James Leeson

Britain needs an economic revolution. Here’s how we will deliver one ⬇️

The headline takeaways from the Bloomberg Brexit analysis published today: ⚫️ The NBER 8% figure is garbage ⚫️ The Customs Union would add less GDP than the value of the UKs trade deals that it would lose ⚫️ The cost of membership in 2028 is higher than the expected GDP add

I cannot believe this idiot and his 45 collaborators spent two years coming up with the idea that rich countries should give poor countries all their money because climate change. It’s the stupidest thing I have ever seen. It’s the kind of nonsense policy that would come out of a middle school model UN. Piketty is so dumb he doesn’t even seem to understand how much he has embarrassed himself. Somebody pays this man and his friends to think, and they got ripped off. But this kind of slop is taken seriously in the community of tenured academics, which means they’re all stupid too. I hope that putting this out into the world this way will draw attention to the ridiculousness of Piketty and the whole ecosystem in which he operates.

Bjorn Lomborg did not deny climate change, but treated it as one problem among many. The past 20 years vindicate his position: emissions are rising more slowly than feared, disaster deaths have fallen, and poverty remains a more acute threat than climate. humanprogress.org/a-vindication-…

Crazy how much HS2 was fumbled. Spent 100bn and still ended up with a design virtually nobody likes. I bet the design on the right would have actually saved money by avoiding the perceived need for as much pointless tunnelling.

Natasha Irons, the Labour MP for Croydon East, said she was “proud” that the government was “putting passengers before profit” by bringing railway companies into public ownership. It was a revealing moment in PMQs this week, because it was so unremarkable. A Labour MP sloganised meaninglessly about “profit” being the enemy of customer service and no one noticed. Keir Starmer replied that he too was “proud” that her constituents are travelling on rail services that are now “back in public ownership”, and no one batted an eyelid. The PM assumed that everyone agrees that public ownership is better than a competitive market because that is what the voters think, according to superficial opinion polls. Worse, he boasted that some of Irons’s constituents were “benefiting from the first freeze in rail fares for 30 years”. If he had said that rail travellers, who tend to be better off, are being subsidised even more by taxpayers, who are on average poorer than they are, the cheers of Labour MPs might have been less noisy. But no, the surrender to magic money-tree economics is so complete that it passed without comment. No one rose to demand, “Did the old Clause IV die in vain?” No one asked if Tony Blair had gone to all that trouble to expunge the commitment to the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” from Labour’s constitution for nothing. Labour’s reflex hostility to profit is back, and it is one of the underlying causes of the government’s failure. Starmer and Rachel Reeves presented themselves as pro-business, but they didn’t mean it. Not really, deep down. They had not done the hard thinking in opposition that Blair forced the party to do by rewriting Clause IV, setting out the party’s “aims and values” in its constitution, to understand what a “dynamic economy” involved. So when they had to choose which taxes to put up, they went for taxes that burdened businesses, stifling wealth creation and employment. Now here comes Andy Burnham, offering to go through the whole sorry cycle all over again. He too says he is pro-business, and the skyscrapers of boomtown central Manchester give us some confidence that he might mean it. He says Reeves’s rise in employers’ national insurance contributions “wasn’t the right decision” and he wants to “reconsider” it. Yesterday he told the Telegraph that he would “look again” at the inheritance tax rise on farmers. But this admission of error was not accompanied by a return to economic realism. Far from it. It was part of a cynical vote-buying exercise: a promise of a 20 per cent cut in business rates on pubs. Never mind that it is unusual for a by-election candidate to make a formal announcement of a policy they would implement if they were prime minister, just ask: where is the money coming from? In the case of the tax cut for pubs, Burnham went through the motions of being a serious candidate for government by saying it would be paid for by higher taxes on online giants such as Amazon and by cracking down on tax evasion. So, he proposes a 20 per cent cut in business rates for pubs instead of the 15 per cent cut announced by Reeves for next April, paid for by a combination of the unworkable and the imaginary. As for employers’ national insurance and farmers, it is all “look at”, “revisit” and “consider”, with a wave of the hand in the general direction of the money tree. But renationalising Thames Water, also mentioned yesterday, seemed to be a firm promise. For the water industry as a whole, “public ownership is absolutely an option,” he said. But “for Thames Water, that is what should be done”. As with the railways, public opinion is on his side – at the level of pop-quiz poll questions. But as Blair once explained, there is a difference between a three-second answer, a 30-second answer and a three-minute answer. People tend to say yes to any question about public ownership, but if the question includes the costs of nationalisation, the history of public-sector under-investment and whether ministers’ energy should be devoted to the complex legislation needed, the answers become less certain. Nationalisation ought to be a pragmatic question – “the market where possible, the state where necessary”, as the German social democrats realised 67 years ago – but for too many in the Labour Party, it remains an article of faith 31 years after Blair’s teachable moment. For Burnham, it betrays an instinct of hostility to profit, and an attachment to fantasy economics that augurs nothing good. Burnham’s alleged closeness to Ed Miliband, whose economically illiterate energy policy is one of the government’s more serious failings, is the opposite of reassuring. It means Burnham may be able to put a happier and less sanctimonious face on Starmer and Reeves’s policies, but he is likely to make the actual policies worse.

A new poll shows that, by more than 2 to 1, British voters would rather keep the right to set their own regulations than have greater access to EU markets. That is the only question that truly matters, and is why talk of joining the EU is for the birds. telegraph.co.uk/gift/97c51e968…

Nicola Sturgeon has updated her pronouns to him/not me

Britain's free-market community has won the intellectual argument on the causes of the country's slow growth. Almost all serious analysts now say supply-side constraints in housing, energy, labour etc are a big drag on it. Remarkable really, given many economists spent the 2010s deluding themselves that more spending by the Department for Communities and Local Government and higher public sector pay was the route to growth. I guess when the country ran huge demand-side stimulus post-pandemic, it became obvious that it was the supply-side all along. But it took a long time to get there!

