A clash of beliefs over food standards and imports

Varied media types who play at being farmers have decided to write to Ministers and MPs about standards for food imports. At the heart of their insistence is a clash of beliefs.

No, not our beliefs against their or anything, but an irreconcilable illogic in their own beliefs:

Importing low-quality agri-food products could force British farmers out of business as well as further degrade the environment. Neither we nor the public want this, as several surveys and petitions have shown.

The problem here is that the importation of such “low-quality” foodstuffs doesn’t threaten the business of British farmers one iota nor whit.

The purchase and presumably subsequent consumption of such items by British consumers very likely would.

The claim is that said consumers don’t desire this cheap food may or may not be true. If it is true then if available they won’t purchase it and won’t consume it - the business of British farmers is safe by that very contention that consumers don’t want this foreign muck.

On the other hand, if farmers’ business is indeed threatened by such imports then it must be true that British consumers will purchase and consume this delightful product of foreigners’ labours.

That is, either no one wants it and therefore a ban is not required or a ban is required because people want it. It cannot be true that a ban is necessary because no one does want it.

The real question then becoming, well, if people want it then who are these celebrity farmers with the effrontery to insist they may not have it?

The Anti-Slavery League did rather well actually

The Guardian reviews a new book discussing the abolition of slavery rather than the earlier killing of the slave trade. The implication of the review at least is that it took an unconscionable long time. In moral terms indeed, and yet as a political movement we disagree - it worked with stunning speed.

The Interest is the story of how widespread and deeply rooted such attitudes were, how powerfully calls for abolition were resisted and why the British parliament nonetheless voted at last in 1833 to end slavery in its West Indian and African territories. In 20 brisk, gripping chapters, Taylor charts the course from the foundation of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 to the final passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.

Only a decade? How quickly does anyone think societal change normally happens?

We speak, of course, as professionals in this field. We exist to propose methods and manners by which society can be improved. Only 10 years strikes us as being lightning speed. To take one of our own proposals, something as seemingly trivial as a substantial rise in the personal allowance for income tax. It took 5 years from first mention - the idea that it is entirely ridiculous to have a minimum wage upon which people then are dunned for tax - to it appearing in political party manifestos and a further decade to come to fruition. It really is only now that the original target is being reached after that 15 years.

Or, to be more party political and something that we as a group were not involved in although one of us was directly, it took Ukip 25 years to move from a - small - rabble of malcontents to forcing a referendum and it’ll be nearly 30 in total by the time the deal is fully done.

We don’t say that you have to agree with both or even either of those political ideas and or changes even as we’d obviously hope that there’s no one left in favour of chattel slavery. But only a decade to achieve that sort of political change, the end of slavery? That’s an astonishing speed. Believe us, we know about these things.

The Lockean Case for London YIMBY

John Locke is best known for his political ideas. Namely, his defence of religious pluralism, of government by consent, and more controversially, that each person has a right to property. Invariably, Locke is invoked to justify and defend private property in particular, however kinds of reasons he gives for supporting an individuals’ right to private property are equally strong in supporting rights to common property in some circumstances. Restoring rights to the urban residential commons offers a feasible route out of the housing crisis in a way that is respectful to property rights – properly conceived. Giving local residents rights over their shared space, including those shared aspects of their private property such as façades, would enable development to happen in a morally legitimate way that benefits those most closely affected by it, and therefore generate popular support for a policy that will generate enormous wealth, and benefit the worst off by giving them access to affordable, beautiful housing in existing communities.

An important premise of Locke’s defence of property is equality. No person is born in a natural position of superiority to anyone else. Robert Filmer, an ardent defender of the natural authority of kings, with whom Locke bitterly disagreed, argued that kings have a natural right to rule because they own the territories upon which their subjects dwell. Subjects are therefore guests of the king, and must do as he wills whilst on his property. Locke’s rejection of the natural authority of monarchs meant a rejection of the idea that anyone came into the world with any special particular claim over territory. The Earth is not owned by the heirs to royal estates, but rather is owned commonly by all of humanity. Locke, a Christian, believed that God gave the Earth to humankind. If we are equals, then why would God favour some having special claims over certain parts? Equality meant the Earth is our common patrimony, for Locke. However, equality also meant that we are sovereign over ourselves – “self-owners” as many neo-Lockeans put it – and this means that those parts of the Earth that we bring into our personal projects, leave a stamp of our personality on, or what have you, become our own property: 

