This essay is part III of a trilogy of related concepts in languages, information theory, geometry, metaphysics, relativity, and the information economy.

Part I — Cavemen Created the First Large Language Model — was published on Sunday 9 August, and Part II — The Shape of Existence — on Wednesday 12 August.

This final part asks what becomes scarce when information itself becomes almost free.

The firehose has learned how to write

The modern world is an unrelenting firehose of information directed straight at your face. It never stops. Devices buzz. Screens blare. Noise intrudes. Instant messages demand. Podcasts accumulate faster than they can be heard. Red notification badges sit there like tiny administrative haemorrhoids, making us squirm in our seat.

Broadcasting information has never been so cheap. Receiving and processing information, on the other hand, is becoming very expensive.

Herbert Simon saw this coming in 1971. What information consumes, he pointed out, is the attention of its recipients, so a wealth of information produces a poverty of attention. He was describing an organisation with one mainframe in the basement. The mechanism has not changed. Only the volume has.

Civilisation has spent thousands of years progressively reducing the cost of creating, reproducing, compressing and transmitting information.

Speech allowed one human brain to transmit part of its internal model to another. Writing separated information from the person speaking it. Printing reduced the cost of copying. Telecommunications reduced the cost of distance. Broadcasting reduced the cost of reaching millions of people at once. The internet placed a printing press, television studio, filing cabinet and global distribution network on billions of desks.

Then social media made information transmission so cheap that people began broadcasting everything from their breakfast to their bum cheeks.

Generative artificial intelligence now attacks the remaining expensive part: creation itself. Producing a passable paragraph once required a human being to possess some combination of knowledge, motivation and time. Producing a thousand passable paragraphs now requires a text box and a sufficiently assertive relationship with the Return key.

This is a remarkable expansion of productive capacity. It is also an enormous increase in the potential supply of things demanding to be understood. Even if what demands to be understood is total, abject shite.

Every previous information technology reduced friction somewhere between the mind of the sender and the mind of the recipient. Generative AI removes so much friction from the sender’s side that the imbalance becomes impossible to ignore.

A person can now produce in seconds more text than another person can responsibly assess in an afternoon.

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Motivated by outrage

Nor does the expanding supply of information necessarily leave its recipients better informed. Information has no inherent value simply because it reduces uncertainty. Knowing precisely which brand of baked beans a cabinet minister prefers is information. It is also knowledge you might reasonably have hoped to die without.

Shannon set that question aside on purpose, and was right to. Whether a message is worth having was never an engineering problem. It is ours.

The internet promised to make political life more transparent. It has certainly made more of it visible. We now receive a continuous video feed of parliamentary fragments, doorstep confrontations, podcast monologues, facial expressions and remarks recorded before their owner had fully decided whether to think them.

Political figures once appeared intermittently through long form interviews and thought-through opinion editorials. They now leak into public consciousness throughout the day, providing an apparently inexhaustible supply of content, perhaps without a corresponding supply of meaning.

This can create the impression of extraordinary political knowledge. We know which politician rolled their eyes, fluffed a sentence, looked uncomfortable beside a flag or produced the day’s most algorithmically efficient expression of outrage.

We may know far less about the administrative capacity of the state, the incentives shaping a policy or whether the proposed solution could survive three minutes of contact with reality.

The political information stream is therefore capable of increasing both information and ignorance at once. It supplies more observable data while directing attention towards the signals best adapted for transmission rather than those most useful for understanding. Social media also biases the new in news, the immediacy of the moment, regardless of whether it contains signal for long term value.

This is measurable. Markus Prior found that as media choice expanded, political knowledge and turnout did not rise. They diverged. People who preferred news learned more, and people who preferred entertainment, now able to avoid news altogether, learned less. More available information widened the gap instead of closing it.

Social platforms perform a kind of natural selection upon political communication. Statements that provoke immediate recognition, anger or tribal affirmation travel further than qualified explanations whose meaning depends on several paragraphs and a chart.

Research finds that social feedback can reinforce expressions of moral outrage, teaching users which emotional displays are rewarded within their networks. A large cross-platform study published in Science found that misinformation associated with outrage received more engagement, and that outrage increased people’s willingness to share — with outrage-evoking links more often shared without being read first.

More recent field research has also shown that reducing the prominence of content expressing partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes can alter what users subsequently encounter and report feeling. The distribution system is not a neutral pipe. Ranking choices influence the emotional and political composition of the information stream.

This does not invariably reward the stupid, but it creates unusually favourable atmospheric conditions for them. The result is the propulsion of imbeciles to improbable heights in political discourse.

Rupert Lowe, for example, has achieved a level of social-media reach that considerably more established politicians might envy. The Financial Times reported in May 2026 that ten of Lowe’s posts had reached at least ten million views since the launch of Restore Britain, while none of Nigel Farage’s had crossed the same threshold over that period.

Lowe had a third of Farage’s followers, but received repeated promotion from Elon Musk — who shared at least eight posts naming the party, all but one of which passed ten million views — and produced material unusually well adapted to the platform’s digestive system. Whether all of that reach was human is another question: the FT noted it is unclear how much of it represents genuine engagement.

The Financial Times has separately reported that Restore’s online ecosystem has been assisted by commercial misinformation networks using stolen and AI-generated content — 43 Facebook pages traced to a single network in Bangladesh and Pakistan, monetised through clicks and advertising.

One such page, having gathered a following as a Lowe support group, then reinvented itself as a vendor of television-streaming devices, to the considerable annoyance of its existing members. Virality is clearly evidence of communicative fitness. Whether it is valuable or contributes positively to society is another question entirely.

Lowe might be nasty piece of work, but the point is not solely ideological. The same system can propel nonsense from almost any political direction, provided it is immediate, emotionally legible and easy to transmit. It is a feature of an information economy that assigns value through attention and emotion.

Nuance is expensive to create, demanding to decompress and difficult to circulate. Vagary, accusation and emotional certainty arrive pre-compressed.

The engagement gauge does not distinguish drinking water from effluent. It simply records engagement with the pipeline.

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The nervous system has no progress bar

Nobody has ever handed you a model of the world. What arrives, every time, is compressed instructions for building one, and the building is done by you, at your own expense, out of parts you already happen to own. That was always the arrangement, and it was bearable for exactly as long as producing the instructions was expensive.

The recipient is not completely defenceless. Search engines compress discovery. Specialism reduces the need to learn generalist skills. Recommendation systems compress choice. Language models compress documents, meetings and email chains.

Apple Intelligence summarises and prioritises notifications, allowing users to scan what the system regards as the important details without opening every message. Apple’s technical account of its foundation models explicitly identifies notification prioritisation and summarisation as intended uses.

The receiver no longer has to read every original word one at a time. Technology is increasingly capable of compressing the expanded.

But this does not remove the bottleneck so much as move it. A human must still decide whether the summary is accurate, whether omitted information matters, whether the source is trustworthy and whether the compressed result requires action.

If the subject is consequential, compression may create a second task: read the summary, become suspicious of it, then open the original anyway.

Apple’s notification summaries demonstrated this problem in miniature when misleading summaries of news alerts prompted the company to suspend the feature for news and entertainment applications while changes were made. Summaries had successfully reduced the character count, without carrying forward sufficient fidelity.

Nor is shorter communication necessarily cheaper to process. A clear hundred-word explanation may be easier to understand than an ambiguous ten-word instruction.

An ill-thought through wall of text on Slack optimises for the speed of asking, not understanding or answering. Five recipients might now need to establish what is actually wanted, whether it is wanted of them, whether somebody has already done it, and whether ‘we should probably’ includes the sender.

The sender might have saved five minutes of thinking by sending a high entropy message. But message recipients could now lose five minutes each trying to reconstruct original intentions. An exemplary little productivity gain.

The thinking cost never disappeared. It has been transferred from the producer to the recipient, and multiplied.

And the recipient’s capacity is seemingly finite. Working memory retains only a small amount of information in a readily accessible form, allowing it to support comprehension, reasoning and planning. The precise capacity depends on how information is grouped and what the person already knows, but the existence of a severe limit is well established.

Psychologist Nelson Cowan proposed that the focus of attention often holds around four meaningful chunks, rather than the roughly seven chunks associated with older estimates. The relevant unit is not a word or pixel but a chunk whose size depends on the structures already available to the recipient.

Existing knowledge therefore expands effective capacity by grouping information into larger, meaningful units. An expert can glance at a chart, equation or paragraph and recognise a structure that a novice must reconstruct piece by piece.

Chess masters do it with a board, and the advantage largely disappears when the pieces are scattered at random: what they are recalling is structure, not squares. Compression allows more information to pass through this limited aperture. It does not make the aperture infinite.

An entire discipline is built on that aperture. Cognitive load theory treats working memory as the binding constraint on learning, and treats the design of the material — what to leave out, what to group, what order to reveal it in — as the way around the constraint. Its useful finding is that the load is not a property of the subject. It is also a property of the presentation.

Every input must still compete for attention and, if it is to become useful, be integrated into some model of the world. A summary, notification or recommendation may lower the immediate processing cost, but the meaning it represents can still entail uncertainty, conflict, emotional consequences and further decisions.

There may be no clean subjective alarm as we approach our processing limits. The human nervous system does not display a pleasant progress bar announcing: ‘You have processed 93% of today’s maximum viable information. Consider becoming briefly unavailable.’

The signs may arrive indirectly: reduced concentration, fatigue, irritability, avoidance, compulsive checking, diffuse anxiety or an increasingly powerful desire to throw Slack into the sea.

A comprehensive review of information overload describes its association with stress, impaired decision-making, reduced performance and avoidance when informational demands exceed the recipient’s available processing resources. Research into ‘technostress’ has similarly found that digital demands can produce cognitive overload and greater distraction from goal-relevant information.

This is where uncertainty becomes psychologically important. In Claude Shannon’s equation, uncertainty is a neutral mathematical quantity. In human experience, unresolved uncertainty frequently induces anxiety, and motivates a demand for attention.

Who messaged? What happened? Does it concern me? Have I forgotten something? Is the apparently urgent email genuinely urgent, or has somebody marked a routine request urgent because they would personally enjoy an answer?

A notification is a particularly efficient uncertainty generator. It tells you that some information exists while often withholding enough of it to prevent completion.

A vibration in your pocket is not always a harbinger of meaningful, important information. But it creates a question.

A message preview provides more information, but may create three further questions. A machine-generated summary can answer those questions, unless it answers them incorrectly, in which case it has compressed the original uncertainty into a smaller but more concentrated form.

Research on attention and incomplete tasks does not justify a simple equation between uncertainty and anxiety, but it supports the broader idea that unresolved goals and interrupted activity can remain cognitively active. Bluma Zeigarnik’s original experiments in 1927 examined the greater accessibility of interrupted tasks, and later work found that unfinished goals intrude on unrelated activity — until the person makes a specific plan for them, at which point the intrusions stop.

The smartphone is therefore not merely an information-delivery device. It is a machine for creating unfinished acts of interpretation.

Perhaps this helps explain why information overload may not be experienced simply as the conscious thought I know too many things. It may instead be felt as agitation: a background sensation that something remains unresolved, some input has not been processed, some task is waiting just beyond recall.

The mind becomes surrounded by partially opened ZIP files, each requesting extraction, evaluation and possible action.

An iPhone can compress notifications. It cannot decide which relationships you care about, which obligations are morally important, or whether ‘Can we talk?’ is a routine administrative request or the beginning of the end of a relationship.

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The other meaning of decompression

The word decompression already contains both sides of the problem. In computing, it describes the reconstruction of compressed information. In human life, it means releasing pressure: moving from a state of cognitive or emotional demand into one in which experience can be absorbed and organised. This may be more than a convenient linguistic coincidence.

Human decompression is partly the processing of information after its arrival. A quiet walk, an idle train journey or an evening without a stream of new inputs allows recent experiences to be revisited, connected and incorporated into longer-term models. What feels like doing nothing may be the mind completing work that incoming information repeatedly interrupts.

Evidence here should be stated carefully. Rest is not guaranteed to perform a magical nightly defragmentation of the personality. But the effect is real: a 2012 experiment found that ten minutes of quiet rest after hearing a story improved recall of it seven days later, and two recent meta-analyses pooling several hundred comparisons between them put the benefit of waking rest at around a third of a standard deviation — still detectable a week afterwards.

Neural research has also found replay of recently learned sequences during wakeful rest — at roughly twenty times the speed of the original behaviour — supporting the idea that apparently idle periods can contain active reorganisation of recent experience.

What the evidence does not support is the tidier version of the story. The benefit is largest in amnesia patients, moderate in older adults and smallest in healthy young ones, and it does not obviously depend on keeping the interval empty.

A 2025 experiment comparing waking rest with social-media use after learning found that rest helped — and that scrolling helped too, with no measurable difference between them. The mind does appear to need offline time to file the day away. That the offline time must be spent staring out of a window is not established.

This also helps explain the value of serendipity in a world designed around informational efficiency. Compression exploits patterns that are already known. Exploration encounters patterns for which no convenient code yet exists.

Recommendation systems, personalised feeds, search engines and AI assistants are excellent at guiding us rapidly through familiar conceptual territory. They infer what we are likely to want and shorten the route towards it.

But a life composed entirely of optimised routes risks becoming informationally narrow. The unfamiliar book, accidental conversation or diversion can present as a risk more readily than an opportunity. This even as the familiar offers only marginal gains, while the transformational upside gains lie in exploration.

Research into recommendation systems has repeatedly raised concerns about the tension between accuracy and discovery: optimising only for immediate relevance can reduce diversity, novelty and serendipity.

Serendipity is difficult to optimise because the value lies partly in encountering something the existing model did not know to request. Efficiency uses the decompressor you already have. Serendipity improves it.

A person exposed to more varied ideas, places and people accumulates a larger library of patterns through which future information can be understood. Exploration is not necessarily a failure of optimisation. It can be an investment in future enjoyment or domain compression.

This is also why the answer to overload cannot simply be better summaries. A summary helps us move more quickly through information somebody has already decided is relevant. It does not determine whether the information should have occupied our attention in the first place, nor does it create the silence in which its implications can be integrated.

We increasingly possess tools for compressing almost everything except the time human beings need to understand it.

Knowledge flows downhill

It is worth knowing that this problem has a solvable version, because we solve it daily for machines and rarely for each other.

When you invoke a metaphor in an LLM prompt, you reshape the representational landscape. ‘Explain X as if it were Y’ activates features and relationships associated with both concepts, encouraging the model to align the source structure of Y with the target structure of X.

The model does not open a cabinet, retrieve a neatly laminated metaphor card and begin photocopying. It constructs a context in which some continuations become more probable than others.

The architecture enabling this contextual transformation was introduced in Attention Is All You Need. Through repeated attention and feed-forward operations, token representations are updated in relation to other tokens before the model produces a distribution over possible continuations. The metaphor in a prompt becomes part of the context from which those probabilities are computed.

It may be useful to imagine generation as movement across a terrain of slopes, mountains, hills, valleys and flatlands. The prompt reshapes the landscape, creating shorter or steeper routes towards particular forms of explanation while leaving others uphill, distant or inaccessible. The model then produces one token at a time according to a probability landscape that is itself continually changed by the tokens already produced.

This is not literally a marble rolling towards one global minimum. Language generation involves a succession of probability distributions, sampling decisions and contextual states.

Nor has mechanistic interpretability reduced the operation of metaphor prompting to one known projection matrix. The landscape is a model of the conceptual effect, not a wiring diagram.

But it captures something important: a good metaphor does not dictate the words the model must produce. It changes the gradient of the terrain.

‘Explain transformer attention like a library index-card system’ gives the model a useful slope. It activates a dense collection of compatible relationships: books as stored information, catalogue cards as indexes, queries as searches and retrieved cards as relevant context. You have not specified the answer, but you have made many bad answers inconveniently uphill.

‘Explain quantum computing as a hen party’ activates superposition, entanglement, uncertain states and an observer whose intervention changes the outcome. Unfortunately, it also activates sashes, penis straws and somebody being sick outside Turtle Bay after too many espresso martinis. The model has found a slope, but not necessarily one tilted towards physics.

A poor analogy increases the number of improbable connections the model must construct. A good one supplies a short vector route through a well-mapped region of meaning. You have given it the starting postcode and pointed it downhill.

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Attention is the last paywall

Historically, creating and distributing information was expensive. Access was scarce, and institutions such as libraries, universities, newspapers and broadcasters possessed enormous power because they requiried capital, and controlled the machinery through which knowledge travelled.

That scarcity is moving downstream. The difficult task is increasingly not obtaining information, but deciding which information deserves the cost of understanding.

Search engines reduced the cost of finding an answer. Social media reduced the cost of publishing one. Large language models reduce the cost of manufacturing one that sounds plausible. None automatically eliminates the cost of distinguishing a robust model from a stopped clock enjoying one of its two daily triumphs.

Indeed, the better machines become at fluency, the less fluency itself tells us. Clear, grammatical prose was once a useful – if unreliable – signal of effort, education or editorial scrutiny. It can now be produced instantaneously by a WiFi-enabled fridge.

This is a signal collapsing, not a standard slipping. Michael Spence’s account of signalling requires the signal to be expensive, and expensive specifically for whoever lacks the quality it is meant to indicate. Fluency met that condition for as long as writing well was hard.

