A third runway for Heathrow; the construction of several reservoirs; a ‘growth corridor’ between Oxford and Cambridge. These are some of the projects that, as of last week, have the public backing of the Chancellor.
Is it thin gruel that Rachel Reeves is serving us? It is certainly overdue gruel. Those projects have been in stasis for decades. And given how many legal obstacles they must still overcome, the projects will not reach the finish line for many years more. Cold gruel, in other words.
Nevertheless, Reeves and Labour deserve some credit. That these projects are economic no-brainers was not enough to persuade the Tories to support them. As successive Chancellors understood, the legal scales are tilted towards the Nimbys and environmentalists. Reeves and her party are going ahead regardless. They know that late, cold gruel is better than no gruel at all.
Still, we might well ask: what if the Government was more ambitious? What if it drew its ideas not from the policymakers of the 1990s, but from today’s cutting edge? On our podcast, ‘Anglofuturism’, Calum Drysdale and I speak to experts whose ideas might help arrest and reverse Britain’s economic and cultural decline. What follows are several proposals from that cutting edge.
They are propositions that would put rocket fuel in the country’s economy. They are bold, innovative and in some cases demanding. But they are also achievable.
1/ Become a robotics superpower
The British robotics and automation scenes are years behind where they ought to be. Electricity is expensive and imported labour is cheap, a situation that discourages investment in the technologies that should be driving progress in manufacturing. Rian Chad Whitton, an industrial analyst, proposes that the Government create a robotics agency. Its purpose would be to bring Britain’s robot density – that is, robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers – in line with that of our European neighbours. ‘Buy robots in bulk for discounts and sell them at competitive rates to businesses,’ Whitton says. (These robots would include robot arms and automated guided vehicles, which cart materials around warehouses.) ‘Hire about 100 top system integrators from East Asia and Europe.’ The new organisation would be about the size of ARIA, which is the Government’s arm’s-length innovation agency. It might oversee a robotic campus, run by a group such as the Wallenbergs, a family of Swedish industrialists. These measures would help to spread existing types of automation. But improving our robotics ecosystem could also help Britain pioneer the forthcoming generation of highly capable new equipment. Tesla’s humanoid robots are on the march – we should help lead the way. The outcome would be cheaper goods, a beefed-up manufacturing sector, and hands-on assistance with all manner of physical tasks.
2/ Build an exascale computer
As in many fields, Britain has great expertise in AI but is thwarting its own progress. A hobbled economy makes it harder to attract top talent; terrible mismanagement of our energy infrastructure makes computation unnecessarily expensive. The Government’s new AI plan is an excellent start. An even more aggressive version, the UK’s technology trade association suggests, would initiate the construction of an exascale computer, i.e. one of the world’s fastest. Rather than remain reliant on Taiwan, we should also give more support to our semiconductor chips industry. And all of this should be coupled with well-funded work on foundational AI safety.
3/ Plan dozens of new towns – all of them beautiful
Last July, the think tank UK Day One proposed that a new town should be built at the intersection of two railway lines in Bedfordshire. That intersection is currently the site of Tempsford, a small village. In the near future, it could be the home of a new town, one within reach of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Tempsford should be built in one of the traditional styles that people generally prefer to modernist buildings; think of the charm of Bath, for instance. Many more towns should be built in parallel, each of them in similarly attractive fashion. The Government should reverse its decision to close the Office for Place, whose aim was to help British development become more humane and attractive. Nicholas Boys-Smith, who was the agency’s chair, should be given near-extensive powers over the design of these new towns. To streamline these developments, we could make use, where possible, of Crown land; needs must. We must expand Oxford and Cambridge and build town extensions along the railway line that will connect them. Let a thousand Edinburgh New Towns bloom.