“Though the Earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. […] The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath thereby mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by his labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.” (Two Treatise of Government, II §V.27)

Labour mixing is a metaphor for how our lives are not lived merely inside our own bodies, but also outside them in the physical environment. When we act and leave our imprint on the world, subjecting it to our purposes, we make it part of ourselves. To Locke, this is how personal property is born – through unilateral action by sovereign individuals. We need not seek the consent of the community before we do this, because this would undermine equality. If we must constantly seek approval from someone else before we exercise our rights, then it looks more like our rights are privileges granted to us at the pleasure of superiors. If we cannot act without leave from others, we cannot truly be said to be free, and when we act, we make things our own.

The idea of literally mixing your labour with external resources turns out not to make much practical sense. As David Hume would later tell us, labour cannot be the subject of physical admixture, but is rather presupposed by it. Nonetheless, tilling soil or the like would have been the primary way people would have brought hitherto unused resources into their personal, ongoing projects at the time Locke was writing. It is hard to argue against this general idea; hard to argue that among equals, individuals should not be regarded as the rightful owners of that which they make an extension of their person, particularly when the proviso that enough and as good is left over for others. It is hard to deny the basic appeal of this claim. After all, who has a better claim to the soil than the one who tilled it; soil that no one knew existed until it was so tilled?

Locke’s argument about the moral importance of property is invariably only taken to apply to private property. Everyone who thinks seriously about property has a little Garret Hardin inside their head reminding them that common property will only result in a tragedy of commons. But the overgrazed common pasture that Hardin so famously analysed in his article in Science is now recognised not to be a particularly realistic model for how common property systems often work in practice. As Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom recognised, only if we assume that users of common-pool resources cannot communicate with each other, cannot socially sanction one another, and are unable to nominate third parties to enforce agreements among one another, must the commons necessarily be tragic. Where we do not assume away the social fabric that would likely be generated by those who have every incentive and capability of cooperating with one another in a sustainable way, the commons can be a comedy, not a tragedy. We should not a priori think that an argument for some kind of property necessarily means it must be individual private property. We should consider how common property can sometimes answer the needs of freedom and equality, just as we do private property.

External resources are often brought into the ongoing projects of groups. Individuals do not always act alone in their interactions with the external world. Where our projects are shared, so too must be the property. Our ownership of the physical resources and spaces that constitute those projects. Of course, we need to be able to exclude third parties, hence it is common property, not a free-for-all.

There is no reason to think that such social projects should not be granted the protection of property, especially where there is the institutional fabric in place to ensure it doesn’t result in social and ecological ruin. Whilst Locke missed this important part of the story in considering the question of lands on the American frontier, he did note that the common lands in his home country of England could not be privatised, because this would violate the rights of those who have established use-based rights to them.

As it stands, we don’t really have any common property rights of this sort, at least not in urban areas where the majority of us live. We have private property rights, and then property owned by the council or the government, or some other agency that administers it with a vague eye to the public interest. However, resources and spaces that are the common property of the particular social groups that leave their imprint on them, that use them, that subsume them into their meaningful life plans should be administered by those people directly – unless they choose to outsource the job. Of course, no one ever asked us if we were happy for the government to take over management of our local streets, parks, and views. If the government cannot take your private property without your consent and administer it in your name, then neither can it take our common property. Yet it has.

It may appear to be hopelessly unworkable to give control of local streets to those who live on them. However, London YIMBY has proposed a comprehensive set of policies which in my view would restore much of the urban commons to those to whom it rightly belongs – the local residents; those in whose ongoing activities the relevant spaces are enveloped within.

The unaffordability of housing in London is a function of the difficulty of acquiring permission from the relevant authorities to build more housing. These authorities make it very difficult to build more housing because the average person does not want more housing in their local community. In a sense, then, the common space in which new housing would be placed is being administered with an eye on the interests of those affected. However, this is only natural when one recognises that adding units of housing to any given neighbourhood is almost all loss for those who already live there. It means more crowded streets and local public transport links, it may mean the obstruction of natural light or of attractive views, it may mean some change to the aesthetic and cultural character of the area, and it threatens their property values. These are things that, to some extent, the local community have some right to. In many ways, they have created (or more likely, paid for) a local physical environment of a certain kind. The YIMBY solution recognises this, and proposes that planning rights be purchased directly from local residents themselves as property rights, rather than being sought bureaucratically or politically from the authorities with no benefit flowing to those affected.

