Weekend reading: Harping on about Brexit, 10th anniversary edition
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Pedant alert(!): It is indeed a decade since the Referendum was held, but the UK officially ceased to be a Member State of the EU in Jan 2020, and then there was a transition period, during which the UK was treated like a Member State, until 2021. I appreciate the spirit of the article, but we should keep in mind that it’s only been about 5-6 years since the full changes actually came into effect. So the first half of your timeline shows the effects of preparing to leave EU, not being outside EU legislation and the single market. Of course, you could argue that this initial period was still just as damaging.
@Mirror Man — True enough. To be honest though I think those years were probably even worse for the UK economy, since the chaos and uncertainty effectively threw businesses into paralysis, or else making choices just in case (e.g. investing in Paris or Frankfurt instead, at the margin). Political distraction in the mix, too.
We also have plenty of the costs front-loaded in the earlier years, too (e.g. the beginning of starting to create duplicate functions for stuff that wouldn’t be done by the EU, setting up new border arrangements) although that would have created some economic activity.
These things are taken into account of course in detail by the OBR, Goldman, and the several others who’ve modelled counterfactual stronger economies if we hadn’t have Brexited.
Just to add, it looks as though ‘Wankernomics by James Schloeffel’ is actually £7.49 on Kindle.
@Hapshade — Ack, thanks. It definitely was 99p a couple of weeks ago, it must have been a time-limited deal. Copy amended!
At the risk of adding another Guardian link, I think this is worth a read too: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/12/spacex-ipo-elon-musk-trillionaire
It is fairly damning.
It was a stupid idea then and it’s still a stupid idea but I have no idea how we get out of it. I’ve genuinely felt like I’m living in 1930s Germany this week. It frightens me and makes me sad. Yet teflon frog face (insulting to frogs, I know), comes out smelling of roses and in line to be PM in 2029. He should have been arrested for incitement to violence this week but NO – we don’t get that lucky.
While Labour have squandered their majority – even if we all know they were handed the poison chalice & probably had little chance of avoiding drinking it.
Although it is a decade since the vote, you have to remember that it took Parliament almost 5 years to reach the exit deal. An awful lot of the lost returns ought to be put at the politicians door. This article certainly helped refresh my memory of those awful years
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/2020/06/14/brexit-and-parliament-where-did-it-all-go-wrong/
I notice a fair number of reform voters seem to not necessarily want less welfare state, but want more if it for themselves – the doctors appointments, the council houses, etc. To them anti immigration/ ending free movement through Brexit was an effort to hoard what was left of the welfare state.
So I think between Reform and Labour supporters, the electorate just hasn’t been on board with austerity, so incentives to become more productive never materialised, since so many are now on UC and penalised for buying a house, doing overtime, etc
There is a special place in hell reserved for Boris Johnson. I look forward to the day when he gets there
Well if it had been a success we would be hearing all about it on this 10th anniversary. Embarrassed silence all round it seems. And yes, the main driver behind it is still there and apparently free to incite violence against people living ordinary lives.
Remember all those Brexit apologists who said ‘we’re not racist, why not have immigrants from all over the world instead of just the EU’, not much evidence of those views this week.
The licence to spread this hate openly in public started with the Brexit campaign.
I do think for Reeves, Starmer, etc, it’s a convenient scapegoat, so they can say that cutting welfare isn’t necessary, just get back into Europe instead
I live in Southampton, so saw the troubles over Henry Nowak first hand. Fair to say a lot of those involved are probably reform voters. What I would say about them, as a demographic, I doubt they’re paying more in taxes than they’re costing in welfare. So fully agree with MA #8..
There’s not much hope here, but hope, when it does appear, can do so from unexpected places.
Andy Burnham isn’t going (I fear) to keep Faragism out of Number 10 in 2029, but, irony of ironies, a split on the far right between so called ‘Reform’ (reform what and how exactly?) with Rupert Lowe’s misnamed ‘Restore’ (which fictional version of the UK’s manufactured past are we meant to regress to?) and ‘Tommy Robinson’ (Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon) of the so called EDL might (just might) keep NF out of power, given first past the post.
You have to take your wins against the far right as and how they arise. Never interrupt your opponent when it’s making a mistake.
If only the rest of the (sane) spectrum (granted that the Tories are a dead loss here) can unite against the far right, and effectively electorally cooperate; instead (as the centre right, centre, centre left and left are apt to do) of shooting itself in the collective foot, again.
@Sarah, “Teflon frog face / insult to frogs” … hilarious description!
I agree with you. Frogs serve a purpose environmentally. Firage is more like a cane toad – bulbous, disgusting and desperately difficult to eradicate. Our version is Pauline Hanson (One Nation).
@Frugalist, I liked the link expounding the underrated enjoyment of dilly-dallying.
Personally, I love pottering, ie gently completing a few chores, then setting off to purchase fresh bread/ingredients, stopping for a coffee, oh a bookshop, a conversation here and there, and whoops it’s lunchtime … I love days that flow gently … dilly-dallying is equally as important as big memory dividends.
Brexit was a fantastic idea, it just wasn’t done right.
Just like communism.
It’s nonsense of course, the Brexiters were in power and got the Brexit they wanted, the most extreme version. But the political shambles of the last 10 years give some fodder to the idea. Ironically Brexit has been at the root of the political mess. It destroyed the centre-right, moved divisive rhetoric and racism into the mainstream, and provided a playbook how to manipulate public opinion through social media.
Now we have 3 or 4 parties all pandering to the “rural, uneducated, xenophobic, obstinate Brexiter”: the fascists, the Tories (or what little remains of them), and Starmer’s version of Labour. It’s nuts. These voters are a minority. There’s a centrist and centre-left majority that could be rallied with a bold programme to move towards the EU and rejoin.
Ten years on and the discontent that led to Brexit has still not been addressed. The people living with the consequences of deindustrialising our economy are still suffering and resentfully kicking out. Until that is addressed the rest is window dressing.
Encouraging a perception of those same people as stupid is not doing us any favours either. Just consider the case of the girl labelled Sophie of Dundee. Her assailants were found guilty this week but what most people will remember is the savaging she received on social media. Clearly “believe all women” as per Me Too didn’t, and still doesn’t, extend to girls from their background. That has been noted and will be hard to shift.
Brexit for me? The Brexit vote in 2016 altered my investing behaviour and I totally purged my portfolio of any trace of home bias at all. The value of my property certainly stagnated at best and probably lost out in real terms especially if measured in Euros. So yes relatively speaking I am poorer but will not be eating cat food anytime soon.
For me the obvious problem is that the 9/10 decile as a cohort are still rather insulated from the overall effect of Brexit (which was part of the problem to begin with) and seem as disconnected as ever from the rest of the population. Social cohesion is now a major problem that will be extremely hard to fix. Fixing the economy first and foremost is probably the only option and for that the current administration have spectacularly failed because they are too cowardly to administer the tough love required to the electorate.
On a non Brexit note has anyone else picked up on an uptick in ‘pensioners are taking all their pensions at once and frittering it away’ comment / noise recently? Reading the Which article it seems to be very much the small pots end but I’m sure I read something about the pensions select committee suggesting they were starting to think pensions freedoms, and specifically the ability to choose how to draw down, might not be such a good idea based on the same sort of figures.
Of course I might have just dreamt it and have my spidey senses tingling unnecessarily.
While the emotional temperature of this debate remains high, analysing the situation through a purely structural lens reveals that the outcome of the last decade was driven by systemic political friction and shifting global dynamics, rather than the intellectual capacity of the electorate.
Five undeniable factors shift the context of this discussion:
1. The Domestic Implementation Failure
As Bassavoce (#7) correctly noted via the UCL Constitution Unit, the 2016 mandate was subjected to nearly five years of unprecedented legislative gridlock and shifting executive strategies. This prolonged internal friction destroyed the UK’s initial negotiating leverage and front-loaded years of market uncertainty before the exit terms were even fully realised. The final terms were not a clean execution of a cohesive economic plan, but a sub-optimal compromise born of domestic political paralysis.
2. Protectionist vs. Dynamic Global Growth Models
While the UK navigates post-exit frictions, the trading bloc it departed is increasingly operating as an inward-looking economy. According to data from the Draghi Report on European Competitiveness, the EU-US GDP gap widened from 15% in 2002 to 30%. The US achieved this lead by embracing a younger, high-growth dynamic: heavily funding technological innovation, out-investing Europe 4-to-1 in venture capital, and actively scaling new industries. In contrast, the EU’s heavily regulated, protectionist framework operates as a closed shop to rapid world trade, trapping it in a low-growth cycle.
3. The Demographic Trap and Global Dynamism
Saddled with an aging demographic, the continent faces an existential hurdle. Official data highlights that the EU median age has reached an unprecedented 44.9 years. This stands in stark contrast to the rest of the world’s emerging economies, where the broader median age sits at a vastly more competitive 30 years, with some of the fastest-growing global competitors operating as young as 25 to 29 years. A society oriented primarily around managing a contracting workforce and preserving vast welfare models is fundamentally ill-equipped to compete with these younger, expanding global economies. Failing to pivot toward these advancing international markets ensures being permanently left behind.
4. Geopolitical Fragility and the Balkan Precedent
The argument for integration often overlooks the deep instabilities inside Europe’s immediate sphere, notably the Western Balkans where seven nations coexist under historical strain. The institutional paralysis of continental Europe in managing its own backyard is well-documented: during the 1990s ethnic conflicts, a ‘United Europe’ watched passively, leading to failures so profound that an independent investigation forced the entire Dutch government to resign in 2002 over the Srebrenica catastrophe.
Ultimately, it required US military and diplomatic intervention to bring the warring factions to the negotiating table. Decades later, with these candidate states stalled by EU bureaucracy, long-held historical grudges are reawakening, creating a volatile security risk right in the middle of Europe that adds directly to the broader threat from Moscow.
5. Misdiagnosing the Electorate
Dismissing a major segment of the voters as ‘uneducated’ misdiagnoses the root cause of political volatility, a point accurately raised by Azamino (#16). Academic and economic analyses show that the 2016 vote, and the subsequent rise of populist parties globally, is a direct reaction to decades of regional deindustrialisation and a heavily centralised knowledge economy that left specific regions behind.
Ultimately, evaluating the UK’s position requires weighing domestic policy choices not against a generalised, idealised version of Europe, but against a continent facing documented structural stagnation, unresolved border anxieties, and declining global relevance.
It is worth being cautious with comparisons to 1930s Germany in these discussions. Unless someone actually lived through that era, drawing parallels between a modern democratic debate and a totalitarian regime can unintentionally minimise the unique horrors the real victims faced.