This makes judgement more valuable, not less. A human recipient must still interpret information, compare it with an existing model, estimate its reliability, decide whether it matters and determine what should change as a result. These tasks can be assisted, delegated and compressed, but somebody eventually has to absorb the consequences of being wrong.

Research on cognitive offloading describes the genuine value of delegating mental operations to external tools, while also emphasising that offloading changes, rather than abolishes the cognitive task: the user must decide what to delegate, when to trust the external representation and how to act on it. A recent review of AI use frames this explicitly as a tension between cognitive offloading and cognitive overload.

This is the defining asymmetry of the information economy. The marginal cost of producing, compressing and transmitting information is collapsing towards zero, while the biological and epistemic cost of making sense of it remains stubbornly human.

Shapiro and Varian’s formula for information goods was costly to produce, cheap to reproduce. Generative models attack the first half. What is left is an economy in which nothing is expensive except being understood.

We have automated the creation of files. We have begun automating their compression. We have not automated the decision of which files deserve extraction, which summaries deserve trust or which ideas deserve incorporation into our model of reality.

Which returns us, finally, to compression itself. If the scarce resource is now the receiver’s decompression – their attention, their working memory, their evenings – then compression tuned to the receiver is no longer merely a stylistic virtue.

This is where the trilogy began. Relevance theory held that a listener weighs what an utterance achieves against the effort of understanding it, and that every act of communication works this way. It was a claim about conversation. At this volume it becomes a claim about the economy.

It is the ethical act of the information economy: the sender paying a cost so that the reader does not have to. Every carefully chosen metaphor, every paragraph that became a sentence, every message that arrived with its context attached is a small transfer of burden from the many readers to the one writer. The machines can generate. Only a writer who has modelled the reader can compress.

Civilisation has spent millennia solving the supply of information. In doing so, it has exposed the scarcity of understanding.

The information age is outrunning human decompression. Information has never been cheaper. Understanding it has never been more expensive.

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This essay is part II of a trilogy of related concepts in languages, information theory, geometry, metaphysics, relativity, and the information economy.

The trilogy began with Part I — Cavemen Created the First Large Language Model — on Sunday 9 August, and will conclude with Part III — Attention Is the Last Paywall — on Sunday 16 August.

I — The grammar of possible things

A protein is a sentence

In 2001 two chemists in Massachusetts built a library containing six trillion random protein sequences. Each contained a stretch of eighty amino acids generated without ancestry, selection or design: a physical sample from the vastly larger number of proteins that could in principle be written. They then searched the library for any capable of one modest trick — binding ATP, the molecule cells use to transfer energy.

Four came back. Out of six thousand billion.

A protein is a string in a twenty-letter alphabet, made from amino acids rather than letters, and almost every possible string lies outside the narrow manifold occupied by natural proteins. Some fold. Some bind. Most arrive fitted to no biological job at all.

Not a slightly inferior solution. Biologically useless junk. Something separates the vanishing few that work from the immense remainder that do not. Nobody designed it, but cells have been reading it fluently in one way or another for four billion years.

The pharmaceutical industry earns a living inside this problem. In 2020 a team screened more than a billion purchasable molecules against one protein involved in the cellular response to oxidative stress. They knew the shape of the target, the site they wanted to occupy, and enough chemistry to reject almost everything cheaply. What they did not know was how to identify the winning molecule.

The best few million were examined more closely; 590 reached the laboratory; dozens bound. The grammar was known well enough to screen a billion sentences, but not well enough to generate valid answers at the outset. In the end, it was brute force what won it.

Both searches were up against the same uncodified rule: the one that let four sequences out of six trillion through, and stopped the rest at the door.

Biologists call it a grammar. They are not being whimsical. The same architecture that encodes patterns in English exists in amino acid chains too, one masked residue at a time, and absorbs enough of the rule to help predict how a sequence will fold.

Spoken word might have been the original large language model. But biology appears to have been running a comparable alpha model for æons.

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A wedding seating plan is not a language

A wedding seating plan has structure. Twelve tables, eighty names, and the two branches of the family who have not spoken since 2011 placed at opposite ends of the room. Every element is where it is for a reason. But nothing in the plan tells you what the eighty-first name could be, because there is no eighty-first name. The plan is finished, and being finished is the whole of what it is.

That is structure. But a grammar can be more than just a few fixed relations – it can be generative.

Noam Chomsky pointed out in 1957 that no list of approved sentences could ever add up to a language. Speakers continually produce and understand sentences nobody has produced before — including this one, and the one before it, and the one you are about to read and probably forget.

A language is not a catalogue or acceptrable sentences. It is a machine for making valid prose, and the machine is far smaller than its vast potential outputs.

Here are five sentences. Each is grammatically sound.

The committee removed everything useful.

The opening was narrower than advertised.

By Thursday, the courgette had acquired a name.

The landlord blamed natural moisture.

Daniel had arrived wearing mostly confidence.

Not one sentence is broken. Together they are gibberish. We can infer a committee, an opening, a landlord and Daniel relying heavily upon confidence for dignity. What we cannot infer is what any of them are doing next to each other.

Well-formedness does not inherit upward. You can be coherent at one level and comprehensively ruined at a higher level of abstraction, which is the experience of hearing Dame(!) Andrea Jenkyns speaking in mostly complete sentences.

Each floor’s well-formed output becomes the next floor’s alphabet. Letters make words. Words make sentences. Sentences make paragraphs, which must develop rather than piling up without supplying additional meaning.

Paragraphs make a piece of writing that goes somewhere — and if this paragraph stops going somewhere, you will notice the failure on that floor, not before. This relationship continues upwards: paragraphs to chapters, chapters to books, books to their sequels and source material, and so on.

Proteins exhibit a comparable hierarchy: amino acids form motifs, motifs contribute to folded domains, and domains combine into structures capable of doing a job. At every level, a valid component can still be assembled into a useless whole.

A generative grammar is not mere order. It is a codification of structured constraints that makes order carry permutations of meaning.

The village excluded the young. The young excluded the village.

The same five words; opposite directions of consequence. The village blocks new homes; the young leave; the school, pub and bus routes eventually follow. The villagers win the planning meeting and lose the village.

English word order can carry who did what to whom only because most arrangements are forbidden, or change the meaning. If every ordering were equally valid, the arrangement would tell you nothing.

Therefore, meaning lives mostly in the exclusion of the infinite combinations of what is not valid for a given communicative intent.

The two ways to say nothing

It is tempting to conclude that more constraint must therefore produce more meaning. Tighten the rules, narrow the possibilities, increase the information carried by whatever remains. But take that to its limit, and what do you get? A diamond.

A crystal is the most ordered object in everyday experience: one pattern repeated in every direction. Part of its grammar is its space group, the set of translations, rotations, reflections and combined operations that constrains how an asymmetric unit is repeated through the crystal. There are exactly 230 space-group types in three dimensions, which is a surprisingly small number of ways for matter to be tidy.

But once the rule is known, almost nothing remains to be learned. See one unit cell and you can predict the next. Perfectly ordered; after the opening sentence, nothing new to add.

Now run the other way. Perfect noise permits every arrangement equally. Each new element is unpredictable, but the surprises accumulate into nothing. There is no stable structure against which one variation can matter more than another: no syntax, no deviation, no development.

Crystals have structure without novelty. Noise has novelty without structure. Neither can sustain a message.

Schrödinger reached the same requirement in 1944, before anybody knew what a gene was made of. Hereditary information needed something ordered enough to survive and be copied, but irregular enough to carry a message: an aperiodic crystal. Nine years later the shape of one turned up in Cambridge. It was deoxyribonucleic acid: DNA.

But constraint alone cannot describe a generative grammar. Entropy tells you how much surprise remains in the outputs; the grammar is the rule system producing and excluding them. Eight inches is something you can measure about a person without it being the person. Entropy is something you can measure about a grammar without being the grammar.

The distinction matters because small rulebooks can produce radically different worlds. Conway’s Game of Life runs on a few rules about which cells live and die, yet generates gliders, oscillators and — given sufficient patience — a universal computer. A crystal also proceeds from a compact rulebook. Its library contains one sentence, repeated until the edge of the crystal, or perhaps an inclusion.

Two rulebooks of similar brevity. Wildly different room in the output. A structure is fixed; but a grammar can be a generative machine — one that accepts valid combinations and excludes an infinity of others.

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Meaning has a shape

The word grammar has now been applied to amino acids, English sentences, paragraphs and diamonds without noticeably changing its meaning. This is the tell.

Strip away the symbols and something survives: a concept which governs which arrangements are valid, which are near-misses, which are catastrophes, which components can be exchanged without anybody noticing, and which cannot be exchanged at all.

The temptation is to say those relations simply are a geometry. But closeness alone isn’t enough to define the relations. Human similarity judgements are routinely asymmetric: a poodle resembles a dog more readily than a dog resembles a poodle. Tversky demonstrated the problem in 1977.

Geometry does not arrive free within a metaphor. But you can try to fit one and see whether it holds. This is what embeddings do. A word, sentence, image or protein becomes an embedding linked by vectors: a position in a multidimensional space arranged so that useful relations become navigable.

This is how a large language model works. In classic word embeddings, the route from man to woman resembles the route from king to queen:

Word2Vec made this structure famous, although not every relation reduces to one clean vector. Modern transformers make the map contextual: bank beside river does not end in the same place as bank beside mortgage. The coordinate is not stored once. It is rebuilt from the company the word keeps.

The representation is not the concept itself. It is a map of the relations the model found useful to describe the concept space.

A caricature exaggerates whatever makes a face distinctive and throws away the rest, and for a familiar face it can still be identified as readily as an accurate drawing. Discarding information is not a failure when the distinctions dropped are the ones the task never used. An embedding discards them freely while keeping others with extraordinary precision.

The useful data also occupy far less space than all conceivable data. Real sentences, proteins and images tend to sit on restricted surfaces inside the enormous spaces capable of containing them — the broad intuition behind the manifold hypothesis.

Almost every direction away from a valid sentence leads immediately out of the language. The model compresses partly by declining to spend dimensions on things the grammar had already forbidden.

Different relations may require different shapes. Analogies often behave usefully in flat space. Hierarchies fit negative curvature, where there is exponentially more room as a tree branches outward.

Periodic structure coheres neatly towawrds a torus — which is also the shape of the map the brain probably uses to keep track of position in a room.

Each of these shapes is the cheapest geometry yet discovered for embedding its particular flavour of relations. None of them was chosen for how it looks in a scientific paper: they were discovered in nature by evolution.

One further prediction follows. If some structures belong to the world rather than the symbols used to describe it, systems trained on different substrates should sometimes recover comparable arrangements.

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis, proposed with a certain amount of nerve, argues that better neural networks trained on different data and modalities increasingly converge on a shared statistical model of reality. A model raised on photographs and one raised on text begin from opposite ends yet sometimes organise what they learn in comparable ways.

This remains a hypothesis. Similar objectives can produce similar solutions without requiring Plato to have been right about anything. But photographs and sentences do not share an alphabet. If both repeatedly recover some of the same relations, the economical explanation is that those relations belong at least partly to what they represent.

Two cartographers can make similar mistakes. It becomes less likely when one has never seen a coastline and the other has never seen a map. The symbols vary. But the relations recur.

II — Is the map the machinery itself?

The map and the machinery

Everything so far has been geometry inside a representation: a shape built to preserve the relations somebody found useful. Embeddings, manifolds, hyperbolic trees, the toroidal grid. All of them are maps. The next step is more conceptual – that mathematics can relate to a system in two very different ways.

Sometimes it is only a map. A Tube map preserves the relationships needed to travel around London while distorting almost everything else. An embedding does something similar: it preserves the relationships useful to a model’s task without claiming to contain the whole meaning of the things represented.

In other cases, the mathematics does more than describe the system. Conway’s Game of Life is not a grid with a separate mechanism hidden underneath it. Its rules are the mechanism: apply them to one state and they produce the next.

A crystal’s symmetry group likewise does not merely provide a convenient summary of the lattice. It specifies the transformations from which the repeating structure is generated. The difference is between mathematics as a description of the machinery and mathematics as the machinery itself.

That distinction matters because we are approaching a larger question. When mathematics describes the structure of language, a protein or the universe, are we looking at a useful map of something deeper? Or have we reached the level at which the map and the thing mapped are the same thing?

Large language models provide a useful intermediate case. Their behaviour emerges from a structure distributed across billions of numerical parameters and activations. A model can generate a fluent explanation of why it gave a particular answer, but that explanation is not a transcript of the probabilistic computation that produced it. Asking a person why they recognised a face does not produce the activity of their visual cortex either.

Interpretability research tries to translate these distributed processes into forms human beings can inspect. Under the superposition hypothesis, networks can represent many overlapping features in the same dimensions rather than storing one neatly labelled concept in each neuron. Sparse autoencoders have begun to recover millions of more interpretable directions, which can be labelled, stimulated and linked to changes in behaviour.

That is genuine explanation, but it remains a translation. Any account shorter than the system must either leave out some of its internal relationships or replace them with a rule compact enough to regenerate them.

Sometimes such a rule exists: that is what the Game of Life has. Where none does, a complete account has nowhere to economise, and approaches the size of the thing it describes. At that point, the explanation would no longer be a summary. It would be another copy.

The most faithful representation of a sufficiently complicated structure may therefore be the structure itself.

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The useful disappearance of of

Physics provides the cleanest example of what happens when description and constitution collapse. In Newtonian mechanics, gravity is a force acting between bodies. Geometry describes where the bodies are and the paths they follow under that force. Cause and geometry occupy different columns in the account.

General relativity removes the extra column. Matter and energy shape spacetime; objects follow its geometry. There is no gravitational hand pulling the apple downward while curvature records the incident. The apple falls because its most probable path leads through curved spacetime.

Gravity is not merely described by geometry. The moving geometry of spacetime is the mechanism. The word of disappears: not the geometry of the gravitational field, but the geometry that constitutes it.

Philosophy has a test for exactly this. Quine asked what a theory must quantify over to come out true — what has to exist for its statements to be about anything at all. General relativity quantifies over the geometry. It does not quantify over a force.

This does not mean that every successful mathematical model should be promoted immediately into reality. The result king − man + woman ≈ queen is telling us something about English, not about the universe. It means the promotion is conceptually legitimate.

Harder cases exist: the Earth–Moon centre of mass is a mathematical point about 4,670 kilometres from Earth’s centre, inside the planet, around which Earth and Moon both move. It is not a separate material object, but it identifies a real relation their motion obeys. Mathematics sometimes maps the machinery, and sometimes identifies it. The question is: can we tell which is which?

Predictive success alone cannot settle it. Two accounts may make identical predictions while disagreeing about what their mathematics means. Nor does elegance guarantee existence, though it might confer it.

But if every observable consequence is fixed by relations, transformations and invariants, an additional substance hidden behind them begins to look unemployed. That thought has a name.

Structure without scaffolding

Scientific realism says successful theories work because they capture something real. Hilary Putnam gave the argument its usual form: realism is the only account that does not make the success of science a miracle. If atoms are a convenient fiction, the fact that chemistry works needs some other explanation, and nobody has a good one.

Its historical problem is that successful theories have repeatedly been abandoned.

Ether, caloric and phlogiston were not fringe hobby theories dreamt up by bunsen burner crack addicts. They originated in serious thinking, and were at least partially accepted by the scientific profression before accumulating evidence moved the academic world forward.

John Worrall’s structural realism asks what survives a revolution. The ontology — what the old theory said was there — may not. But mathematical relations sometimes do. The continuity he identifies is not merely observational: it lies in theoretical structure carried from one account into its successor.

Structure seems to be what science can know reliably. Ontic structural realists go further: perhaps structure is not merely what survives our descriptions. Perhaps it is all there is. Objects do not first exist and then enter into relations; their identity is defined already by the relational role they inhabit within a system.

Relations all the way down sounds like a missing noun. Relations between what? The structuralist answer is that the demand for a noun may be a grammatical habit. English prefers a subject before a verb. But the universe is under no obligation to provide one.

Modern physics makes that suggestion less strange than it sounds. Swap two electrons and nothing changes — not that no experiment could tell them apart, but that there is no difference for an experiment to find. Being this electron rather than that one is not among the properties an electron has. What it has is a role.

Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Hypothesis takes the strongest step: the universe does not instantiate a mathematical structure. It is one. In its strongest form, every consistent mathematical structure exists in the same broad sense. Nobody could accuse Tegmark of conceptual timidity.

But such audacity risks explaining why our universe is mathematical by declaring every possible mathematics real. A theory that accommodates everything can become difficult to inconvenience with evidence, which is traditionally considered a disadvantage outside theology.

Tegmark’s hypothesis clarifies the question behind what Wigner called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Abstract structures developed in one context repeatedly describe phenomena in another, sometimes predicting effects not used to construct them.

Richard Hamming’s reply was to deny part of the puzzle. We notice the mathematics that fits, we build the mathematics we need, and we quietly forget the enormous quantity that describes nothing. Selection accounts for some of what the miracle was invoked to explain.

Structuralism disagrees. Mathematics works so well because mathematics studies structure, and structure is what reality is made from. If that is true, its effectiveness is not unreasonable. It is barely avoidable. An attractive answer.

But history advises against becoming too pleased with it.

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The basement keeps moving

Worrall’s case begins with a genuine pattern. Fresnel believed light travelled as waves through an ether. The ether later disappeared from physics, but important mathematical relationships emergent in Fresnel’s theory survived into Maxwell’s account of electromagnetism.