Under the proposal, residents of a given street would be given voting rights on the nature of their street. This would include a design code for new buildings or extensions. By a two-thirds majority, a group of residents can develop their street as they see fit, or if they choose to sell these rights to professional developers to be used in line with the design code and terms determined by the residents. Of course, this does not extend to violating the private rights of other residents, such as overshadowing another’s house. It would also mean that street -communities which do not want any further development are free to not have any – and rest in the assurance that none will be thrust onto them. Sometimes, the most valuable part of a property right can be that it gives a person or group the right to simply say “no”. As Professor David Schmidtz often says, “knowing I have the right to walk away makes it safe for me to turn up at all.” Of course, those who remain steadfastly Not In My Back Yard will be within their rights, it is just that now they would be aware of the cost of this decision, because they will be sitting on valuable voting rights (or, what can be understood as their share of the common property rights). Other times, the most valuable thing a property right can give a person or group is its cash-value. Those who under the current system are against further development because of the costs it would impose upon them have the opportunity to actually be made better off by others buying out their rights.

Restoring the urban residential commons to those who truly hold the rights to them not only gives greater reality to our sovereignty as embodied persons living in a physical environment, but it will help us overcome the housing crisis in a way that does not run rough-shod over any affected party’s interests. Agreeing on a design code means that new developments can be beautiful, and augment surrounding property values. The YIMBY proposals would mean development took place in a way that benefits those closest to it, and not only that diffuse group of persons who would benefit by having more affordable housing.

Dr Billy Christmas is the Lecturer in Political Theory and director of the PPE programme at King’s College London, in the Department of Political Economy

The Adam Smith Institute. and London YIMBY, have released our submission, written by London YIMBY founder John Myers, to the Government’s Planning for the future White Paper

If you would like to submit to the consultation, you can click here to Give Streets a Say.

Acknowledgements

My work on the commons has been supported by a grant from the Templeton Foundation under the Ideal of Self-Governance project, and forms the groundwork of my forthcoming book Property and Justice: A Liberal Theory of Natural Rights. If you are interested in the ideas discussed here, please check out London YIMBY’s website, and my recent article published in Economics and Philosophy, “Ambidextrous Lockeanism”.

Those special laws will only ever be used in special circumstances, Oh Yes.

It is indeed true that there are at times special circumstances which lead to the need for special laws. There is also that slippery slope to be glissaded down. That second can indeed be a logical fallacy, for it to be true requires that the second and subsequent steps will necessarily follow.

Which, we would argue, is true of those special laws for special times.

Raniere was prosecuted under a law that was previously used to bring down the leaders of mafia organisations. Prosecutors said he maintained relationships with about 20 women who were ordered to lose weight and were not allowed to have sexual relations with anyone else. He was convicted last year on charges that included racketeering, sex trafficking and child pornography.

RICO as indeed involved:

The Indictment charges him with racketeering (or "RICO") conspiracy,

Sex trafficking and and child pornography should be enough to get him off the streets. Those special laws required - sorry, justified - purely to beat the vile machinations of mafiosi intimidation of witnesses and law enforcement……well, there’s our slippery slope. It was indeed said back then that the use of those special laws would expand over time, so it has proven, the use of those special laws has expanded over time.

The answer being let’s not have the special laws.

Which role of the state in the economy?

Whether there should be more - or a continuation of the current level of more - state intervention into the economy rather depends upon which problem we’re talking about and which state role in the economy. From Tom Kibasi:

In economic terms, the pandemic is best understood as an epic, simultaneous supply-side and demand-side shock. Demand has collapsed as incomes have dropped and workers fear for the future, and at the same time the labour market has ground to a halt as normal working patterns have been disrupted. Structural shifts – such as the move away from high streets and hospitality to home entertainment and online shopping – are set to destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, probably for ever. This is why the V-shaped recovery predicted by the Bank of England in May is nothing more than a pipe dream. And it’s why a vastly expanded role for the state in the economy is here for the foreseeable future.

It’s rather obvious that much of that V shaped recovery has already taken place. Things like retail sales, GDP and so on show that it has. Not, agreed, to above February levels in everything but we’re not that far off in most things. It’s also true that there are certain things which never are going to bounce back - those things that cannot, or will not, be done because of social distancing and all that.