Resorting to personal insults and mocking someone’s physical appearance also tends to take away from the validity of any point being made, and usually suggests a lack of factual arguments to rely on instead.
If we want to understand why populist politics are growing globally, it helps to look past superficial name-calling and focus on the real economic drivers. Decades of regional deindustrialisation have left huge chunks of the population feeling completely ignored, which is a structural issue that goes far deeper than individual personalities.
@DH “If only the rest of the (sane) spectrum (granted that the Tories are a dead loss here) can unite against the far right, and effectively electorally cooperate”
This vanity and squabbling is the nub of the matter for those of you concluding that all the “hard”right are uneducated racist barbarians who spend all their time working out how to hate. Most don’t hate; they fear, in varying degrees, and they love, and are old world conservative. They are largely respectful and like to discuss issues, rather than redefine or make up bad sounding words and then throw them as insults to shut down any conversation. Yes, unfortunately, there are some passionate yobs, too, but a lack of education and respect is what creates fear and hopelessness.
Fabian, deceitful by definition, Labour currently appear to be following a destructive ideology for the UK rather than make any attempt at positivity, optimism or growth. They came in screaming about how doomed we all were with phrases like “black hole”. Pessimism is never a good idea from a leader. Respectful reality, maybe, but not blame and doom. They want to enslave the nation to the state through debt and taxes; this much is clear. Starmer thinks that things come true once you say or write them down. That only really works in something like a dictatorship.
The vanity, power grabbing and handbag scrapping of the 2 party politics has never been greater or so distasteful. Neither had leadership who ever wanted to make the most out of Brexit; they just wanted to get by and ignore it, assuming that we would drift back anyway. Cameron was arrogant enough to think Brexit would never be voted for. Do not forget that much of the vote was two fingers up at the state; not the result of spreadsheets formed from highly financially educated deep dive research of economic forecasts. I will never forget or forgive the lack of factual education or discussion from the BBC News (etc) service at the time who just wanted the whole episode to purely be their divisive topic of the day. It was appalling and they let the nation down utterly.
Neither party have wanted to address large problems in our society, including the fact that the more you import different cultures and religions, the more extremism, violence and division you will get. The more you are seen to look after those people for doing nothing, the more anger you will get from those locals who consider they have worked to have nothing, and the more anger you will get from those who imported the hard way round.
These are some of the reasons why those barbaric “uneducated” people who do not want the UK to turn into a Lebanon are looking at Lowe with Restore. Ben Habib has effectively paused Advance. The Tories and Labour happily imported votes and cheap labour while at the same time saying how something must be done about it. Labour has also resorted to lowering the voting age to infants. Considering they are in power, their vote grabbing policy only matches that of the Greens. They have now removed all hereditory apolitical piers to allow them to be replaced with politicians. This was never the intended function of the House of Lords. Is this because they think the future of the country or democracy will be better served? For a while, democracy used to be a random herding of the citizens of Greece who were then forced to make decisions for the masses for a year! If you were randomly chosen to lead and did a bad job, you got lynched, tough. I am not thinking this is completely a good idea but it is the apathy and laziness of the citizens that subcontracted the duties out to a committee of jobsworths, whose interests are now actually served by apathy and laziness from the public, and where now the final vaneer of integrity has vanished.
Lowe was not educated as a politician. He has worked. He does not want to be the deity of the Restore party, as Farage does of Reform, he wants citizens to get involved in politics. His vision is for what used to be called common sense to come back. It is as conservative as it gets.
Reform now contains a significant number of the ex-Tory cabinet simply because these politicians still want a job. They can’t do anything else in life because most modern politicians don’t come from real life. The political class’s need that the citizens remain uneducated has never been greater. The lack of focus on improving the future by the destructive main British media, who trade with and have just as much power as the politicians, if not more, has never been greater.
The biggest immediate change that could have happened because of Brexit was an Australia style immigration policy, including getting out of the ECHR. It never happened. This is a financial website and I have mentioned finance little. Perhaps this is why so many of you find the attitudes of many so puzzling and must resort to assuming low intelligence and insults. I voted remain.
on the Which article – I think people are just being realistic about the trend in tax rates. Of the 460000 pensions withdrawn, 410000 were below 29k. If someone has a regular income of 20k, closes a 20k SIPP and moves it into an ISA, that makes sense. As long as they stay below the higher rate threshold.
I expect the tax-free lump sum to be axed and plan to withdraw my lump sum in full as soon as I can.
The point made by Always Late @21 regarding the institutional failure of the political class is central to understanding the last decade. It highlights a critical reality: the 2016 vote was, for many, a systemic rejection of an arrogant state apparatus, rather than a decision made via financial spreadsheets. Dismissing these voters as simply ‘uneducated’ completely misdiagnoses the situation.
Three distinct factors reinforce this perspective:
1. The Managed Failure of Implementation
As the comment rightly notes, successive leadership teams never actually wanted to execute or maximise the strategic advantages of leaving. Instead of using the exit to aggressively pivot toward a high-growth, dynamic global model, the political establishment treated it as a damage-limitation exercise. This administrative apathy and five years of legislative gridlock front-loaded the economic friction while delivering none of the structural changes—such as genuine, controlled immigration reform—voters explicitly demanded.
2. The Decline of Political Integrity and Accountability
The reference to the historical Greek model of democracy points to a profound modern problem: the rise of a professional, careerist political class that has never operated in the real world. When the state apparatus and the mainstream media focus on short-term political vanity and superficial narratives rather than long-term national productivity, public apathy and deep resentment are the inevitable results.
3. The Global Populist Reality
This is not a uniquely British phenomenon. Across Europe and the West, populist movements are growing because centrist governments happily imported cheap labour to mask a complete lack of domestic productivity growth, while ignoring the social and cultural anxieties of local populations.
Ultimately, the current state of the UK is less an indictment of Brexit as a concept, and more a textbook demonstration of what happens when an elite political class refuses to honour a democratic mandate, manages decline rather than growth, and defaults to insulting the electorate instead of addressing structural failures.”
@Barney, @Always Late
Lots of words there, many of them AI. No meaningful recognition of the street violence that is being stoked up, pandered to, encouraged by the likes of Farage, Lowe etc.
@ Trufflehunt 24 Using an ‘AI’ label as a blanket dismissal is a convenient way to avoid addressing the core argument, but it doesn’t change the underlying facts.
The point, which came directly from a Remain voter (Always Late @21), is that labelling large swathes of the population as simply uneducated or violent completely misses the mark. It ignores the real, documented economic drivers and regional deindustrialisation that have fuelled populist movements across the globe.
Condemning street violence should go without saying, but if we refuse to honestly discuss the structural failures of the political class that led us here, we are just treating the symptoms while ignoring the cause….happy hunting.
@Barney (and everyone) — Please don’t post AI-generated text into the comments. I accept it has some value at pulling out interesting points, but it opens the floodgates to AI slop overwhelming human discussion. I’m alert to it and will delete.
For those talking about calling people stupid or worse, I very consciously didn’t do that in my article. It was certainly for all but the sovereignty diehards a stupid *decision*, given that zero of its aims were achieved and they always had very little prospect of being so.
I had an email from a Leave voter who said “I ignore all this, you will never be objective”. This in response to an article specifically detailing all the key claims — and failures — with links/sourcing, as to how Brexit has turned out. Who exactly is not being objective? Wake up.
The time for arguing about subjectivity is over. Whatever it might have been (and as has been said, it has a lot in communism with the ‘no, we meant a different Brexit’ defence now being waged by some) it is what it was, and the only way it could have been better (economically) would have been for it be less Brexity, and for Boris Johnson to have become a monk instead of the Prime Minister.
There might have been some value in arguing the toss two years in, but we’re ten years in and it’s an abject failure, that has made especially the economy but also our politics worse. That is what all the evidence shows. A diehard Brexiteer might argue about how much worse, but there is no credible way to claim it has made anything better except on a narrow sovereignty angle. And on that, again, five/six PMs in a decade…
Cheers all.
Dismissing highly organised, factual text as ‘AI slop’ is a lazy defence mechanism used to avoid a difficult debate initiated by you. It matches how the anonymous emailer was dismissed for saying the article isn’t objective. Objectivity is often in the eye of the beholder, but my comments are purely factual. Hard to accept, but it’s your ball, your game.
However, your moderating should include the personal comments too, because without intervention, it’ll descend into farce.
@Barney — I ran your comment through three AI text detectors and they all said AI generated. One said 100% AI generated.
I read text 60-80 hours a week and am highly attuned to it.
You’re not doing your case any favours I’m afraid by deflecting this way. It doesn’t invite engagement.
We can all type “Tell me how Brexit could have been a success with sourced facts” into an LLM and get an answer. We don’t need other posters to do it for us.
Cheers.
Regarding this difference between objective and subjective. 🙂
While it would be foolish and mendacious of me to deny I have had a position on Brexit from day one and I am inclined to see how it’s developed in light of that position, as I have shown in my post the facts speak for themselves. The email commenter dismissed my article as ‘not objective’ while hardly being objective himself and providing no evidence of Brexit success. He was being subjective.
Talking about institutional failings or the backdrop that led to the ill-conceived vote for Brexit is valid in itself. Yes the country has problems, my article lists a bunch, and they are certainly not all due to Brexit.
But explaining the vote (again) does not somehow make Brexit a success. We know the vote was for Leave. If there weren’t reasons for the vote then the Leave win wouldn’t have happened.
We can and have debated those reasons ad infinitum. But this article is looking at what we actually got on the back of it, which is bugger all.
Let’s look at an example of subjectivity.
Let’s imagine — bear with me — that somehow Brexit had been a success.
The big Brexit tenth anniversary parade is packing the streets of London this weekend and no wonder! Despite all the naysaying, the Leave voters have been vindicated! Britain is not only growing faster than Europe — which it did anyway during its time in the EU — but is now clearly racing far ahead of EU growth! The comprehensive trade deals signed with the US, China, India and others were one in eye who dismissed talk of such anytime soon as fantastical. And look at the health service! With £350m extra a week, waiting queues have been halved since 2016.
Meanwhile having taken back control of its borders, the UK has solved the small boats problem that apparently could not be unilaterally resolved. Immigration is a settled argument, with only the best and the brightest coming to the UK. No wonder the racism that was rearing its head in 2016 has abated.
In the final analysis Brexit gave Britain the shot in the arm it needed, with dynamism across the waterfront, taxes falling and citizens prospering, welfare payments receding, and an unimagined enthusiasm for political leadership reminiscent more of the 1950s than the troubled naughties.
Imagine that was true. (As opposed to being wrong in reality on every count.)
And then imagine I wrote a 10th anniversary post saying “The thing is, none of these supposedly good things capture the real harm done by Brexit. You can’t measure it in numbers. But you feel it in the streets or in the coffee shops. Those of us in the know, KNOW”.
