Mark

He is many things but Keir Starmer is not a liar.

On Saturday morning, a woman in her twenties was raped outside Epsom Methodist Church on Ashley Road. She had left a nightclub; she was followed by a group of men; the attack took place between two and four in the morning, in the heart of a market town in Surrey that most of the country thinks of, if it thinks of it at all, as somewhere you go to see the horses run. The residents of Epsom have asked Surrey Police reasonable questions. "Who are the suspects? What do they look like? Is there CCTV?" Surrey Police has declined to answer. They have said they do not have "sufficient information" to release descriptions. They have urged the public "not to speculate," because speculation "may lead to additional tensions within local communities." Translated from the institutional dialect, this means: we know what you are likely to conclude from the descriptions, and we would rather you didn't. On Tuesday evening, hundreds of residents gathered in the town centre to ask the question again. The police response was to deploy public order units, riot shields, and helmets against people standing on the pavement of their own high street demanding to know what the men who raped a woman six doors down from them actually look like. The local Lib Dem MP - who represents these people and the town - told the protesters to "take it elsewhere." "Take it elsewhere." This is the settled posture of the modern British state toward its own citizens. When a town asks for the most basic information about a violent sexual offence committed on its streets - information that, thirty years ago, would have been on the front of every regional paper within hours - it is met first with bureaucratic evasion, then with riot police, then with a sitting member of parliament telling them to do one. Epsom is not an unruly place. It is not a place with a history of disorder. It is a comfortable commuter town in Surrey whose residents have been told, in the space of seventy-two hours, that the police will not tell them who is hunting women on their streets, that asking about it constitutes a threat to community cohesion, and that if they persist in asking they will be treated as a public order problem. There is a specific and ugly contempt encoded in this response. It is the contempt of an administrative class that has decided the British public cannot be trusted with the truth about anything happening to it, and that the job of the state is no longer to solve the crime but to manage the reaction to it, forcibly. The people of Epsom have not misbehaved. They have done the thing that citizens of a serious country are supposed to do when something terrible happens where they live: they have turned up and asked questions. And the answer they have received, delivered in riot gear, is that their questions are the problem.

I think a huge part of the reason why no government has been able to enact difficult pro-growth reforms is that the average voter still believes we remain a rich country. You hear this in politicians’ rhetoric “the sixth richest country in the world”. We’re the sixth largest economy but now far from the richest. Per capita we’re tanking down the rankings. One of the reasons why Poland or China have been able to have growth miracles in recent years is they think like a developing country. They know they were poor and they have to build to get rich. We think we are rich and that we don’t have to build anything anymore, or that when we do, it has to be the most expensive possible version of what we build. Bat tunnels. Fish Discos. Kittiwake hotels. We think we’re rich so we can afford to chase some wealth creators away, afford to mandate public biodiversity net gain on every development in the country, and afford to ratchet up state pension spending five times faster than the rate of growth in the economy. We’re suffering from acute ‘rich country delusion’. It’s only once we realise we’re far poorer than we should be that we can start to fix this nonsense.

A group of NIMBYs have courageously grouped together to try and block the development of... ...a cancer hospital. The UK's cancer survival rates are up to 25 years behind other European countries. Is this acceptable?