What we fear Kibasi means about the state’s role is managing that change required from those things we cannot, or do not, do any more to the new methods and things we can. That redeployment of scarce resources to sate human desires in new ways.

If the meaning of the state role is to continue to alleviate the pain and grief of the transition then carry on even if precise details can be and will be argued about. If it is to direct the transition then that’s exactly wrong. We don’t actually know what those new methods are. We also don’t know which human desires people want sated, in which manner, from the new menu of options that a socially distanced world allows.

We do, however, have a method of discovery - that free market guided by the capitalist lust for profit. That’s the most efficient system known to chew through what can be done and match it up to what people desire to be done. Consistent market experimentation that is. Given the current difficulties we’d actually like to have a frenzy of such experimentation and government’s role is to get out of the damn way.

Harsh times may well mean government has a greater role in alleviating the harshness. Economic change means getting out of the way of markets to enable the discovery process to work efficiently.

Devolution works only if it's actually devolution

John Harris argues for more devolution - we’re fine with the idea that decisions are taken at the appropriate level even if we do normally argue that that’s by the people, by individuals, rather than some level of government. Harris though hasn’t quite grasped the implications of what he’s demanding:

Consider, for example, the southern German town of Rosenheim, which has a population of around 65,000, and was one of the virus’s early German hotspots. To quote the country’s health minister, as the authorities there got to work, “there were really no instructions from Berlin. Decisions were made locally, on the spot.” This is the very opposite of the approach taken here, a difference reflected in the fact that the UK’s death rate is around six times higher than Germany’s. But will anyone learn?

That would be to argue for dropping the national part of the National Health Service then. Which when baldly stated is something Harris would reject in horror. The point is more general as well:

Mayors and councils need decent tax-raising and borrowing powers. A whole range of responsibilities – over health and social care, education, housing and transport – ought to be spread across regional, city and local government, not on the basis of the current model of ad hoc “deals”, but a uniform shifting of power and resources. With the benefits system and so-called welfare-to-work now colliding with rising unemployment, most of the things overseen by the Department for Work and Pensions should be pushed in the same direction. On any matters of national emergency or strategic importance, politicians at the centre should always bring in leaders from outside. And decision-makers from all sides need to embrace one key matter of consensus: that austerity will never again be visited on local councils.

Much of the “austerity” that has been so visited is actually a reversal of the subsidy that Gordon Brown designed, the subsidy from richer areas to poorer. That though can be set aside, if we like, as just being the normal politics of spending everyone’s money on my voters.

The point is larger than that and meets with Milton Friedman’s four ways to spend money. Spending other peoples’ on yet other people is the least efficient form of it. Therefore any true devolution has to, as Harris says, lead to substantial local tax raising powers to go alongside those spending ones. The corollary of that is that the varied national cross subsidies have to go.

That is, strong local politics is just fine, local spending is zippetty doo and all that. But that spending has to be from resources raised from that local area, local taxation. Being able to tax Esher to pay for Wythenshawe needs to stop. Devolution means that the local spending not be subsidised from national taxation.

A world in which Manchester elects the government it wants and then Manchester pays for the government it gets has an attraction to it. One in which Manchester has the power to spend but not the duty to pay for it is less appealing. That last would be close to harlotry, that power without responsibility thing.

Entirely true, yes, and?

That Donald Trump fixates on manufacturing as some symbol of the health of the economy is true. That he’s not expanded it is also true. The correct reaction being yes, entirely true, and?

The point being that the fixation itself is incorrect:

Manufacturing, a centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again, sits at its smallest share of GDP in 73 years of data.

This is used as a gotcha against Trump’s policies and actions. When the criticism should be of the concept itself. There is nothing special about manufacturing. It is not the foundation of all wealth creation, it is not something an economy must do in order to be able to do everything else.

Manufacturing is simply one manner of combining scarce economic resources to produce value. If we find that we’ve other combinations that produce more of that value then of course we should be running with those other combinations. Which is, indeed, what we’ve been doing this past 73 years. For this is not something specific or unique to America, it’s been happening in every rich country. Yea even in German - manufacturing is a higher portion of GDP than it is in the US or UK, certainly, but it’s also smaller than it was as a percentage of the German economy in the past.

Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP is falling in China for goodness sake.

Manufacturing as an economic sector just doesn’t have the importance currently assigned to it let alone that insisted upon by certain politicians from varied parties.

