Among iconic British TV moments, it is the cultural equivalent of Del Boy falling through that bar. Kenneth Clark, looking towards Notre Dame, intoning: ‘What is Civilisation? I don’t know yet. But I think I recognise it when I see it; and I am looking at it now’. This is the introduction to the first episode of Civilisation, Clark’s magisterial televisual tour of Western cultural history. Go and watch it on Iplayer, if you can bring yourself to pay the licence fee.

As egotistical as I can be, I will not pretend that my pronouncements here at Economic Affairs will be as eloquent and informed as Clark’s views on art, architecture and philosophy. But this Substack shall take inspiration, at least, from that first episode: ‘The Skin of our Teeth’. It charts how civilisation survived the Dark Ages – Hebridean monks, battered by the Atlantic out on Iona, diligently preserving Christian teaching before its successful and triumphant return to the mainland, the Continent, and the wider world.

Embarking on Economic Affairs, I feel a little like those monks. Just as they laboured to protect the truth in an age of ignorance and spite, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is fighting to share the timeless lessons of liberty in harsh and unforgiving climate. We are on the verge of our most left-wing government in decades, with charlatans like Gary Stevenson touted as serious economic advisers. We have parties – supposedly on the free-market Right – committed to welfare splurges like the Triple Lock and dabbling with nationalisation. We are told that “40 years of neoliberalism” are the rout of our ills in a country in which nothing gets built, with a Soviet health service, and taxing and spending at record levels.

Against this, Economic Affairs shall stand resolute. As our Director highlighted yesterday, this Substack will be your daily one-stop-shop for all the best writing, news, podcasts and more associated with free-markets and classical liberalism. We have a stellar list of contributors lined up, ranging from political and economic titans, via various IEA legends, to a range of up-and-coming writers who I owe a pint or three. Those familiar with my work from The Spectator and ConservativeHome will know that my tastes can be eclectic, my instincts inconvenient, and my writing laced with a sense of humour. If those are tendencies you share, get in touch, and pitch away. Mi Substack es su Substack.

But for those unfamiliar with me, a brief introduction. All my adult life has been working towards Economic Affairs. From a teenage introduction to classical liberalism spurred on by reading IEA papers and blogs – a happy side effect of crushing on Kate Andrews on Question Time – to a happy few weeks at a summer school five years ago, I have since become a journalist. But I have long been inspired by that quotation on Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate cemetery. The point is not to philosophise about the world, but to change it; taking the reins here at Economic Affairs is my chance not to idly pontificate but help lead and shape the debate over our economic future, just as the IEA has been doing for decades.

As Civilisation was subtitled, one must take my remarks on this site as a personal view. But the principles upon which Economic Affairs are both timeless and timely: that individual liberty, limited government and free enterprise are the best path to prosperity. If you agree, please add Economic Affairs to your daily reading list. And if you don’t, stick around and enjoy yourself while we try and convince you. I can promise that you won’t regret it.

What we’re reading today

What we’re reading today

1. Readers will have different opinions on AI. Some will see it as a triumph for human ingenuity set to liberate us to ever-greater heights of growth and prosperity. Others will view it as a menace, the Terminator-esque cuckoo in the cradle fated to doom us all. But the Bank of International Settlements – often described as the bank for central banks – fears that ‘excessive’ spending on new AI data centres is risking a financial meltdown like the credit crunch. If the bots don’t get us, the crash will…

2. Bad news for Javier Milei. The chief of staff of the Argentine president has been forced to resign. Manuel Adorbi was one of Milei’s closest advisers but quit on Saturday following revelations about lavish spending habits and a burgeoning property portfolio. Having been the President’s spokesperson for his twin drives to impose austerity and crackdown on corruption, this wasn’t the best of looks. Nonetheless, he denies any wrongdoing.

3. Across the Pond, Zohran Mamdani, New York’s self-declared socialist mayor, has taken a break from the World Cup to watch as the city’s Rent Guidelines Board has voted to freeze rents for 1 million flats in the city. The clever chaps and chapettes over at Reason have an excellent rundown of why these measures don’t work, helping tenants in the short-term but discouraging investment in rental properties and leaving fewer homes available in the longer. A familiar IEA theme…

4. As you may have noticed, it has been rather warm recently. This has prompted a tedious row between the sane – those of us who know our Lee Kwan Yew and think air conditioning is a jolly good thing – and the climate loonies, who seem like they think boiling is a just punishment for the ‘evil’ of the Industrial Revolution. The noble Robert Colvile put the latter in their place yesterday, while once again highlighting our national inability to build reservoirs and the folly of renationalising water.