That suggests science may be progressively recovering the structure of reality even while repeatedly misidentifying what carries it. The difficulty is that the relations change as well.

Newtonian gravity survives within general relativity, but only as an approximation: accurate when gravity is weak, speeds are low and nobody has done anything unnecessarily close to a black hole. Space and time, previously the fixed stage on which physics occurred, became part of the action.

Kuhn’s account of these episodes denied that the old theory survives inside the new one as a tidy special case. Mass in Newton and mass in relativity are not the same quantity measured more carefully. The word is shared; the concept is not. If he is right, whatever continuity science has must be found in the mathematics, because it will not be found in the vocabulary.

General relativity is itself expected to be incomplete because it does not fit cleanly with quantum mechanics. The theory that replaced Newton is now waiting, with some dignity, to be superceded in turn.

The history of physics is therefore not a succession of identical mathematical structures with the nouns crossed out. It is a succession of remarkably successful models whose limits become visible only when somebody produces a better one.

Larry Laudan made the wider objection in 1981. The history of science contains too many theories that predicted successfully while being seriously wrong about what existed. Success tells us that a model has caught something structurally real. However, it seems rarely, if ever to provide an itemised receipt for the ontology.

Kyle Stanford sharpened the objection. The recurring failure is not that earlier scientists were entirely wrong; it is that they could not conceive of an alternative theory that could beat the current champion, and nothing marks us out as the first generation to have imagined all the options.

Structural realism handles this better than ordinary realism because it expects the supposed objects to change. But it risks becoming suspiciously good at winning after the result is known.

Whatever survives is declared the structure. Whatever disappears is dismissed as scaffolding. That is the retrospective danger. Stathis Psillos pressed a related objection against Worrall: the line between structure and nature is not clean enough to bear the weight structural realism places on it.

Scientific theories repeatedly announce the ground floor has been found, only to subquently discover a basement.

Perhaps mathematics is steadily converging on the final structure of reality. Perhaps each successful geometry is merely the best available map of something deeper. Nothing in the history guarantees that the digging stops.

One theory, two universes

There is a second problem that no better experiment obviously resolves. Imagine that physics eventually produces a final theory: one mathematical structure capable of predicting every observable event, from the orbit of a galaxy to the decay of a particle.

Two accounts would still fit. The first says that the mathematical structure is the universe. The second says that it perfectly describes a universe whose underlying nature remains something else. A perfect model, just one that could be compressed into a description requiring fewer bits: the real real reality.

No experiment could choose between them. Any difference capable of being measured would already appear in the theory. The disagreement would not be waiting for a larger collider, a cleaner telescope or a grant application with more ambitious nouns.

It would have run out of observable consequences. James Ladyman calls this metaphysical underdetermination: the same physics supporting incompatible accounts of what exists, with nothing in the physics to separate them.

Occam’s razor favours the first account. If the additional substance changes nothing, predicts nothing and can never be detected, science has no reason to include it.

But Occam’s razor is a rule for constructing theories. It does not patrol the universe confiscating surplus ontology. Something can be explanatorily unemployed without being impossible. Elliott Sober separates razors of silence from razors of denial: declining to assert the extra substance is cheap, and denying it is a much stronger move requiring much stronger grounds.

The obvious objection is to point at E = mc² and call the argument closed. Nothing is more compact, nothing has been more thoroughly vindicated, and Albert Einstein derived it rather than fitting it to anything.

The usual reply is that the compactness is a choice of units. It is. But the choice is available only because distance and duration are the same kind of interval, exchangeable at one rate everywhere and for everyone. Newton’s universe has no such rate.

That rate is not bookkeeping; it is the finding. Take the units away and an equals sign is left standing. Mass and energy are not two quantities that track each other closely. They are one quantity written twice — for a body at rest, which is all the famous form covers. That is the stronger reading, earned in a single case.

So the honest conclusion is narrower. Mathematics plainly captures real structure. Mathematical relations connect phenomena first encountered separately, survive tests they were not designed merely to flatter and sometimes outlive the physical stories originally attached to them. Wigner’s puzzle is real.

What we cannot establish is whether structure is the whole of reality. Geometry sometimes describes the machinery, often in few bits with incredible fidelity. In general relativity, it appears to be the machinery. That does not prove that every successful geometry deserves the same promotion.

So, a proposal: keep the of, but hold it loosely.

The geometry of language.

The geometry of a protein.

The geometry of spacetime.

Perhaps, eventually, the geometry of reality.

The word may turn out to be unnecessary. We do not yet know enough to delete it. And even a perfect description of the universe would not arrive inside a human mind whole. It would have to be compressed, transmitted, read, checked and fitted into whatever the recipient already knew.

Whatever reality is made from, our access to it still arrives as information. Somebody has to unpack it.

This essay is part I of a trilogy of related concepts in languages, information theory, geometry, metaphysics, relativity, and the information economy.

The release of part II will follow on Wednesday 12 August, and part III on Sunday 16 August.

Metaphors are, in essence, linguistic compression algorithms. We use metaphors to communicate complex ideas and concepts in fewer words by projecting information onto a domain we already understand. Metaphors are ZIP files: they compress information and, upon extraction, communicate a high-fidelity representation of the original information before it was compressed.

A bad metaphor is hydraulic fluid: it does not compress, and here it does not faithfully describe the original concept being communicated. The idea has not been shrunk into fewer bits and, upon decompression, the extraction does not accurately represent the original information.

ZIP files work by embedding information contained within source files in a more efficient way, encoding patterns found within the data. If a pattern exists, it can be stored as a pattern with a guide to its extraction, rather than by precisely describing each individual component every time it appears.

Common ZIP compression uses a format called DEFLATE, which combines two complementary tricks. LZ77 identifies sequences that have appeared before and replaces them with directions back to the earlier version. Huffman coding assigns short codes to common symbols and longer codes to rare ones. One removes repetition; the other avoids extravagantly spending bits on things that happen all the time.

The best writers do something similar. Complex ideas, ideologies and emotions are conveyed in their essence, distilling many hours of research, experience and cognition into a comparatively small collection of black squiggles. Words and letters are part of linguistic compression algorithms too – embedding the vast variance of sounds, concepts, experiences, feelings and ideas of humanity itself in a systematised and orderly collection of little shapes.

Not all compression is lossless. And the opening conceit has a confession to make: ZIP is lossless, and metaphors probably never are. A metaphor is closer to a JPEG — convincing at a glance, with the fine detail quietly discarded and the flaws showing up only when you look closely, or extrapolate.

But there is another similarity. ZIP compression is lossless, but a ZIP file still needs decoding software when it arrives. A metaphor needs a decoder too. It must point towards something the other person already understands — and if they cannot decode it, nothing unpacks at all. It’s all Greek to me. Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof.

The shortest route between two minds

The metaphor ‘the market is a jungle’ linguistically encodes many varied concepts: competition, predation, unpredictability, survival of the fittest, and emergent rather than designed order. Five words, but a great deal of information – communicated as much through visual invocation as through the words themselves.

And the extraction? It does not preserve every nuance of market economics, but it rebuilds the big picture with remarkable fidelity for the price of five words. That is an enormous ratio at little cost to meaning. If your account of how markets work cannot be distilled to something like it, the problem is more likely your model than the metaphor.

What the jungle leaves out is the institutional scaffolding: property rights, contract law, courts, regulators. That is not a defect. It is what lossy compression is for — throwing away the detail that does not have immediate purpose for conveying meaning. Artefacts only matter when extrapolation from compressed information is unfaithful to the original.

This is the function of a good metaphor. It identifies structural patterns within one well-understood concept and uses them to encode another. The jungle supplies a ready-made bundle of relationships. The reader probably already understands predators, prey, scarce resources, adaptation, danger and ecological niches. The metaphor does not need to explain each of these from first principles. It invokes a source domain of existing knowledge and projects it onto the target where structural patterns align.

This compression is not confined to metaphor. Every word is a compact retrieval instruction. The word ‘tree’ does not contain bark, roots, leaves, shade, growth rings, branches, nests, autumn, timber or the distant childhood memory of falling out of one.

It is four characters that activate some contextually useful subset of an enormous stored model. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a well-chosen word can summon several thousand pictures, smells, textures and memories.

Efficient communication is not about brevity in bits alone. It is the optimal route between concepts already shared between sender and recipient. ‘It’s happening again’ can contain almost nothing when said to a stranger, but represent something quite different, known and complicated to a friend. The words are identical; the decompression algorithm is not.

Research into metaphor has long treated it as more than decorative substitution. Conceptual metaphor theory argues that metaphor allows the structure of one conceptual domain to organise another, while work on structure-mapping in analogy describes comparison as the alignment of relational systems rather than a hunt for superficial resemblance.

Relevance theory makes the widest claim of all: that every act of communication works this way – minimal cues, maximal inference, with the receiver’s existing model of the world doing most of the reconstruction.

A good writer therefore models the reader. They intuit which structures already exist in the recipient’s mind, which must be supplied, and which can be invoked with a nudge. A bad writer entertains effortful redundancy without purpose, or simply removes words and declares the result concise.

Every language compresses the same world

English, Russian, Spanish, Mandarin and Tagalog are different linguistic embeddings of largely shared human experience: historically accumulated systems for carving experienced phenomena into reusable patterns and transmitting them between minds.

Embeddings in language overlap enormously because their speakers inhabit the same physical world, possess similar bodies and continually need to discuss food, family, politics, danger, sex, weather and why the dishwasher has once again been loaded by a psychopath.

But languages distribute their descriptive resources differently. They make some distinctions compulsory, others readily available and others irritatingly circumlocutory. English may require an entire phrase to describe a highly specific administrative misery. German is more likely to assemble the relevant nouns into one immense linguistic freight train and drive it directly through the sentence into France.

Russian, meanwhile, conventionally divides what English gathers under blue into two basic categories, commonly transliterated as siniy and goluboy. In experiments, Russian speakers were quicker to distinguish colours that crossed this linguistic boundary than colours that sat within one category. The language did not furnish Russian eyes with additional photoreceptors; it provided a readily accessible distinction through which colour experience could be organised.

Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the effect disappeared under verbal interference, strengthening the argument that language – not a difference in vision – was involved. Our own linguistic embedding spaces shape our experience of the world just as much as they describe it. Would you rather make love in Finnish, or Italian?

The divisions are not arbitrary, though. Berlin and Kay surveyed ninety-eight languages and found colour vocabularies growing in a near-fixed order — light and dark first, then red, then green and yellow, then blue — and clustering around the same focal shades however many terms a language had. Languages carve the spectrum differently. They do not carve it freely.

Languages can also structurally demand different information from their speakers. Evidentiality is the linguistic encoding of how somebody knows what they claim to know: whether an event was witnessed, inferred from evidence or reported by somebody else. In Turkish, for example, source information can be marked grammatically rather than left entirely to optional wording.

English lets the whole question of how you know something dissolve into ‘apparently’ — the source information is simply discarded, which makes gossip fast to transmit and easy to disown.

British English contains phrases whose extracted meaning bears only a passing relationship to the transmitted words. ‘Not ideal’ could describe anything from a marginally delayed train to fire raining down during the Rapture. The recipient is expected to infer the severity from the tone and any available context.

A language is not a mirror held neutrally against reality. It is a culturally inherited compression dictionary for navigating it. Each embodies decisions – most of them made gradually and passively by nobody in particular – about which patterns recur often enough to deserve a convenient code.

This does not require the strong claim that language imprisons thought. Speakers can describe concepts for which their language has no single word, just as a ZIP file can contain an unfamiliar format. Contemporary accounts of linguistic relativity generally concern influences on habitual attention, categorisation and processing rather than an absolute inability to conceive whatever one’s grammar declines to provide.

Some paths are simply shorter than others: a distinction named, grammaticalised and repeatedly reinforced is more readily available than one that must be reconstructed from scratch every time. Languages are therefore not merely collections of vocabulary. They are different ways of embedding low-cost routes that describe the human experience.

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Knowing means being wrong less often

It is worth asking at this point: what is knowledge? Arguably, the simplest definition of knowledge is structured information with low prediction error. It does not merely reproduce an answer it has seen before (also known as overfitting); it captures a pattern that remains useful when inputs change.

That is a form of compression, and equating it with comprehension has a serious lineage, from Gregory Chaitin’s algorithmic information theory through the Hutter Prize‘s premise that compressing human knowledge is equivalent to understanding it, to recent work demonstrating that large language models function as competitive general-purpose compressors.

A student who has comprehensively studied a subject will probably perform well in an exam. Their internal model of the domain will be strong and should extract faithfully when challenged by unfamiliar questions. A peer who has spent more time in the bar than the library is more likely to answer incorrectly. Their responses will be more chaotic, less reliably connected to reality and more vulnerable to confident improvisation.

In another domain, we would call this ‘hallucination‘.

The gap between large-language-model hallucination and a student with an underdeveloped understanding of an exam topic is conceptually smaller than popular culture might imagine. Failure takes the same shape: output assembled from a region the model is probabilistically unlikely to cover faithfully.

What differs is the scope of the gap. The student’s model is thin more or less everywhere across the domain, because they did not do the reading, and an examiner should be able to anticipate roughly how and where it will fail.

Modern LLMs cover an enormous scope and – judging by the lucidity and quality of most generated text – it is thin only in patches, which makes its lapses far harder to anticipate: it can be genuinely authoritative about a subject in one sentence and invent a mistruth and attribute it to a fabricated source in the next.

Nothing in the surrounding competence tells you which patch you are standing on. In both cases the fluency is real and the grounding is not – which is precisely why fluency can be such a treacherous signal of knowledge.

A speaker who intuits a grammatical rule can apply it to sentences they have never encountered before. They do not merely remember that one verb takes a particular form; they recognise the pattern and extend it to valid sentence forumlations. Their knowledge is not a list of approved sentences, but a model capable of producing new ones.

You know that the sentence ‘I live at the wooden red big house’ is grammatically out of order, even if you hadn’t yet come to realise that English grammar expects a specific order to its adjectives. The same adjective order convention applies across English sentences.

Meanwhile, a stopped clock is not knowledgeable, because the prediction error across its relevant domain is enormous. Two correct outputs per day do not rescue 1,438 wrong ones. It has not learned an efficient, predictive or descriptive model of time.

The same applies to memorisation without understanding. A student who remembers one exact answer but cannot use it outside the circumstances in which it was learned possesses a brittle, crystalline compression that fractures under pressure. The information extracts correctly only when the question reproduces the original path.

Generative knowledge is therefore not only the capacity to produce a correct answer – that could just be lookup or recollection. It is the compression of observations into a model that remains predictively useful beyond the particular data from which it was constructed.

This aligns with the broad logic of predictive-processing theories. The brain is modelled as continually generating expectations, comparing them with incoming signals and using prediction errors to revise its internal representations. Prediction error also plays a central role in reinforcement learning, and has been used to explain how people learn not only from their own outcomes but from the actions and rewards of others.

More recent experimental work using magnetoencephalography found evidence that predictive learning reshapes the representational geometry of the human brain. Regularities learned across acoustic sequences changed how the brain represented those inputs, connecting prediction error with the organisation of internal representations rather than merely the correction of individual mistakes.

Learning, on this account, is the iterative refinement of a compression algorithm.

Claude Shannon counts surprise

This was the revolutionary insight formalised by the 20th-century mathematician Claude Shannon: information can be understood through uncertainty.

For each possible outcome, take how likely it is and multiply it by how surprising it would be to see it – where surprise is measured as the negative logarithm of the outcome’s probability, so rare events carry more of it. Add those values across all outcomes and you have the average surprise, measured in bits.

A coin that always lands heads communicates no new information when it lands heads. A fair coin communicates one bit because either result was equally plausible before the toss.

A sentence in which every word is completely predetermined is informationally inert. One in which every word is wholly random is maximally surprising. Useful communication sits between the two. It contains enough predictability to be interpretable and enough surprise to justify having interrupted you.

Shannon’s theory deliberately set aside the semantic value or truth of a message. The opening to his paper notes that the engineering problem of communication concerns reproducing a selected message, regardless of whether that message is meaningful. That boundary is vital: information theory can quantify the uncertainty resolved by a signal without determining whether anybody was better off receiving it.

If a message is predictable – if it contains redundancy – it can be represented in fewer bits. Huffman coding in ZIP files does exactly this: it assigns short codes to frequently occurring symbols and longer codes to rare ones.

The compression system spends its smallest codes on the things it expects to see most often. Find the redundancy. Exploit it. Say less without losing more. Thus, a great metaphor is a Huffman code for meaning.

English already works this way. Shannon estimated its redundancy by asking people to guess each next character of a passage and recording how many guesses it took. With long-range context included, he put ordinary written English at roughly 75 per cent redundant — about one bit of new information per character. George Zipf had noticed the consequence years earlier. The shortest words in English are the most load-bearing: pronouns, articles, prepositions and conjunctions — it, a, he, she, at, the, and, of. Nothing required in almost every sentence is permitted to be long. The language spends its briefest codes on its commonest meanings, exactly as a compressor would.

You can even observe the progression of compression through etymology. God be with you was already being used to say farewell by the late fifteenth century. Over the next hundred years it appears in increasingly compact forms: God be wy you, God b’uy, God buoye, godbwye.

Then God became good, probably pulled sideways by good day and good night. Goodbye eventually lost another syllable and can just be bye. Four words became one. The theology disappeared; the social function survived. Nobody saying bye is invoking the Almighty. English kept the useful bit and deleted the rest.

