Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

I know it's a state religion and all that, but having a government minister appoint someome to a religious position just feels so odd.

In fairness it is basically a formality, like judges are technically appointed by the Lord Chancellor/Minister for Justice but they're given a very short list (of one or two) by a judicial committee and can, at best, ask for an alternative.

What's actually perhaps funnier and weirder is the actual process. There's public consultations and "listening exercises". Plus a committee of the great and the good of modern British society - so the people who do decide who to nominate (the Anglicans' Conclave) include a former Director-General of MI5 (the chairman), a law firm partner, a former editor of editor of the Law Reports, a local councillor and former chair of two NHS trusts (all of whom have been involved in the CofE in some way or other. Plus some clergy, including representatives of the wider Anglican community such as a Maori priest and the Bishop of Kumasi in Ghana.

Basically the sort of committee and sort of people who sit on every appointment body in Britain - so very much a state church

[Tamas]

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/oct/05/police-to-get-new-powers-to-crack-down-on-repeated-protests-says-home-office

This is going to be very useful for the Farage and then the Tommy Robinson governmens.

[Sheilbh]

Yes, if any middling country can make it then it really should be Britain. We've so many natural advantages.
But the state of our government is such that all this boost is doing is pushing us up from absolute failed state to getting by, constantly scraping a C.

I don't know about natural advantages - I'm not sure have that many compared to, say, Canada or Australia.

But I think there are a lot of self-imposed constraints we could choose to ease. Also there's loads of quite alarming news about China in the UK recently, but it is interesting in illustrating where our relative strengths are. There's a lot of focus by China on AI, material science, medicine/life sciences/pharma and aerospace in the UK. Those are areas where we have a really strong base. We've got very good research universities, trusted courts and professional services, strong culture sector etc. That's a solid base but we need to work from it and snap out of the "I would simply be Germany" dreams too many policymakers hold.

I'd add on that it's not particularly helpful that Treasury and planning decisions have had major life science companies pull out of planned investments - again not indicative of the "laser focus on growth" the government claims to have.

What about Japan?
The Yen is vaguely comparable to the pound for % of global reserves et al and they hang on with fantastic debt. Yes, they have a very different economic setup which is key there- Japan inc and the massively incestuous relationship between business and government. But there are some lessons.
The pound is in nowhere near the same league as the dollar or even euro, but its not nothing. Its solidly a best of the rest competitor.

Yeah. I think that's fair. Japan's bond market is far more domestic than the UK's (about 85% domestic v 70% domestic) - and we're about to get a lot more reliant on international bondholders and shorter term debt as the defined benefit pension schemes wind down as they were a very reliable market for 30 year debt.

Japan has a huge structural current account surplus - like Germany. Britain doesn't - we have a structural current account deficit. The Japanese state also holds a lot of assets and is a large international lender. I also understand the BofE's QT program is more rapid than any of the other major central banks, including the BofJ, so there's a slightly different perspective there.

But even in Japan there are challenges. Interest on debt is up to 3% from a pre-pandmic low of 0.2%. Most tellingly though servicing debt accounts for about 22% of the Japanese budget. That's compared with 8-10% of the UK budget. Japan spends signficantly more on debt redemption and interest than on education, public works and defence combined. So even Japan's debt stability is a bit of an open question in a post-QE/central bank funded world.

From what I've read the price of off shore wind is competitive with other methods.
Sure the equipment itself isn't borderline free as solar is getting, but all-in, its competitive.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-low-uk-offshore-wind-cheaper-than-existing-gas-plants-by-2023/

Yeah so that's a very out of date piece - it's from 2019 and the UK uses gas to set electricity prices (most of Europe uses hydro - but we don't have much of that - Germany uses coal and hydro, France uses nuclear). I think the auction for Contracts for Difference just announced are running at about double those prices and Miliband has had to extend the term from 15 to 20 years.

I think the slightly bigger problem is that solar is so good. It is the future of renewables. In part because you've got China building it. But also there's a really strong economy of scale - so roughly every doubling of production reduces actual module price by about 20%. It's totally modular and pretty passive once installed. The generation cycle is daily - that 24 cycle is really good for (current) battery technology. Also it's very low cost to operate - once you buy the kit and install it the rough costs of operation and maintenance is around 7-10% of the cost of electricity.

That's all fantastic globally in a big picture kind of way. It's not great for Britain The problem is Britain's latitude is really, really shit for this given the daily cycle - generation would collapse at exactly the point we consume most energy. So we'd need to massively overproduce solar and batteries for it to work. We've looked at things like building solar in Morocco or Spain with interconnectors - again it's very expensive and the subsea attack risk is very high.

We do have a lot of wind. The problem is there is no learning rate for offshore - depending on which study you either see a very weak learning rate. There's on piece of research in the UK that actually shows a negative learning curve - it is becoming more expensive per unit the more we make (offshore wind isn't viable on the scale it is in the UK in many other places - so I'm not sure how much of this is structural v our unique ability to create incredibly expensive, bespoke solutions that somehow don't work). Also the modularity isn't great either - in large part this is because solar has become a volume play (you need more and more PV panels), while wind has become about scale (bigger blades, bigger cranes, bigger turbines, deeper ports etc) which is increasing the logistical cost as well, so the cost curve is flat. The operating costs are about 3-4 times solar's. And wind has a very long generation curve - it isn't a daily phenomenon but runs for a while that means you need about 5-10 times the amount of energy storage for wind than you do for solar (again increasing costs). The other problem is that wind is regional so not just most of the UK's but most Europe's windpower fleet moves in unison - they're all generating at the same time and they're all not generating at the same time. Onshore wind is better - and mitigates a lot of these problems (it's more modular, it can be smaller etc) but nowhere near enough to level the playing field with solar.