5. Who will be our next Chancellor? With Andy Burnham on his way in and Rachel Reeves on her way our – we think! – the debate has settled on an intriguing binary: Ed Miliband or not Ed Miliband. Both Duncan Robinson at the Economist and Josh Glancy at the Sunday Times have written pieces explain why we may already live in Miliband’s Britain. But for moi, the best insight into how and his hinterland was written by Will Lloyd in the New Statesman in March. Worth a revisit!

• Better off out?

• Nationalisation doesn’t come cheap

• Booming black markets

On Monday, the IEA will launch its new substack, Economic Affairs. With original daily content and a round-up of stories about the state of free markets in the world it will be the only site classical liberals need to read.

We will be running regular columns from some of the titans of the free-market movement, including Matt Ridley and John Redwood, as well as introducing a number of stellar new contributors.

Economic Affairs will be edited by Will Atkinson, one of our finest young writers, formerly of ConservativeHome, a Spectator leader writer and regular Telegraph contributor.

These are challenging times for supporters of limited government. The government has gone from spending one pound in every three at the start of this century to closer to one in two. Debt has risen to 100 per cent of GDP. Taxes are higher than at any moment since the post-1945 demobilisation. Yet most voters think that our problems come from “neoliberalism”, and support spending even more, especially in the budgets that are already growing the fastest: healthcare and social security.

We need to go back to first principles. We need to explain, to a country that has forgotten, why governments run things badly, why only the private sector generates growth, why we cannot return to prosperity without low spending, sound money, light regulation and free trade.

Economic Affairs will be the place, not just to hear these arguments restated, but to find out how they are landing, to learn about the state of classical liberalism in Britain and the world. Please make it part of your daily reading menu.

by Lord Hannan

Director General

The best way to never miss out on IEA work, get access to exclusive content, and support our research and educational programmes is to become a paid IEA Insider.

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IEA Podcast: Director of Communications Callum Price is joined by Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz and Director General Lord Hannan to discuss whether Britain is ungovernable, Brexit ten years on, and ask if air conditioning is right wing now? IEA YouTube

How to make Brexit a success

Dr Kristian Niemietz on how to make the most of Brexit, ten years after the referendum:

“Free-marketeers, whether they were on the Leave side or on the Remain side, have always argued that Brexit was only ever going to be a success if it led to genuine economic liberalisations, especially on trade and regulation. A Brexit followed by liberalisations would be an economic success. A Brexit not followed by liberalisations would not be.

“Free-market Brexiteers thought that Brexit was likely to be followed by liberalisations. Free-market Remainers thought that a liberalising Brexit was possible, but unlikely.

“Ten years on, it is fair that there have been some liberalisations, but they have been too timid to cancel out the disruptions caused by Brexit (and the years of Brexit uncertainty). The UK has signed up to some additional trade deals that it could not have concluded as an EU member. There have also been some mild deregulation measures, such as on gene editing, which would not have happened in the EU.

“These are welcome steps, but their impact has been small in magnitude. If we want to see bigger effects, we need to roll out reforms of that style across the board. Free trade and light-touch regulation are the way to make Brexit a (belated) success.”

News and Views

“A good economist sees beyond the visible and the secondary consequences”, Daniel Hannan warns steel protectionism could harm 2.8m construction, 452k agriculture, 183k automotive workers reliant on imports, YouTube

Why my friends talk about leaving Britain, IEA polling on perception of UK prosperity covered in The Times

“Recently, the Institute for Economic Affairs asked 3,000 people to rank our GDP per capita against American states. On average, respondents thought we were as well-off as the seventh American state. It turns out that we’re poorer than all of them.”

Renationalisation doesn’t come cheap, Senior Economist Dr Valentin Boboc on why the case for nationalisation doesn’t stack up, CityAM

“I don’t trust the Government to distinguish misinformation from correct information”, Chris Snowdon on GB News

Tax Rises Built a Black Market. Is Britain Next? Chris Snowdon talks to former Australian Border Forcer official Rohan Pike about the negative consequences of a tobacco crackdown in Australia, IEA YouTube

The nanny statists lack evidence for their campaigns, Chris Snowdon on the myth of evidence-based policymaking, CapX

The cost of Net Zero, IEA research on what our environmental commitments are costing us, The Express

“The Institute of Economic Affairs calculates that his net zero madness could top a staggering £9 trillion. British companies are buckling under the weight of some of the world’s most expensive energy costs. They’re either shifting operations overseas or shutting down.”

Events and Opportunities

Applications are open for our 2026 Beloff Conference

We are delighted to invite applications for our 2026 Beloff Conference, a three-day residential programme taking place at the Vinson Centre, University of Buckingham from 14–16 September 2026.