The rate of compression is related to usage. Omnibus, Latin for ‘for all’, became bus once everyone was catching one. The taximeter cab was contracted almost at once: taxicab was in print by March 1907 and taxi by November. English had compressed the new machine almost as quickly as it arrived. And comparing recordings of New Zealand English across generations, words whose usage rose over time became measurably quicker to say, while words falling out of use grew longer.

The refinement may go further. One study covering eleven languages found that contextual predictability tracked word length better than raw frequency, although later analyses have not consistently replicated that ordering. Language clearly shortens what is common, and may also shorten what the listener can already half-supply.

We ask people: ‘Could you explain this complicated concept to your grandparents?’ We request an ‘elevator pitch,’ or an ‘executive summary.’ Or perhaps: ‘Explain it like I’m five years old.’ TL;DR. These are cultural embeddings of linguistic compression algorithms. They also encode the wider value of concept refinement.

That paragraph you just sent to your colleague: could it have been a sentence? Would they understand what you were trying to tell them better if you gave them fewer bits to process?

Good communication is not the transmission of the largest available quantity of information. It is the selection of the smallest quantity capable of rebuilding the right model inside its recipient(s).

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The shortest possible thought

There is a related concept – Kolmogorov complexity – which asks: what is the shortest possible description of something that fully specifies it?

More formally, it is the length of the shortest program that causes a specified universal computing system to reproduce an object. The wording ‘shortest possible description’ is a standard accessible rendering because the program functions as a complete generative description.

A thousand repetitions of ‘AB’ require two thousand characters if written individually, but very few if described as ‘print AB one thousand times’. The digits of π appear disordered if written out one by one, but can be produced from a comparatively short generative instruction.

long double z_re = 0, z_im = 0;
int iter = 0;
while (iter < 50000) {
    long double z_re2 = z_re * z_re, z_im2 = z_im * z_im;
    if (z_re2 + z_im2 >= 40000) break;   // this point escapes
    z_im = 2 * z_re * z_im + c_im;       // z ← z² + c
    z_re = z_re2 - z_im2 + c_re;
    iter++;
}

A perfect metaphor aspires to minimum Kolmogorov complexity for a target concept: the shortest possible linguistic instruction capable of reconstructing the idea with high fidelity.

There is an important human variation. Formal Kolmogorov complexity assumes a specified computational system. Human recipients are not identical machines.

The shortest explanation capable of reconstructing an economic concept in the mind of an economist may be incomprehensible to a child (just as likely a politician). The economist already possesses a large library of relevant patterns; the interlocutor requires the supporting files.

The minimum description of an idea therefore depends partly on the person receiving it.

This resembles the principle behind minimum description length, a model-selection framework which favours the account that gives the shortest combined description of a model and the data left unexplained by it.

An explanation that is very short only because it leaves everything important unresolved has not achieved elegant compression. It has hidden the remaining information in the error term.

This is why jargon can be elegant inside a profession and unbearable outside it. A technical term can compress an entire chapter for one reader, while presenting another with an indecipherable challenge.

A great metaphor, therefore, finds a short generative instruction that works across a large number of disparate minds: the philosopher’s stone of linguistic compression.

Nobody designed it; everybody trained it

Here is a system trained on everything its users have ever needed to say: what is safe to eat, who is not to be trusted, whether that noise was anything, and precisely what was meant by fine.

It has no specification, no version number, no maintainer, no issue tracker, no pull requests desperately vying for a review from @codeowners, and no roadmap. It was assembled over tens of thousands of years by people who were, for the most part, simply trying to get through the day with a full belly and empty balls.

This is not a description of a large language model. It is a description of English, and of Mandarin, Russian and Tagalog, and every other language spoken by humans. Nobody designed it; everybody trained it.

The resemblance between language and artificial intelligence is more than a clever parallel. It poses a question. We have spent a decade asking what machines might do to human thought, while paying far less attention to the older system already inside it: a generative compression dictionary inherited rather than chosen.

Every time you reach for a word, you follow a path worn into language by ancestors who never knew you would need it for the sentence you are formulating, nor the purpose of you uttering it.

Cavemen and their descendants created the first large language model, and they didn’t even know they were doing it.

A path worn into grass tells you something about the ground underneath it. If language is a compression of the world, its shape is evidence about the shape of the world.

Follow that evidence far enough and the question stops being about the shape of language. It starts to become: What is the shape of existence itself?

This is a narrative Reform will be keen to project following its third sitting MP defection in less than two weeks: that a trickle of departures is becoming a thunderous torrent of Tory talent, scouring out what remains of the Conservatives and destined to put wind back into Britain’s slack sails of stagnation. Braverman’s defection speech was lofty, ambitious and radical — and quite angry. Britain is ‘broken’, and ‘weak and humiliated’ on the world stage, she said, echoing Robert Jenrick’s own departure, in which he branded the government’s energy policy ‘suicidal’.

‘They run Britain like they hate it,’ Jenrick added last week. This is not the language of custodianship or repair, but of rupture and emergency. It is not the prose of plodding and deliberative Tories – this is the heated rhetoric of impatient and agitated radicals, ready to charge at every fence they find in their way, blocking the path to victory. If there is one, the purpose of the fence can be discovered later.

Braverman opened her defection speech by saying: ‘I feel like I’ve come home.’ Whether she intended it or not, her quip hit the nail on the head. The former Tories joining reform have every right and reason to be impatient about getting Britain back on track – its problems are manifest and deep – but it’s historically unusual for British conservatives to be quite so revolutionary and reactionary in the words they use to describe their politics.

While Reform’s upper ranks are increasingly being dominated by impatient Tory cast-offs, an opportunity is emerging for Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party to retake some of its historically important ideological territory. That Burkean tradition of preservation, caution in change, and respect – but not reverence – for institutions.

The ideological underpinnings of decades, if not centuries of Toryism were discarded in the last decade, to the radical chaos of the EU referendum and its aftermath. These conservative values sometimes seem more an innate human disposition than a deliberative, ideological and rationalised positioning. It’s the humble English antidote to the belligerent and activist conservatism of the United States.

If Badenoch chooses to pick up and run with this lost strand of Tory thought, she will need to walk a tightrope. She would need to find a means of communicating an honest and uncompromising assessment of the failures of liberal institutions to deliver in recent decades, and the need to enact thorough reforms – all while not just defending, but fighting for their very right to exist. ‘What will fill the space of what has been destroyed?’ is the question not being asked.

Former West Midlands Mayor Sir Andy Street and Ruth Davidson, former Scottish Tory leader, spoke out for exactly this vision on Sunday. ‘There is still a really, really strong centre-right who believe in Britain, believe in its institutions, believe in its future, and who want to build things up, and not knock things down,’ said Street.

‘This is about people that feel that the Conservative party left them but also feel like they don’t have a home in Labour or the Liberal Democrats,’ Davidson added. It’s a quaint, hopeful vision that feels oddly nostalgic, and naive in equal measure. It’s like unearthing a time capsule buried at the London 2012 Olympics.

Politics has changed at a rapid, frightening pace since then – nationally and internationally. Much that has been taken for granted for decades has now come into play. It is for liberal institutionalists, not revolutionary radicals, to come up with the reforms that empower and, even more importantly, moat the liberal structures that they value. For voters, raw outcomes will always, quite literally, ‘Trump’ process, procedure and philosophy.

Without delivery on migration policy and its implementation, and stagnating living standards, liberal institutions have a limited shelf life – no matter their historic, moral or theoretical value. And that’s before factoring in how short form video feeds are influencing our perceptions of our own lived reality. The emotive and algorithmic politics of agitation, resentment and anger that keeps you tied to your black mirror is a potent social media business opportunity.

A glowing red top that lives in your pocket, goes to the bathroom with you, rests beside you at night, and offers an infinite open window facing out onto all that makes you despair. And everyone has one, from your dentist to your grandmother. Does deterministic, 20th century liberalism have any answers for these existential challenges? If it does, we are yet to find its communicators.

The politics that Davidson and Street speak of is rich in intellectual tradition – and has supported many historic Conservative election victories. But let’s say they get past the first hurdle of finding a way to both criticise and cherish the structures of state, and come up with a viable means to reform them such that they actually deliver again. Does a viable Tory electoral coalition for this vision even exist in this new, post-postwar politics of funhouse mirrors?

Growth is the defining mission of this government. It is the only way to deliver our Plan for Change and put more money in people’s pockets. The only cure for the sickness of stagnation and decline. – Sir Keir Starmer

I don’t think we talk enough about how interesting and profound Labour’s journey on economic growth has been. Barely five years ago, economic growth was an abstract concept owned by the ‘80s tribute band on the other side of the Commons. It was Tory territory, defined in Thatcherite terms: free enterprise, privatisation, deregulation. Pinstripe suits, Canary Wharf and impractically enormous mobile phones that made you look like a cross between a pillock and a twat.

If Labour considered economic growth at all, it tended to be through the lens of ‘industrial strategy.’ Which usually meant subsidising sclerotic and uncompetitive industries producing things that nobody wanted, in order to prevent decline and social crisis in constituencies dominated by primary and heavy industries – until crisis meant it happened anyway, and quickly and in lockstep instead of gradually and independently. Now, economic growth is the declared ‘defining mission’ of this Labour government.

The usual defining mission of a Labour government is acting as the heart to the Tories’ head: expanding the reach and funding of government as a means to promoting equality of outcome and social justice. But what does a Labour government do when there’s no money to spend? 15 years ago, chief secretary to the treasury Liam Byrne infamously left a note to his successor saying ‘Dear Chief Secretary, I'm afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck!’

A decade and a half on, and there’s even less than no money left. The debt-to-GDP ratio has grown from under 40 per cent to nearly 100 per cent since that ill-advised letter was written. Economic growth – the once dependable escape valve for state debt – is no longer something British governments can rely on, with per capita growth remaining stagnant since the mid-2000s. Britain’s ageing demographic profile is strong-arming the state into allocating an ever greater proportion of its spending towards age-stratified benefits and health and social care – catering for both the genuine needs, and the wants, of a powerful boomer voter bloc.

Brexit dominated the political agenda from 2016 until 2019, raising trade barriers, but more importantly, distracting politics from the pre-existing and growing crisis in economic growth and living standards. Then there are the external shocks – appearing one after the other, as if arriving by conveyor belt. First there was the Global Financial Crisis. Then Covid-19 saw government spend vast sums on pausing the economy, and paying out furlough cash to the suspended workforce.

Then there was the inflation that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Liz Truss’s government subsidy towards household energy bills. Yet again: more debt, and with each uptick in debt to GDP, less future room for manoeuvre. The war in Ukraine has also presented a fresh, unavoidable requirement for more spending – this time for raising the defence budget. In an uncertain, multipolar world with a protectionist United States, economic security is once again a means to defensive security. And now, look who’s back in the White House, declaring tariff wars on allied nations.

Growth has not been this difficult to manifest since before the Industrial Revolution, but manifesting it has rarely, if ever, been more important. By circumstance, Labour has been forced to examine an area of politics, philosophy and economics that does not naturally set its loins ablaze. But what does a social democratic party do in government if it cannot increase government spending and expand the reach of government?

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Under a social democratic paradigm, there are few means to social justice delivered by the state without more money. And without social justice, what is the point of being in government as a party of the centre left? Labour has come to realise that, as important as growth is for living standards and for the sustainability of the British state, it’s also now an essential precursor to Labour being able to be, well, Labour.

The incentives in the politics of growth have inverted. Long gone is the Tory lust for vigorous and spunky urbanite free enterprise, forsaken for the limp and sedentary comfort of retired suburbia. Boris Johnson said it best: ‘fuck business’ - there’s a new socio-cultural priority in town for Conservatives. Strangely, Labour now finds itself as the party with the biggest immediate incentive to boost growth. Their working-age voter coalition is crying out for affordable housing, better-paid jobs, and cheaper electricity and childcare. All of this points towards a need for growth and what might enable it.

Theory of growth

It’s no secret that the first six months of this Labour government were disappointingly dysfunctional and directionless. Much of this is attributed to operations under Starmer’s departed chief of staff, Sue Gray – but not enough is attributed to how the 2024 election was a wide open goal for Labour, after the Cornbynite disaster of 2019. The atrophy of Conservative competence and ideology offered a far less planned and intellectual route to government than when Labour last re-entered government in 1997.

Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Sir Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had spent more than a decade slowly, but determinedly winning the arguments about what was necessary to accept, and what could be unpicked from the Thatcher-Major political settlement. Starmer had four years to do more than a decade’s worth of work in making the Labour Party electable again – on top of developing a workable, politically palatable theory of what was wrong with Britain, and how it could be fixed.

Except he didn’t, because the first few years of his leadership were devoted to purging the hard left from the party and its power structures, and the pseudopolitics of the Covid-19 response. It was over this time that the cultural and political influence of right-leaning and Labour-hostile newspaper media landscape really started to haemorrhage towards social media newsfeeds and podcasts. And after 2023, all Labour needed to say were the magic words ‘Liz Truss’ to win an argument on the economy. Labour has never had it so good when talking about government finances and the economy.

In short, the party was given the media and political space to be lazy on its theory of growth, the economy and government finances – and didn’t have much time to develop one even if it had been pressed. We see the political consequences today in the indecision and inchoate growth policy that is, let us not forget, the stated ‘defining mission' of this government.

But ‘what is Labour’s theory of growth?’ Ben Ansell posed this seemingly basic, but very insightful question a few months back. We still don’t have an assured answer – let alone one that is communicated ad nauseum to hammer home the message and give a sense of government drive and direction to frontbenchers, activists and voters. The Labour leadership risks stating that growth is its defining mission – without backing it up with coherent, comprehensive and urgent action.

Lord Finkelstein regularly proposes on The Times’ How to Win an Election that boiled down to their essence, there are only three types of election propositions1:

• It’s time for a change (1997, 1979, 2010, 2024)

• Britain is on track – don’t turn back (2001, 2005, 2015, 1987, 1983)

• Better the devil you know (1992, 2019)

If Labour is to win the next election, it must be in the position to claim the second narrative, and be able to say ‘let’s finish the job’ – having made noticeable, if incomplete progress on the economy, public services and stagnant living standards. Anything less will have been a continuation of the last 14 years of Conservative growth, living standards and state services failure.

The unbeatable bomb

Artificial intelligence (AI) could be the government’s single biggest lever to deliver its five missions, especially the goal of kickstarting broad-based economic growth. It is hard to imagine how we will meet the ambition for highest sustained growth in the G7 - and the countless quality-of-life benefits that flow from that - without embracing the opportunities of AI. - Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology

Kyle is not in charge of government growth strategy, but it is concerning that cabinet members are apparently going off piste by talking about AI being the ‘government’s single biggest lever,’ for growth, rather than planning reform. Noting the watered-down government aim of achieving the highest sustained growth rate in the G7, Kyle seems to imagine that no other country in the G7 will be trying to achieve exactly the same from shared AI technologies. We are not a walled garden. Differentiation in strategy and regulation may move the dial. The human capital of the UK might move the dial too. But what will differentiate the UK to enable AI-driven top-of-the-G7 growth that wont be pursued by our peer nations?

It’s effortlessly easy to assume that AI is the new beam engine, the new steel blast furnace, the new motor vehicle, the new Haber process – the latest change in technology that drives ongoing productivity growth. But if information technology gains so inexorably led to improvements in productivity growth above baseline, why did the 1980s-2000s telecoms revolution not raise growth above trend rates? Can you spot when emails and digital word processing changed the workplace for ever on the productivity growth chart? Why should we assume that recent developments in AI will lift the growth trajectory from its early noughties dog leg?

But it seems that Starmer is equally bought into the potential for AI to transform both economic growth and government service provision. Recently announcing the use of a new AI tool aimed at speeding up the planning process, he said: ‘For too long, our outdated planning system has held back our country— slowing down the development of vital infrastructure and making it harder to get the homes we need built.’ So far, so good.

‘We’re harnessing the power of AI to help planning officers cut red tape, speed up decisions, and unlock the new homes for hard-working people,’ Starmer added. Let’s be real: the purpose of the system is what it does (often know by its acronym, POSIWID). As Stafford Beer put it, there is ‘no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. That is to say, planning the building homes to meet the needs of the country, its businesses or communities is not the current purpose of our regulatory planning system. Its purpose is to prevent homes being built where it might inconvenience or affront local, extant homeowners. The government claims:

For the first time, this cutting-edge technology will help councils convert decades-old, handwritten planning documents and maps into data in minutes – and will power new types of planning software to slash the 250,000 estimated hours spent by planning officers each year manually checking these documents. This will dramatically reduce delays that have long plagued the system.

Great – but. The United States once developed the unbeatable bomb. Unfortunately, Soviet spies read the plans, and they got the bomb not long after. Likewise, the strategic advantage to the government from using AI in planning will be transitory, at best. The other side is already looking at using AI to counter and automate objections to planning proposals, as James O’Malley surfaced in his recent Substack post. He noted the example of ObjectNow, which apparently offers various paid tiers of service for using AI to automate planning proposal objections. Their website states:

At ObjectNow, we harness the power of artificial intelligence to help campaign groups, communities, and individuals effectively object to large-scale wind farms, solar parks, and battery energy storage systems (BESS) developments. With planning applications becoming increasingly complex, our AI-driven platform simplifies the process, ensuring well-researched, structured, and impactful objections that stand up to scrutiny.