At this point I'm pointing out that the then-SNP auditors Johnson Carmichael LLP DID highlight concerns in real time (i.e. their 2021 warnings of the "great risk of fraud" was with "revenue and recognition". By September 2022 they resigned. The SNP leadership hid this fact for 6 months, failing to even inform their NEC. Humza Yousaf only was told AFTER being elected (and publicly committing himself to the "proven winner" Peter Murrell). These are all facts, on the record.

@GavinBarwell Have you seen the natural gas price in the US Gavin? In regard to the gas price, domestic production very much does bring down the domestic price.

...because it would make little difference to overall supply. Don't believe me: the US is an energy exporters but that hasn't protected its consumers from big increases in petrol prices 2/2

This isn't true. Ofgem made it clear "This increase is a result of higher wholesale gas prices caused by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East". More drilling in the North Sea would be good for our economy, but it would make little difference to prices... 1/2

What if all new terraced houses were this harmonious, good simple? Following patterns that evolve gently with the centuries, making people happy not creating false ruptures.

Tony Blair to Jon Sopel re Ed Miliband and net zero, part 1

Britain’s miserabilist view of energy policy is never as clear as during a heatwave. That’s because, unlike virtually every other civilised country, British housebuilders are de facto banned from installing air conditioning. Our building regulations say that housebuilders must exhaust every other “passive” option for cooling buildings – from airflow to shutters to awnings – before local council pen pushers will let them install air con. The result is that most of our homes are built without it. That’s why 3% of British homes have air con, compared to 90% in the US, Japan and Korea. Why do we have this mad ban in place? Because our political class, including erstwhile Conservatives such as Robert Jenrick, said it ‘used too much energy’. This is an anti-growth mindset that must be rejected. Cheap, abundant energy is the foundation of prosperity, but the problem with the net zero ideology is that it turned this fundamental truth on its head. Energy use became a bad thing to be demonised, and the result is that we made electricity scarce and expensive by focusing on decarbonisation over cost and security of supply. Prices went through the roof and fewer and fewer people now use it. But as energy demand has collapsed in the UK, so have growth and living standards. That’s why two years ago I made a speech saying we would need to prepare for more energy demand to fuel AI and air con, or risk becoming poorer and less prosperous. The fact that we are one of the only major economies that has decided the solution to hot days is to “sweat it out” tells you everything you need to know about our warped energy ideology. All the evidence shows that in heatwaves people sleep far fewer hours, productivity plummets and children struggle in school. Why would we limit access to a technology that is proven to save lives, boost productivity and make people more comfortable? It is even more absurd when you consider that Ed Miliband is carving up the countryside for masses of solar farms – solar farms that we are going to be paying millions of pounds to switch off when it’s too sunny in the summer. Yet air conditioning demand peaks in the summer at exactly the same time as those solar farms are generating more electricity than the grid can use. That’s how mad our energy policy is – we are now building energy generation that we want to stop the public from using. We really are through the looking glass now. This is all part of the mind rot that has infected all echelons of government, which sees UK energy usage as uniquely bad and will do everything it can to drive it down – even when that means transferring our industries’ emissions to coal-powered China, or blocking our households from enjoying the growth, prosperity and consumer benefits that other countries allow. That’s why rather than embrace AI, Labour are currently agonising about whether it’s compatible with net zero - and why they would rather use Putin’s oil than back our British industry in Aberdeen. Under Kemi Badenoch and my leadership, we Conservatives are taking a new approach. We need to get back to energy realism by repealing the Climate Change Act. We need to prioritise cheap, abundant energy by backing the North Sea, doubling down on nuclear and adopting our Cheap Power Plan to make electricity cheap. Energy policy should serve the needs of the British public, not the other way around. That’s why we would axe the outdated building regulations that are blocking air con and build an energy system which puts consumers first.

A reminder that, under our soil, we have 1.5 billion barrels of oil, 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 300 years' supply of coal. ofgem.gov.uk/press-release/…

Would love for Blair to one day talk about how he views his own constitutional legacy: HRA, devolution, judicial review, Supreme Court, Civil Service Code. All that might go under a future right-wing government. What does he think of it?

If every income in this country doubled tomorrow, 'child poverty' would stay the same. This is because it is not a measure of poverty, but of inequality. If we are to cut the hundreds of billions of pounds necessary from the British state, we must first reject's the left lexicon which shapes how we think about public policy. My thoughts at @Prosperity_Inst 👇

@TorstenBell The debt interest situation has been made worse by your government going on a borrowing binge. “Fixing the foundations” 🤪

Most importantly higher debt interest costs (a global trend reinforced by scale of debt rise under the last government). This alone has driven taxes up by 2% of GDP since the late 2010s and has to be wrestled with not ignored as the essay does

Blair putting on full display what is in many ways his special ability - to lay out a political argument grounded in his own view of global trends (globalisation in the 2000s, tech in the 2020s). But…

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions: - welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap - defence spending is too low - the triple lock is unsustainable - without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution - we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea - migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state - any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement - we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable - Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly Blair basically says all that. The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind: - judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast - the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement. Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others

“Since Brexit, Britain’s economic performance has been as good as or better than most of the EU and the G7 (except the United States)…” telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/2…