Designed for postgraduate students and final-year undergraduates with an interest in economics, public policy, and classical liberalism, the Beloff Conference brings together some of the brightest young minds for an intensive programme of discussion, debate, and learning.

This year’s programme will explore the topic of Migration. Through an interdisciplinary lens, participants will explore the economic, historical, philosophical, and geopolitical dimensions of migration, engaging with questions surrounding welfare systems, borders, displacement, diasporas, and international relations.

Speakers will include:

• Professor Jonathan Portes (Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King’s College London)

• Professor Syed Kamall (Professor of Politics and International Relations at St Mary’s University London and Member of the House of Lords)

• Professor Eric Kauffman (Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and writer)

and many more!

The conference is entirely free to attend, with accommodation and meals provided. Places are highly competitive, with only 15 participants selected.

If you’re looking to deepen your understanding of one of the defining policy issues of our time while engaging with leading academics and fellow students, make sure you apply!

Conference: 14–16 September 2026
Application deadline: 7 August 2026 (23:59)

Apply now!

The conversation looks at why successive governments struggle to control spending, with health and social security now accounting for around two thirds of the total, and why questions about the civil service, judicial activism and the constitutional reforms of the Blair years have moved to the centre of think tank debate. Lord Hannan and Dr Niemietz assess why the Brexit result remains contested a decade on, the deregulation opportunities that went unused, and the culture war that followed the vote. The discussion closes on climate policy, air conditioning and the case for adaptation rather than restriction.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems. The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.

Introduction: Brexit before Brexit

At our conferences for students, I sometimes give a talk with the title ‘The Economics of Brexit’, which, as I’m always at great pains to make clear right at the beginning, is neither a pro-Brexit nor an anti-Brexit talk. It is a talk which spells out the trade-offs that Brexit involved: it is about how to think about Brexit, not which conclusion to reach. The first question that comes up during the Q&A is usually some variation of ‘All well and good, but where do you stand on Brexit?’, and the fact that that’s not obvious from the talk tells me I’m doing something right.

Like most people, I didn’t really think very much about these issues until around the time the referendum was announced, and we suddenly all had to become Brexperts (or at least, be able to fake it convincingly). In hindsight, I wish I had read Better Off Out? The Benefits or Costs of EU Membership by Brian Hindley and Martin Howe much earlier. Even though it was published 20 years before the referendum, 16 years before ‘Brexit’ was even a word, and a mere 3 years after the European Single Market came into existence, it still does a remarkably good job at explaining the trade-offs alluded to above. Better Off Out? essentially does what I’m trying to do in my ‘Economics of Brexit’ presentation, but better. Today, thirty years on, one could still read it as a Brexit Primer, even if it was not written for that purpose. The book already foreshadows many of the debates that would consume the nation 20-plus years later. But it was nonetheless not a prophecy, and contrasting what the authors thought a withdrawal from the EU could look like to what actually happened is in itself instructive.

Better Off Out? is a first attempt at a rough cost-benefit-analysis of Britain’s EU membership, of the type that would begin to proliferate 20 years later. That cost-benefit analysis is of a more qualitative than quantitative type, though, because, as the authors make clear right from the start, ‘the preliminary spadework that might make accurate estimation possible has not been done.’

Better Off Out? book is Eurosceptic in tone, but it is not a proto-Brexit manifesto. The authors’ overall verdict is:

‘The analysis provided here does not allow a confident claim that the British economy would gain from withdrawal. The central point, however, is that any economic gain or loss is small – [...] [e]ven the worst case [...] is a long way from economic suicide.’

If you are a Leaver, you can read that as an early rejection of ‘Project Fear’. If you are a Remainer, you can read it as an early rejection of the idea that EU membership is what holds Britain back. The authors’ point, though, is not that Britain should, or should not, leave the EU. It is simply that this is a question which cannot be decided on the basis of economics alone. It is a political choice – as, indeed, it would be, 20 years later, although the fact that the Remain side prioritised economic arguments to a much greater extent than the Leave side would be a cause of much misunderstanding.

The European Customs Union

But back to 1996. The authors deal with the different layers of Britain’s EU membership separately. One of those layers is, of course, the European Customs Union. I have to admit that until 2016, it was not clear to me at all why you would need customs checks within a free trade area. Surely, an FTA worthy of the name is about eliminating tariffs and quotas, so once those are gone, what exactly would a customs official do? Would they just sit there all day, waving everything through?