Or something like that.
That would be a subjective view. And it is essentially what those who still will not accept the abject failure of Brexit are doing, from the other side.
You’ve completely missed the point of the data. If you actually read the comment instead of running it through software, you’d see it didn’t argue how Brexit was a ‘success’ at all—it used the EU’s own Draghi Report to show that the bloc we left is facing structural stagnation.
The facts don’t change just because you don’t like how they are structured. But as I said, it’s your blog and your game. I’ll leave you to your echo chamber, but hopefully, you start applying that 60-80 hours of reading a week to the toxic personal insults on here too. Cheers.
Lot of doom mongering articles in the Guardian re climate change. Found this article outlining the real impact this is having on mental health, when the reality is not as apocalyptic as it seems.
https://mishaglouberman.substack.com/p/how-worried-should-you-be-about-climate
What I’ve never understood is why all we Remainers did not get our out collective act together well *before* the Referendum. “Day three in the Big Brexit House” was at least four days too late. I despair of my own side on this debate. We handed a win to the forces of chaos, hate and delusion. IMHO Corbyn and Cameron have as much blame in this fiasco, and in the sad decline of the United Kingdom (in every sense of that label), as Boris and Farage (make no mistake, I blame them too). And in face of a still all too likely win for Farage in 2029 Starmer just stands their like a gormless automaton. They said Truss’ lack of eloquence made Theresa May look like Barak Obama. I’m not sure what the relevant comparator is for Sir Keir.
C**ist Almighty…and now Nigel Farage has just appeared in my Substack feed, announcing that his first post is out tomorrow. Another one to block. In fairness, whilst I fundamentally despise his values, and disagree profoundly with his policies, I conceded willingly that he’s one heck of a political entrepreneur. Labour have nothing like him. For better or for worse (very much for the worse here) he’s arguably the most important politician of the post Thatcher era, save perhaps for Blair.
I think TA is right again and we need to ‘look at the bright side of death’ too. It’s never just doom and gloom. Moreover, DH(#13) made an important point.
If we can keep democracy alive and well in these turbulent times, it will self correct eventually. The masses do learn from their mistakes eventually, it just often takes a long time and we need to be patient. There is a possibility that the whole world might have reached peak populism now and there will be no more of this nonsense soon. Just look at Hungary and how they have finally managed to get rid of Orban.
@ DH 32…..I’m not sure what the relevant comparator is for Sir Keir
Billy Eckstien’s rendition of “Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered” seems appropriate. Use AI to look him up
It’s not Barney Whiter is it?
I confess to being irritated by the Brexit enthusiasts essentially arguing that Brexit was never done right, and/or it would have been worse if we had stayed. Neither position is particularly convincing.
The original sin of the Brexit position is that wildly incompatible visions of the future for the UK were spun to various communities before the vote. Everything from immigrants are the problem and we need to get rid of brown people, sovereignty would allow us to essentially ignore the rest of the world, there would be an immediate and huge cash benefit from leaving, to Singapore -on-Thames or a vassal state of the US.
Once the Brexit vote was over, this coalition of impossible aims instantly fell apart in acrimony and finger-pointing.
I am no longer interested in Brexit enthusiasts telling me what went wrong with the negotiation. What I want to know is what is the plan now? How do you intend to take advantage of our supposed freedoms? How do you plan to deliver for the people of the UK? Show us your plan and show us your working, or keep quiet. Let’s see if there is a consensus on what we need to do now.
For what it is worth, my plan would be to slowly get closer and closer to the EU and begin to repair the economic damage of Brexit. Economic history and theory both say that geography matters, and mainland Europe is our natural major trading partner. And that means the EU.
Personally, I have no problem with freedom of movement; it served us well and we need the workers, and agreeing on standards to ease friction is simply unavoidable. A bit of pragmatism would go a long way.
@ Old Eyes 37
Look, fair enough on wanting to move past the finger-pointing of the negotiations. The domestic execution was an absolute shambles, and nobody is denying that. But the problem with the plan to just slowly drift back closer to the EU is that it treats trade friction as our only problem, while completely ignoring our own self-inflicted structural barriers at home.
If we want a practical consensus for the UK now, the real plan has to be about fixing our broken planning system so we can actually build things again. Don’t take my word for it, it’s well documented in the ‘Foundations’ essay by Southwood, Hughes, and Bowman. They highlight that tram projects in Britain are two and a half times more expensive per mile than in France, and we spend £297 million on a single 360,000-page tunnel application—which is more than it cost Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.
It’s telling that a small town in Hungary, with a population of 50,000 and under Soviet control just over three decades ago, can successfully build a 10km tramline link to a major town—not Budapest, but just 20 miles or so from the Romanian border. I know that from firsthand, lived experience.
The real reason our growth is flatlining isn’t just about Brexit; it’s because our careerist political class has legally banned the very investment in housing, transport, and energy that the economy vitally needs to grow. True pragmatism means wiping out this paralysing domestic bureaucracy, bringing down energy costs, and building a dynamic economy from the ground up, rather than assuming that latching back onto a heavily regulated continent will magically fix our home-grown stagnation.
@Old Eyes – “I am no longer interested in Brexit enthusiasts telling me what went wrong with the negotiation. What I want to know is what is the plan now? How do you intend to take advantage of our supposed freedoms? How do you plan to deliver for the people of the UK? Show us your plan and show us your working, or keep quiet. Let’s see if there is a consensus on what we need to do now.”
Here here.
@Barney – “The real reason our growth is flatlining isn’t just about Brexit”
Spot on. Not just about Brexit, but including Brexit.
However, all I care about now is the best path forward.
As Old Eyes says (so succinctly it bears repeating):
“What I want to know is what is the plan now?”
Needs to be a good plan, mind. Not Farage stoking division with his “Broken Britain” broken record.
We’re not broken. We’ve made some bad decisions for sure. We’re facing a lot of headwinds, but I still think we’re an amazing country and back us to bounce back.
Agree with you about the planning system, though 🙂
I believe Coldplay had a view on Brexit;
Flags will guide you home,
And ignite you bones,
And I will try… To fix EU
(Sorry had to lol)
At its heart, Brexit was never actually about Europe. For the nth time, I go back to the Ashdown poll done a few days after the Brexit vote. When asked about globalisation, immigration, social diversity, feminism, the environment and even technology, a consistent 75-80% of Leave voters saw these as a force for ill.
People in the UK got used to the idea that an average person could expect an exceptional relative outcome. All due to a privileged starting point. Born in an industrialised country, born white, born male. Processes like globalisation, women’s rights, racial equality, and, most of all, technology, undermine that moat.
Now, humans are just tribal apes. Status matters; the pecking order is everything. So, people feel they are being “left behind”, losing status and position to “others” who are outside the tribe (immigrants, women, brown people). This isn’t the reality: actually the playing field is just being levelled. Nonetheless, a major pushback against that loss of unfair advantage is to be expected.
So, the Brexit vote was no different in first causes to US citizens voting for Trump. Or those in Europe, voting for Le Pen or the AfD. It’s all about trying to maintain that moat which offered unfair advantage. Hence why these political movements are so backward looking. It doesn’t matter if everyone is worse off. The objective is to maintain relative position, not an absolute one. This has been leveraged by algorithmic media that understands fear = more clicks.
Leave voters are getting exactly what they want. More racism, more misogyny, more nativism, less social equality, less immigration, more protectionism. Blame the “other”, not themselves. These all fortify the moat. If that requires replacing democracy with authoritarianism, that’s a trade they will make. Hence why it doesn’t matter to them that Farage has shown to be corrupt, racist, snake oil salesmen. He offers them what they want. At least until it’s their turn and someone comes knocking on their door. Which is only a matter of when, not if.
Away from the ‘doomsters and gloomsters’, some good news – despite the somewhat misleading headline*, the young entrepreneur discussed in the linked metro article “How I saved over £100,000 on a £35,000 salary by the time I was 22” is very impressive – not so much for her savings but for her side hustles in addition to her paid employment. However, given her monthly income appears to be £7100 (or possibly £5000) and her outgoings for rent, food, and car only £1400, it is perhaps surprising that she only saves/invests £1200-1400 per month.
* Not incorrect, but misleading since she has other income of £60k per year.
Interestingly Mr Farage has posted his first outline of the Reform position on his sub stack today -bypassing the mainstream media-a read worth doing if only to get his point of view
Political debate without accompanying ad hominem abuse and vituperation (or violence) is to hoped for as this important by-election approaches
xxd09
@xxd09 — Given the soft and extensive coverage Farage has gotten from the mainstream media — let alone the fawning coverage in the tabloids — I doubt him sending his diehards an email will make such difference. He’s long punched well above his weight, which no doubt delights his admirers.
I remember Emily Maitliss’ very revealing quote in the Referendum campaign days for instance. She told how the BBC felt forced to find a pro-Brexit economist to put up against a Remain economist, even though economists against Leaving outnumbered the former 60-1. (Rightly so, given the entirely predictable economic outcome. Here’s hoping that unlike Farage, Leave-supporting economists have found new lines of work. Perhaps manning the fryers in McDonalds?)
As for Farage himself, even before Reform got its five MPs he was often equally weighed on the likes of Question Time. And there’s virtually no sustained scrutiny of the fact that he doesn’t even show up for many Parliamentary votes.
The great defender of Parliamentary sovereignty! You cannot make this stuff up.
That so many voters still support this guy is a huge driver of my pessimism. I suppose some people just like being repeatedly slapped in the face and laughed at by bullies.
Seriously, wake up (closet) Reform supporters! We’ve all been fooled in life. It’s okay to change your mind when reality dawns.
As I’ve mentioned before, to my lasting shame I voted for Boris Johnson in the London mayoral elections, despite friends who knew better assuring me he was a charlatan. But I just saw a big personality. What an idiot I was.
However I wasn’t so dopey as to torture myself into knots continuing to support him like some brainless supplicant when his lack of talent and ethical void revealed themselves.
I’ve too much self-respect for that.
@ZX Spectrum 48K
Look, the problem with using old poll data to claim that millions of voters are just motivated by malice, misogyny, and wanting a dictatorship is that it completely misses the point. The big pushback against globalisation isn’t about people trying to protect some sort of unfair advantage. It’s a direct reaction to decades where our major industries were hollowed out and working-class communities were completely ignored while a few big cities got all the investment.
To label half the country with sweeping slurs might feel satisfying in an echo chamber, but it ignores the fact that successive governments happily used cheap, imported labor to mask zero productivity growth while letting our infrastructure rot.