The British housing problem in a nutshell

Apparently there’s a thing called “garden grabbing”. Which is where people who have land a house can be built upon build a house upon that land. Tsk and don’t we just have to invent a phrase to condemn such behaviour?

With the recent changes in planning law announced more people are inquiring about how to do this. Which seems, neatly, to tell us that the recent announced changes in planning law are going to lead to more housing. Within this report there is this though:

The planning process is protracted and expensive, but if you can secure permission, the rewards could be big. Homeowners can increase the value of their land at least 10-fold by getting the green light to build on it, said Mr Bainbridge. “Say you had an acre paddock worth £10,000, if you got planning permission for one house, it could be worth £100,000.”

The same piece of land, with the same entire lack of utility connections, is worth ten times as much after the wave of a bureaucrat’s pen. Or, if we prefer, the absence of the wave of the bureaucrat’s pen deprives society as a whole of the creation of £90,000 in value. We would, therefore, all be richer if more bureaucrats would wave more pens. This being true even if enough waving is done for the price premium to entirely disappear. For at that point the value would still be being created, it would just be enjoyed as the consumer surplus - what people would be willing to pay but don’t have to - rather than being something that must be forked over. We, like all sensible economic types, thinking that increasing the consumer surplus is a jolly good idea indeed.

Or, of course, we could just get all medieval on that planning bureaucracy and return to a system where property actually is property and leave people to deploy their land as they see fit. It is this last which is our preferred end state although we agree that the occasional detail will need to be considered.

The heart of our point here being that the very existence of a rise in value upon the allocation of planning permissions shows us that there is something deeply wrong with the allocation of planning permission. Not enough is being allocated for why on Earth would we want a system that increases the costs of life via a bureaucratic permissioning system?

That planned economy nonsense again

As you may be aware we here are not grand fans of the idea of a planned economy. On the simple grounds that a planned economy never does provide what is the aim of any economy, that the people gain more of what the people want. By definition planning can only ever provide what the planners think the people might want or, as it actually turns out, what the planners insist the people should want. This inevitably leading to some pretty weird ideas of what should be wanted and what won’t be planned for as a result of an insistence that people shouldn’t want it.

The most recent example being the lockdown in Wales.

Wales lockdown: Supermarkets told to sell only essential items

Well, what is an “essential” item?

Supermarkets will be unable to sell items like clothes

Clothes are not essential items. In late autumn. In Wales. Well, doesn’t that just kill the idea of the omniscient planner?

Yes, we do grasp the point that there’s a pandemic on. We don’t agree with this idea of lockdown but we do indeed still get what it is that people are trying to do. It’s the system, how it is being decided, that we’re objecting to:

There is no precise list of non-essential goods in the law coming into force on Friday, but any business selling goods or services for sale or hire in a shop will have to close.

But there are exceptions for food retailers, newsagents, pharmacies and chemists, bicycle shops, petrol stations, car repair and MOT services, banks, laundrettes, post offices, pet shops and agricultural supplies shops.

Under the law firms conducting a business that provides a mixed set of services will be allowed to open if they cease conducting the service that must close.

The aim is to stop the swilling of the virus through the crowds of shoppers. Thus limit which shops may open in order to reduce the size of the crowds. Yes, we get it even as we disagree. But to then say that a shop which is open, which people can visit, may not sell what is there, on the shelves, is ludicrous.

But this is what we get when we have planners deciding for us. A specific and weird form of pepper, as a comestible, may be bought and or retailed. A pot to cook it in may not. And a child’s coat is entirely verboeten. In late autumn. In Wales.

The Welsh polity has always been at the forefront of socialism in the UK. As it is now in showing, again, why it doesn’t work.

A call for papers: recovering and prospering

The dawn of the 2020s has not gone as most had planned. We have, and continue to, face both an extraordinary and unprecedented predicament. While some foresaw the danger of pandemics, few could have predicted the abject failure of many governments and the seismic challenges that would eventuate.

Covid-19 has created immense new challenges like developing test and trace systems, producing equipment, medications and vaccines, and millions of newly unemployed. It has also accelerated existing issues from political disillusionment and division to questions about social media. 

The challenge in the years ahead will not simply be to return to the relative prosperity of December 2019, but to go much further in creating a more prosperous future. We are facing an extraordinary moment of opportunity yet anxiety, change yet yearning for certainty.  