The answer, of course, is that when country X signs an FTA with country Y, that only means that they are happy to accept tariff/quota-free imports of goods and services from country Y (and vice versa). But at any given time, there will be plenty of goods and services sloshing around in country Y that aren’t actually from country Y. And these are not covered by the X-Y FTA. They need to be filtered out at the border. As long as X and Y have different trade arrangements with the rest of the world, they need customs checks between them. The only way for them to obviate the need for customs checks would be to adopt identical trade relations with the entire rest of the world. Which is one way to describe what a customs union is: it is an area with a common trade policy. Hindley and Howe already explained this well in 1996:

‘The distinction between a customs union [...] and a free trade area is that within a free trade area the free trade applies only to goods originating in the area, and not to goods imported from outside. Members of the free trade area may have differing external tariffs which could be avoided by trans-shipping goods through the country with lowest tariffs; so customs formalities are exercised on trade between members of the area and ‘rules of origin’ are applied to determine whether or not the goods concerned are entitled to free entry. Since it is necessary to prevent avoidance of customs dues through minor repackaging or representations of goods originating outside the free trade area, the rules of origin become quite complex.

On the other hand, a customs union requires that all its members maintain a single external system of tariffs and [...] quotas. Thus, members of a customs union lose the ability to forge their own relationships with other parties. It is, for instance, in principle possible for a country to be a member of two different free trade areas; but it is not possible for a country to be long to two different customs unions. [...]

The EU is in part a customs union. It aims for free trade between members, but maintains barriers against imports from non-members hence, trade between members is encouraged and trade with the rest of the world discouraged.’

There, in a nutshell, we already have the main advantages and disadvantages of a customs union, and criteria to decide whether or not it makes sense for a country or region to be a member of one. Customs unions eliminate the need for customs checks, and enable frictionless trade among its members. But that elimination of frictions comes at a cost, which is the loss of sovereignty over trade policy. A member of a customs union has no independent trade policy anymore: they outsource their trade policy to the customs union. Whether that makes sense or not depends on what you prioritise: frictionless trade with your nearest neighbours, or the ability to strike separate deals with other economies further away? This depends not just on current economic geography, but also on policy preferences. Pooling your sovereignty with your neighbours can work if you agree with them, and would do largely the same thing as them anyway. It becomes harder if we are dealing with diverging policy preferences.

The European Single Market

Now let’s move on to the European Single Market. The Single Market is a very advanced form of an FTA, which is characterised not just by the absence of tariffs and quotas, but also by a harmonisation of regulatory standards. It was still a fairly new arrangement when Better Off Out? was first published, but the authors already explained the trade-offs involved in it very well:

‘‘Harmonisation’ as practised in Europe has benefits, but it also has costs. The benefit is that a manufacturer in any European country can manufacture goods to the common European standard in the expectation [...] that he will not then have to meet different or additional standards or requirements in order to export into any member-state. The cost is that the standards adopted may be unnecessarily cumbersome and expensive for the home market and for exports outside the EC or may simply be inappropriate for the specific requirements of the home market or the country’s industry. [...] The direct cost is compliance with unnecessary standards in the domestic market and other EC markets, and possible loss of competitiveness in world markets.’

Quite so. Being part of an economic zone with common regulatory standards has its upsides even if those regulatory standards are far from ideal. They do not need to be the best possible standards, what matters is that everyone else within the economic zone accepts them too. But it does mean that members of that zone lose regulatory autonomy, and have to accept regulatory standards they might not have chosen for themselves.

Liberal Leavers vs liberal Remainers: a debate foreshadowed

Hindley and Howe already pointed out that an exit from the EU would not automatically lead to repeal of burdensome regulations: that would still require active political choices. In their words:

‘The cost imposed on British industry by EC social rules would be capable of being removed. Clearly, there would be a policy choice as to the extent that EC rules [...] would be continued as rules of national origin. A similar calculus would apply to environmental costs’.

And elsewhere:

‘The extent to which leaving the EU would result in a cost saving under this heading [excessive or unnecessary costs of EU regulations] would of course depend upon the policy choices made by the British Government after leaving – in particular, the extent to which it engaged in a bonfire of existing EU regulations.’

But while they recognised that Brexit (they did, of course, not call it ‘Brexit’ yet) would not guarantee regulatory cost savings, they saw them as a relatively easy Brexit win: ‘there would clearly be a better prospect of ending rules which […] impose large costs.’ With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the word ‘clearly’ was doing too much heavy lifting here. There is not much appetite for deregulation at the domestic level either.

20 years after Better Off Out?, this would, in fact, become a point of disagreement between liberal Leavers and liberal Remainers (and after that, between liberal Hard Brexiteers and liberal Soft Brexiteers). The former pointed to all the deregulation measures that (Hard) Brexit would make possible. The latter agreed that Brexit would indeed make many things possible. But would it make them sufficiently likely to justify the cost of leaving the Single Market?