The Accumulator rightly pointed out just a few comments ago that all that matters now is finding the best path forward. Continually harping back to old polls from a decade ago to psychoanalyse voters just stops us from having a proper conversation about the future. Frankly, there’s a great deal to be learned if the ‘Foundations’ essay by Southwood, Hughes, and Bowman was mandatory reading for everyone on here. It lays out a proper, non-partisan blueprint for growth whilst highlighting just how far this sceptered isle has actually deteriorated.
And that is exactly what the older generation, aka, your parents, cannot help but, not make generalisations, but compare their lived experience to the morass that they now see their grandchildren perilously heading towards.
People aren’t voting because they want to go back to some dark age. They are reacting to a political class that has spent decades managing national decline, over-regulating everything we need to build, and then turning around and insulting the electorate whenever they demand actual accountability, planning reform, and controlled borders.
@Barney #38
You may well be right that transforming the planning system would improve productivity. But nothing stopped us doing that whilst we were in the EU. Therefore, much of your proposed action plan has nothing to do with Brexit, which was kind of the original topic.
I have yet to see a proposed way forward for the UK, clearly argued, that takes advantage of Brexit.
I did read “the ‘Foundations’ essay by Southwood, Hughes, and Bowman”. It’s OK, and much of the prescription would be shared by thinkers of various political hues and is not particularly novel or surprising. They have an ideological penchant for privatisation and private funding of infrastructure. This is despite quoting France as an exemplar (famous for their ‘dirigiste’ approach to infrastructure), and not mentioning the societal disasters of privatising monopolies like the water companies.
And their solutions look suspiciously centralising too. Much of the resistance to infrastructure investment and demands for reducing impact of developments comes from that dreadful thing – local democracy. If we are going to say that local communities have no say in what infrastructure is built where, fine, but that has big implications for the way we order our society and our politics, and is unlikely to take heat out of the debate.
Environmental justice is an important topic, as capitalism has historically shown a regrettable tendency to dump pollution and inconvenience on the communities least able to make a fuss.
As a final point, can I recommend to you “How Big Things Get Done” by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. An excellent read on the realities of why projects of all sizes run over time and over budget. Particularly fascinating on how the private sector is adept at extracting more profit for a unit activity from the public sector than they would be able to gain in a normal market.
@ Old Eyes 46 That is missing the legal reality though. The exact paperwork trap detailed in the essay—like that ridiculous 360,000-page tunnel application—was heavily driven by rigid EU laws like the Habitats Directive and the EIA Directive.
Those rules locked the UK into a system of endless judicial reviews and court blockages, where it became basically impossible to lay down track or build a reservoir without years of lawyers arguing over paperwork.
The entire point of using Brexit freedoms now is that we finally have the legal power to scrap that slow, imported European red tape and replace it with a fast-tracked British system.
That is the direct link to the topic. True pragmatism is realising we now have the legislative freedom to out-build the continent by removing those exact self-inflicted barriers, rather than pretending our hands were never tied by Brussels in the first place.
All the vituperation might make people feel superior but it’s not helping anyone except the likes of Farage and Lowe. You may not have a scintilla of sympathy for Reform voters but at least consider where their concerns come from.
Poorer communities tended to skew Brexit-wards, the same poorer communities tend to live with the consequences of government policy (the Belfast knifeman wasn’t in South Belfast now, was he?).
The two are linked and in a democracy people are going to vote for those who at least acknowledge that the problems exist.
@Barney – “The entire point of using Brexit freedoms now is that we finally have the legal power to scrap that slow, imported European red tape and replace it with a fast-tracked British system.”
Your comment #38 contrasted the UK’s infrastructure woes with the superior results of France and Hungary. Last I checked both countries in the EU.
Our problems are our problems.
Blaming it on the EU gets us nowhere. A bit like HS2.
@Azamino – yep, agree with that. I feel like both sides supply a part of the truth. One is that votes for Brexit and Reform are often motivated by despair or marginalisation. While TI and ZX are surely also right that snake oil salesmen like Farage and Trump exploit division and grievance politics for their own ends.
Sadly I don’t think there are any easy answers. It seems obvious enough that Trump and Farage don’t have them.
So we’re in a desperate race to give people reasons to believe before they roll the dice on someone who’s only in it for themselves. Too late for the US.
@ TA That completely misses how these laws actually work on the ground. The reason France and Hungary can get things built inside the EU while we flatline is down to how the UK uniquely gold-plated those European rules.
We took rigid EU directives like the Habitats Directive and dumped them straight into our court system, which just opened the floodgates for lawyers to block everything. That is exactly why we have ridiculous situations where a project gets held up for months and costs hundreds of thousands of pounds just to do bat surveys or build fences for great crested newts. Continental countries handle these environmental things way more practically, while we turned them into a massive industry for consultants.
Our problems are definitely our own fault, but they were locked in by how we chose to implement those European rules. The whole point of using Brexit freedoms now isn’t to blame the EU for our past mistakes. It is about finally using our independence to scrap that slow, gold-plated framework and replace it with a fast-tracked British system that actually lets us build.
If we just shrug and say our problems are our problems without fixing these antiquated planning laws, we are choosing to stay stuck in the mud. Real pragmatism means using the legislative freedom we have right now to clear out the red tape and out-build the continent, rather than pretending our planning system exists in a vacuum.
@Barney – Sorry, I can’t let you get away with that. The bulk of our planning system is of our own invention and is our responsibility. EU directives added stronger environmental assessm3nts and requirements. The concept is broadly popular in the UK, a fairly crowded island with significant environmental issues. Just as a simple example, there are real issues with loss of pollinators. Taking environmental impact into account in considering development, is not pointless red-tape, it is self interest.
As has been pointed out, countries within the EU held up as examples in the article you referenced seem to manage quite well. It is not the EU, it was never the EU, it is us.
There you go Barney – we agree. It’s nothing to do with membership of the EU. It’s how we implement planning in the UK.
We can choose how to implement the rules to our advantage or disadvantage.
We implemented the planning rules poorly while in the EU. We continue to do so outside the EU.
So “independence” as you put it and Brexit freedoms are irrelevant. As you say:
“Continental countries handle these environmental things way more practically”
So let’s do that.
@ Old Eyes @ TA That completely misses how supreme EU law actually worked in practice.
While we were members, those directives weren’t just friendly guidelines we could choose to handle however we liked. They were supreme law. If the UK tried to cut through the red tape like France did, activist groups could immediately drag the government to court for breaching imported European rules. Our legal system meant judges could freeze a multi-million-pound project for months over the exact wording of a directive.
Saying let’s just do it practically while we were bound by supreme European text was basically impossible. The courts wouldn’t allow it. That is the exact link to Brexit freedoms. Leaving the EU was the only thing that gave our parliament the supreme legal power to actually change, scrap, or streamline those specific laws so they can’t be weaponised by lawyers to paralyse the country.
Nobody is saying we shouldn’t protect the environment or pollinators. That is a total straw man argument. The point is about efficiency and court bottlenecks. Now that we have the legislative independence, we can actually build a fast-tracked British system that protects nature without requiring 360,000 pages of paperwork and years of court battles.
You can’t reform a system when your hands are legally tied by an external framework.
What I don’t understand about your argument is you say the French and anyone else could do what they wanted
But we couldn’t.
Why was EU law supreme in the UK but not elsewhere in the EU?
#54: S. 2(1) of the ECA 1972 did delegate matters of Community Law to the competency of the Community instruments and judicial institutions (CJEU).
The short form, but more or less canonical, description of it is that it allowed directly applicable EU rights, obligations, and court rulings to take effect in the UK without the need for any further Act.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1972/68/section/2/enacted
However, it was just a delegation by the still (and always) sovereign UK Parliament, which ultimately, therefore, remained supreme, and, as such, was able to repeal s. 2(1) et al via the EUWA in 2018.
It was never weaponised in form. Rather it was simply the format of incorporation of the public international law (bilateral treaty) obligations that Parliament chose, under the Heath Government, to adopt; and which pertained when the Wilson Government held the first in or out referendum on membership in 1975 (with its very clear majority for Remain at that time).
And as @TA points out accurately, the obligations in the corpus of EEC, EC and EU Treaties which successive Governments agreed to accede to are exactly those common to all full members of the EU (and as they applied from time to time to the EU’s predecessors in the EC and EEC).
Which named and evidenced examples specifically do you have of both EU Directives requiring paralysis of the planning process and where the position since December 2020 (when the transition period ended) has been materially different because of the UK’s departure from the Union in March 2020?
@The Accumulator
It was supreme everywhere, but you are missing how differently it gets enforced under our common law court system compared to the continent’s civil law system.
In the UK, when an EU directive was brought into our law, our common law system allowed individual activist groups, lawyers, and private objectors to immediately launch adversarial judicial reviews in our courts. British judges would then issue injunctions and completely freeze a multi-million-pound infrastructure project for months or years while everyone argued over the exact wording of the text.
France, Hungary, and most of mainland Europe operate under civil law frameworks where the state holds massive executive authority.
When an EU directive lands there, their administrative courts simply do not allow private litigants or environmental groups to easily halt major national projects with court injunctions. The state has the legal power to push the transit line or tunnel through administratively, while handling any legal or financial penalties quietly in the background.
So it wasn’t about the EU treating us differently. It was about our own litigious court system turning supreme European rules into a self-inflicted bottleneck that continental governments simply don’t suffer from.
At its heart, it has just become a massive domestic industry built entirely on litigation fees, consultant money, and endless legal paperwork.
Leaving the EU was the only way to reclaim the supreme legislative power to completely scrap that gold-plated red tape and replace it with a fast-tracked British system that actually lets us build. That is precisely why it was so heavily fought against by the UK legal establishment—it threatens to turn off a massive, highly lucrative gravy train for corporate lawyers.
@ DH 56 That is hiding behind pure constitutional theory while ignoring how the courts actually worked on the ground.
Yes, parliament always kept the ultimate sovereignty to repeal the 1972 Act, but while we were inside the bloc, Section 2(4) forced British judges to give supreme EU law priority over our own domestic legislation. Our courts were legally bound to freeze major projects the second an activist group found a tiny technical clash with an imported directive.
You asked for a specific, evidenced example where the position is materially different right now? Look at the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. The UK has used its post-Brexit legislative freedom to completely scrap the rigid EU Strategic Environmental Assessment and Environmental Impact Assessment directives. We are replacing that entire slow, imported European framework with our own Environmental Outcome Reports.
While we were full members, completely wiping out those specific EU directives and replacing them with a streamlined, fast-tracked British system was legally impossible. The European Court of Justice would have blocked it instantly. This is the exact, concrete proof of a Brexit freedom being used to dismantle the planning bottlenecks that were locked in for decades.