The other really good option would be hydro - but we don't have the geography for that either. So maybe tidal. My understanding is the UK is one of the few places in the world where tidal could work. I can't remember the details but it was a map and the factors where the size of tides - high to low - which needs to be big for tidal to work, plus dense power network and proximity to population centres (all present in the UK). But that's tech that still isn't really viable at scale (yet).

This is where I think that the UK really, really needs to focus on nuclear if we want decarbonised power. Wind has a role to play, so does some solar (particularly in their respective seasons) - but wind is nowhere near as viable a solution as solar is and solar isn't viable in Britain.

Definitely true the number of jobs won't 'bring back industry'. This is often forgotten by those who want to blame foreigners, that a far bigger factor in the decline of industry as a mass employer is mechanisation. There's that stat I always mention, now a few years old and no longer true, that Britain is making more cars than it did in the 70s but with something like 10% of the workforce (actual number is forgotten).

Also outsourcing. I think mechanisation is a bigger story elsewhere because Britain deindustialised earlier and more severely than anywhere else - and British industry has always massively, massively underinvested on things like mechanisation (part of this was also that we had very strong sector-specific unions).

This is Perry Anderson's point in his recent LRB essay that the three crises (but also necessary consequences) of neoliberalism are inequality, oligarchy and "factor mobility" (basically if your cost of labour is too high you can easily move the factory and the flow of goods is not impacted, or you can take advantage of "free movement" to bring in lower paid labour, or you can outsource to a producer in a cheaper country). The right wing populists want to talk about inequality and factor mobility, the left wing populists want to talk about inequality and oligarchy - but no-one's really talking about all three.

More needs to be done there. The decline of work is a problem in the world at large that AI is threatening to drastically worsen (though I'm increasingly skeptical we're near that key point). We do need a different way of thinking.
The far right of course doesn't offer that. They want us to stop shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic just so they can throw dark skinned people overboard and half the chairs with them.

Yeah. I think AI has the potential to do to certain sectors what the 70s and 80s did to industry. We've already seen a drop in graduate recruitment by about a third this year - part of that is also the increase in employers' NI, but I can't help but thing AI is a factor there. I think those entry level jobs are exposed.

I also think there is a risk for the government in being very gung ho about AI while simultaneously increasing the cost of employing people.

There's definitely big stay clenched until Trump is gone and we get America back thinking going on at the moment.
I can understand it to an extent. That would be lovely.
But given everything going on in America I'm not so confident that's something we can rely on. I really hope behind the scenes at least (it can't be too public as Fox News will tell Trump about it) other plans are underway.

I think pre-Trump America is gone. I think in a way the Biden presidency was almost cruel to Europe in lulling people into a false sense of security that the status quo would be restored - I think it's over. Whether it's a Democrat or a Republican, the style and politeness may change - but I think America does not want to be continuing to be the security guarantor for the third, sixth, seventh, eighth richest countries in the world (plus others) - their focus is going to be the Pacific. And I think protectionism is here to stay.

Really we need to be making common cause with the environmental groups.
We don't want to just open the floodgates to get back to doing what we were doing in the 1930s and have been doing on a far more start-stop basis since then.
This didn't work. Its key to many of the problems we're dealing with today.
We need a fundamentally different approach to building.
We really need to sell the key point that if we build more sensibly this would actually be better for the environment.

I think there is zero common cause with most environmental groups (or heritage groups for that matter). They are institutionally conservative in the truly conservationist way. They're vested interests that need to be beaten (and not just them there are other vested interests like homeowners etc ).

On the 30s I'm not sure - millions of people still live in those homes and use those train lines to get into work every day (I used to live in a 30s Homes for Heroes block and it was fantastic - just very well constructed, solid home). Also my impression is there are far fewer legacy problems from those days than post-war building. In the UK and around the world we have huge costs from post-construction: asbestos, cladding, RAAC, the structural flaws from Ronan Point still unfixed in thousands of buildings around the world.

Again no immigrants I know have this.

In fairness it only came online earlier this year and is replacing the various physical documents like the biometric cards.

I'd have no problem with the police having the ability to check papers under certain explicitly defined circumstances. Not around public transport, though that is the norm in Europe.
But at places of work?
This is where the digital aspect is useful- no "I haven't got my card today" excuse.

It's already legally required for employers to do a right to work check using one of the Home Office's IDs.

I also think your ease about it is possibly white European traveling in Europe privilege

Edit: Although I think digital IDs are already dead. Tech companies saying they're not interested. Government not really building a case, Cabinet minister briefing against it. And a policy going from +35% to -15% approval purely because it's been proposed by this government and this Prime Minister. I think that's possibly the biggest reason to get rid of Starmer. I think he's already so unpopular (like Sunak) that he's now got the "reverse Midas touch" and anything he says, even if it was popular beforehand, will be opposed by most people.