This was just one manifestation of a deeper divide, already anticipated in Better Off Out?:

‘An important matter underlying the economic costs and benefits of EU membership is an apparent cultural difference in attitudes to free markets between the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the ‘continental’ approaches. The latter exhibits a propensity to favour regulation over free markets. [...] That free markets are better for the general welfare than political processes is, of course, the central proposition of classical liberal thought. British Conservatives do not always apply it in full, but few of them would […] fail to pay it at least lip service. That their continental counterparts refuse even lip service reveals an intellectual gulf. Reflected in policy, it could become a political chasm.’

This goes to the heart of the divide between liberal Leavers and liberal Remainers which we would see 20 years later, including at the IEA. Liberal Leavers saw Britain as, essentially, a free-enterprise nation, albeit one that often fails to live up to its own ideals. The EU, on the other hand, was a place that did live up to its ideals, but those ideals were themselves the wrong ones, at least from a liberal perspective. Its ideas were corporatism, protectionism and interventionism.

Liberal Remainers had a more cynical – or as they would see it, a more realistic – view. They said that while Britain had indeed historically had a stronger classical liberal tradition than most of continental Europe, the average modern-day Brit was not particularly appreciative of that tradition, and did not treat it kindly. Liberal Remainers argued that, these days, the average Brit was just as hostile to free markets as the average continental European. Whether it is in the UK or in the EU-27, if you are a classical liberal in this day and age, public opinion is not on your side, and the general public is not your friend.

Brexit options compared

Last, but very much not least, Hindley and Howe already noted that a cost-benefit analysis of Britain’s EU membership needs to first answer the question: compared to what?

‘Britain’s economic circumstances as a member of the EU must be compared with its economic circumstances if it withdraws from the EU. ‘Withdrawal from the EU’, however, has no single simple meaning.’

We have since learned the hard way that it does indeed not.

The authors discussed a number of options. One was what would later become known as a ‘No Deal Brexit’: ‘Withdrawal might mean […] that membership was not replaced by any special arrangement between independent Britain and the EU.’ They considered this ‘the worst case’.

They also already discussed what would later become known as the ‘Norway Option’ or ‘EFTA/EEA Option’. They saw some attraction in this model, because:

‘the EEA […] is a free trade area rather than a customs union; hence its members retain responsibility for setting their own tariffs with countries outside the area and may enter into special trading relationships with third countries. This is a freedom denied to members of the EC, which is a full customs union. Second, EEA members enjoy in full the ‘four freedoms’ of the European single market: freedom of movement of goods, of services, of persons and of capital.’

But while they argued that ‘this arrangement should not be rejected out of hand’ and that it ‘can be considered as having considerable attractions in its substantive terms’, they did not seem enthusiastic about it:

‘The main defect of the EEA is that [...] [t]he EEA states are obliged to implement [...] single-market harmonisation measures. [...] Thus, EEA membership would do little to ease the present regulatory burden attached to the single market if that were thought to be one of the main drawbacks of full EU membership. [...] [I]t would leave the UK closely tied to the single market while limiting its ability to influence single-market rules. It would do little to free British industry of the existing regulatory burden imposed by single-market harmonisation directives’.

They seem keener on what they call the ‘Swiss/EFTA model’, similar to the Norway Option in principle but outside of the Single Market, if not very far from it. Their ideal model is an outer-tier membership model for the Single Market which was not seriously discussed during the Brexit years (although I have vague memories of seeing a proposal quite like that), a bit like Norway but without the drawback of rule-taker status:

‘[O]uter-tier Community members would adhere to those aspects of the Rome Treaty (and associated regulations and directives) which pertain to the single market and its four freedoms. They would retain full rights to vote on those matters, and free-trading rules would continue to be binding on all member-states, both inner and outer tier.’

To me, that sounds a lot better than what actually happened – although how realistic that was, we will probably never know. I suppose it would have helped if a few more politicians had read books such as this one before the Referendum, rather than panic-Googling ‘What is a customs union?’ after triggering Article 50, like a student half an hour before an exam they didn’t prepare for.

Pike sets out how the illicit market has grown to around 80% of all tobacco sold in Australia, with the illicit vape market above 95%. He explains how tax of roughly $1.53 per cigarette, about £17 a packet before sales tax, opened a gap that organised crime moved to fill, with black market packets selling for a fraction of the legal price. The discussion covers the violence that has followed, including murders and hundreds of fire bombings, the rise of a multi-billion dollar criminal syndicate, and why enforcement at the border can only ever stop a small share of what comes through.

The second half turns to Britain. Snowdon and Pike argue that the UK is only a few years behind Australia, pointing to high tobacco duty, the tax escalator, the planned vape tax and official figures that they say understate the size of the illicit trade. Pike argues that the answer is not tougher enforcement alone but lower excise, consistent enforcement and an honest approach to harm reduction, contrasting Australia’s stance on vaping with the position taken in the UK and New Zealand. He closes with a warning for the Treasury and for ministers that the same path leads to the same result.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.

