Sunday reading
Why is Britain poor?- Ed West reviews a paper on why everything takes so long and costs so much. There are some truly shocking stats, but this one takes the biscuit:
‘the planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.’
The first thing we need to do on gaining power is blow up the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act (TCPA).
The case for prisons- The Inquisitive Bird gives detailed evidence on this, and why removing some wrongun's from circulation benefits the rest of us:
'nearly a third of shoplifting arrests in 2022 involved just 327 people, who collectively were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.... 2020, three prolific burglars were on the loose in Leinster, Ireland. Together they had accumulated over 200 convictions. But one day, they all died in a traffic accident. As a result, the robbery rate plummeted.'
One key difference between us is the right accepts that some people are just irreformable and need locking up and throwing away the key, while the left insists against all evidence that no one is irreformable (apart from wrongthinkers who insist women don't have penises of course)
Normophobia- Mary Harrington on the desire to subvert all values by the trangressive. She particularly focuses her scorn on those who went along with this:
'Middle- and upper-class women, for example, have led the charge against older norms regarding sexual continence, behavioral expectations, and sex segregation, in a moral transformation that delivered significant dividends of status and financial opportunity to their sex and class. The largest subset of mainstream normophobes is drawn from this demographic. But conservative-identified normophobes also bear some responsibility. Their attachment to economic growth means that they do not wish to see the workforce shrink, and an outraged defense of women’s freedom to defy oppressive, heteronormative, patriarchal norms affords a righteous frame for making this case.'
Are the Tories brave enough to be- conservative?- Douglas Murray asks one of these 'questions to which the answer is (probably) no, and channels Regan and the importance of ideas (something that most of the UKs politicians seen to be lacking in)
That vision was not just about nipping around the edges of Democrat policies, but about laying out a separate idea of what America was and what it could be.
Reagan’s vision was one that most conservatives have been able to rattle off for the past five decades: a smaller state, fiscal responsibility, strong defence. Today’s conservatives sometimes do a copy of this. Or a copy of a copy. They talk about free markets, but it’s not always clear that they know what to do to let them flourish.
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