Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

As I said before this story being such big news is a good thing.
Not because this pub was particularly special, but because this kind of thing happens all the time and nothing ever happens. Developers get away with not quite literal murder all the time.
This particular case has seen the reaction finally boil over. Which is a very good thing. Hopefully other developers will think twice before doing this and punishments will be harder.

I am sure these things happen but how can on this island anyone claim that it's a reckless free for all for developers? Like, really?

[Sheilbh]

I am sure these things happen but how can on this island anyone claim that it's a reckless free for all for developers? Like, really?

Like the stuff about property developers owning the Tory party (they are the largest donors by industry, I think). I wish

There was a line in a piece in the Times today:

Which is why I know politicians of all parties, some extremely senior, who privately support all these things but none who say so publicly. They calculate that voters won't thank them for offering pain today, gain tomorrow. A minister recently told me about proposals for an innovative green energy project in his constituency, adding: "It's just what the country needs but I'll have to oppose it because my local Lib Dems are campaigning against it."

The Tories will happily take anyone's money but don't expect anything in return if it threatens the vote of one retiree in Royal Tunbridge Wells. Thought the same over Ukraine where you still get people going on about how the Russians bought the Tories because they may well have given them money, but I'd want a refund if this is the return they've got

[Valmy]

Kind of wild how membership in the Tories dropped off a cliff in the 1980s.

[Sheilbh]

Kind of wild how membership in the Tories dropped off a cliff in the 1980s.

90s, no? It looks like they were growing for most of the 80s.

Although the Tories have always been a lot more shady about membership figures (we don't actually know but 170,000 were able to vote in the last leadership election) - in part because they're not a very democratic party.

[Zanza]

Steepest decline seems to be around 1970s, no?

[Sheilbh]

Steepest decline seems to be around 1970s, no?

Yeah - my suspicion is a not insignificant part of that were people who backed Enoch Powell when he was kicked out of the party for his "rivers of blood" speech.

Although it may be the general 1970s malaise/shocks - three day week and the miners' strike and the oil shock etc.

[Josquius]

As I said before this story being such big news is a good thing.
Not because this pub was particularly special, but because this kind of thing happens all the time and nothing ever happens. Developers get away with not quite literal murder all the time.
This particular case has seen the reaction finally boil over. Which is a very good thing. Hopefully other developers will think twice before doing this and punishments will be harder.

I am sure these things happen but how can on this island anyone claim that it's a reckless free for all for developers? Like, really?

Yes.
The thing is what developers want to build are not buildings that would be particularly helpful for the housing crisis

There's definitely an argument to make that scummy developers are pushed to ignoring the law by the over the top empowerment of nimbys. But two wrongs don't make a right.

[Sheilbh]

Separately quite glad to see messages supporting Ukraine on Ukrainian Independence Day from Sunak, Starmer, Sir Ed Davey and Humza Yousaf - rare example of more or less total unanimity.

[Sheilbh]

Also John Burn-Murdoch on just how bad public transport is in the UK:


This means we are experimenting with a bold new type of city. Ones that are simultaneously badly served by road and public transport networks


One point is that things are just a lot more expensive to build in the UK:


He points to NIMBYism as a factor but also this thread by Sam Dumitriu on a whole range of projects, costs and causes:
https://twitter.com/Sam_Dumitriu/status/1694990887439233239?s=20

One startling example (though as he notes Norway is particularly good at this stuff but still amazing):

Sam Dumitriu
@Sam_Dumitriu
Yet some projects stand out.

Incredibly, £267m has been spent on the Lower Thames Crossing's 63,000 page planning application.

Norway built the world's longest road tunnel and the world's deepest subsea tunnel for less.

And while everyone agrees on the need for a new crossing as Dartford is heavily congested we're still not there and it is worth pointing out quite how involved the consultation process has been for that application (which did result in some design changes):


Another problem is unpredictable feast/famine approaches to funding by different central governments, often in order to meet arbitrary fiscal rules that they've imposed on themselves (this has been the cause of the recent HS2 decisions - by pushing work back HMT can say they've met their fiscal rules, as defined by HMT ). Interestingly not the heroes/villains you'd expect on, say, rail electrification:


Rail electrification is an area where we really lag behind Europe meaning our trains are slower and dirtier. Part of the reason is it's significantly more expensive:


One other point made on rail electrification is that ministers change and change their minds. So he gives the example of the TransPennine Route Upgrade designed to electrify 76 miles of rail connecting York and Leeds to Manchester. This was announced 12 years ago with a cost of £289 million and to finish in 2019. The current costs are between £9-11 billion and the upgrade has not yet happened. As Tim Harford in the FT put it:

Ministers have vacillated endlessly over the specifics as personnel and budgets changed. Work was started in 2015, then paused almost immediately while waiting for Network Rail's investment programme to be reviewed. When it restarted later that year, the aims of the project had changed: the line now needed to accommodate more passengers on faster, more frequent and more reliable trains. A further rethink committed the upgrade to laying extra track, enhancing station platforms and introducing digital signalling.