The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.

• ‘Leave those kids alone’: IEA response to the U16 social media ban

• Inside the sausage factory

• Has the UK lost faith in capitalism?

It is an unusual phenomenon that a by-election in a small-town suburb could decide the country’s future leadership, but here we are: for the first time in nine years, Andy Burnham is back in Westminster. Having won Makerfield, he now has a clear path to a challenge for the Labour leadership and the top position in the country. Upon his return, we can expect some discussion about the meaning of his much-trumpeted ‘Manchesterism’, or whether the term has any meaning at all.

‘Manchesterism’ means different things to different people. To the Burnhamites themselves, it seems to mean ‘the end of neoliberalism’ or a ‘business-friendly socialism’ that takes water, energy, transport and housing back under public control while otherwise staying ‘comfortable’ with markets.

Originally, of course, Manchesterism referred to the Manchester School of Richard Cobden and John Bright, the great nineteenth-century liberals who campaigned for free trade, the repeal of the Corn Laws and peace through commerce. While that is quite clearly not what Andy Burnham has in mind, some have noted that ‘his new dynamic Manchester has been built on a modern revival of Manchester liberalism’. What they mean by that is not that Andy Burnham is secretly a Manchester liberal in the original sense. Rather, what they mean is that Manchester’s governance arrangements are conducive to better policy outcomes. This predates Andy Burnham, and it may not have much to do with him.

Manchester became Britain’s fastest-growing sub-regional economy from 2015–2023, growing at roughly 3% per year, almost double the nationwide average. An enhanced devolution deal allows Manchester to capture more of the benefits of development and local growth. The local administration is more construction-friendly and there are attempts to shield the business sector from harmful regulations. For instance, in order to de-risk private developers and avoid onerous costs, barely 5% of recent housing-fund units were required to be ‘affordable.’

Having more decentralisation, better incentives to fight NIMBYism, lighter regulations and a pro-construction bias will certainly vastly improve the economic performance of any region in the country.

In that sense – Britain needs more Manchesterism. Britain’s cities, towns and regions need fiscal and regulatory governance arrangements under which even someone who is very much not a Manchester liberal in the original sense is incentivised to act a little bit like one.

By Valentin Boboc

Senior Economist

The best way to never miss out on IEA work, get access to exclusive content, and support our research and educational programmes is to become a paid IEA Insider.

Subscribe now

IEA Podcast: Director of Communications Callum Price is joined by Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz and Senior Economist Valentin Boboc to discuss the government’s social media ban, Musk’s trillions, and what Piketty gets wrong, IEA YouTube

New Book: Inside the Sausage Factory

New IEA book by Dr Christopher Snowdon exposes the illusion of ‘evidence-based’ policy making over four key policies in recent history.

• Four major policies (plain cigarette packaging, the sugar tax, minimum unit pricing for alcohol, and fixed odds betting terminals stake cuts) were all pushed through on evidence that was weak, partisan, or selectively applied, shows new analysis

• In every case, small paternalistic interest groups dominated the research agenda, shaped media coverage, and achieved sweeping policy victories without meaningful public mandate

• Politicians proceeded not because the evidence was compelling but because the reputational risk of inaction exceeded the risk of backing policies that harmed consumers

Read the Book

"When the policies were eventually introduced, there was little sign that they made the slightest improvement to any of the problems they were supposed to address.”, Chris Snowdon writes in The Spectator

News and Views

"At a stroke, everyone with a phone would be an unwitting spy." Lord Hannan in the Daily Mail on on the surveillance powers a social media ban would require.

Impractical, illiberal and ultimately undesirable

Chris Snowdon responds to the Government’s ban on social media for under-16s:

“We must stop judging new legislation by the good intentions of its advocates rather than its likely consequences. We know from Australia that most teenagers will get around the ban and that those who are not able to do so will suffer from social isolation.

“There are legitimate concerns about screen addiction among both children and adults, but parents are already able to restrict what their children see online and limit the number of hours they can use a smartphone. These guardrails are removed when kids log in via VPNs or sign up to platforms as adults.

“What the Government is trying to do is reminiscent of attempts to ban the printing press. It is similarly impractical, illiberal and ultimately undesirable.”

• Read Chris’ full article about the ban in The Critic.

A legend’s battle with the joyless nanny state, Chris Snowdon in Spiked on the legacy of David Hockney.

Market forces helping to keep inflation in check

Julian Jessop responds to latest inflation figures:

“The official figures for May provide a bit more reassurance on inflation. The CPI measure was unchanged at 2.8%, against expectations of a rise to 3%, while food price inflation actually fell.