New towns alone will not solve the housing crisis; the Government must also address the shortfall of housing in cities. The Street Votes proposal, which would allow residents of a street to vote for blanket planning permission to add another story to their homes, should be enacted immediately, as should proposals to make it easier to redevelop the land surrounding Tube stations. Councils should be given the tools to make it easier to regenerate council estates. This practice allows the replacement of cramped, ugly blocks of flats, marooned in little-used moats of grass, with more spacious and more plentiful housing that makes efficient use of its plot. Residents tend to be strongly in favour of such redevelopments. Finally, regeneration will be much easier if listed status is removed, by default, from all 20th-century buildings.
4/ Kneecap judicial review, pass the LFG bill
There are many reasons why Britain struggles so terribly to build. One of those reasons is the ease with which those who are opposed to development can request judicial review – a legal proceeding that creates huge costs and delays. As the campaign group Looking for Growth (LFG) has argued, the Government should make it harder to obtain judicial review – thus making big infrastructure projects, such as the construction of railway, a little less easy to obstruct. Some have called for Britain to quit the Aarhus Convention, an international treaty that gives the public the power to intervene in this manner. LFG does not go that far, but has prepared a parliamentary bill that would, via various means, make new infrastructure more feasible. As a minimum, Parliament should pass that bill at the earliest opportunity.
5/ Build a spaceport that can accommodate Starship
Ours is the century of perfected spacelight and a booming space economy. The economic activity undertaken in space is already larger than many countries’ GDP, and it is likely to multiply in size. Satellites aid communication and data-gathering; microgravity makes it easier to develop certain forms of drugs and perform challenging kinds of manufacturing; asteroids will one day provide bonanzas of rare earth metals. Britain has an enviable space sector, and should be playing a more significant role than it is today. We could build a spaceport large enough to accommodate Starship, which is SpaceX’s gargantuan flagship; we would do this in partnership with SpaceX or its rival, Blue Origin. We could reserve 1% of government spending, the space expert Peter Hague proposes, for space development and colonisation. In the long term, we should aspire to plant a Union flag in lunar regolith or Martian dust; in the medium-term, we could become a space manufacturing superpower, securing a strong return on government investment.
6/ Avert the Boriswave crisis
In 2020, Boris Johnson’s government attempted to patch holes in Britain’s labour force by making it much easier for foreign workers to take those jobs. The result has been the largest influx of people in Britain’s history – an annual injection that, if it were a single city, would be the third-largest in the country. Many ‘Boriswave’ workers earn low wages and have brought many dependents, such as those in social care, meaning that they will take far more out of the public purse then they will put in. By default, the members of the Boriswave will soon become eligible for indefinite leave to remain, which would lock in the situation for good. The cost of the Boriswave visa route, it is estimated, could therefore reach £84 billion – a vast and unintended liability for Boris’ short-termist fix.
In order to prevent what they fear will be a fiscal catastrophe, some commentators have begun to call for changes to the rules. For instance, workers could be required to meet a certain threshold of taxpaying in order to be eligible for indefinite leave to remain. In the long term, argues Tom Jones, co-author of the Adam Smith Institute report ‘Selecting the Best’, Britain must adopt a new immigration model. It must wean itself off its current short-termist immigration policy, replacing it with a more sustainable model that is designed to attract high-skilled workers and encourage high-tech automation. Without a change of policy, says Jones, Britain will not be able to afford the investment required to unlock long-term prosperity here and abroad. He says: ‘We cannot have a new economic model without a new immigration system; we simply cannot both afford en-masse non-contributory immigration and the high-tech of Anglofuturism.’
7/ Remove unnecessary hurdles to nuclear power
British energy is some of the most expensive in the world. This state of affairs results in great financial hardship for many people in this country. It is also throttling industrial activity by making it prohibitively expensive. Nuclear power is our best means by which to provide reliable, cheap energy 24/7, but it is held back by regulation that forces each new reactor design to be assessed as if it were a new technology. This is one of the many regulatory requirements that have made this clean, safe energy source prohibitively expensive. Instead, new designs should be approved as a cohort rather than individually. UK Day One made this argument in January, also making the case for the UK to fast-track the approval reactor designs that have shown excellence abroad. Both these proposals should be enacted. Because we are so appallingly behind on firm power, we might need to temporarily relax our net zero rules and make time-limited use of North Sea gas. Ultimately, we should pursue energy abundance rather than simply net zero. We should aim to install a small modular reactor beneath every village green.
