John Fingleton

I am pleased to see the government response to Task Force on Nuclear Regulation. First, it has been published on time which sends a positive signal about priorities. Second, the detailed and considered response shows that the Government is serious about reform. Third, almost every recommendation is to be taken forward fully. All of this should help bring about a substantial reduction in cost and delivery schedules for new nuclear. This should spur greater confidence for investors in nuclear in the UK. A few recommendations will be taken forward in a different way that in our report, as we envisaged. The role of the Implementation structure will be critical in continuing to ensure that this is prioritised.

@s8mb The piece by @DanNeidle on it was interesting.

I don’t really see why anyone would want to work for or invest in a startup in Britain under these tax rates. It’s already a pretty risky proposition, employees already pay income tax and NICs when equity vests, and then nearly half of any gains after that are taxed as well?

My thoughts on social housing and building in inner London: - Almost everyone who lives in social housing is a decent human being who is trying their best in often difficult circumstances. Among them are many retirees, kids, and people with disabilities. This must be the starting point for any serious thinking about housing in London. - London's job market is much stronger than that of the rest of the country. The median London wage is 25% more than the median English wage. The easier we make it for Britons to move to London, the richer they and the country will become. - Housing in inner London is extremely scarce and building rates are very low. In 2024–25, only 4,170 homes were started in London. London's housing target is 20x that and I think it's possible that we could build 100–150x that with the right reforms. - For now, we are in a roughly zero-sum game (which is one reason tensions are so high). We need to make this positive-sum by building more and by allowing voluntary exchanges of the existing housing stock. - There are about 450,000 socially rented homes in inner London. This is about one in three homes. About half of the 450,000 are occupied by lead tenants who are not working, either because they are retired (18%), disabled (13%), caring for someone else (7%), studying (2%), or unemployed/otherwise inactive (11%). - Social housing tenancies are basically tenancies-for-life, and can often pass down from parents to their children. They are close in practice to ownership, except that they cannot be sold. Ex-council flats in inner London are often worth £500,000 or more; there are many in extremely central parts of the city like Shoreditch, Soho and Farringdon that are worth even more than that. - Kicking people out of these homes against their will is, in general, morally bad and politically impossible. The public does not resent these people and would, rightly, find it appalling to turf them out of their homes against their will. - 'Gentrification' is a problem when it drives people out against their will by raising rents or other costs. It is primarily a problem caused by housing shortages. When housing supply can respond to new demand in an area, there is much less displacement of the people who live there. - Poor people do not like dirt, graffiti, crime, or derelict buildings, and many of their supposed champions have a patronising and somewhat dehumanising idea of what is in their interests. They do not want to live in unsafe, unpleasant areas any more than anyone else does. Change that makes places safer, cleaner and prettier without displacing existing residents is a good thing for everyone. - Large supermarkets are the cheapest places to buy food in London and allowing them to be built is the best way to protect people's access to affordable retail. - There are options that are good for tenants and good for people who wish to live in these central areas that do not push people out against their will. These are options that put tenants in control and give them a large share of the value created. At best, they reduce scarcity overall. - One is to make the social housing stock much more liquid by allowing social housing tenants to sell their tenancies into private ownership, keeping the returns to spend on a new property that is more suitable for their needs and the rest as savings. - Arguments against this that focus on the fact that many of the out-of-work people are blameless completely miss the point. For retirees, parents, and some people with disabilities, a home in a London suburb or a town other than London may be preferable to an apartment in inner London – more spacious, easier to access (eg, not up flights of stairs), and in a quieter neighbourhood. Existing schemes to allow people to trade their social home for a home by the seaside or in the country are hugely oversubscribed; this would unlock the entire private market to them. - Private owners already have the freedom to sell their home to who they want. That is one of the core benefits of private ownership. This extends that right to social tenants. - Another option is 'estate regeneration', where entire housing estates are rebuilt and existing tenants are given larger, newer homes built to modern standards and thousands of private units also added. Where tenants are given a vote on this, they consistently vote in favour (29/30 ballots have passed, often with enormous majorities and turnouts.) Hundreds of thousands of homes could be added in this way. - A vast amount of regulation also needs to be reversed – the Building Safety Regulator, second staircase rules, dual aspect rules, and others – in order to make building cheaper. Otherwise, we will find ourselves in a position where even if you get permission to build a home it is prohibitively expensive to do so. - Affordable housing requirements are a tax on new housing and almost certainly reduce the overall amount of homes that get built. Manchester has built thousands of new homes without them. Richard Leese, the Labour leader of the City Council, said "If we’d tried to impose 20% affordability on it, it wouldn’t have happened. We wouldn’t have got 20% affordable housing, we would have got nothing." - Many of the most vocal foes of new building in inner London are ideological opponents of private construction and cannot be reasoned or bargained with. Defeating them will involve a combination of targeted upzoning imposed by central government and the creation of hyperlocal mechanisms that allow the people who are most directly affected by new development to decide on it (eg, estate regeneration). The anti-building ideologues only win because normal people sympathise with them. - If we do not do not work to make the existing housing stock more easily transacted and building much easier, London will become hollowed out. Existing market-rate housing will be bid up by wealthy people who can afford it, and anyone on a middle income – let alone a low income who does not have a social home – will find it very difficult to live here, except in cramped houseshares when they are young. London should not be a city for only the very poor and very rich.