ObjectNow automates the creation of tailored objection letters, integrates relevant policies and environmental concerns, and provides expert guidance to strengthen opposition efforts. Whether you’re facing a single development or a wave of applications in your area, our technology equips you with the tools to respond quickly, accurately, and with maximum impact.

Once again, by far the biggest growth lever that the government has is cutting through the Gordian knot of our planning laws, which constrain the supply of housing and infrastructure. AI will not prevent the system defaulting back towards its unspoken, but evident purpose. It will simply result in more efficient processing of an ever greater volume of content, while not solving for the core political conflict itself.

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What large language model (LLMs) and the telecoms technologies of the late 20th century share is a lower effort threshold for the mass sharing and consumption of information. Do we risk, instead of dissolving the inefficiencies of our systems, actively giving more breathing space and capacity to inherently dysfunctional structures? A fundamentally broken incentive system is failure of politics more than a failure of operations. We could be creating a grey-goo government of AI assistants and tools analysing data to death and chatting to each other with little decisive, productive output.

Tech cannot trump politics

AI LLMs are already fully commoditised, with private subscriptions to premium LLM services costing around $20 per month. Other AI applications have near-instantly become as transformative as they are affordable. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January: ‘As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of.’

He’s right to call upon the wisdom of 19th century Liverpudlian economist William Stanley Jevons, who noted the tendency of technology to be used more, not less, the cheaper and more efficient it becomes – rather than seeing total usage decline as efficiency gains mount.

It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. Whatever, therefore, conduces to increase the efficiency of coal, and to diminish the cost of its use, directly tends to augment the value of the steam-engine, and to enlarge the field of its operations.

One of the best examples of the so-called Jevons Paradox is the electric light bulb. The cost of producing artificial lighting has dropped by a factor of one thousand since 1850, but despite this, our energy consumption for the purpose of artificial lighting continued to increase in the long run, rather than fall.

The Las Vegas Sphere, an entertainment venue covered in 1.2 million LEDs, represents ‘our seemingly insatiable appetite for stuff,’ said Ed Conway in a New York Times guest essay last year. The lesson is: as technology becomes cheaper, we find new uses for it that were once impractical or uneconomical, rather than cutting back on total input costs. AI is already ubiquitous across government, and it will continue to course through the veins of Whitehall with unrelenting inevitability. But government currently isn’t working. Giving a temporary respite to broken processes and politics is not temporary salvation – it is a monkey’s paw curse.

The Vegas Sphere represents a vulgar usage of lighting technology that could not have been imagined in Thomas Edison’s lab, when energy and bulb-fabrication costs were much higher. Not that the innovation it represents mattered in London, because of politics – in January 2024, the UK government sided with Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan in rejecting a proposed equivalent Sphere in Stratford. MSG Entertainment said at the time:

‘After spending millions of pounds acquiring our site in Stratford and collaboratively engaging in a five-year planning process with numerous governmental bodies, including the local planning authority who approved our plans following careful review, we cannot continue to participate in a process that is merely a political football between rival parties.’

It doesn’t matter how innovative any technology or AI tool is when it faces a broken political process. Even if the Sphere is truly not to society’s taste, there is far too much banned, unrealised economic activity in housing, infrastructure and business parks that gets rejected. These rejections do not happen because the planning process cannot be facilitated without technological advances, or AI enhancements, but because of a political disagreement over what outcomes should be prioritised for society-at-large.

Incidentally, another entertainment Sphere is actually being built – in Abu Dhabi. London turned away the $2bn ultra-venue. Abu Dhabi grabbed it. The problem isn’t technology or innovation — it’s politics. AI does not, and cannot solve for the political human and communitarian disagreements between that which facilitates growth, and its objectors.

Labour must realise that growth is a choice. It is a choice that we are not making. We must cut through the Gordian knot, rather than use AI to try to disentangle it. We must find the route to answering the core political dispute between pro-growth and anti-growth interests. It is only by solving for the dispute in interests that we will resolve our growth crisis – which unlocks the crises in state capacity, living standards, housing and wages. And the sooner that Labour realises it, the sooner it can get on with fixing Britain, and defining the framing for how it wins the next election.

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Out of the three, Australia gets the most attention. The camp, evil drama of deposing its Prime Ministers through treacherous leadership spills every few years is a good story in of itself. Then there’s the relentless brutality of its short three-year electoral cycle – which gives plenty of experience to Aussie political strategists that hop on a plane to Britain in fallow years, to instruct campaigns for their sister parties (see Sir Lynton Crosby, Issac Levido). Elections abroad are rarely big news when the governing party does not change. But the recent Canadian federal election was noted in the UK more than usual.

Five short months ago, Pierre Poilieve had a golden ticket to the Canadian premiership. Buoyed by a successful campaign centred around housing affordability, the cost of living and federal carbon taxation, he was odds-on to lead a majority government. Then three things happened. Justin Trudeau, the longtime Prime Minister and increasingly unpopular leader of the Liberal Party (the main centre-left and governing party of Canada) resigned – to be replaced by former Bank of England governor, Mark Carney. Fourteen days later, Trump assumed the US presidency. And the New Democratic Party, to the left of the Liberals, collapsed.

Poilievre went from near-certain landslide victory to the humiliation of losing his own riding1 of Carleton – a seat he had held under various boundaries since 2004 – on April 28th. It’s a cruel lesson in just how volatile the business of politics can be – Canadian politics in particular. But important as Trudeau’s replacement by Carney was, the clear reason for this abrupt shift is not primarily rooted in domestic Canadian politics. It’s the choices and politics of the president of their neighbour – Donald Trump. Canadians are absolutely hopping mad about the capricious, unprompted and unneighbourly behaviour south of the border. It’s almost inconceivable that the United States could do this to its ‘little brother’.

“What the President said, and he has said this repeatedly, is he was told by the previous Prime Minister [Justin Trudeau] that Canada could not survive without unfair trade with the United States, at which point [Trump] asked, ‘Well, if you can't survive as a nation without treating us unfairly in trade, then you should become a state.” – Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State

It would be humorous in its absurdity if it were not for the radicalised, nonsensical intent behind Trump’s statements on annexing Canada and declaring it the 51st state. Canada’s politicians are warning against taking his proposals quasi-seriously. In his second term, surrounded by ‘yes men’, the days of ‘take him seriously, but not literally’ are over. Then there’s the tariffs, which assign Canada equal blame for America’s fentanyl crisis as Mexico with its notorious drug cartels and leaky border. Canadians have responded by boycotting American goods and reducing visits south of the border. Carney still ran on the tired legacy of the preceding Liberal Party governments – but, for Canadians, a rejection of Trumpian America, and renewal of Canadian identity, won out.

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And that did for Pierre Poilievre. He might be a very different politician to Donald Trump, but even whiffs of similarity – like attacks on the funding model of the Canadian public broadcaster, CBC, and his anti-‘Ottawa elites’ and ‘Liberal gatekeepers’ rhetoric – convinced Canadians against endorsing a right-of-centre victory. That doesn’t mean Poilievre’s Conservatives didn’t do better than last time – their vote share rose by 7.6 percentage points, and they took an extra 23 seats. But Carney’s Liberals strongly outperformed even that, uplifting their own vote share by 11.1 percentage points, taking an extra 17 seats.

But it’s not just a disaster for Poilievre and the Canadian Tories. It’s a disaster for British Conservatives too. The exact same mistake was being made by the incumbent Canadian Liberal Party as the British Tories – overseeing a mounting housing crisis, rooted in a tightly regulated planning system, while leaving the immigration tap running freely. In Canada, that left Poilievre free to attack the Liberal government in explicitly postwar conservative terms: ‘government overreach is making your rent skyrocket and shunting homeownership out of reach – we should hack back the state, give you a home of your own, and lower your cost of living’. Of course it’s much harder for British Tories to trash the identical record of their own party in government than the Canadian Tories of a Liberal government.

But what Poilievre once offered was a Conservative victory template. A pathway to making centre-right politics relevant to young people in 2025. A winning narrative that could have taken root in newsrooms, opinion columns and activist WhatsApp groups: here is a proven path to Conservative revival in comparable circumstances, why are the British Tories not taking it? Perhaps it’s too naive and optimistic to imagine that a far away victory could have served as such an salutary yet instructive lesson for the British Conservatives, or to imagine that it could be as easy as copying and pasting the arguments. But then again – with every next council or by-election loss could have been the renewed opportunity to share the story of a proven route back to power, offering the possibility of productive introspection.

The biggest problem that the British Tories face, proven by the recent local election results, is complete and utter irrelevance. Not the typical irrelevance of regular opposition politics. There’s barely even a question before the question mark any more – what are you for? In the past, the temperance of sound money and non-ideological, competent government was a trusty backstop to the party’s identity. Now? The party offers nothing that Reform cannot bid-up without immediate consequence, and has an atrocious, incompetent recent record in government. The party is a surrealist joke to under-25s. The reason the threat to the party is quite so existential, is because Conservatives themselves are quite uncertain why they exist at all.

In Canada, until Trump fouled up the plan, Poilievre’s Tories had a very clear idea of what they were for – reestablishing the living standards of young Canadians by restoring the dream of homeownership. That path back to power now appears to have been closed off – lost to the chaos of history. It is for the Liberal Party to decide if it will pick up the mantle of reforming planning and restoring the dream of homeownership in Canada. In Australia, coincidentally, the centre-right Liberal Party (not to be confused with the centre-left Liberal Party of Canada) experienced something very similar to the Canadian Tories only a few days later on 3rd May – losing heavily to the incumbent centre-left government, with their leader, Peter Dutton, also losing his own seat of Dickson2. Similar comparisons were made between Dutton and Trump during the campaign trail.

It’s painful today, but it might do the developed Western centre-right a great deal of good to have been denied victory twice by Trump. There are few things more motivating than righteous anger. It can force fixed, foundational assumptions to be re-examined and challenged. Victories twice denied by Trump will be fuel to a raging fire, forcing the global centre-right community to ask questions about who, and why it is – and crucially, what separates it from the politics of the populist, Trumpian right that has just wronged it. The route back to relevance just got even more elusive for the Conservative party, but furious determination abroad might be the first ingredient in finding it.

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What now feels like a very long time ago, I previously wrote about what was behind Poilievre’s surge in the polls, and how he communicates his conservatism to young people. If you enjoyed this article, you should check it out.

After posting this on Bluesky a few days ago, a follower suggested that if Farage were offered the prime ministership by a genie in a bottle, he would take them up on the offer immediately. I think instead that he would be utterly horrified, and use his wish to destroy all evidence that the offer ever was given. He may be extremely serious about Reform doing very well, and using its success to force the two main parties adopt his positions and talking points, but is he serious about anything beyond that?

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It’s easy enough to be a radical campaigner against institutions. It’s much harder to run them, let alone building them – and leaving aside building them to last too. Farage’s schtick is beguiling and seductive to his followers, but what will it mean for them in power? Can he move beyond tearing down institutions?

If Nigel Farage were an artist, he would be a celebrated impressionist. He has a refined, seemingly effortless talent for painting the distilled essence of a political movement. What does Reform stand for? Even seasoned politicos might struggle to name or detail a Reform policy, but the party’s “vibe” couldn’t be easier to feel. A trompe-l’œil realist, interested in photographic policy detail, Farage is not and has never been. This becomes clear the moment he is pressed on details — the bread and butter accountability of detailed political interviews is never worth his time. As one of his erstwhile Ukip MEPs, Patrick O’Flynn recently wrote: “Broad brush strokes and killer sound bites are still prioritised over detailed policy work.”

The finesse of how to govern well can wait — for now, Reform can simply ride the wave, propelled by the euphoric high of political momentum. Realism and political temperance comes second to whether “The Establishment” is running scared. The old playbook is simple: identify ruling power structures that feel distant and aloof, be they parties or institutions, and campaign against them in an uncompromising, boisterous fashion — all washed down with an (imperial) pint of blokish bonhomie.

But Farage’s script, refined over a political career spanning decades, is changing: “I’m not mucking about — I’ve got one goal, and that is that Reform wins the next general election,” Farage told assembled party members at the launch of Reform’s local election campaign in late March. That’s quite a shift in political aim: from outsider revolutionary to governor. Thursday’s local elections are being spoken of as a mere staging post, before the march onwards to No. 10. If we are to take Farage’s stated ambition seriously — and we need to, with a recent gold-standard MRP poll putting Reform ahead of Labour and the Tories in seats — then we need to ask what a detail-light party might look to actually implement in power. Policy is harder than it looks…

To read this full article on how Reform is less united than it appears on the surface, visit UnHerd using the link here: https://unherd.com/2025/04/farage-has-no-plan-for-power

The ‘woke’ advert couldn’t have whacked more culture war buttons without castrating the iconic Growler and giving it new pronouns. You couldn’t pay the Telegraph, Daily Express and Daily Mail combined to write and publish an advertorial with so much reach, for so little effort. Jaguar has a wry, iconoclastic sense of humour.

Your irritation contains a valuable lesson: it doesn’t matter whether you think you have a stake in Jaguar’s brand, even if your demographic was historically its biggest customer – if you and your contemporaries don’t support it with your cold, hard cash today, you don’t have a say in its direction.

Faced with extinction after the asteroid blast of electrification hit the motoring industry, Jaguar had no choice but to evolve. Its brand recognition, heritage and history are things to be proud of, and still hold significant cultural – if limited monetary – value. But Jaguar could not live forever, unchanged in a changing world. The Growler is dead, long live the Growler.

By actively looking beyond its late-middle age, caddish, ‘sorry darling, I seem to have forgotten my wallet’ brand identity, the company has taken a bet that it’s worth using the assets it has today to pivot to a new, more affluent customer base – with different motivations, values and æsthetics.

Speaking to a new base doesn’t mean it has to wholly abandon its explicitly British roots, sense of humour and reputation for innovation. These valuable brand associations can remain even as the way the company talks about them becomes radically different. Better to attempt a moonshot than be remembered alongside Blockbuster, British Leyland and Kodak as an example of a sad, slow, bleed-out into obscurity.

Another brand associated with an older, more traditional demographic faces similar challenges. It simply isn’t viable in its current form – targeting only its limited and dwindling number of core customers with messages that they want to hear, rather than speaking to and acting in the interests of an expanded customer base of tomorrow. It is insular; deaf to and uninterested in the outside world. It needs to understand modern Britain.

It’s time for the Tory party to become woke.

Right, that’s the SEO and the gratuitously inflammatory article hook sorted. What do I actually mean? I mean the party needs to look beyond the piss-poor 6,828,925 members of the electorate that it managed to cling on to by its fingernails in the 2024 general election, in which scored 23.7% of the vote and only 121 seats, the worst showing in its history.

Kemi Badenoch’s victory in the Conservative leadership election worries me not because she doesn’t have an authentic conservatism rooted in her life experiences and with an intellectual underpinning, but because the Badenoch project seems so far to have been based solely on preaching to the choir.

Wanging on about woke, or even appearing to do so, is a self-indulgence that might motivate the base – but comes across as just odd and obsessional to normal folk, who don’t spend all day doing the same.

Bathrooms matter, but do they matter to a normal voter as much as the cost of childcare? Cultural conventions on gender identity and expression matter, but do they matter as much as the cost of housing to someone renting from a slumlord with no chance, like their parents’, of homeownership?

Where are the broad brush stroke soliloquies about how the party even cares about these totemic issues that are central and fundamental to so many voter’s lives and living standards, let alone having a defined and deliverable plan to sort them out?

Obscure farming documentary maker Jeremy Clarkson observed long ago that if you include petrolheads in the design choices of your vehicle, you will end up with a car that goes around the Nürburgring three seconds faster at the expense of a comfier ride for everyday commuting. Mass consumers suffer for the minority interests of obsessives.

It’s not that these cultural topics aren’t worth discussing. But Labour was given permission by the electorate to enter Number 10 not just because of the manifest and myriad failings of the Conservatives, but because it purposefully avoided stepping on culture war landmines.

It’s still abundantly clear that Labour activists and MPs hold socially progressive views that are out of step with the wider public’s – but by not framing them front and centre of their case for a Labour government and instead focusing on the cost of living and Tory incompetence, the potential dividing line was neatly sidestepped. Labour didn’t shave three seconds off the lap time, it went for the softer suspension.

Younger readers may scoff, but there is still a deeply embedded cultural memory of the Conservative brand representing sound money, sound governance, and steady-as-she-goes economic growth. The Conservatives were a conservative party, not reactionary party. These are immensely powerful, emotional and basal brand identity associations.

The most successful party of the 20th century was successful for a reason – it had a strong brand that represented the comfort of the familiar, the temperance of exuberance, the reassurance of tradition, backed up by governance that supported these associations. But times have changed. Serving only the interests of its core voter base has made it forget about its core voter base of tomorrow.

What does Nick (30 ans) care about institutions that are milking, instead of serving him? Why should he value the familiar, when it isn’t working for him? These values only have a cultural memory so long as they have a demonstrable credibility.

With much less to lose than there is to gain, it’s time for the Tory party to take a risk, and place a bet on speaking a language that might even alienate much of its diminished remaining voter base. It’s time to wind up the Conservative crumblies, and explicitly make a case for itself to the people that regard it at best with casual disinterest.

There is no future without a wider, renewed electoral coalition – a new customer base that looks very different from its old base. Yes, the remaining seven or eight voters will kick off. But maybe the voters they actually need to pitch to to have a viable future might start listening. It’s time for the Conservatives to go woke, before they end up broke.