None of those changes are necessarily bad - but thinking about it from my work-y perspective if the timeline, funding and scope are likely to change fairly regularly (and each time the building company will have to submit new documents - and it might need to go back through a full procurement process), then the internal costs will be high. But also companies bidding for the work will pad their numbers or want guarantees or some other way to recover costs on a project that's constantly changing.

I know I often moan about NIMBYism and that is part of it - but I still think a huge number of these issues are just that Whitehall is central to it. Whether it's HMT's ever shifting "fiscal rules", unpredictable funding from central government, or shifts in scope as ministers change and want to announce something new (or just want to announce something again). I can't help but feel that more decentralised power and empowered local leaders with local revenue (rather than reliance on central government grants) would be better able to deliver a lot of this stuff. In the UK very little money for local government is actually raised locally (less than 5%) which is less than most countries and means I think that local government leaders at the minute don't actually really see the benefits, for what they can do, from more infrastructure or better economic performance. They don't actually get that much extra money from it - while they feel the impact of local opposition in elections (I'm not yet in GF's camp of just bribe locals - but not far from it).

And it's worth saying that not only is all of this having an impact on I think our growth potential, but also, again, how in the world we're supposed to meet our net zero targets with these types of issues building infrastructure is beyond me. Relatedly I also think it's more expensive because we actually have a lot of fiscal transfers in the UK:


But it's the opposite of convergence - I think in part because the focus is on mitigating the underlying issue of some regional economies doing a lot worse than others. But that is partly reinforced by local government incentives where they just don't see the benefit of a stronger economy through revenues that might incentivise policies that would help convergence, as in Germany. And worth noting I believe the fiscal transfers to the North East, Wales and Northern Ireland are now significantly larger than to any German state because they're converging.

Edit: Incidentally this reinforces my view that our lack of real decentralisation of power, funding and revenue is the big democratic issue in the UK, more than the voting system. I think you could change that and still face these problems because fundamentally power isn't distributed well and we'd still be vastly over-centralised - just with the Lib Dems in the cabinet blocking things too

[Gups]

I agree. Nimbyism is an issue but it's just one of many and not even the main one (for major infra).

The biggest problem is that we get the authoirsation first and then do detailed design and a decision as to whether to finance it. A project tlike HS2 has really wide boundaries (called limits of deviation) within which the railway can ultimately be built to allow for detailed design. THis means significantly higher levels of opposition (as more people are potentially affected), more information required on impacts etc etc. Deals can't be done with landowners because nobody know what the design will be and there's no budget.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah and the costs impact for the builders/developers must be huge as specs change too.

Looking at that TransPennine electrification for example if you bid on a contract to electrify 75 miles of track that's a fundamentally different project and work you need to do than that plus actually improving the electrification and track for more trains, building a new track, installing digital signalling and re-doing stations.

I suppose the flipside is (and I imagine this is a Treasury concern) lots of money being spent on detailed design and scoping on projects that ultimately don't go ahead.

[Josquius]

Amazing transport is worse even than in the US. How the hell is that possible? I Wonder how they measured this.

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/24/hundreds-of-items-missing-from-british-museum-since-2013

Hundreds of items 'missing' from British Museum since 2013

Gold coins, silver necklaces and 540 pieces of pottery are among the hundreds of historical artefacts missing from the British Museum since 2013, the institution's records reportedly show.

The British Museum revealed last week that police were investigating items that were "missing, stolen or damaged" from its collection. Legal action is being taken by the London-based institution against a member of staff, who has been sacked.

The Times reported on Thursday that a freedom of information (FoI) request to the museum had disclosed that a Greek silver coin, a 4th-century Roman coin and a German coin had disappeared from the museum in the year to April 2014.

An early 20th-century ring, a chain made up of "round-sectioned silver wire", animal-shaped wooden opium poppy scorers and glazed leaf pendants and beads are also said to be among the items to have gone missing over the past 10 years.

...

So much for the idea that the British Museum shouldn't repatriate objects as it is a safer place to store them.

[Sheilbh]

So much for the idea that the British Museum shouldn't repatriate objects as it is a safer place to store them.

Yeah - I mean my understanding is only about 60% of the collection is even catalogued. There are millions of items and a lot are not on display and not even properly catalogued. I can't really see a defensible case against repatriation of at least an awful lot of that.

Or, most egregiously the Ehtiopian tabots (which I believe there are now plans to return) which are incredibly sacred objects to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. So sacred that the British Museum has agreed to never display them - which makes it seem to me there's no possible justification for keeping them.

My suspicioon is this story is going to get a lot worse. The way it broke and some of the details makes me think the board have suddenly discovered they've got a huge problem on their hands.

[Tamas]

Not even catalogued? Was it their busy schedule of not robbing the world blind anymore that got in the way?

Having said that, I'd not have had the means to tour the world to see all the stuff I am glad to have seen in the British Museum, so I don't want to speak up against it too much.