and in Wales, Plaid Cymru is now the largest party. The constitutional settlement was fundamentally dependent on a Unionist party (Labour historically) holding Scotland and Wales – a big point will be how would Reform winning change this?
- Going back to Daisley’s points (as a bonus, see Ed West’s latest Substack on Scottish politics here), I have to acknowledge this is a real drawback to devolution – of course there have to be winners and losers. The Scottish government has the freedom to set education policy, NHS reforms, among other areas. Unfortunately, these have been a clear example of what not to do.
- The problem that I see is that devolution seems to be strangely designed – Scotland and Wales get grants (courtesy of the Barnett formula), but really don’t have to own their decisions. So poor economic decisions don’t really get reflected in Welsh or Scottish politics – it is easy enough to blame Westminster for these decisions.
- I come back to our post-WWII setup – we have tried to have the government control key parts of the economy, namely land and housing. Development is curtailed by the state, which is mostly still set by the centre. This has to be unwound – in theory, no reason why this cannot be done at a national level and set to pro-development policies, but I don’t believe it’s possible in the UK today.
- What I could potentially see working is a repeal of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, but with the carrot of allowing local regions to block development, but with the understanding that costs will be felt (e.g. lower council tax revenue, lower business rate revenue, and so on).
- One of the key reasons why I am more pro-devolution than I was previously is precisely this fear of central control – I like allowing the possibility of experimentation in politics and economics. Unfortunately, so far we have allowed political experimentation without economic consequence. This has to be resolved for devolution to work.
- And now for something completely different from World Politics, on why elephants don’t get cancer.
- A few interesting facts about the TP53 gene, which apparently acts as a tumour suppressor, and is present in about 50% of human cancers.
- A gene called LIF6, which in most mammals is a non-functional pseudogene, has been reactivated in elephants and contributes to the apoptotic response, working alongside p53 to eliminate damaged cells.
- So elephants have got a mostly dormant gene going again, that helps them avoid getting cancer. Very interesting and exciting for human cancer research.