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Confronting the terror of a denied truth is one of the most human, soulful and rewarding things a person can do. Naturally, human beings therefore spend a great deal of time and effort avoiding it at all costs, no matter how depleting, difficult, or even debilitating, the paths taken to avoid it can become.

Telos

What is the purpose of a political party but to advocate for its ideologies and implement them, in the hope of governing and reforming its constituency and its denizens for the better?

On the surface this is self-evident, but political parties serve many more purposes to their members that can come into conflict with this higher purpose. We also use political parties as social and psychological comfort blankets to validate and reinforce our preconceived worldviews, and soothe our anxieties about the complexity of society, politics and existence. My team good, your team bad.

Political parties are conformal structures in which individuals can find shared identity, personal development and friendship – this is true at the parliamentary level, and even more true at the local activist and councillor level, where politics is inherently less ideological, and more practical.

Parties are philosophical, systemising and theoretical institutions in principle, but deeply social institutions in practice – wearing the resultant contradictions and imperfections heavily upon their shoulders.

It is the secondary, functional purpose of political parties that so confuses them into diverging from the primary longings of their soul, thereby losing the privilege of their raison d’être – to govern and create the best conditions for constituents and communities to thrive.

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Focusing too much on the functional turns politicians into transactional tacticians and caseworkers, rather than strategic leaders that are prepared to weather political turbulence for a delayed, higher purpose.

An excessive focus on tactics can pull strategy away from the desires of the political soul without a party even noticing it – parties can become blinded by their cognitive conviction over what, why, how, and who they are, even as their existence screams of tortured disconnection.

Mandate

One of the most skilled political operators in recent political memory must be Michael Portillo. After famously losing his Enfield North seat to Labour’s Stephen Twigg in the 1997 election ‘Portillo moment’, you might imagine that seeing his dreams of party leadership dissolve would be a great personal wrench.

Reliving the experience in 2015, Portillo spoke of the opposite: ‘The fact that I didn't have to run for the Conservative leadership, the fact that I wasn't going to be part of this rump of 165 Tory members who were clearly going to have a miserable time, at least for five years, if not for 10 or 15 years. You know – all of that was actually quite a relief.’

Having lost by such a severe margin, it was already clear to Portillo that the recovery of the parliamentary Conservative party would take a very long time. A defeat of such magnitude would require the party to undergo a severe and distressing challenge to its identity. Being the leader of a party embarking on such a painful journey is a thankless and difficult role that offers few rewards – and rarely the reward politicians consider most precious – power.

After he re-entered the commons in 1999 at the Kensington and Chelsea by-election, and despite his relief at missing out on the party leadership after the ‘97 election defeat, Portillo still had plenty of political ambition left in the tank. He quickly assumed the second most senior post in Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition – the position of Shadow Chancellor, under William Hague.

All the better vantage point from which to launch a leadership bid, when the inevitable drubbing occurred at the next general election – and so it did, 2001 delivering a near-perfect facsimile of the 1997 landslide. After Hague stepped down, Portillo announced his candidacy in the leadership contest early on, convinced that it would be a coronation.

Following two identical and overwhelming landslide defeats in a row, and with a pervasive sense that the party was simply not comfortable with modern Britain, his case for reform and modernisation was surely unassailable.

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Not so, said the parliamentary party, which instead favoured a bunfight over Conservatives’ future direction – leaving the sole declared candidate standing like a soldier in no-man’s land: shot at from all sides.

After two weeks of relentless negative briefings from colleagues, and subsequently having made almost no progress in accumulating more votes than his initial 49 in the multiple parliamentary rounds of the leadership election, the will to fight on for the leadership ebbed from Portillo as the contest went on.

He said: ‘[By this point] I didn't much want [the leadership]. I did have this big idea about what I wanted to do with the Conservative Party, which was to move it to the centre ground. In order to do that, I thought I would need a huge majority.

‘I would need an absolutely whopping mandate to do that. From quite early on, as this 50 votes was never added to, it was clear to me that I was never going to have a whopping mandate. And to try to do what I wanted to do without a whopping mandate seemed to me very unattractive.’

Once again, Portillo spoke of relief of having been freed from the constraints of an unenthusiastic, unclear mandate with little room to claim an endorsement for his vision of the party’s future: ‘So actually, when I didn't get it, I was relieved, because I was never anywhere near getting the mandate.’

If the parliamentary party was disinterested in his vision for modernisation, that was nothing compared to party members, who under reforms that Hague had introduced, now had a voice. They were given a direct say on the final two MPs put forward by the parliamentary party.

The parliamentary votes in the third and final round before candidates were put before the membership was nearly equally split between Portillo, Ian Duncan Smith and Kenneth Clarke – offering a resounding and powerful parliamentary endorsement to absolutely nobody. And while Clarke won a slim plurality of the MPs votes in the final round of party membership votes, he went on to lose to Duncan Smith, who won a convincing margin of 60:40.

What is even worse than an unenthusiastic and unclear parliamentary party mandate? A conflicted one. The party membership had just eagerly endorsed a candidate who had only been voted for by a third of his fellow parliamentarians, and – perhaps more importantly – had not been endorsed, or was even actively opposed, by the remaining two thirds. The rest is predictable history, with Duncan Smith lasting only two unremarkable years as party leader before being replaced.

In voting for Duncan Smith - the candidate of the party’s right – at a time when elections were being won from the centre by a landslide, the party membership declared to the electorate that the party was not sufficiently serious about winning. ‘I will not come to the electorate, the electorate must come to me.’

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Because the failings of the last Conservative government were so vast and varied, there is plenty for the current crop of leadership candidates to lament and lambast without great cost to political identity. You don’t need to have a wider position on the structure of Britain’s political economy to say that governments should uphold ethical standards and avoid blowing up bond markets.

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Few outside of the populist right of the party are happy to defend the moral standards of the party leadership under Boris Johnson, even if they might be happy to welcome him back in spite of his ethical failings in government. Even fewer are willing to defend the chaotic, short-lived Liz Truss government, or the lacklustre, rudderless captainship of Rishi Sunak.

Leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat said that the party must ‘rediscover moral leadership’, while James Cleverly said ‘our division and behaviour obscured the victories and compounded the mistakes.’ These are easy positions to take.

That is not to say that these positions are incorrect, or that the party does not need to work on these areas. It absolutely must. But these are besoothing bromides. Stating these things does not require a structural understanding of Britain’s economic and wage stagnation, and how this is having knock on impacts in living standards, intergenerational inequality and the quality and availability of public services.

Distracted first by Brexit, and then by Covid, the party simply did not sit up and pay attention to the structural economic failings piling up under its tenure in government. The party of free enterprise, growth and aspiration had not seen real wages increase for two decades – while it was in power – and it didn’t even notice!

It never examined the extend to which it had become an elderly welfare party, and how placating the NIMBYism of its increasingly retired voter based tied into economic stagnation and overspend in public services and infrastructure. It didn’t notice how the most basic unit of conservatism – the family – was being suppressed by passively allowing homeownership for young families become a distant, bitter dream.

It did not foresee that indulging every preference of pensioner voters was a cursed choice, as the selfsame demographic came to expect the NHS to work for them. And to do so after a decade of low capital investment, while they retired into the long term health management needs of their generational autumn.

It had quite simply become a functional political party, devoid of ideology. Its direction resembled that of Woolworths or Blockbuster – one of managed decline, not driven and hungry innovation. Its purpose was to listen to its voters and membership, and give them exactly what they wanted, regardless of the long-term consequences. The party’s function had diverged from its identity, and in doing so, its identity had diverged from its soul.

The chaos and impropriety are downstream of the party’s ideological failings. Without a flag to rally around, politics becomes an individual, rather than team, sport. Victories are no longer strategic and collective, they are tactical, and singular. When letting down colleagues is normalised, letting go of ethical standards is easier.

Unpicking the threads of failures of the last government would require the leadership victor to claim a mandate – an overwhelming mandate given by both parliamentarians and members to truly challenge the party on its failings – to tear off the comfort blankets and confront it with the cold truth of what must be done.

What must be done not just to win power again – but to how to wield it to once again raise wages, improve living standards, and support public expectations of the state. None of the candidates has said the unsayable thus far.

And without saying the unsayable to the party, none of the candidates can truly claim a mandate for change, even if they win. Without a mandate for change, how can the party be forced to change, and thereby recover? I said in UnHerd recently:

At first, it will be too offensive to declare that the party can no longer rely on offering pork-barrel goodies to a dwindling set of grey voters. But challenging the status quo of a pensioners’ welfare and planning system that hands out cash to retirees, and prevents the building of infrastructure and new homes, is vital. Not facing up to these realities has led the party to catastrophic defeat in any case, yet it’s unlikely to give a mandate to change this order without the maturity that comes through serial defeat.

To his credit, Jenrick has publicly and emphatically endorsed Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman’s exceptional and must-read Foundations essay on the structural reasons behind Britain’s stagnation.

But this is still far from explicitly telling the party the uncomfortable truths it must face to break free of the stagnation. That there will actually need to be pylons and new homes in not just someone’s back yard – but your backyard.

That redistributing the incomes of the young towards the wealthy elderly has practical and moral limits. That taking away winter fuel payments from millionaires is fine, actually.

Perhaps this is as far as Jenrick feels he can go for now. Ask Theresa May – her frank honesty about the need for social care to be partially funded by the wealth tied up in personal estates was swiftly rewarded – by lifelong socialist Jeremy Corbyn robustly attacking her proposed wealth tax, and the unravelling of her anticipated 2017 election landslide.

Telling voters truths they are not prepared to hear is rarely the route to electoral success. But the party membership is not the same as the wider electorate, with whom the party just lost. In order to win again, it will be necessary to stop indulging, and start disappointing the party membership selectorate.

Just as the Labour Party came to realise after 2019 – after nearly a decade out of power – ideological indulgence comes at the price of your opponents winning. Again. And again. And again. Until you make peace with, and act on, the lesson the electorate are trying to communicate to you.

The remaining Conservative Party membership is now comprised of the distilled essence of the demographic the party must challenge – and disappoint – to win back power. This will make the task much, much harder.

The parliamentary party votes are currently, reminiscent of 2001, relatively evenly split: 27.7%, 23.5%, 17.6% and17.6%. None have yet mapped out the way forward convincingly. Maybe this will change at party conference, as the media cycle shortens and narratives set alight.

But even if the parliamentary party coalesces around a particular candidate. Even if that particular candidate champions reform, and maps out the path back to victory. Are the rank-and-file members be ready to challenge themselves? See you at the next leadership election.

The second article discusses how the Tory leadership election has thus far focused on personality. I do not believe the party is yet psychologically ready to understand or accept the structural and strategic reasons for its great 2024 loss. It is much easier to process and discuss the tactical reasons for defeat. Without asking for a mandate for change, the victor will not be able to claim (and use) one.

We only need to observe the photo recently tweeted by former home secretary Suella Braverman to see the existential threat to the party should it not course correct from being a client party for retirees. Where is the physical future of the party?

It was always wrong to give wealthy pensioners annual handouts

Winter fuel payments need to be means tested to stop intergenerational inequality growing 

Should millionaires receive benefit payments from the government, or should hard-earned taxpayers’ cash only be handed out to the truly needy? Amid claims of a £22bn “black hole” in the country’s finances, the answer to that question is clear. It would be offensively decadent to keep dishing out payments to wealthy members of our society while our public services feel the strain of years of underfunding.

Yet this is precisely the policy position on winter fuel payments that the incoming Labour Government inherited from the outgoing Conservatives. When one in four pensioners lives in a household with a net worth of more than a million pounds, when pensioners have £4,000 more disposable income a year than working age people, and when wages have been flatlining in real terms for over a decade, it’s high time the universal nature of such benefits was reconsidered.

Defending the move to cut the benefit for those not on pension credit or other means-tested benefits, Sir Keir Starmer said: “I know they’re unpopular, I know they’re difficult, of course they’re tough choices. Popular decisions aren’t tough, they are easy.” He is right to challenge the indulgence and political ease of the status quo…

To read this full article on the means testing of winter fuel payments, visit i using the link here: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/always-wrong-give-wealthy-pensioners-annual-handouts-3268989

Means testing pensioner benefits was a key recommendation in the paper I co-wrote with the Adam Smith Institute – recognising the nonsense of freely gifting taxpayer’s money to some of the wealthiest members of our society.

Have the Tories really learnt from their mistakes?

Soul-searching has not been evident during the leadership conterst

So Mel Stride has been knocked out of the latest round in the Tory leadership election. Remember Mel Stride? No, me neither. But as one of the few ministers left willing to go out to bat for Rishi Sunak’s dying government during the daily media rounds, could he really have represented the future of the Conservative Party anyway?

Not that the remaining candidates fare much better by this metric, former senior ministers as they all are. Each seeks to disown the inheritance they played their own personal part in building.

But a leadership campaign is an opportunity for ideological freedom — for unhelpful shibboleths to be discarded, biases to be challenged and fixed viewpoints and policy positions to be reassessed in all frankness. It is easy to deliver sermons on the moral failures of Boris Johnson’s premiership, or to lament the political and operational failures of the Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak governments: these are self-evident. It’s easy, too, to promise the red meat of tax cuts and an anti-woke agenda to the party base…

To read this full article on the tory leadership contest, visit Unherd using the link here: https://unherd.com/newsroom/have-the-tories-really-learnt-from-their-mistakes/

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There are many ways of reacting to imminent danger: run away from the problem in the hope it never catches you (Theresa May), make yourself big to give the illusion that you’re more substantial than you actually are (Boris Johnson), chaotically scream and shout to scare it off (Liz Truss). Or you can roll over and play dead (Rishi Sunak).

Sunak is failing. On just about every measure — the economy, housing, policing and justice, NHS waiting lists, illegal and legal migration, local government, and, of course, the polls. It’s not just failure on the opposition’s terms either — it’s on his own and his own party’s terms. There will be no triumphant valedictory speech in the style of Gordon Brown setting out the achievements of New Labour.

It’s like Sunak has given up, going early just to end it all. None of them wants these outcomes — no wonder they’re fighting like rats in a sack. This wasn’t meant to be what happened to the Conservatives’ Golden Boy.

Hastily thrusting the prime ministerial baton into Sunak’s hand after Liz Truss was meant to herald the return of the Sensibles™ to government. Gentle, purposeful, middle-of-the-road government — the sort that keeps the suburbs and the shires sanguine and subdued. If the Sensibles™ had a pitch for how to run government, it wasn’t ideological. It could be summed up in a single word: ‘competence.’

And yet here we are, with Sunak slipping on every banana peel and standing on every rake while his own colleagues thrust custard pies at his face. It’s cruel to laugh, but there’s much schadenfreude to be found in watching the irritatingly perfect prefect trip over his laces. All this despite Sunak’s genuinely impressive CV, backed by collegiate soliloquies to his talents from fellow parliamentarians, praising his intelligence, work ethic and commitment to being well-briefed.

Political journalist have chronicled plenty of Sunak’s political failings, notably the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg:

‘The most successful politicians at the very top level are the ones who have very strong beliefs and instincts – his approach looks like a series of transactions or problems to be solved,’ a former official who admires Sunak told me.

Another source who worked closely with him said: ‘He thinks that working really hard and being good is enough. Being PM is art, not science - and he is no artist.’

‘We’re like a government of civil servants,’ a serving minister tells me.

And Tim Shipman of The Times:

One recounted the moment the prime minister railed against the prospect of leading his party into its worst general election defeat by complaining about voters and his MPs: ‘Why do people not realise that I’m right?’

A second senior Tory with close links to Downing Street, said: ‘He’s really miserable and that is infecting everyone else. He feels completely snookered.

‘This is like nothing that he’s ever experienced in his life. He’s questioning his own judgment, can’t take a decision, but at the same time doesn’t want to take advice. He’s rude and dismissive to his team for not being good enough. It’s very Gordon Brown: the micromanagement, immersed in details, dithering, blaming others. He and his team have realised they aren’t just going to lose, they are going to get hammered.’

Bizarrely, prime minister Sunak is insufficiently political for politics, without the ability paint a comprehensive and coherent philosophy for government in broad brush strokes and use it to rally troops to a cause, as Dominic Cummings picked up on in August last year:

He spends his time wading through endless detail and spreadsheets on fifth order matters because it’s psychologically easier than doing the PM’s actual job which he doesn’t know how to do nor wants to do.

Officials obviously prefer him to Boris or Truss. He reads the papers diligently and is neither a crook nor a cretin. But the old hands know it’s roughly the Brown failure mode: a workaholic, the PM’s office a massive bottleneck and can’t sustain focus when the news shifts, the smartest MP but can’t build a team or lead etc etc.

No10 is so politically lost that OFFICIALS suggest ways the PM can achieve his priorities faster and his OWN SPADS say ‘no too aggressive’. The fundamental reason for the boats failure is choices by the PM’s political team and a reluctance by Sunak to face unpleasant reality, not deep state resistance.

Sunak’s policy announcements have been an incohesive hodge-podge of whatever takes his fancy. What links the cancellation of HS2, a ban on smoking for anyone born after 2009, national service for teenagers and new qualifications standards1? It’s like he’s gone to the supermarket and bought one third of the ingredients for 5 different meals. Individually, each ingredient might sound delicious, but who wants to eat a Stilton, salmon and marmalade pie?