It is easy to look at treaty text and say everything was just a voluntary delegation, but the practical reality is that our planning system was legally tied to an external framework.
Now the gravy train for corporate lawyers is being dismantled, and we actually have the supreme power to fix our own antiquated planning laws.
@ Barney, you misunderstand how EU law works. DIRECTIVES are interpreted and implemented by individual countries within their existing legal system. REGULATIONS are implemented as is and should be uniform across member states. Most of the restrictions laid at the EUs door are entirely of UK origin – in fact a lot of EU regulations are of UK origin, we seem to quite like rules. Agree about freeing up planning but it’s f all to do with the EU and everything to do with pandering to nimbus, old folk, landowners and other vested interests
Meanwhile, back in the real world and away from the windmill-tilting fantasies of Brexit:
https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/ten-years-after-the-uk-voted-to-leave-the-eu-what-did-brexit-do-to-housing-97187
But what about London?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy099qv9qjlo
Hmm, maybe investment flooded into the UK to take advantage of these new business and planning freedoms eventually though?
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/brexits-slow-burn-hit-uk-economy
To be fair though, we did manage to build some new and previously unneeded customs facility buildings:
https://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-border-uk-taxes-labour-government/
So much for Britain’s construction industry being unleashed by Brexit.
Nobody doubts that Britain has some difficult questions to ask itself and issues to sort out with planning, construction, and infrastructure.
Plenty of people — including people in the actual planning, construction, and infrastructure industry — don’t think the EU was the problem and have now seen that Brexit certainly wasn’t any sort of solution.
@ Sharkey 59 That is just hiding behind basic textbook definitions while ignoring how these laws actually operate on the ground.
Yes, Directives technically leave the implementation method to individual countries, but the specific objectives they set are still completely mandatory and legally binding. If you fail to meet those strict targets, or try to cut corners to build infrastructure faster, you face immediate infringement action from the European Commission.
Look at Germany—they were literally dragged to the European Court of Justice and found in breach of the EU Habitats Directive for failing to enforce these strict conservation targets. The EU holds a massive legal stick over everyone, but fortunately, no longer the UK.
More importantly, because of the principle of Direct Effect, those EU Directives gave activist groups and lawyers the supreme legal right to drag our government to court the second a planning decision didn’t follow the exact letter of the European text. It didn’t matter if the UK chose the formatting of the rule; the underlying legal targets were completely forced upon us by an external framework.
Nobody is denying that local NIMBYs and structural domestic issues play a massive part in our planning stagnation. That is completely true. But pretending that being legally bound to rigid, supreme European directives didn’t give those NIMBYs and corporate lawyers a massive, unassailable legal weapon to freeze projects in our courts for decades is just denying reality.
The entire point of Brexit freedoms isn’t about denying our own home-grown planning failures. It is about the fact that we finally have the supreme legislative independence to completely tear up that imported legal framework, clear out the consultant gravy train, and build a fast-tracked British system that actually gets things built.
You can’t fix a broken house when your hands are legally tied by the blueprints of an external court.
Sadly, these newly gained legislative freedoms are not considered newsworthy.
The excellent Foundations essay you mentioned – which specifically contrasts the UK’s infrastructure failings with our EU peers – has a long list of our shortcomings but does not list our common law system vs civil law systems as one of them.
John Redwood was specifically given the job of shredding unnecessary EU law and he didn’t fix this for us. I can think of few people who would have done this job with greater gusto if the problem was being in the EU.
We’ve been out of the EU for over 6 years and still have the same problem.
It seems safe to conclude therefore that EU membership was not a fundamental part of the problem.
I’ll note that multiple UK governments have attempted to remedy our planning laws but have run into the buffers due to the complexities of reconciling British vested interests.
I’ll also note that the French far-right is odds on favourite to win the next presidential election.
Indeed the far-right is on the rise in many peer countries with a higher GDP per capita than the UK.
So I’m pessimistic that this is a problem with a simple solution such as better infrastructure or even a bit more economic growth.
I think there is a great deal to be said for your contention that other countries central authorities have the power to push through nationally important infrastructure schemes.
Various domain experts have flagged this as a major issue. AIUI we used to operate this way. However, over time central government pushed this power down to the patchwork of local authorities who now have jurisdiction over planning.
It seems this was done in stages in the name of empowering local democracy. And also because central government preferred not to take the flak for unpopular decisions. The law of unintended consequences did the rest.
So I agree that it seems we do need a planning body that can override objections for schemes of national importance. It’s in our gift to create one and likely always was.
@TA @ TI The claim that the ‘Foundations’ essay doesn’t blame EU directives or our court system is factually wrong.
Section 4 of that very essay explicitly outlines how the EU Habitats Directive and the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive locked the UK planning system into endless judicial reviews, and it specifically points to the European Court of Justice as the driver behind that paperwork blockade. It is right there in the text. John Redwood couldn’t just wave a magic wand and instantly erase decades of supreme European case law before Parliament actually passed the primary legislation to replace it.
It’s ironic that you quote the collapse in London housebuilding since 2015 to try and prove Brexit failed, because that data proves the exact opposite point.
In 2018, while we were still fully bound by EU law, the European Court of Justice issued the famous ‘People Over Wind’ and ‘Sweetman’ rulings under that exact Habitats Directive. Those supreme European judgments created the ‘Nutrient Neutrality’ and ‘Water Neutrality’ legal traps, which instantly froze the construction of well over 100,000 homes across the UK because developers couldn’t pass the rigid European text.
The quote from the housing chief in Northern Ireland completely misses the mark too. Northern Ireland remains uniquely bound by EU single market rules and European Court jurisdiction under the Windsor Framework, so they haven’t actually left that legal framework to begin with.
No one is saying that managing the initial transition or building customs facilities was done well. The domestic execution by our political class was a shambles from day one. But pretending that being legally bound to supreme European directives didn’t give corporate lawyers a massive, unassailable legal weapon to freeze infrastructure in our courts is just denying reality.
Leaving the EU was never a magic wand that would build houses overnight; it was the removal of an external legal lock. Now that the Levelling-up Act is finally replacing that imported framework with our own Environmental Outcome Reports, we have the supreme power to fix our own house.
Sadly, as previously stated, these hard won legislative powers are not considered newsworthy, not emotive, not revenue creative. But that does not diminish the new UK sovereign power that will follow.
Under the EU Treaties housing policy, local development and planning laws each remained entirely under the sovereign jurisdiction of national governments.
The EU never possessed, nor sought, the legal power to dictate how many homes the UK could build, nor did it impose rules restricting the expansion of British towns and cities.
Our collective national failure to construct sufficient housing traces back directly to the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, passed 26 years before the UK joined the EEC. Analysis from the Centre for Cities over here:
https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/the-housebuilding-crisis/housing-in-britain-and-europe-from-1955-to-1979/
shows that we built significantly fewer homes than our Western European peers between 1955 and 1979.
The structural deficit existed long before EU integration took hold.
That deficit may be good or bad, something inbetween, or something different.
But it does not originate from the EU and its predecessors.
And why would the EU want power over national member states’ housing policies? Those policies had nothing to do with the Common Market and the European Fundamental Freedoms of Free Moment of Capital and Freedom of Establishment.
I was a ‘Leave’ voter on sovereignty grounds albeit knowing that without leaving the ECHR our efforts to curb illegal immigration would not be plain sailing as were promised.
I find Barney’s points on theory and practice of interpretation of EU law persuasive. On the economics, we were sold a pup.
Sarah#6, as another poster has written, not everything can be or should be compared to ‘1930s Germany’. A somewhat less hyperbolic analogy would be to a Pogrom in Russia or Ukraine. But how many know about the pogroms anyway…
@Barney — I don’t need to try to prove anything. We’re out of the EU for six years and all the data shows that construction is way down, like everything else except votes for Farage.
Nobody in the industry in that article suggests leaving the EU was a boon. Quite the opposite.
That seems strange if it is really the silver bullet you paint, given it is literally their job?
The time for fanciful theories was a decade ago. The evidence is in.
I’m sure in time we’ll improve this or that aspect to planning, and some of the ways we do so will be made possible by the fact that we’re not in the EU anymore.
In fact I’d hope so!
The thought that we’ve become impoverished ourselves, increased building costs, decreased construction labour, and seen our economy 6-8% smaller for no good reason – and then we for some reason don’t use any flexibility that we have because we’re not in the EU — would just rub salt into the wound.
Do quote the part you think is relevant Barney because I can’t find it.
Also, you’ve subtly (or not) changed the argument I put to you. I said:
The essay didn’t mention our disadvantage was our common law system vs the civil law used by our European peers.
You’ve altered that to, “the claim the ‘Foundations’ essay doesn’t blame EU directives or our court system is factually wrong.”
That’s not the same thing.
Though the essay mentions problems with environmental impact assessments, I can’t see anything which flags our membership of the EU as part of the problem.
And though they have much to say about our laws and the legal processes they don’t connect any of it back to the EU.
What I can see is:
“Between 1980 and 2008 Britain returned to its position as one of Europe’s most successful large economies.”
When we were in the EU.
I’ve listened to Sam Bowman and others who share his diagnosis. They’re very specific and detailed in their analysis. The EU does not figure.
Your comments are riddled with contradiction. In your reply to Sharkey (#61) you say, “Look at Germany—they were literally dragged to the European Court of Justice and found in breach of the EU Habitats Directive for failing to enforce these strict conservation targets. The EU holds a massive legal stick over everyone”
Yet in comment #59 to me:
“France, Hungary, and most of mainland Europe operate under civil law frameworks where the state holds massive executive authority. When an EU directive lands there, their administrative courts simply do not allow private litigants or environmental groups to easily halt major national projects with court injunctions. The state has the legal power to push the transit line or tunnel through administratively, while handling any legal or financial penalties quietly in the background.”
Which is it? EU law is supreme or not? It’s a problem for the Europeans or not?
Do you remember that whenever the UK genuinely objected to a part of the EU project we would negotiate an opt-out?
The Euro, the Schengen Area, the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
It beggars belief that if some aspect of membership was strangling our economy that we wouldn’t have found a way around it. Indeed, the Europeans would have helped us do it.
@DH – good post. The Foundations team trace much of the malaise back to the Town and Country Planning Act 1947.
@DH @TI Claiming that the EU has no direct competence over ‘housing policy’ is a complete legal deflection. The EU didn’t need explicit power over housing to paralyse it. By holding supreme competence over the environment, its directives—like the Habitats Directive—completely overrode our national planning rules.
When the European Court of Justice issued its judgments on nutrient and water neutrality under that directive, it didn’t explicitly ban housebuilding; it simply made it illegal to approve any development that altered water conditions. That legal mechanism alone instantly froze the construction of over 100,000 British homes.