For over forty years the Adam Smith Institute has been at the forefront of debates about the UK’s future. We have big plans for the 2020s. While the decades may change our mission remains the same: make the UK a freer and more prosperous union. 

At the centre of this challenge will be winning the war of ideas. This pandemic must not result in a closing in of society, a reduction in trade, an opposition to change, a rejection of new technologies. To recover and prosper we must be adaptive to new challenges and open to ideas and people.

That is why we are calling out for paper proposals on both ideas to address our immediate predicament (“Short, sharp Covid papers”) and broader issues (“General briefing papers”). There is a list of topics below that take our fancy. This list is by no means exhaustive. We are open to pitches on other topics.

If you would like to pitch please send us a few hundred words on the proposed topic, as well as a quick background on your interest and expertise in the area to: research@adamsmith.org. We can offer a nominal honorarium for papers that we publish.

Short, sharp Covid papers

In the first instance, we are interested in short briefings (of around 2,500 words) tackling very specific issues raised by Covid-19 that put forward narrow suggestions for how to improve our response. What can we learn from test and trace systems overseas? What simple regulatory changes could be made to allow society to better adapt? What is a simple yet effective tax change that could help businesses recover?

General briefing papers

Additionally, the following are a list of topics and questions that are of interest to the Adam Smith Institute, and we would be open to publishing 5,000-10,000 word policy briefing papers. If you are unfamiliar with our work, and  style of our writing (accessible yet rigorously academic), please see previous papers. 

• Red tape and regulation: What specific regulation holds back prosperity and opportunity? What is the cost of regulation to Britain's economy or a particular sector? Can we introduce new mechanisms and processes to reduce red tape (RegData, Sunsetting, One-in-two-out, Exclusionary clauses, Green Book treasury rules)? What regulations can be reformed after Brexit? What can we learn from the Trump Administration’s red tape cutting exercise?

• Tax reform: what is a key modification to the tax system that could, with the least revenue hit achieve the most additional investment? How should a broader tax system be structured?

• Fiscal responsibility: What is the impact on economic growth of more government spending? How can the Government get the national books back in order? What spending can be cut to ensure better intergenerational fairness (i.e. abolishing pension triple lock)? 

• Social mobility: What are key policies to ensure equal opportunity for every individual? What should be the focus (housing, education and skills, transfers, etc)?

• New technologies: Artificial intelligence and machine learning, driverless cars, air taxis, 5G, drones, OLED, robots, supersonic flight, hyperloop, blockchain, e-scooters, vertical farming, vertical aquaculture, lab grown meat. What are the potential benefits and what regulations need to be developed or red tape cut to ensure they can prosper?

• Market environmentalism: What are some pro-market policies that would help address climate change and broader conservation aims? How can we better use property rights? What’s holding back wider use of nuclear energy? 

• Education: Should we fund higher education using an equity stakes rather than debt model? How can we ensure free speech and diversity of ideas are produced throughout the education sector? Should we be adopting ‘micro schooling’?

• Free trade: How can we remake the case for free trade? Should Britain adopt an entirely tariff-free system policy? What should replace the common agricultural policy (CAP)?

• Bureaucracy: What has Covid taught us about the state of the British bureaucracy? How can we increase state capacity? 

• Decentralisation: What has Covid taught us about the state of localism in the United Kingdom? How can we effectively decentralise both powers and responsibilities (fiscal decentralization)?

• Infrastructure and project management: How can we ‘fix’ the civil service? How can we stop projects always being ‘over time, over budget’?

• Criminal justice: How can we be ‘tough’ and ‘smart’ on crime, both saving the taxpayer money and reducing criminal activity? What about drug policy reform?

• Nanny state: What impact do paternalistic policies have on the least fortunate? Do they actually achieve their goals?

• Urbanism: What is the future of cities? How can we ensure cities flourish after the disruption caused by Covid? What powers should be held by city governments and how should they be funded?

• Immigration: What is the economic impact of the loss of immigrants caused by Covid? How can we most effectively make the case for the movement of people?

• Internet: What are the threats to online freedom? How can we ensure free speech is protected? What is the impact of new regulations on online competition? 

• Aid, development and remittances: What has been the impact of Covid on remittances to the developing world and how does that compare to aid? How can we restructure domestic policies to help the world’s poorest (reducing tariffs and regulatory barriers to trade? Cutting remittances red tape?)?