The underlying picture is relatively simple: upward pressure from higher transport costs (mainly motor fuel and airfares) was offset by falls in inflation almost everywhere else.

This is consistent with the survey evidence that weak demand and strong competition are keeping corporate pricing power in check, despite rising costs. Market forces are far more effective in controlling inflation than any amount of government tinkering.

These figures will help the Bank of England to justify keeping interest rates on hold this week, especially if tomorrow’s labour market data is also soft.
Nonetheless, inflation has now been back above the 2% target for more than a year and a half, and it is still likely to rise further.

Even if the US-Iran peace deal holds, there is plenty of cost pressure in the pipeline from past increases in commodity prices and from the ongoing disruption to global supply chains. The UK government is still loading businesses with extra costs too.
Inflation is therefore unlikely to return to the 2% target before the end of next year. This is pushing the boundaries of what could reasonably be downplayed as a ‘temporary’ overshoot.

In short, today’s data may give the Bank of England a little more breathing room, but it is far too soon to dismiss the upside risks either to inflation or to interest rates.”

Was Thatcher the only time Britain loved capitalism? Daniel Freeman and Martin Vander-Veyer on why the UK lost faith in capitalism, IEA YouTube

Why a wealth tax wouldn’t work – and what might, Kristian Niemietz writes for the Chartered Institute of Taxation

“If campaigners are concerned about wealth inequality, there are far better ways to address that issue. One of them would simply be to do what governments of all stripes keep saying they want to do anyway, but just never actually do: make it much easier to build houses. Britain has one of the lowest levels of housing supply in the developed world. A building boom would enable more people to become homeowners and build up housing wealth.”

We can’t let Degrowth win, Kristian Niemietz writes for the Rational Optimist Society about Piketty et al’s ‘Global Justice Report’

Kids will never forgive Keir Starmer for his Turkey Twizzler moment, Chris Snowdon on the social media ban for under 16s, GB News

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On the social media ban, the panel weighs up whether the policy can actually be enforced, pointing to Australia’s experience and the ease with which children use VPNs to get around age checks. They consider the case for and against leaving the decision to parents, the coordination problem this creates for families, and the oddity of a digital curfew for 17 year olds at the same time as the Government wants 16 year olds to be able to vote. They also place the policy in a wider pattern of governments reaching for bans that poll well but prove difficult in practice, drawing on Christopher Snowdon’s new book on evidence-based policy.

The conversation then turns to Elon Musk and what his trillion-dollar fortune says about how markets reward people, covering consumer surplus, company valuations, and why the size of a fortune does not track hours worked. Finally, the panel examines Thomas Piketty’s call for a per capita GDP cap of around €60,000, a forced shift from material to immaterial sectors, and the global institutions he proposes to run it. They question how such a system could be enforced, what it would mean for ordinary living standards, and the use of taxpayer funding for degrowth research.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.

The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.

Snowdon explains that each policy tended to rest on a similar package of evidence: modelling showing how the measure would work in theory, an example from another country that had tried something similar, and an expert review that gave it a stamp of approval. He argues that much of this evidence was weak or asked the wrong question. Plain packs were obviously less attractive, but that did not mean people would give up smoking. Modelling predicted large falls in alcohol deaths and in obesity that never materialised once minimum pricing and the sugar tax came in. In his view the evidence was rarely what decided the outcome.

The second half turns to what really drove these policies through. Snowdon makes the case that pressure, not evidence, was the deciding factor, with professional and often state-funded campaign groups generating media coverage while almost nobody organised against the measures. He draws on public choice theory to explain why millions of affected consumers stayed silent, why politicians took the path of least resistance, and why ministers from George Osborne to Rishi Sunak reached for these policies to build a legacy or shift the headlines. He closes on the recent move by the Government to restrict social media for under-sixteens, argues that opinion polls are a poor basis for lawmaking, and suggests defunding state-backed pressure groups as a place to start.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.

The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.

Close examination of each of the policy campaigns suggests that politicians did not make decisions based solely, or even mostly, on the basis of evidence. Instead, the government of the day responded to political pressure whipped up by campaigners on issues that were not a priority for them. Most of the policies had not existed even as ideas until a few years earlier. None of them had appeared in the manifestos of any of the main parties, with the exception of minimum pricing which was mentioned by the Liberal Democrats in 2010 - and yet minimum pricing that was the only one of the four that was never introduced in England.