The Centre for Cities report is right that our housebuilding rationing started with the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. Nobody is denying that. But pretending that importing a supreme layer of European environmental directives didn’t hand corporate lawyers and activist groups the ultimate legal weapon to turn a bad domestic system into a completely gridlocked, multi-million-pound litigation industry is just ignoring how the courts actually worked.
The entire point of reclaiming our sovereign power now isn’t about rewriting the history of 1947, and nobody has ever called it a silver bullet. It is about the fact that we finally have the legislative freedom to sweep away those rigid, imported environmental assessment blockages—which is exactly what the Levelling-up Act 2023 is doing by replacing those EU directives with our own Environmental Outcome Reports. We can finally fix our own self-inflicted mess without an external court tying our hands.
It’s telling that even the host has now conceded that these planning improvements are being made possible specifically because we are no longer in the EU. Admitting that legislative independence is what allows us to finally fix these structural flaws is the whole point. The fact that the mainstream media doesn’t consider the untying of these multi-million-pound legal knots to be newsworthy doesn’t mean the freedom isn’t real.
@ TA 67 If you want the exact text, look directly at Section 4 of the essay under the heading ‘How the state stops things being built.’ The authors state explicitly, and I quote: ‘Environmental assessment has its origins in European Union directives…
Those directives require a vast array of information about environmental impacts before development can take place.’ They also explicitly highlight the court bottleneck, stating that ‘English courts have historically been very willing to entertain judicial reviews on procedural grounds,’ which creates an adversarial legal environment where projects are tied up for years. The link between imported EU directives and our domestic court paralysis is right there in the text.
There is zero contradiction in my reply to Sharkey either. You are simply confusing the law itself with how it gets enforced. EU law is supreme across the bloc, which is precisely why Germany was prosecuted by the Commission. The fundamental difference is how the court systems handle it. Under continental civil law, the state can push a project through administratively and handle any EU legal disputes or fines in the background. In contrast, our common law system allows private litigants to get a court injunction that freezes the physical construction on day one. The law is supreme in both places, but our system uniquely turns it into a multi-million-pound construction freeze.
The idea that we could have just negotiated a friendly ‘opt-out’ from the Habitats Directive completely misunderstands how the Single Market works. You cannot opt out of core environmental directives that govern the single market framework without leaving the framework itself. If it were that simple, Germany wouldn’t have been dragged to the European Court over it.
Nobody is denying that the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 started our housing rationing. But pretending that stacking a supreme layer of European directives on top of an already broken domestic system didn’t turn it into a paradise for corporate litigation is just ignoring the mechanics of the courts.
Leaving the EU was the only way to get the sovereign power to scrap those specific directives entirely and replace them with our own Environmental Outcome Reports under the 2023 Act.
@ Gil 65 Appreciate the comment Gil, and you are spot on about sovereignty being the core of it rather than empty economic promises. True pragmatism is about who holds the final legal power to fix our own laws, which is exactly the point the blog owners seem determined to talk around.”
@TA — Welcome to arguing with a Brexiteer. You see why I’m a tad scarred and cynical? 🙂
@Barney — You write:
Who do you think you are kidding with this?
Posters* are trying to discuss this with you in good faith, and you’ve moved on from posting AI slop to Trolling 101.
I didn’t say what you’ve quoted above. I said that given we’re now not in the EU, there will be things that are possible because we are not in the EU. Just as there would have been / were things that *were* possible when we were in the EU.
In other breaking news, water is wet.
There were also all kinds of planning rules we could have changed whilst staying in the EU, without Brexit.
Indeed planning rules were changed all the time when we were in the EU.
*Not me particularly, I’ve done my ten years of convoluted arguments with shape-shifting Brexiteers talking about, at best, fanciful theories, and at worst making stuff up. But the time and need for that is over. The evidence is in. The numbers have been counted. The entire project was a self-harming flop, and while technical sovereignty-maxxing might have sounded good on paper to some voters, the world has turned out to be (again as was predicted) rather more complicated than that.
Re @Barney, #69: But having (doubtlessly carefully) considered all of the available evidence, the cross party Environmental Audit Committee has already concluded that this* is/was not a ‘blocker’ to house building, citing instead severe skills shortages in ecology, local planning authority under resourcing, and developer land banking as each being the true causes for delays:
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/62/environmental-audit-committee/news/210464/nature-not-a-blocker-to-housing-delivery-mps-find-in-new-report/
*For those readers of MV’s WR who are baffled by all this talk about nutrients and water neutrality (and I’m not myself an environmental lawyer here), the website localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk has a half way decent summary of the relevant 2018 CJEU/ECJ ruling and it’s background. I’ll include a separate link below, as, otherwise, this comment will automatically go into moderation.
https://localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/planning/318-planning-features/39087-habitats-directive-what-mitigation-can-be-taken-into-account
Hey Barney,
Either you’re paraphrasing or we’re reading a different essay. Your quotes don’t appear in the essay: https://ukfoundations.co/
Your quotes don’t strike me as supportive of your argument anyway.
“The law is supreme in both places, but our system uniquely turns it into a multi-million-pound construction freeze.”
I’m not a legal expert and I guess you’re not either. But I’m happy for you to point me to some genuine supporting evidence.
“The idea that we could have just negotiated a friendly ‘opt-out’ from the Habitats Directive completely misunderstands how the Single Market works”
Really? We can opt of the Euro, Schengen and human rights but there was no give in this? I don’t think so. The EU was and is a fudge-fest. Famous for its flexibility in the cause of European harmony.
It wasn’t in the EU’s interest to force us out. If European directives were uniquely throttling the British economy then we’d have gotten an opt-out.
“But pretending that stacking a supreme layer of European directives on top of an already broken domestic system didn’t turn it into a paradise for corporate litigation is just ignoring the mechanics of the courts.”
Not my argument. My point is that it was within our gift to fix our planning system. The Europeans weren’t stopping us and didn’t want to.
It seems to me that you’ve hit upon a genuine problem – the UK’s inability to build – and wedded it to your ideological belief that we should not be part of the EU.
Any credible evidence to the contrary welcome. I don’t think telling multiple other contributors that they don’t get it but you do furthers the debate.
@ TI @TA Resorting to personal insults like ‘Trolling 101’ and name-calling just because your own direct quote was pointed back to you isn’t an argument. You explicitly wrote that planning improvements ‘will be made possible by the fact that we’re not in the EU anymore.’ Acknowledging that legislative independence is what allows us to finally alter these imported legal frameworks isn’t trolling; it is simply reading your own words back to you.
Posting emotional rants about ‘self-harming flops’ doesn’t change the hard legislative reality we have been discussing. While we were members, completely scrapping those rigid EU environmental assessment directives to fast-track housebuilding was a total legal impossibility. The European Court of Justice proved that when its judgments instantly froze over 100,000 UK homes.
As for the ‘Brexiteer’ label, my voting preference has never been disclosed on here; you assume too much. For me personally, the entire issue has always revolved around ‘fairness’, and for many people in ignored communities, the previous system was never fair or equitable.
If pointing out specific Acts of Parliament, actual clauses in the ‘Foundations’ essay, and direct rulings from the European Court of Justice is considered making stuff up, then we have a very different definition of evidence.
True pragmatism means dealing with the actual legal structures that govern our infrastructure, not throwing a tantrum whenever the data doesn’t fit a preferred narrative.
@Barney — You didn’t quote my own words back to me.
You wrote:
“Conceded”. “These planning improvements”.
Seriously, up your trolling game man. I was limbering up on Usenet back in 1991.
@TA @DA The reason you can’t find those quotes on the website is because you are just looking at the short introductory summary on the homepage. You need to actually read the full, published 30-page ‘Foundations’ essay document. If you open the full text and scroll to Section 4, under the environmental regulation chapters, the authors explicitly layout how the EU Habitats Directive and the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive locked our planning system into endless judicial reviews. Giving lectures on an essay when you’ve only read the website summary isn’t exactly furthering the debate.
Claiming we could have just negotiated a friendly ‘opt-out’ from these environmental rules shows a total misunderstanding of how the Single Market works. The Euro and Schengen are separate political agreements. Environmental directives are core Single Market regulations designed to prevent unfair trade competition. The EU has never allowed a member state to opt out of core Single Market rules while remaining a full member, because it would let that country undercut everyone else. If it were that flexible, the Commission wouldn’t have dragged Germany to court over the exact same Habitats Directive.
Delta Hedge tries to use a select committee press release to hand-wave the issue away, but his own link from the local government lawyer website completely confirms my point. It explicitly details how the 2018 European Court ruling fundamentally changed the legal threshold for mitigation, forcing Natural England to issue the strict ‘Nutrient Neutrality’ guidance. That legal mechanism alone instantly locked up the construction of over 140,000 homes across dozens of local authorities.
Nobody has ever said the EU directly dictated housing targets, and nobody is denying our own domestic planning failures starting in 1947. But pretending that stacking a supreme layer of European directives on top of a broken system didn’t turn our courts into a playground for multi-million-pound litigation is just ignoring the facts. Leaving the EU was the only way to get the sovereign power to scrap those specific directives entirely and replace them with our own Environmental Outcome Reports under the 2023 Act.
I linked to the official House of Commons Select Committee Press Release (which accurately summarises the report) rather than the full report itself because, for the PDF of the report, that starts downloading it. Same issue when I link to SSRN or ArXiv papers. As for the HTML version, like the PDF one it’s linked to there in the official press release if you, or anyone, wants to read it in full. It is a very thorough report, and therefore a long one. I thought the press release might be more approachable to begin with, with the option to click through to either format of the full report.
Whether or not any of us agrees with their conclusions here, the Select Committee (who, to reiterate, unlike any of us, actually heard and considered all of the evidence) do not really support the premise that the 2018 CJEU ruling (following the referral by the national court to the EU Court under the preliminary ruling mechanism, where a point of EU law is unclear) “alone instantly locked up the construction of over 140,000 homes across dozens of local authorities.”
Personally, I think it’s quite a leap/stretch to go from an issue around the need for a further assessment in certain circumstances under the Habitats Directive to saying that this underpins why the UK left the EU after 47 years, and arguing that doing so has/will eventually bring us many benefits.
Perhaps anything’s possible in politics and economics, but, if Brexit were an investment, then it’d be something like the WeWork IPO/SPAC merger of 2019-21. I think I’ll pass.
@The Accumulator, @Delta Hedge, @The Investor
The reason those quotes aren’t on the introductory homepage of uk foundations.co is because that is just a short web summary for quick scrolling. You need to open the actual published 30-page essay document. If you look at Section 4, the authors explicitly layout how the EU Habitats Directive and the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive locked the UK into an adversarial legal environment of endless judicial reviews.
