When I think about UK state capacity and its ability to implement policy, it seems quite obvious that in a choice between looking like a functioning Swedish government or a Californian hot-mess it will almost by default opt for hot-mess.
There’s scope for a number of measures to making deportations work and reducing illegal migration, some involve addressing legal obstacles like articles in the ECHR, some policy measures and withholding things in our gift in exchange for compliance.
Momentum matters. For the game not to be fatal there are three options – to change the player, to change the rules, or to quit playing. Despite being the worlds oldest political party, as every investment disclaimer reads these days ‘past performance may not be indicative of future results’.
On example is that the UK planning system designed to frustrate house building need not be used solely for its intended purpose. It can, if not prevent, at least slow down the kind of building changes needed as part of the government’s policy of distributing illegal immigrants to hotels nationwide.
When I think now of ‘independent candidates’ I think of hate. Go on a 300 mile drive from Devon to Burnley and you will see what the new face of independent candidates looks like.
Every credible study into the impact of such programmes on children has found null results for every objective measure – whilst school leaders will have to fund it by cutting spending on things that actually work.
If Switzerland suddenly introduced our capital gains and inheritance taxes, it wouldn’t work there either.
The problem in quangos, the judiciary, and in academia is that despite these bodies claiming neutrality – or at least objectivity – they have created a soft form of selection bias, distorting their output.
The clear need for more defence spending creates a huge opportunity for promising the kind of local revitalisations that won the Conservatives the 2019 election.
This is not a dispute on policy but on priorities, and I suspect Thatcher herself might tell you that the contemporary Conservative version of the ancient Japanese rice festival is emblematic of the wrong one.
If we look at the data it may be uncomfortable but must be accepted, that the face of gender based polarisation looks far more like Phoebe Plummer than Andrew Tate or some other idiotic bro-fluencer.
What essentially defines Biden’s presidency, more than age or Covid or anything else, it’s the scale of the spending. The economy Trump today inherits seems remarkable but it is remarkable in so far as it is storing up problems.
2024 is the year we learnt the limits of judicialisation and the legal-state. It’s hard not to see why when (and despite it being years in the making) 2024 in the West, was the worst case of omnipresent judicial-excess since contemporary jurisprudence first developed.
Globally there is one incumbent who not just won a convincing re-election but whose performance in that re-election has proven frankly masterful. Who is it? Ursula von der Leyen.