8/ Build geothermal field labs
Another source of 24/7 clean power is the Earth’s core. Geothermal power, which makes use of this heat, would be a terrific addition to nuclear power. A new generation of geothermal power stations relies on underground networks of fractures. Water is pumped through these fractures, picking up heat along the way. But it is tricky to design these fractured reservoirs such that they retain heat over the course of several years. It is trickier still to make use of the tremendous heat that lies a few miles deeper. Pump water that deep and it will become incredibly dense in heat energy – but your electronics and your well casing will melt. The US has funded a geothermal field lab that is testing out different techniques on behalf of commercial players. The British Government should do the same, building field labs that cater to different British geologies. At least one of these labs should be told to develop the technologies we need to make use of those high temperatures many miles deep.
9/ Bring about a baby boom
Britain’s declining birth rate is a one-way ratchet. The older the population becomes, the more subservient our country’s policymaking becomes to the elderly. That means we build less and devote an ever-higher proportion of GDP to pensions and social care – leaving even less money for child-rearing. To bring about the baby boom that would reverse this demographic decline, we should increase the supply of housing, lower the cost of childcare, and perhaps find a way of bestowing social status on parents of large broods. Could the King bestow a medal on the most prolific mothers? (Something like that happens in France.) And could we use technology to spare mothers the ordeal of difficult pregnancies and painful births? The pronatalist think-tanker Aria Babu has argued in favour of the development of artificial wombs. This would be a challenge of great complexity – one whose success would rely on well-crafted changes to existing regulation, as well as a much deeper understanding of the way a woman’s body supports a foetus.
10/ Prepare to exploit the Antarctic Peninsula
Thanks to the explorers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain claims an area of the Antarctic eight times larger than Great Britain itself. Antarctica is protected by a treaty, but contains resources of extraordinary value – not only copious amounts of oil and gas, but also gold, uranium, and rare earth metals. Most of these resources are concealed deep under ice sheets that are more than a mile thick. But Britain’s claim includes the Antarctic Peninsula, whose vast tracts of exposed rock make it a much better proposition for resource extraction. Other countries are multiplying their Antarctic bases. It seems likely that some of these countries are ensuring their readiness for a revision of the treaty, whose terms can be re-evaluated from 2048. Britain finds its claim contested by Chile and Argentina, and new contenders might muscle in too. Others might muscle in. The Government should therefore increase the size of its presence in Antarctica. It should build new bases, add ports, and do as much prospecting as the treaty permits. (A well-resourced American city-builder has offered to work with the Government to dot the territory with geodesic domes, which can house humans in inhospitable environments.)
Britain should also be prepared to defend its claim, and to turn a resourceful eye towards its other overlooked possessions. As has been argued by the Anglofuturist essayist Aris Roussinos, the Government should make much better use of its other overseas territories – the Falklands, the islands in the Caribbean, and several others.
This is neither a manifesto nor a comprehensive list. Many more ideas abound. Other Anglofuturist-sympathetic correspondents have suggested that Britain should build Crossrail 2 (and Crossrail 3, and 4?); cut VAT from the retrofitting of heritage buildings; electrify all our railway lines; get the Church of England to undertake the biggest almshouse-building programme in a generation; build a Wales-sized island in the North Sea, on Dogger Bank; make the King our Housing Czar, with default planning permission for everything he wants to build; begin a reform of the Civil Service with an issuing of ‘Fork in the Road‘ letters to everyone in Whitehall; rid the civil service of every process and team that adds avoidable friction to recruitment, retention and decision-making; multiply the salaries of MPs and the best civil servants, so as to attract a better calibre of public servant; create a new order of valour for the top 20 taxpayers each year; and make use of our first refusal on Greenland. That would make two British Hyperboreas. There is no shortage of good ideas, we just need politicians brave enough to implement them.
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