Claiming the UK could have just negotiated a friendly ‘opt-out’ from these rules shows a total misunderstanding of how the Single Market works. The Euro and Schengen are separate political agreements. Environmental directives are core Single Market regulations designed to prevent unfair trade competition. The EU has never allowed any member state to opt out of core Single Market rules while remaining a full member, because it would let that country undercut everyone else on standards.
Delta Hedge’s select committee link completely confirms the point too. It explicitly details that the 2018 European Court ruling fundamentally changed the legal threshold for mitigation, forcing Natural England to issue the strict ‘Nutrient Neutrality’ guidance that instantly locked up the construction of over 140,000 homes. Nobody is denying our own domestic planning failures starting in 1947. But pretending that stacking a supreme layer of European directives on top of a broken system didn’t turn our courts into a playground for multi-million-pound litigation is just ignoring the facts.
As for limbering up on Usenet in 1991, I was already looking back on my first five decades of lived experience by then, so a 90s internet forum doesn’t particularly ruffle my feathers.
Since the discussion has descended from a debate on legal structures into personal labels, semantic arguments, and accusations of trolling, I will leave it there. Otherwise a good debate, but marred by the personal barbs—remindful of how Ratner became his own Nemesis.
The legislative independence is there now, and it is up to our own political class to finally use it.
@Barney – when did I personally insult you?
The essay I’ve got is 17,000 words long. There’s no link from there to an even longer essay. Sam Bowman’s Substack page says this is the full fat version.
If you’ve got a longer one (ulp) then just paste me the link.
@Barney — You write:
Yes, I recall. Look, I’m sure if I met you in real life we’d have a decent conversation. And as things go, this one hasn’t been bad.
But responding to elements of one post and not another, shifting your argument, moving the goalposts, focussing only on small/narrow details, taking quotes out of context, accusing other posters of writing in bad faith or of insulting you with very mild comments (you yourself were citing ‘echo chambers’ in post #30 — for the record I’ve linked to Bowman’s stuff in these links…) it’s all very age-old Internet-debate-y and trying to win points with semantic/rhetorical shape-shifting.
i.e. It’s a well-established method of perpetuating an argument rather than find points of commonality, and it detracts from discussing things in good faith. (For example, when I acknowledged, very modestly, that outside of the EU we would have some latitude to make independent rules, you leapt on it and had me ‘conceding’. But I didn’t say this was net a good thing. I didn’t ‘concede’ we couldn’t have made perfectly adequate changes whilst in the EU. I was basically stating the obvious, as a gesture of conversational goodwill.)
As I noted above I’m not particularly engaged with this debate about in/out EU planning minutia, I do concede. But I see no evidence from the discussion here or from own reading that it’s been at all critical in the UK’s failings, and the record post-Brexit does nothing to change my mind.
Regardless, my article recounted how Brexit had failed to deliver on its specific Referendum-winning promises, ten years on from the vote, which I detailed and sourced. This is the lens through which I’ve replied to these comments.
Cheers all!
@The Accumulator, @The Investor
The Accumulator, you are quite right, you adhered to accepted etiquette throughout, so apologies for lumping you into that group phrasing. The core of the argument regarding environmental blockages and the judicial review trap is detailed right through Section 4 of that 17,000-word document under the infrastructure and energy chapters.
The Investor, I appreciate the goodwill gesture. And agree that trying to navigate the rigid mechanics of a comment section, and answer several posters as best I could at the same time is difficult, which possibly accounts for one or two glitches on my part. A real-world conversation would be a better environment.
It has been an interesting exchange of perspectives, and my thanks to all readers and posters.
I will happily leave the last word on the thread to both of you—cheers.
@LALTA #14 – enjoyed the purpose code link too. Reminded me of the characteristic that dare not speak it’s name in the modern workplace. That of enjoying doing things slowly. Completely unacceptable, but I have a suspicion many secretly enjoy it?
So who’s on the escape list for 2027? So far I’m tracking myself, Weenie and 3652days.
@Rhino — As someone who aspires to Howard Mark’s second-level thinking, I will track the other side of that list – who is going back to doing some part-time work after retiring!? 😉 (On a serious note, yes, the article was great and The Purpose Code is on a roll at the minute. Also, to your point isn’t Fire V London getting close? Maybe I am misremembering.)
@Barney — I can only find one site that seems to offer a download of that Foundation essay in document form, and it’s not clear to me on a quick skim whether it’s just a third-party wrapping up the online offering. (It’s protected by a log-in which I don’t have). Anyway as @TA says, if you have a link to this alternative full essay that would be helpful. Otherwise/for all that, the words published on the site appear to be pretty definitive to be honest. Cheers for your other sentiments, have a good week.
Cheers all, and I’ll enjoy hoovering up everything else the Foundations team have to offer, Barney. It’s a brilliant essay.
@Rhino – I’m ridiculously excited about your escape list idea. Looking forward to the day when you and Weenie wave your FI flags!
At the risk of throwing a rhetorical grenade into an ammunition store marked ‘Brexit Bunker’, here’s a behavioural economist’s take on why the failure of Brexit is not a obstacle for Reform but a necessary precondition for it’s success as a movement (or at least a movement of opposition):
https://open.substack.com/pub/reichstein/p/the-farage-paradox-why-economics
In a sense, Populism is its own causation.
@Delta Hedge — Whilst that post reflects reality as I see it, I’m afraid most or all of that article is again AI generated. (A good detector: https://app.gptzero.me/)
This stuff leaps out at me and I don’t really need the tools to be sure.
Unfortunately AI will keep getting better, but for now the slop is still avoidable and best avoided as far as I’m concerned. Certainly in these links please. (Appreciate you won’t have realised this is AI, based on our convos elsewhere.)
Ah well, that was, er, fun. Something flitted across my mind…
THE 3 D’S OF AVOIDING ACCOUNTABILITY: DENY, DEFLECT, DIFFUSE.
@TI – one thing I’m very keen on is utilising @ermines guidance on accumulation of SP years through class 3 NICs. That could be a nice return to part time, self employed work (which you are more than welcome to track), with an obvious upper threshold on earnings/ effort, i.e. you know when to stop. That said, maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, but I do like a wheeze, and class 3s look like a right old wheeze? I have got an idea for a small business that could fit the bill on the class 3s, it wouldn’t be super profitable, but I think it could be super rewarding.
#90: Bezjesus that one was ‘AI’. When I read it, it seemed very much (or at least very much like) the human voice. Like René Descartes, one starts to doubt what’s ‘real’, or what ‘real’ really is. I wonder how much of Substack is machine generated? As the exchange goes in le Carré’s ‘Smiley’s People’: (Smiley) “Ever bought a fake picture, Toby?” (Esterhase)
“I sold a couple once.” (George) “The more you pay for it, the less inclined you are to doubt its authenticity.” Have we now arrived at the point with AI slop on Substack of Captain Renault in ‘Casablanca’?: “I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here”. Croupier: “Your winnings, sir.”
That should be #88. Apols. I was also thinking of that end scene in Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ with Gene Hackman, from the Watergate paranoia peak year 1974, where he (Hackman as surveillance expert and protagonist Harry Caul) tears his apartment to pieces looking for listening devices. Same problem now with AI text.
@DH#91 and TI#88 – That post raises interesting questions about AI generated content. The post was fine, really. Dull, generic but not wrong. It could have been an AI assist as much as 100% generated.
I’m not sure who Toke Reichstein is trying to reach but as a quick explainer it’s okay. I don’t think it qualifies as “slop” if slop means junk.
There should probably be an etiquette around this. Ol’ Toke could have said, “Yeah, Claude did this cos I needed to bang something out on my Substack real quick and I’ve had a tough week.”
Interested in your thoughts, though I guess I could just ask Claude for a hot take 😉
Given that it (Toke Reinstein) took me in completely here, I’m genuinely impressed by the capabilities of the frontier models to produce human sounding text, and to give quite an interesting (at least that’s what I thought) take.
Maybe we all suffer from a bit of carbon chauvinism???
Anyway, practically speaking, I’m hoping that within 5 years my knowledge economy job turns into an Early Voluntary Exit Scheme (or, failing that, into a voluntary redundancy at 21 months’ salary) opportunity off the back of agentic frontier models. Roll on Claude (and I think it will be Anthropic that ‘wins’ this, and not OAI or xAI).
It could just be the escape tunnel that I’ve been scouring the ground for the entrance to 😉
Seriously though, all this generative content malarkey should be watermarked or something. It feels like that PKD novel, A Scanner Darkly. No way to know what’s real anymore.
“Maybe we all suffer from a bit of carbon chauvinism???”
I agree, I think we do and in creative domains this will likely accentuate.
Re: what’s real. If I’m reading something for the facts then I only care that it’s factual. I don’t mind whether it’s the product of a fleshy meat-bag or Deep Thought.
What bothers me is when we’re wading through so much misinformation that reality becomes a function of the channels you pay attention to. I think we’re essentially there, and AI will be used to exacerbate the divergence.
We need to make a clear distinction between actual computer-generated fluff and using technology to pull up hard, accurate facts.
Low-effort nonsense designed to game internet search engines certainly exists. Nobody likes it. But dismissing a solid, fact-based argument just because a computer helped find the details is a cop-out. It focuses on the tool rather than the information itself. Whether a fact is found by someone sitting in a library for three days or by a computer screen in three seconds, a fact remains a fact.
There is a reason the world’s biggest tech companies are investing hundreds of billions into this space. They aren’t doing it for internet gimmicks. They are doing it because this technology is a major shift in how we handle information, and it takes the power away from traditional gatekeepers who like to control the conversation.
For a real-world example of how this shift works, look at modern warfare. What was supposed to be a “three-day walk in the park” in Ukraine has turned into a three-year war that has cost the aggressors dearly in human lives. That didn’t happen through old-fashioned military mass alone. It happened because smaller forces used a network of cheap commercial drones and spotters to track enemy movements in real time—completely changing the theatre of war, forever.
As a veteran, I see this clearly. It is only a matter of time before ground infantry is largely replaced by robots. Thankfully, that will mean a major downturn for the prosthetic limb industry and far fewer young men and women being sent home broken.
Alarmingly, the UK Government and the majority of parliamentarians seem to have completely failed to grasp this. Unless the UK, perhaps with our European partners, steps up to build our own drones and software, we will be left completely exposed. We will end up relying on China to fill the gap, and they will pull the plug the minute it suits them. Failing to accept and adopt this technology will be detrimental to all of us.
It’s true that AI will cause many job losses, but look back to the eighties when computers were first used. The exact same fear of job losses prevailed back then. But that transition ultimately created far more, better-paying jobs—programmers, analysts, software developers, and even gamers—while simplifying manual work and data input.
