A slightly different post this week, with only two links, a book review, and some thoughts to replace the usual third one.
I’ve also just finished Can Europe Survive by David Marsh, which deserves a post of its own. It’s a great deep dive into the European Union’s political formation, the decisions made, and the key actors across the recent era. Naturally, given its scope, there is a lot that couldn’t make it in and areas of disagreement, but it’s a great read regardless of where you fall on the EU spectrum.
Now, onto the links:
https://taipansam.com/long-march-2029.html
- Lovely to see an actual website, in this case from Taipan Sam, rather than just a Substack.
- Essentially, the British State has lost sight of the fact that fairness is the fundamental underpinning behind the social contract. Areas like immigration being much higher than voters want, the grooming gangs scandal, Henry Nowak’s murder, and the high levels of taxation for a worsening public realm are toxic to the average person.
- This is because, fundamentally, a British understanding of fairness is that it can be bad for everyone as long as it is a fairly distributed level of badness. People will tolerate difficulty if they think the burden is shared. They will tolerate austerity, or pressure, or scarcity, or trade-offs — of course complaining about them too, as is their God-given right — if the thing still feels morally legible.
- It’s an interesting point with austerity – although you could argue that this wasn’t as universal as imagined, given the Triple Lock introduced in 2010. But still, in the context of recent moves by the Labour Party (such as over the Winter Fuel payments allowance), this is quite telling. It does make me more optimistic that we can implement tough reforms, but these must be shared broadly.
- The section on immigration should be drummed into the incoming Burnham administration:
- The public often gets the wording wrong here, mixing asylum, illegal migration, legal migration, small boats, students, dependents and everything else interchangeably. This gives politicians and commentators an easy way out, as they can shrug and say: “Well, you do not understand the categories, see? You have mixed up asylum seekers with illegal immigrants. These are different things!” But directionally, people can see what is happening.
- Fail to deal with this issue of unfairness, and you invite Reform or its equivalent, into power.
- Rian Chad Whitton argues that reindustrialisation needs specific targets to be a credible aim for any British government, using Singapore as an example.
- If we combined agriculture, manufacturing, extraction and construction, we would have a production economy with a value of £485 billion in 2025, or 19% of total GVA. Alarmingly, this sector reached its high point of £504 billion (£2025 money) in 2006. Having your capacity to manufacture, build, and produce energy and food stagnate for 20 years is probably not fine.
- Even more worrying is that in 2006 we had a broadly stable global order, a strong public balance sheet, and reasonably strong armed forces. Remove all of those strengths, and add a loss of industrial capacity, and the alarm bells should be ringing across the British state.
- Interestingly, according to Whitton, manufacturing makes up 20% of Singapore’s economy (8% for the UK). Obviously there are a lot of issues with comparing the UK to an island city-state, but even compared to the USA, we appear quite low.
- To rectify this Whitton proposes two criteria:
- For Britain, I recommend a 10-year minimum target for the value-added growth in manufacturing of at least 50%
- There should be a target for the share of the economy we want manufacturing and production to represent.
- This is a strong start and would be a serious challenge to Britain’s current political economy. You’d almost certainly have to remove net zero as it stands, which is going to be very difficult for the Labour Party to accept.
- You’d also have to change our taxation and immigration system significantly – much more generous investment tax breaks and subsidies, offset with lower immigration (i.e., companies cannot use immigration as a cheap substitute for investment).
- Do I believe that Burnham will achieve something like this? As it stands, it appears he’ll follow the 2024 manifesto – so no reform to net zero. This could change if he calls an early election, but until then, I suspect he’s unlikely to succeed.
The Children of Abraham thoughts
On occasion, a book will influence how I think, or provoke me to respond – for instance, Tom Holland’s Dominion, or more recently Between the Waves by Tom McTague. The Children of Abraham was certainly thought-provoking, and I wanted to share some of those thoughts below.
Marc David Baer has taken on the task of providing a nuanced and balanced history of Muslim and Jewish relations, which seems ever more important globally. Fundamentally, Baer argues that there was never a golden age, but, importantly, there was no barbaric age either. However, the creation of Israel represented a fundamental rupture in relations with no historical parallel.
Baer then splits the book into theological underpinnings and history. The theological section is essential to understand the issue, if a little hard work for someone like me who tends to misunderstand religion. I’ll focus more on the history here.
Initially, Muhammad and the Jewish tribes formed an alliance and a wider community. However, this didn’t last – the tribes were destroyed, and one was sent into exile. Here, I think this is the fundamental tension behind Baer’s book – this is about power relations. When the Muslim community is clearly number one, it can accommodate Jewish members quite successfully, indeed much more so than in most contemporary Christian societies. For instance, Jews in the Ottoman Empire were able to hold exceptional levels of power and trust with the viziers, which they struggled to do in Christian Europe.
However, as soon as the Muslim community perceives a threat to their social standing, this swiftly falls apart – though, as Baer notes, this doesn’t mean universal rejection of the status quo. But the dhimmi system is unsustainable in these circumstances.
The other key issue is the creation of Israel itself and its conquests in 1967. For the first time, there is a Jewish nation in the modern world, meaning that Jews in Muslim nations have an alternative (and Muslim states in turn fear mixed loyalties from their Jewish population), making the status quo unsustainable. Note that Israel also feeds into this by depopulating Muslim and Christian regions as well, leading to more distinct borders. Given this, I don’t see how there is an easy way (or frankly any way) for Muslim and Jewish relations to reset to a more cordial state on their own terms. Which is quite depressing, but is what it is.
Overall, I think it’s a very informative and noble book about a contentious part of history that absolutely needs further study. While I accept Baer’s view that there was never a golden or a barbaric age, I slightly disagree on the role of interreligious power dynamics. This of course has troubling implications for the future relations between the two religions, but perhaps that’s a subject saved for another time.