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Politics on hard mode

But Sunak’s biggest failure is diagnostic, not political — it’s his complete failure to identify and grasp the scale and importance of the United Kingdom’s biggest problem — and to build a case to his party and the country that it needs to be sorted. The disaster in question is no longer being obscured by Brexit or Covid-19. It’s a crisis that’s only starting to be talked about seriously in the past few years, and even then, usually only by nerds and wonks.

The crisis is this: Britain has barely seen any productivity growth since before the 2008 financial crisis. Our average worker is not much more productive today than they were nearly two decades ago.

And because most (though not all) economic growth is dependent on productivity growth, the trend in British GDP per capita and productivity growth is the same — dead since around or just before the Global Financial Crisis.

This is not just a temporary phenomenon that we should be relaxed and sedate about — a productivity growth trend that extends all the way back to the Industrial Revolution ended nearly 20 years ago, and with it the bountiful and succulent fruits that it offered.

Nearly all of Sunak’s challenges are downstream of this fundamental fact. Because wages and per capita GDP are tied to productivity growth, living standards are stagnating — and that’s just in aggregate.

Put stagnant incomes next to rapidly inflating asset prices, and for younger people, there is an active decline in age-equivalent living standards versus previous generations (measured by wealth accumulation and housing quality and floorspace consumption.) All this despite huge advances in technology and increases in total human wealth. It should not surprise us that our politics has become so volatile under these conditions.

Negligible productivity growth also means we can no longer finance state spending by anticipating economic growth and therefore assuming that future tax receipts will grow organically. In a healthy economy, the growth you can forecast for tomorrow ensures you can spend more money responsibly today without increasing the deficit or debt as a percentage of GDP, like a business investing in a new machine in the expectation it will pay itself off in the future.

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If British productivity growth has ended permanently, this leaves us with two options: cut the state coat according to the state’s cloth, or raise taxation beyond the highest level since the Second World War to keep our spending tastes sustainable.

Instead we are doing a chaotic combination of the two, where government tries to do the full scope what it did a decade ago, but on increasingly stretched budgets, despite rising taxes. Our expectations of the state have only increased, while our ability to finance it has decreased.

Demographics are adding to this pressure — a very large cohort of people is moving into old age, and combined with longer post retirement longevity, we are going to see demand continue to increase for state spending on health and social care, and pensions in the coming decades. Without productivity growth, how can we fund our expectations of the state?

The end of productivity growth is not inevitable, as the United States demonstrates, both by having a higher level of productivity than the UK, which we could catch up to by adopting American innovations, and by still growing today, even from a higher base. There is still fruit to be picked higher in the tree.

We need to understand that stagnant productivity growth is the midwife of stagnant wages, stagnant or declining living standards, stagnant tax revenues and stagnant or declining public services. It is the midwife of growing NHS waitlists, of the increasing number of potholes on your commute, and of the security tags on cheddar cheese in Tesco that you didn’t see a few years ago.

This is not just for the politics of the entrepreneurial right — productivity growth is the most effective means to deliver social justice through making the poor wealthier. Productivity growth should be the most urgent priority of left wingers looking to see living standards and public services improve for deprived communities and individuals.

We’ve had a few centuries of politics on easy mode, where growth provided an expanding tax base to fund public service expectations and push up real incomes. Now we’re experiencing politics on hard mode, with no easy choices to be made anywhere. Instead of baking more bread, we are rationing the loaves we have.

This worked for the Tory party for a while, with low interest rates supporting the household incomes and consumer spending of the boomer cohort that the Conservatives have become so dependent on.

But stagnant productivity growth has put paid to that, killing off the future voter base and squeezing the funding of public services that boomers are becoming increasingly reliant on as they age into healthcare needs. Not even the boomers can be satisfied any longer. Wile E. Coyote has discovered he’s not running on solid ground any more.

The end of productivity growth is also partly responsible for the chaos we’ve seen in the Conservative Party for nearly a decade, calling the curtain on the intergenerational voting coalition and dissolving the glue that bound MPs of disparate, but sufficiently compatible values and tastes together under one flag.

Without a crisis, electoral success or growing living standards and a stable, secure state with adequate funding for boomer health and social care to unite around, the incentives to remain collegiate and helpful have faded away.

Downstream focus, upstream cause

It is the nature of politics and media that we focus our attention on the digestible and eye-catching human interest stories that are downstream products of the cessation of productivity growth. A 15 hour wait for an ambulance or crumbling school buildings caused by government services with squeezed funding are much easier concepts to understand and communicate than theories covering the ultimate, upstream cause of constricted budgets.

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Whatever the actual apportionment of blame for the end of British productivity growth actually is, there is one very big likely culprit, which if we solved, would also deliver a great deal of social justice regardless. You guessed it — the difficulty, complexity and cost of building homes and infrastructure is Himbonomics’ biggest productivity villain.

Making homes and infrastructure very expensive and difficult to build has upended all of the incetive structures that once favoured growth. Why bother with the fight and cost of installing better power lines with more capacity when local residents are ‘in despair’ over the provision of utilities infrastructure?

Want to buy a new home near to a good job? Sorry, the barely perceptible view of a church through a small gap in some trees is more important than the construction of a new apartment building 15 miles away.

Want to construct a film studio in a disused quarry next to a busy dual carriageway? Local Tory candidate Joy Morrissey has successfully campaigned against such distasteful jobs and economic activity: ‘I urge the applicants to now recognise, once and for all, this is the wrong development in the wrong location.’ She was backed by her Liberal Democrat rival, Anna Crabtree, who said that the development ‘could not be justified economically,’ which must have come as a surprise to the private businesses who were applying to invest in the site for their own economic reasons.

Want to build hyperscale data centres on a former landfill site, five miles from Heathrow airport to support the cloud infrastructure of tomorrow? Unfortunately the economic case does not ‘outweigh the harm to the Green Belt and to the character and appearance of the [former landfill],’ according to self-proclaimed YIMBY housing secretary, Michael Gove.

This is the core failure of Sunak and the wider Conservative Party over its 14 years in power. Not Brexit, not the management of the state itself — though few will argue it’s done well on either — but the complete lack of insight into why the country is where it is. We haven’t lost the means to productivity growth — the ‘free market’ Tory party banned it instead.

It may well be the only strategy that the party has left, but it is astonishing seeing it steer into, rather than out of its strategic mistake of prioritising elderly, NIMBY homeowners above all else during the campaign so far.

Yes — making the argument on housing and infrastructure to your voters, candidates and activists is hard. It means challenging them with complicated and difficult truths that they may be unwilling to hear. But if you’re an activist, parliamentary candidate, or instinctive Conservative supporter worried about this challenge, ask yourself: how much are you enjoying it right now? Is this working? Is it worth it?

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From a distance it seems more likely that the Tories will go fully off the deep end during and after the election, chasing ungrateful and rambunctious Reform voters with reactive, reactionist policies. They will spend time armour-plating the areas on the planes that return home with bullet holes like proposing national service, not realising that we need to patch the areas critical for all planes to come home like economic growth, housing affordability and working, sustainable state services.

Even with the party heading for a catastrophic loss, it has barely even begun to make the first steps on the journey towards accepting this truth. It cannot be overstated how unintellectual the Conservative Party’s natural instincts are. While some groups like Next Gen Tories are making the thinking case, the wider party is probably a decade behind the Canadian Conservatives.

Pierre Poilievre’s Canuck Tories have come to understand that protecting the veto power of homeowners above all else has consequences for conservatives and Conservatives, from reduced family formation to the growth of the state and higher welfare expectations, to a diminished natural voter base with wealth and family to protect.

But it’s much easier to campaign on this from opposition, than reform it from government. Starmer will soon walk through the door of Number 10, facing a comparable, but much worse set of problems. The instinct of Labour in government will be to spend more money, but it won’t have any to begin with, unlike in 1997.

The Labour trap

Kier Starmer’s Labour Party seems to have the right instincts on understanding how important bringing back growth is for its core mission of social justice. They realise that they will need to do something big to find the money to fund and reform public services — and have linked this to building more homes and infrastructure (which also delivers social justice in of itself.)

But there is still too much of a reliance on recycled policy ‘solutions’ that have had a marginal (albeit sometimes positive) impact on housing and infrastructure supply, such as New Towns. We should note that despite several iterations of New Towns, housing affordability criteria and demand-side subsidy, we still have a housing crisis that is getting worse, not better.

This is because the incentive structures that facilitate our housing and infrastructure outcomes have not been comprehensively reformed since the the Town and Country Planning Act 1947.

The history of attempts to reform planning in Britain is proof that political willpower is not enough: you need to be smart, not just brave — Samuel Watling, Works in Progress.

Housing tenure is dominated by owner-occupiers. They are more likely to be older, more likely to vote, more likely to live in a swing seat, and to be highly motivated concerning changes in their immediate surrounds. As the Triumph of Janet described, they have little incentive to back development in their backyard, and plenty of incentive to block it and vote against it.

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There is enough political will in the Labour party right now to do something big on housing, particularly if — as the polls indicate — Starmer enters Number 10 with a large majority. Perhaps he can even get a few New Towns through before the old structural pressures against development start to re-assert themselves.

But does he want to be the Prime Minister that made a small dent in housing, like his predecessors, or actually slay the planning regulation dragon and become a reforming prime minister with a legacy for the history books?

If he wants the latter this will mean a laser focus on restructuring the incentive structures in British planning. How can we make the huge, but widely-distributed costs of blocking infrastructure and housing visible and felt by objectors right now, rather than collectively and hypothetically in the future? How can we make the benefits of approving of and welcoming infrastructure and housing clear to existing owner-occupiers?

Any policy solution that does not focus on the upstream incentive structures will see the dents push themselves back out through population growth, and the re-establishment of the cultural and political power of NIMBYism in an incentive structure that rewards it. A few temporary dents in the planning system will not bring back productivity growth, and without this and the living standards improvements and tax revenue it would generate, Labour can kiss the rest of its ambitions for government goodbye.

Starmer will have limited time to get any of this right. The demands on any prime minister are immense — never more so than in a period of constrained budgets and dilapidated public services with high expectations coming from all directions. He could spend his energy and political capital on the downstream management of the consequences of the end of productivity growth.

Or he could be the Labour prime minister that brings Britain back to life, restoring productivity growth by reforming the incentive structures that deliver our harmful planning outcomes. The payoff will take longer. But the fruits of restored income growth and a sustainable tax base for state spending will be so much sweeter. Stay upstream, Keir.

The Chicxulub asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago left behind an identifying calling card — a relative abundance of the rare element iridium in the rocks formed at the time, marking the boundary between abundance and extinction. We may come to call the marker at the boundary between Tory life and death “Nigel Farage”.

Farage is the factor that could turn this election from “just” a punishing and bruising defeat into a catastrophic wipeout. Labour in ascendancy with a collapse in the Tory vote would be bad enough for the Conservatives, but what they should really fear is losing votes not just to the centre, but to the Right at the same time…

To read this full article on the existential threat to the Conservatives from the Right, visit Unherd using the link here: https://unherd.com/newsroom/could-the-conservatives-finish-third-in-the-next-election/

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‘There is no magic money tree,’ we are repeatedly told by the Conservative Party in sermons about the virtues of fiscal responsibility and sound money. But the Tories seem to harvest a magic money tree every day, enthusiastically handing over its fruits to just about the only demographic left in its dwindling voter base: pensioners.

Last night, the Tories announced that the triple lock pension policy was going to be upgraded to the ‘triple lock plus’. This ‘quadruple lock’ would mean the tax-free allowance threshold remaining frozen for working-age people, while pensioners will be protected and see the threshold at which they start to pay income tax rise above earnings and inflation over time.

‘Without change, next year pensioners would start paying income tax on their state pension alone. That isn’t right,’ said chief secretary to the Treasury, Laura Trott. Under the plans, the personal allowance for pensioners would rise by at least 2.5 per cent, or at the level of earnings or inflation, whichever is higher…

To read this full article on the unsustainablity of the triple lock, visit i News using the link here: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/triple-lock-plus-more-handouts-to-wealthy-pensioners-3078408

As a soggy Rishi Sunak was almost literally drowned outby the New Labour anthem “Things Can Only Get Better” on the steps of Downing Street last week, I began to wonder why the Conservative Party has never coalesced around an optimistic anthem of its own in quite the same way. If it did, what song would it be? Then it hit me: “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” by the St Winifred’s School Choir would be the perfect choice.

It would be consistent with the party’s choices over the last 14 years in office, prioritising pensioners over working-age people at every turn — with the net effect of tax and benefit policy changes since 2010 putting pensioners £2,000 a year ahead of those below 66 years of age. Meanwhile, the postwar promise of a home of one’s own for those who work hard and do the right thing has been broken for Britain’s youth for over a decade.

New depths of the pork barrel were scraped last night when the Government announced plans to tighten the triple-lock pension thumbscrews even further, upratingthe tax-free allowance for pensioners by the highest of 2.5%, earnings or inflation. For workers, no such luck — another shift in the salt mines will help bring out the flavour of the pensioners’ pork…

To read this full article on the Tory grey vote strategy, visit Unherd using the link here: https://unherd.com/newsroom/rishi-sunaks-pension-tax-cut-is-another-insult-to-young-people/

Gove first made his name as a reformer while education secretary early on in David Cameron’s government. Firstly by putting rocket boosters on the late New Labour policy of academising schools, giving them the freedom to innovate by making them independent of local authority control, and secondly by giving schools minister Nick Gibb full backing to revolutionise reading standards by introducing phonics to the curriculum.

Both successful reforms saw Gove rally against “The Blob”, the contemptuous moniker he applied to what he saw as an education sector establishment that opposed just about any change to a soft, fluffy, “learning to learn” teaching philosophy, as opposed to a more direct, “chalkboard” pedagogy. Working with a certain Dominic Cummings as his special advisor until 2014, it would not be the last time that Gove would sail headlong against the prevailing establishment winds…

To read this full article discussing Michael Gove’s legacy, visit Unherd using the link here: https://unherd.com/newsroom/michael-gove-will-be-more-powerful-outside-politics/

What is the first country that comes to mind when images are invoked of a line of weary citizens, queueing up to purchase basic goods in limited supply?

It’s likely you thought of the USSR, where so-called bread lines became a hallmark of the late Soviet era. These queues left us with enduring images depicting the failure of a modern, developed state — with the second most successful space agency in the world — to reliably deliver groceries to its people.

By the late eighties, the destructive influence of centralised five year economic plans, market interference and price controls had over-spilled into the general availability of food, books and clothing. Just about everything required lining up and waiting, often for hours, with no guarantee that what you desired would still be available when you reached the front of the queue.

If you cannot determine access to goods by price, demand can only be allocated by first-come-first-serve and subsequent shortages, or rationing — or some combination of both. Even in a system of allocative rationing there will be systemic leakage, as unavoidable market pressures forcibly reestablish themselves through informal arrangements and favours, black markets, and of course, outright bribery.

Likewise supply. Because prices could not be set by a combination of consumer preference and the cost factors of production, Soviet farmers were forced to supply whatever meagre, underwhelming produce that fixed prices could allow them to produce.

This led to the phenomenon of ‘Bush legs’, where ordinary Russians were shocked by the size, taste and succulence of more than 200 tonnes of free market chicken imported to Russia from the United States, following a 1990 trade agreement signed by then Soviet leader, Michael Gorbachev and US President, George H. W. Bush.

Supplier? I hardly know ‘er!

Another country you might have thought of when asked to picture a line of weary citizens, queueing up to purchase basic goods of which there are limited could be the United Kingdom, where there is a severe shortage of supply relative to demand in housing — where people will literally queue in their dozens to view a small two bedroom terrace house. To rent, not to buy, of course.

Queues don’t have to be physical lines of people, as anyone trying to contact a utilities provider by phone will be well aware. The BBC reported last year that the average queue of tenants requesting to view a retail property has lengthened to 25 — up from six in 2019 — with prices increasing by 10% between July-September 2022 and 2023, using data from Rightmove.

Ria Laitmer, lettings manager at Clarkes agents in Bournemouth, said: ‘The gap between high demand and a severe shortage of rental stock at the moment is just crazy.

‘We're receiving mounting enquiries for each property to rent from would-be tenants, with queues of tenants arriving to open-house viewings and the majority being left disappointed as there are just not enough properties on the market to meet the demand.’

So far, so familiar. But unlike in the Soviet Union, we are lucky enough to be able to much more freely observe price signals, distorted as they are, in addition to noticing queues. Prices are a very important piece of information. They tell us the equilibrium point of demand relative to supply. The point at which free agents are willing to exchange goods and services.

Japanese holdouts

We are being told in the clearest possible terms, by the highest house prices since Queen Victoria was on the throne, that housing supply is not adequately able to respond to housing demand. Most goods become better or cheaper relative to incomes over time (otherwise, what would be the point in economic growth?) British housing, along with many other countries with restrictive planning policies, is an exception.

We might also look abroad and see our own equivalent of ‘Bush legs’ when we compare the quality, abundance and floorspace of housing in other, comparable developed nations. If you are a prolific scroller of TikTok, you might have noticed that videos filmed in an average American home have rooms that look much nicer and are substantially larger than TikToks filmed closer to home.

Scarcity also leads to all possible personal efficiencies being made in the consumption of goods. The UK has one of the lowest proportions of vacant dwellings in the OECD, precisely because housing is so expensive — caused by the relative shortage of homes per capita. People must make the best of what they are being allocated by the rationing system.