Want cheaper food? Don’t cap prices, instead scrap the planning rules that make our supermarkets less productive and less competitive. Here’s how the ‘Town Centre first’ policy lets big supermarkets block Aldi and Lidl from opening new shops.

No smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics, as the culprit for the global drop in fertility: • In the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest • Birth rates were stable in the US, UK and Australia until 2007; in France and Poland until 2009; in Mexico and Indonesia until 2012; in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal until 2013-15 Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption (see picture). • The younger the age group, the sharper the drop. • in-person socialising among young adults is dropping. In SK, by 50% in 20 years • Sexual dysfunction is higher among heavy social media user • Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies — Middle East, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa • Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC 2008 and those not hit, fast-growing and not growing. Excellent again @jburnmurdoch. ft.com/content/fba35e…

NEW: Natural England are set to delay Hinkley Point C by insisting on even more measures to protect fish. A two-year delay to Hinkley Point C Unit 1 would mean about 24TWh less clean firm power on the grid, between 2-4bn cubic metres more gas burnt, and between 4-8m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Even though EDF have spent £700m on fish protection, including a £50m acoustic fish deterrent that is 93% effective, regulator Natural England wants them to do even more. This is likely to involve creating a salt marsh on nearby farmland. This could take years. samdumitriu.com/p/natural-engl…

This is a great read Ben.

@JohnFingleton1 is absolutely right Ireland should be building state capacity in nuclear now to keep its options open later

The way we build nuclear is broken. Great that legislation to implement @JohnFingleton1’s plan to fix it is in the King’s Speech. Government cannot back down on the bold reforms to habitats regulations that make nuclear easier/faster/cheaper to build, and better protect nature.

Which are the most common everyday phenomena that we don't properly understand? Off the top of my head: • Lightning (how does it happen?) • Sleep; dreams (why do they exist?) • Glass (thermodynamics of formation) • Turbulence (when does it start?) • Morphogenesis (how does a creature know what should go where?) • Rain (it seems to start faster than models would predict) • Ice (dynamics of slipperiness) • Static electricity (which material will donate electrons?) • General anaesthetic. (And the mechanism of a lot of drugs, e.g. paracetamol.)

I am very pleased that the Nuclear Regulatory Review got a positive mention in the King's Speech today. Good to see progress on implementation continuing.

@lugaricano Thanks...that is much I thought but useful to know

Hi John, Ireland (WEO: 96% of US per-capita GDP in 2000 and 162% in 2030) is excluded from Figure 1 because, as you know, Irish GDP per capita is close to meaningless--heavily distorted by multinational profit shifting and IP booking, and including Ireland would have made the (economically meaningful) variation across the rest of Europe much harder to see.

New post out!: The two Europes: why the security shock is deepening Europe's economic divide. Europe is divided in two: the chart shows a positive convergence story and a divergence story. Poland went from 34% of US per capita GDP in 2000 to a projected 67% by 2030. Romania from 27% to 60%. France dropped from 86% to 71%. Italy from 93% to 68%. The EU is not one economy moving slowly. It is two economies moving in opposite directions. The hope after Draghi was that the Russian threat would supply the political urgency the rear of Europe lacks. The correlation is the wrong one. Our analysis shows the shock is mobilising the countries where the Draghi problem is not most severe, and leaving the rest largely untouched. War is reforming Europe's frontier. It is not reforming its rear. New post with @OlivierKooi. siliconcontinent.com/p/the-two-euro…

Everyone who cares about climate should understand this. Texas, with no pro-climate policies, has blown passed California in clean energy. In large part because Texas has less red tape and makes it easier to build.

Tough (but deserved) panning of Govt rail plans from independent international nonprofit Allrail group. They say there are no quantified benefits or evidence it will make things better & goes in opposite direction to successful global Open Access trend. s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/uploads.mangow….

What is Progress Ireland all about, asks our new communications chief @sarahjscales

Just out: my conversation with @Caffar3Cristina on her Escape Forward podcast on Europe's position in the AI race: if we cannot build the foundation models, where exactly do we capture the value of AI? I think what people are missing is that we are not in the race by orders of magnitude, and all the talk about industrial policy and sovereign stack will not change it: - EU public R&D in 2024 was 127.9 billion euros, or 0.71 percent of GDP. Includes every national research ministry, every research council, the entire EU framework programme combined. - Private R&D across the entire European economy was 268 billion euros. The five US tech giants together spent close to that, around 230 billion dollars, inside one industry. Amazon alone spent 85.6 billion. More importantly, the AI spend of the hyperscalers this year will be 600 bn. Goldman Sachs projects 1.15 trillion dollars of hyperscaler capex from 2025 to 2027. The answer in Brussels for those who do not understand arithmetic is "sovereign AI." Sovereign chips, sovereign models, sovereign clouds. The reality is that most of this race is already over. Even ASML makes the lithography machines, but the light source comes from San Diego and the critical patents are American. Nvidia and TSMC own the chips. How do we avoid becoming the dumb pipe sitting underneath someone else's value capture? Our telcos already lived that story. The risk for our pharma, automotive and machinery industries is that they end up having to perform all the value added tasks using AI from American hyperscalers and watching the margin migrate to New Jersey and Seattle. The way out is what I call the smart second mover strategy (links below to the two key posts with Jesús Saa-Requejo): use the assets we actually have, which include manufacturing data, richest health data in the world, pharmaceutical companies that lead in drug discovery, a skilled workforce, a 450 million person market. The job is to make our factories, labs and hospitals the fastest AI adopters in the world, so that the implementation layer becomes where the rents accrue. Two things have to be true for this to work: First, speed. Our companies need to deploy AI in factories, labs and hospitals without waiting for an Annex III conformity assessment from the Market Surveillance Authority of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The AI Act in its current form makes most useful applications "high risk" by default. That has to be fixed, and the GDPR rules that block training on industrial and health data have to go. The European Data Health space cannot be stopped by the local data regulator Second, competition at the model layer. The good news is that LLMs are not Facebook. Switching from Claude to Gemini to a Chinese open-weight model is one API call. Open weights, even six months behind the frontier, hold prices down. The bad news is that this only stays true if Europe insists on interoperability, data portability and encrypted local data centres. PSD2 forced banks to open their APIs and gave Europe a real fintech sector (By 2024 there were 580 licensed payment institutions and 350 licensed account information service providers operating across the EU: Klarna, Adyen, Wise, Revolut, N26, Tink, TrueLayer, Yapily,. The same logic has to apply to AI.) Cristina pushed me hard on the limits of all this. Are we really sovereign if Azure and AWS still hold 60 percent of European data, with the 2018 Cloud Act giving Washington legal access? No, we are not. Some sovereign capacity for defence and core government is non-negotiable. But for the rest of the economy, encrypted, local and portable beats nothing, and it beats waiting ten years for a European cloud that never arrives. The biggest enemy of Europe in this race is Europe. We have spent a decade regulating problems we do not have and ignoring the ones we do. We are not a middle power. We are the second largest consumer market on the planet. Time to act like it. Full conversation with Cristina here: escape-forward.com/2026/04/30/ai-… Links to my posts on this strategy: siliconcontinent.com/p/the-smart-se… siliconcontinent.com/p/the-smart-se…

As reflected in many of my posts over the past few months, I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory. What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria. I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978. Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely. Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies. But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies. I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric information, career concerns, lack of timely feedback, pressure toward conformity) that cause dysfunction in the former are even more pronounced in the latter because of the absence of a profit motive, the sharpest disciplinary mechanism. At a very fundamental level, Marx got modernity wrong; Weber got it right. Time to spend much less time with Marx and much, much more time with Weber.

While AI Twitter Britmaxxes, I look at how government tech/AI policy is stuck: - What is the government's theory of technology-enabled growth? - Does it have one? - Are they worse than their predecessors? - Is Labour factionalism to blame? - What about Sovereign AI? Link ↓

Is AI killing jobs? New data shows that, more than three years after the release of ChatGPT, there is no evidence for a significant impact of AI on overall employment in the UK. In our new report, we break down the labour force into different occupations and use four measures of AI exposure to determine how likely they are to be affected by the technology. Surprisingly, occupations with higher exposure to AI have grown faster than least-exposed ones, not slower. This holds across all four measures, and across two different data sources. The wage picture is different. Pay in AI-exposed occupations has lagged the rest of the labour market since 2019. But that gap opened three years before ChatGPT, which makes AI an unlikely candidate for the observed wage compression. This flattening of the wage structure is visible across the within-occupation distribution and strongest at the top quartile, which is consistent with labour market dynamics that predate generative AI.

Good article on housebuilding and the effect of height restrictions. cepr.org/voxeu/columns/…