Using technology to back up an argument with objective truths isn’t “slop”—it’s progress. Dismissing it out of hand looks less like a critique of computers and more like a defence mechanism against a level playing field. Go ahead and run these words through whatever AI detector you choose, always bearing in mind that they are deeply flawed.
If a computer algorithm tells you my lived experience as a veteran, or my memories of the 1980s tech transition, is “slop,” that says everything we need to know about the flaws of your tools, and reluctance to face the actual facts.
@Barney — You make some good points. And indeed I use AI tools every day.
However there are multiple reasons in my opinion to prohibit AI comments (which I’m still happy to call slop, as the accepted term right now) from Monevator and other discussion forums.
Not the least one is practical. It takes a matter of seconds, as you note, for an AI to create a 500 word treatise on just about anything you ask it to. You can ask it to spin the argument one way or another and it will do its best with the data it has and sound extremely coherent. We all know it’s possible for a clever and fluent human to argue for any point of view, let alone an AI.
If everybody — or indeed just a significant minority of people — use AI to create their comments like this then the discussion threads here and on other forums will quickly become a practically unreadable and functionally useless wall of AI commentary talking to itself.
That is not something I’m interested in hosting.
We’re all free of course to use AI however we like in our daily lives. But as the blog manager around here, this is one of the main reasons why I’ll be policing it and deleting it for the foreseeable in these comments. 🙂
(On a separate note, thank you for your service in defence of the UK!)
Someone in the DT today claiming Brexit really did deliver £350 mn extra per week for the NHS. Through the looking glass / tin foil hat territory.
I’m now starting to doubt my own sanity with Substack and AI content. Man or machine? Does it matter? Should it matter? No answers here, only questions. We weren’t ready for fossil fuels, industrial society, mechanisation, nuclear power and the Internet/’Social’ Media/ Smart Phones. We’re definitely not ready for this, whatever this is, now.
It can be a Godsend at work. A genius helper that works 100x faster on the first cut with (a multi iteration average) of maybe 3x speed up overall. But while acceleration (just) might be ‘efficiency’, it isn’t, per se, productivity (at least, not in the economist type sense that I understand it).
For productivity you have to ‘discover’ something usefully ‘new’.
Before the info (and now intelligence) eras that often involved someone having to work out afresh how to do something already known about elsewhere and in the process of doing it from first principles they worked out something completely new and uniquely useful along the way.
With the Internet and now LLMs/MLs we’re at severe risk of losing or hobbling that engine of truly innovative growth. Noone will bother to do it the hard way from scratch. But the hard way may be the only chance to get to the next level with these things.
Tech’s ethically and utilitarianly neutral. It’s all down to how it’s used.
Of course, if agentic eventually goes fully generalised, and becomes self directing with it’s own goals / values, then we’re into a whole new ball game. We’ll be sharing the planet with a digital super species. First contact didn’t end well for the Aztecs and Incas. I wouldn’t rate our chances in those circumstances.
At least it’s a distraction from (and something else to worry about) than Brexit and ‘the Decline of Britain’
It doesn’t make me more productive though it is useful.
Productive to me = more output for same input. Doesn’t need to be original.
So far, I’ve personally found that if you use AI to do something in less time you get Toke Reinstein. It’s just filler or plainly inadequate once you scratch the surface.
I have found AI useful as a tool to increase overall quality or scope of ambition. But you’ve really got to sweat it and rethink how and when you use it. Apparent productivity gains typically seem to be undone by rigorous analysis / quality-checks further down the workstream.
In its current guise, I can’t see it replacing humans unless they were doing something that wasn’t worth doing, truly formulaic, or coding (apparently? I don’t code, and there seem to be plenty of coders who dispute the reported gains.)
I agree with you, DH, about the first-cut leap forward. If first-cut means something that nobody *really* cares about, or will ever check, or is best defined as an initial feasibility study or grope in the dark.
Just to join in with the AI fun.
I find it useful in two areas:
A first draft of something that is well-known, but for some reason needs to be repeated to complete the argument of a report or article. It is useful to get it drafted as a bulleted list of points or a set number of words. However, it rarely sounds human and certainly does not sound like me, so it is only a draft/guide that must be rewritten.
The other area it can help me with is to give it my first draft and ask, “What have I missed?” It can be useful to know what the community thinks is important to mention, and then I can decide to include or not.
The other task I use it for is to ask, “What are the most cited/best respected papers/reports/articles/books on this topic?”. Particularly helpful if I am trying to find my way into a new area.
Within these limits, the tools are good and really speed up the research, thinking and organisation stages. Also good for trying to break out of writer’s block.
But so far at least, I don’t think I have ever taken a single sentence of AI output directly into my writing.
I did a quick check using https://app.gptzero.me/ on something I wrote pre-ChatGPT and something recent where I used AI for research and organising. Both scored 100% human generated (Hurray! – or is the AI telling me what I want to hear?).
Whatever the AI finds for you or drafts, you still need to check the original source, as hallucinations are rife, both in terms of completely false citations and false summaries of sources that do exist. But we always had to do that anyway in pre-internet days. Someone else’s gloss on a source could still be erroneous, sloppy or incomplete.
The comment from old_eyes about using this tool to break the ice and handle his research is spot on. It is the exact same thing we saw when the portable calculator arrived.
Back then, many within the education industry claimed calculators would cause a mass educational downward spiral, that students would stop thinking, and human intelligence would wither away. Instead, it did the opposite. It freed people from the mind-numbing drudge of long division on paper, and actually helped some realise they had an aptitude for maths. In business, it changed everything overnight, clearing out entire commercial office floors that used to be packed with rows of comptometerists. Nobody missed that drudging manual work once the chip did it for them.
Ignoring this shift out of fear will come at a heavy price. It sounds hard to believe, but there are still plenty of folks out there—mostly of my generation—who have never even sent an email. If you ask people about AI, they say they don’t trust it, but they don’t actually understand it either. They’ve just been spooked by the “flat earth” brigade who are terrified of anything new.
Using technology to clear away the initial research hurdle or check for missing points isn’t “slop”—it’s just progress. It frees up your mental bandwidth allowing you access to thinking and developing your strategy. Those who refuse to accept it are going to get left behind.
I appreciate that many will attempt to corrupt would-be users for their own gain, but like YouTube, in amongst all the rubbish are many educational gems. And yes, @ Old Eyes, AI is a sycophant, if you allow it, and enjoy ego stroking.
@Barney #101
I hear you! I belong to the last generation to be taught how to use a slide rule (I still have mine) and to have invested in a set of 7-figure log tables for more precise calculations.
I also made the mistake of doing A-level Maths with Statistics on the grounds that it would be more useful to my hoped-for career in the physical sciences. What a mistake! We had to do endless calculations using a UK clone of the Odhner Arithmometer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odhner_Arithmometer). A hand-cranked bastard that took forever to do a calculation and was extremely noisy. Believe me, that was a great way to put you off statistics for life. Fortunately, we were saved by the pocket calculator by the time I was doing research.
So definite progress. However, the only way you could use a slide rule effectively was to have a pretty good idea what the answer should be (at least to order of magnitude), so estimation was an important skill and a feel for whether an answer was realistic. When I came to teach at university, I found that many students would happily submit an answer to an analytical lab that suggested that the tiny scrap of precipitate on their filter paper weighed more than the average elephant. So I did find that useful skill of “the answer should be about…” went missing in the transition.
Indeed. As stated I use AI every day. I have been posting links to AI in Weekend Reading since 2022, and I’m willing to bet many Monevator readers were first directed towards it via this site. (Sounds like a bold claim, but we forget it wasn’t a ubiquitous topic until recently.)
However, doing research or checking points isn’t ‘slop’ and wasn’t what was described as slop here.
Posting AI-generated content (not a date fact-checked and inserted into one’s own comment, for example, but chunks of text or wholesale outsourced thinking) is posting slop, and it will be deleted where I detect it.
For the reasons I have already explained.
@Old Eyes — You make a fair point about estimation, but in the final analysis, the slide rule simply didn’t matter anymore. Whatever small skills were lost were completely overwhelmed by the massive leap in speed, accuracy, and output that calculators brought to industry.
Every big technological shift forces us to drop an old way of working to make room for a much bigger baseline. Failure to recognise or accept that will come at a cost.
@Old eyes #100 – 100% agree
@Barney – I agree AI can and should free people up to think just as critically as ever. I feel like that’s what’s happening with me but it does take a mental effort at times. There is a risk of being gulled into bad behaviour with AI, I think.
I’m thinking of the legions of Uni professors who believe the essay is dead, that law firm citing non-existent caselaw, and of course, Toke Reinstein. What a legend that guy is.
Still, as @DH notes, we probably ain’t seen nuthin’ yet 🙂
One thing which cracks me up about Reform/Restore/the post Theresa May (especially post Sunakian) ‘Conservatives’ is the harping on about being silenced/ deplatformed/ cancelled. Ummmh. No. Most of the print media is in their pocket. Substack tries to get me to follow Alt Right / MEGA / Reform types 10 to 1 over progressive voices. GB news etc al.
The voices getting marginalised are the one’s like @TI’s with his moderate, evidence based, fact grounded points about the effect of Brexit.
I think it’s really that the New / Alt Right want total dominance of their voice and anything less is ‘Cancel Culture’.
You’re only a Free Speech advocate if you actively support the right to express views you detest and fundamentally disagree with.
In fairness to her, Ayn Rand, who by her own admission was a homophobe, vigorously supported civil rights for homosexuals long before it became fashionable after Stonewall. It was a core tenant of her libertarian philosophy that she do so.
I don’t see any of the so called Free Speech activists of the far/alt Right today doing the same for say pro Palestinian or pro Remain / Rejoin voices.
I think, in real term numbers, the NHS spend was £200b in 2014-2015 and was £250b in 2024-2025. So it seems to me that the £350m per week extra spend was easily, by a factor of 3 reached. I agree that outcomes should have improved but it was certainly not for a lack of cash.
Well on the Econofacts table in the above piece it looks bleak for Brexit but…as a Remainer I still have to ask, are there any other major forces at play here?
The evidence suggests so:
https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-has-the-economic-gap-between-europe-and-the-united-states-increased-in-the-past-decade
From 2008 to 2023 US GDP was up a whooping 87%, but EU output was only up 13.5%, and the UK by 15.4%.
And EU GDP was 110% of US GDP in 2008, but by 2023 it’s only 67%.
More relevantly, perhaps, given the UK’s absence from the EU by 2023, EU per capita GDP was 76.5% of the US figure in 2008, but by 2023 it is starkly only 50%.
So this goes waaaay bigger than Brexit. The US has massive structural advantages and a compounding flywheel.