The UK also has shrinking floorspace per person in the faster-to-respond and expanding private rented sector, as houses are subdivided into flats, living rooms are converted to bedrooms, and cost-squeezed tenants move into smaller properties to manage their personal finances and account for the systemic supply shortage. Younger renters would like to consume housing equivalent to or better than generations before them, but this is rendered unaffordable by rationed housing supply.

It’s rather odd, given the abundance of evidence that we have a supply crisis, that we still see supply deniers or doubters in the housing policy space — appearing like Japanese holdouts hiding in ideological jungles, long after the end of the war.

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The spectrum runs from nakedly anti-growth and living standards supply denial, to softer scepticism that revolves around the idea that supply and planning reform is necessary and good, but not sufficient, to make housing more affordable. A report released by the Social Market Foundation (SMF) this week sits at this well-meaning end of the spectrum.

The report accurately describes much of the governmental and policy landscape on how our planning system restricts the supply of homes. It also fairly covers the advantages, disadvantages and potential political difficulties and disappointments that planning reforms, with the aim of increasing build-out rates, might run into. But if we follow some of the logic in the report to its conclusion we must infer that we have created a perpetual wealth machine, which would be a surprising finding.

Even where supply does increase, there is no guarantee the increase will be large or that the new units will be affordable. In fact, planning reform has in some cases been blamed for worsening the affordability crisis through gentrification, as changes to the land’s capacity increases its land value without increasing supply. Here we refer to ‘gentrification’ as the disproportionate increase in local home prices or rents relative to the region as a whole.

In cases like New York, new units worsened affordability by building at or above market rates or being designed as “luxury homes.” In these cases, policymakers promised that the deflationary effects caused by the new supply would outweigh the inflationary effects of higher prices. Yet in practice, limited supply and high prices combined to decrease affordability.

If prices do not fall when additional supply is delivered, then we have either found a way to generate infinite wealth by building as many homes as we can — or, as seems more likely, we should draw the opposite conclusion from building homes is not the long-run answer to affordability.

Instead, we should understand that housing demand is extremely inelastic, precisely because the shortage is so severe. In other words, people are so desperate to consume more housing that they will pay extortionate amounts to receive even the most desultory crumb.

The SMF report appears to assume that upward trends in planning permits is an ongoing inevitability, rather than something that may require sustained political and policy pressure to remain feasible, and focuses in on narrow time windows.

It does, however, correctly identify that planning reform that appears to improve permitting on a surface level will not result in more planning consents or houses unless it can reliably deliver government approval outcome as well as intent, and is unconstrained by the details of adjacent policy areas.

This is an argument for a better policy development and implementation, not an argument against supply-side reform as an answer to the affordability question.

More broadly, a common theme on the left end of the housing policy spectrum is (likely unintentional) data dredging to facilitate supply scepticism and avoid market-based solutions. Novel research that goes against the consensus is more likely to be noted and shared, especially if it facilitates an easy answer for politicians keen to avoid telling existing homeowners that building in their back yard will, in fact, be necessary.

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Another left focus is affordability requirement policy solutions. Such requirements necessarily make development more costly or less beneficial for developers (or these would not be mandated by policy) and are one of the ways most western governments have attempted to make housing more affordable for the last 20 years: trying to use regulation to regulate existing regulatory outcomes into into behaving properly. Price signals be damned.

This approach to housing can be expressed in various ways: affordability requirements for developments, rent controls, and the UK Government’s Help to Buy government loan scheme, Help to Buy ISAs, and Lifetime ISAs. Each are a demand-side attempt to argue a market into submission. But markets fight back.

The Great British Housing Famine

The SMF report suggests the following:

Affordability requirements following a 60-30-20 rule which provides tax incentives for property if they agree to a price such that households making 60% of the local area’s median income do not need to pay more than 30% of their wages on rent or mortgage payments in 20% of units.

A focus on affordability over supply puts the cart before the horse. If we look to other examples of extreme supply constriction, such as famines, would not advise against delivering additional grain to the affected region unless it is ‘affordable’.

Delivering one additional sack of wheat will not lower the market price. But that does not mean that it will not be hungrily consumed, or that it cannot represent the beginning of the end of a supply crisis, should it be the first of many more. If prices do not fall when supply is delivered, this indicates consumers are very hungry for the good or service they are purchasing.

Subsidising housing rents or purchase prices, or mandating ‘affordability’ (when supply is constrained) forces wider market rents and prices to rise. There is no supply escape valve that can respond to the additional capital input or restrictions, which means market prices are forced to rise with no additional quality or quantity benefit to housing consumers — unless the consumer already own housing equity, which will increase in value.

Even then, this only advantages them relative to their peers without capital. What use is an expensive, low floorspace, poor quality house compared to a cheap, high quality, high floorspace house?

Demand side subsidies with restricted supply therefore represent a large additional transfer of wealth to the existing owners of capital, topped off with access to even greater economic rents — with profound implications for wealth inequality, intergenerational inequality, and the social contract itself.

We might say this is worthwhile, if it means that housing becomes ‘affordable’ through subsidy to the least well off. But it is a cursed choice of temporary convenience, and delivers affordable housing by lottery. It forces cities to play host to inefficient labour markets, encouraging high-productivity workers to give up and seek better living standards elsewhere, while not addressing the core reason for the affordability crisis, and doubling down on the deadweight losses of restricted housing supply.

Folk economics

Focusing on policy-mandated affordability over supply seems to be an expression of ‘folk economics’ — how people intuitively understand economics. For housing, folk economics diverges substantially from the observable and measurable reality in a way that it does not for other markets.

Nall, Elmendorf, and Oklobdzija, found that: ‘30%-40% of Americans believe, contrary to basic economic theory and robust empirical evidence, that a large, exogenous increase in their region’s housing stock would cause rents and home prices to rise.’

Perhaps this is simply an expression of how illiquid real estate is. It is far easier to imagine a supply shock causing a price rise or fall in oil, and subsequently in petrol prices. Maybe the infrequency of house purchases and the emotional connection to our own homes is the cause of the distortion.

But when it comes to solutions, we can continue celebrating affordability criteria like tractor production figures, or can start to notice the large queues outside the bakery. There is a housing famine.

We have tried demand subsidies, as have many of our peer nations, time and time again — in guises as varied as Help to Buy, affordability criteria, shared ownership and targeted ISAs. Yet we still have one of the worst housing affordability crises in the world. What conclusion should we draw from this?

The experience of younger Brits increasingly resembles a game of Buckaroo, loaded up with extortionate housing costs, mounting student loans, and stagnant real incomes. How much more can my generation shoulder before the game is up for the Conservative Party and the country kicks back?

The latest saddle bag being eyed up for draping on the overburdened millennial mule is a faster increase in the state pension age rising to 68, with ex-ministers warning this will be necessary to make the pension triple lock promise affordable. When one in four pensioners live in households worth more than £1m, why is cutting back future entitlements to make current expenditure sustainable even being considered?

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It might have escaped the attention of senior politicians, but raising the state pension age is not the only way to make it sustainable. Pensioner wealth, driven by housing that is now unaffordable to the young, has ballooned. Meanwhile, pensioner poverty has halved since the late 1990s – even as working-age and child poverty has barely shifted…

To read this full article on how there are more equitable ways to make the state pension affordable, please visit i News using the link here: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/younger-people-pensions-sacrifice-rich-boomers-2978690

And in case you missed it, I also penned another article for i News back in November that I didn’t post here at the time — ‘Michael Gove’s impossible housing dilemma.’ Its theme of finding the least frictional route to yes remains just as important now as it was then:

You can access it by clicking on the following link: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/michael-goves-impossible-housing-dilemma-2821522

The marathon finishing line is behind me; I am now the proud owner of my own little slice of heaven. I may be eating takeaway pizza off cardboard boxes with a dust sheet thrown on them as a makeshift table, but I’m doing it in my own home, not my landlord’s.

Strangely, one of the most common reactions to buying, after the warm and heartfelt congratulations, is the suggestion that this means I can finally stop moaning and groaning about housing affordability. You made it! Why are you still complaining? But while I managed to get there, despite the odds being stacked against my generation, my housing woes have not been wiped clean…

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To read this full article on how finally buying my first home hasn’t undone the damage done by extortionate rents, high house prices and consequent low economic growth, please visit i News using the link here: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/finally-bought-home-mortgage-pressure-awful-2735375

It is yet another announcement being lined up by the Conservative Party on housing affordability. You could be forgiven for thinking it’s Groundhog Day – only despite the announcements, every day doesn’t stay the same. It gets worse instead, with a seemingly inexorable rise in house prices, rents and deposit requirements pulling ownership further and further out of reach.

As someone who’s been shafted by the Conservatives’ Lifetime ISA product, I have a word of advice – don’t touch these poisoned promises with a barge pole. Why should anyone trust the Conservatives on housing after 13 years of housing policy failure…

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To read this full article on how the Lifetime ISA, a product designed to help people like me get on the first rung of the housing ladder, will end up costing me thousands of pounds, please visit i News using the link here: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/regret-first-time-buyer-scheme-2704393

This stands in stark contrast to Starmer’s opposite number, Rishi Sunak, who took to the stage during the the Conservative Party’s conference in Manchester to mention the strategic failure of the planning system to build enough homes and infrastructure… not even once, instead announcing the cancellation of a once in a generation infrastructure project, without any mandate from party members or the public.

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The irony of the project ballooning in cost to one of the highest per-mile rail lines in the world, primarily due to our dysfunctional planning system and attempted NIMBY-placation that he is doing nothing to reform, should not be lost on any of us.

If this is what the Tories have to offer the British youth — ever increasing housing costs, cancelled infrastructure projects, higher taxes, and removing the ability of grown adults to chose whether they can or cannot smoke — it will find even right wing under-40s reject it for the freer economics, planning and house building deregulation and higher real wages of a Labour-run administration. The Conservative Party is freely ceding its own territory of aspiration and liberty to its opponents, even as the Canadian Tories bravely yank their territory back.

On Wednesday I set out in the i how we should, nonetheless, remain highly cautious when looking at Starmer’s vision. Conservative housing secretaries have been promising reform for the best part of 13 years, and we have little to show for it, despite, in many cases, a genuine wish and ambition to achieve reform1.

Starmer’s lofty ambitions are to be lauded, but we should look beyond announcing the construction of new towns and social housing to the deep roots and structural causes of the housing crisis, to solve the British planning system’s deep failings once-and-for-all.

Long-term decisions for a brighter future, you might say…

If my generation can’t own a home, everything Labour stands for will be forgotten

Keir Starmer set out grand and ambitious plans for building 1.5 million homes in his conference speech on Tuesday, closing what could be the last conference season before the next general election. He has promised to build a generation of new towns, echoing the Clement Attlee vision that oversaw the construction of Basildon, Stevenage and Slough, each accompanied by education, health and transport infrastructure.

Such aspiration is a soothing balm for younger generations burned by decades of housing policy failure that has seen British housing become some of the worst, and most expensive, in the world.

Yet despite our appalling housing conditions, which at the sharp end pushes people into homelessness and sees society’s most vulnerable forced to live in overcrowded, mould-infested slum housing, oft-promised reform has not yet occurred…

To read this full article on what Starmer needs to do to seal the deal and lock in planning reform that lasts rather than being a flash in the pan, please visit i News using the link here: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/generation-home-everything-labour-stands-forgotten-2677504

Student loans: How I avoided paying tens of thousands of pounds in tax

I also spoke to the i’s Callum Mason last week on the impending 9 per cent cut to my marginal tax rate that I only will see through by the grace of being born 72 hours early enough. Being born on the 29th of August put me just the right side of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s changes to the student fees and loans system, giving me a ‘Plan 1’ loan, rather than a ‘Plan 2’ loan.

The lower interest rates and far smaller fees mean I stand to be paying the full amount off within only a few years, leading to this 9 per cent marginal rate cut. This equates to hundreds of pounds a month in additional net income and really hits home how damaging the student fee changes were to the generation of students that followed my intake year, separated only by three days.

You can read his write-up here: https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/money/student-loans-absurd-born-later-cost-tens-thousands-extra-tax-2660812

One year on from Liz Truss, Sunak is sprinting to define his personal ‘ism’ in the short run up available to him before the next general election. Or as aides and advisors are characterising it: ‘Let Rishi be Rishi.’

No longer is he constrained by being Boris Johnson’s chancellor, or being forced by circumstance to mop up Truss’s mess. He’s now his own man. Anything we see now goes beyond values of staid managerialism and competence, it’s now the real deal — how he actually wants to be ideologically defined and perceived.

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What clues do we have so far as to who the real Rishi is? Delaying the transition away from internal combustion engine vehicles by five years. Putting the future of HS2 beyond Birmingham in doubt, and potentially scrapping Euston as its southern terminus in favour of Old Oak Common — a random depot station in the outer suburbs of north west London. And an end to the ‘war on motorists,’ going after Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), the 15 minute city concept of walkable neighbourhoods with local amenities, 20mph speed limits1, and creating a ‘national parking app2.’

‘One thing that I’ve realised: politicians, for too long, they always want to make short term decisions — take the easy way out — without thinking about how that is actually […] going to impact ordinary people. This war on motorists is the perfect example of that,’ he said.

If there is such a thing as the war on motorists, motorists are winning. The number of households without a car has dropped precipitously since the 1970s, and continues to fall. The percentage of households with access only to one car has held broadly steady, but this is only because the number of households with two or more cars is increasing.

And recent decades, the cost of rail and bus and coach journeys has risen far more quickly and substantially than the cost of motoring.

Meanwhile, the fuel duty escalator has been proudly frozen by each of the last seven conservative chancellors we have had over the last 13 years, making fuel duty 37% less expensive in real terms than in 2010. Does any of this look like a war on motorists?

As Himbonomics has previously argued, there are a great many reasons to actually wage such a war, given that cars make us more sedentary, obese, likely to die or be seriously injured in vehicular collisions, give us worse overall health outcomes, and make the very places we call home noisy, unsafe, polluted and ugly. Long-run focused policy should not be favourable to cars — Sunak is campaigning against the last 50 years of policy progress on urban and suburban design and living.

But reason this line is being trotted out by Sunak is that it’s a simple and effective ‘wedge issue,’ a topic that divides, or puts a ‘wedge’ between a united political front. Brexit is the prime example: it cut straight through the Labour electoral coalition of city liberals and suburban and rural ex-industrial voters in the North, pitting aligned economic values against misaligned social values.

Herein lies great danger for the Labour Party. Sunak’s fake war against the ‘war on motorists’ is a wedge issue trap. It’s demonstrably utter bollocks. But the very act of a shadow minister calling out this nonsense on, let’s say, the BBC’s Politics Live, means stepping straight into the Sunak bear trap, and appearing to go on the offensive against the 70 per cent of households that do have access to cars.

As reasonable as the minister might be, and as backed by evidence as they might be, they will be called out as backing higher motoring costs during a cost of living crisis, driving a wedge between Labour’s currently united voter coalition. It’s one thing for a minor newsletter for urbanism and growth nerds to point out that Sunak’s policymaking is a crock of shite — it’s quite another thing for a Labour MP to argue for the same publicly, and to then be unfavourably clipped by opposition staffers for negative campaigning. Labour should avoid feeding into this divisive campaigning narrative at all costs.

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Sunak’s next policy announcement as part of the 2023 Conservative Party Conference was a rejection of cities — the country’s engines of growth: ‘For too long our economy has focused on cities — at the expense of towns,’ he said, adding: ‘We need to change our economic geography — away from cities.’

Reality doesn’t care about your wedge issues, Mr Sunak. By gunning for towns, you are limiting the already meagre growth of this country. All else being equal, the bigger the city, the more productive its average worker, with most productivity growth occurring in the densest areas.

The chart above demonstrating the relationship between city size and productivity only covers the United States — if we start looking at western European cities, we see an unusual relationship emerge. The relationship between city size and productivity holds — except for Britain.

Which leads us back to the poor state of Britain’s public transport infrastructure, which takes a back seat to cars. By the measure of whether or not cities above 250,000 people have a tram, metro or urban light rail system, the UK is one of the worst performing developed western nations. A war on motorists? The real war is against public transport.

So why doesn’t the productivity-city size relationship hold in Britain? The answer appears to lie in the poor provision of public — not private — transport in major British conurbations. Adjust for the number of people able to visit city centres within 30 minutes by public transport, and the correlation becomes much stronger. This supports the theory of urban agglomeration that the meeting of minds and the sharing of goods, services and ideas is made possibly only by the mixing and efficiencies that well-connected cities enable.

But reality isn’t the priority right now — cars are, alongside a bunch of discordant policies that sound like they were stolen from closing time at the Dog and Duck. Sunak is is prioritising superficial, populist and short-term wedge issues that speak to the politics of the next 6-12 months. And for what, another 5 years of this shower?

He is not bringing forward policies to make the country a better, more productive, richer place in the long run — with the ability to fund the state services the public desires. Labour would only take the credit, anyway.

Instead, Sunak is salami slicing the few public infrastructure projects that remain (like HS2), in the process removing the benefits while retaining the costs. He’s backing car-dependent uglification of our cities and suburbs, against our long-run health interests. He’s backing the convenience of the past.

All under the banner of ‘Long-term decisions for a brighter future.’ It’s laughable. If he were serious about long-term decisions for a brighter future, the first policy pledge would be a huge increase in housebuilding, and the second would be on investing in public transport infrastructure. I won’t hold my breath.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might enjoy these other articles on what Sunak is all about: