David Thomas

Launching the @SovereignAlbion Podcast: How to Regulate British Nuclear, with @JohnFingleton1 & Mustafa Latif-Aramesh Since writing @sovereignalbion, I have been lucky to have some of the truest and best conversations of my life. What was intended to be a personal essay, albeit with a little hope that it might lead to something more, came to represent a first draft at nation-building. That might sound a little grand, but it’s when I’ve taken these ideas seriously, and stopped caveating the ambition, that I’ve had much deeper conversations and built much deeper friendships and relationships to learn from — especially with founders, artists, policymakers and many others. These conversations tend to skew a bit more Sovereign — i.e. focusing on hard power, critical industries, state capacity and AI — but frequently stray into the Albion: the aesthetics and cultures that run in parallel to progress. In effect: who we are, where we’re going and how we get there. So I’m going to record some of these conversations. Maybe you’re like me: you enjoy listening to @dwarkesh_sp, but you’re left wondering what AI continuing to scale means for us. What is our strategy, in Britain, as it does? Maybe you’d like to see us building more infrastructure and homes across the country, but also think protecting the mysticism and enchantment of nature is critical for restoring collective national purpose. Maybe you believe that startups are the delivery units of progress and you’re frustrated by generic, reflexive ‘anti-tech’ sentiment, but you look around and recognise that we’ve made it easier to build slop than sovereignty, industry and state capacity. @SovereignAlbion looks for better choices. Progress and preservation. Based and woke. Rational and mystical. Metal and moss. Means and meaning. Episode 1 is with @JohnFingleton1 and Mustafa Latif-Aramesh, who were part of the UK’s brilliant recent Taskforce on Nuclear Regulation. When it launched, the report quickly became a rallying point for the many people who refuse to accept that Britain is at some terminal value, both economically and culturally. Nuclear could play an enormous role in enabling safe, clean, abundant energy — solving the energy trilemma of cost, climate and capacity! — but we have made it slow and expensive to build. Britain was the first country in the world to have civil nuclear energy, but today we haven’t built a new nuclear power station for 30 years. I wanted to understand how we got here, and what needs to come next. Thank you to @BritishProgress for supporting this experiment, and please share your feedback, however small, so this can as good as possible. I’m excited to start imperfectly and improve at what @tamarawinter calls ‘deploying your taste’. If it works, I hope to build an audience and leverage that distribution to give power — in the style of @Alex_Danco — to the people, ideas and machines rebuilding our national spirit and restoring national agency.

Britain needs nuclear power. Our nuclear projects are the most expensive in the world and among the slowest. Regulators and industry are paralysed by risk aversion. This can change. For Britain to prosper, it must. Earlier this year, the Prime Minister appointed me to lead a Taskforce to set out a path to getting affordable, fast nuclear power Britain. Our final report today sets out 47 recommendations, among them: - Creating a one-stop shop for nuclear approvals, to end the regulatory merry-go-round that delays projects at the moment. - Simplifying environmental rules to avoid extreme outcomes like Hinkley Point C spending £700m on systems to protect one salmon every ten years, while enhancing nuclear's impact on nature. - Limiting the ability of spurious legal challenges to delay nuclear projects, which adds huge cost and delay throughout the supply chain. - Approving fleets of reactors, so that Britain’s nuclear industry can benefit from certainty and economies of scale. - Directing regulators to factor in cost to their behaviour, and changing their culture to allow building cheaply, quickly and safely. - Changing the culture of the nuclear industry to end gold-plating and focus on efficient, safe delivery. If the government adopts our report in full, it will send a signal to investors that it is serious about pro-growth reform and taking on vested interests for the public good. A thriving British nuclear industry producing abundant, affordable energy would be good for jobs, good for manufacturing, good for the climate, and good for the cost of living. And it could enable Britain to become an AI and technology superpower. Britain can be a world leader in this new Industrial Revolution, but only if it has the energy to power it. Our report is bold, but balanced. Our recommendations, taken together and properly implemented, will forge a clear path for stronger economic growth through improved productivity and innovation. This is a prize worth fighting for. gov.uk/government/pub…

'If we are serious about social justice and intellectual ambition, this must change. KS3 should be the intellectual powerhouse of the secondary school' schoolsweek.co.uk/how-labour-can…

Study finds less than one in ten initial high-achievers in maths from disadvantaged backgrounds go on to achieve at least a B at A level tes.com/magazine/news/…

My latest article is in @palladiummag The article is about Romania, and specifically, why it seems to do so incredibly well in international academic competitions If you look at Romania, it's not what you'd expect As I explain, the answer is its hyper-stratified school system