A handful of MPs felt strongly about some of these policies but they were low salience issues for the government. It was lobby groups such as Action on Sugar and the Campaign for Fairer Gambling who pushed them up the agenda, issued press releases, got celebrity endorsements and garnered media coverage. This all had an effect on public opinion and forced the government to make a decision. Since the politicians are rational actors who want to get re-elected, they gauged public opinion and asked themselves whether the political costs of doing nothing were greater than the political costs of acting. By the time the decisions were made, only 15% of the public were opposed to plain packaging and only 6% of the public were opposed to clamping down on fixed-odds betting terminals. Resistance to the sugar tax was more substantial, at 33%, but opponents were clearly in the minority and George Osborne needed to make an announcement at the Budget that would take the nation’s mind off the cuts he was making to disability benefits.

Public opinion was evenly split on minimum pricing, however, and it is telling that this was the only one of the four policies that was not introduced in Westminster. In Scotland, by contrast, only a third of the public were opposed and the SNP had nationalistic reasons to forge a different path and become a ‘world leader’ in public health.

It would be an exaggeration to call this government by opinion poll, but that would be a more accurate description than ‘evidence-based policy-making’. Evidence did serve a purpose. Modelling studies showed how the policy could work in theory. Evidence from other countries where similar policies were in place reassured politicians that the they were at least enforceable and would probably not create a public backlash. The regular publication of new research gave the pressure groups a way of keeping their campaign in the news.

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But scientific evidence was only one part of the overall campaign and was never decisive. In the plain packaging campaign, there were far more references in the media to Lynton Crosby, a government advisor, and his alleged links to the tobacco industry than there was to all the peer-reviewed evidence on plain packaging combined. Similarly, Jamie Oliver’s support for the sugar tax was mentioned in more articles than all the evidence for the policy combined. It was the general climate of opinion, not the careful scrutiny of academic research, that mattered.

The four case studies in Inside the Sausage Factory suggest that politicians will succumb to pressure on low-salience issues unless they believe that the policy will be widely unpopular or conspicuously backfire. Once the public health interest groups had put their policies on the agenda, the government could not put off a decision forever. They became ‘barnacles on the boat’ that needed to be scraped off, either by implementing them or by rejecting them. With the exception of minimum pricing in England, which had significant public and political opposition, the government in Westminster concluded that the reputational risks of inaction were greater than the political, economic and legal risks of acting. This can be inferred from the results of opinion polls, the tone of media coverage and the fact that the policies had already been tolerated, if not embraced, by people in other countries. By and large, this judgement has been vindicated. Although the evidence that any of the policies achieved their objective is virtually non-existent, there has been no significant political blowback from introducing them.

Consistent with public choice theory, I find that everyone involved in these policy campaigns, from the voters up to the Prime Minister, was acting in their own rational self-interest. Most of the politicians didn’t care about the price of sugary drinks or what people get up to in betting shops, but they did want to get re-elected and they didn’t want to be on the wrong side of history. So long as they were confident that the policy wouldn’t backfire spectacularly, lose the government a lot of tax revenue or be very unpopular, siding with the nanny state was the path of least resistance. The decisions to introduce plain packaging and effectively ban FOBTs were particularly easy because only a small minority smoked, an even smaller minority played machines in bookmakers and there was limited public opposition.

The people who told pollsters that they supported these policies were acting in their own self-interest too. For those who didn’t consume the products in question, the rational response was either apathy or mild support for the nanny state cause. The sugar tax effectively transferred money from those who consumed sugary drinks to those who did not. A reduction in smoking and heavy drinking was widely assumed to cut NHS costs, thereby lowering taxes or providing better treatment to those who do not drink heavily or smoke. Cutting the stake on FOBTs was assumed to reduce the number of high street betting shops, thereby freeing up commercial property for shops that might be of more benefit to non-gamblers and, in the opinion of many, lifting the character of the high street.

Read the Book

Whether or not these assumptions were realistic is beside the point. The vast majority of the public were not actively involved in campaigning for or against any of the policies and their ‘support’ amounted to no more than expressing an opinion in a survey. The putative benefits of the policies to individuals who did not consume the products may have been negligible, but the cost of agreeing with the policies was zero (and since all the campaigns involved alleged social evils, social desirability bias encouraged support). Like the politicians, the public did not need to be convinced that the policy would work so long as they had no reason to believe that they would be adversely affected if the policy failed. So long as there was some chance that they would benefit, however indirectly, from fewer people using a product that they themselves did not consume, they could be persuaded that the policy was in their interest.

As for those who did consume the products, they mostly did nothing to defend themselves, but the was rational too. As Mancur Olson explained in The Logic of Collective Action, individuals know that their participation in an organised protest group will make virtually no difference to the outcome. The cost of taking action is typically greater than the cost that the policy will impose on them and so they do nothing. In my case studies, some consumers were prepared to voice their opposition in low-cost ways (more than 100,000 people signed a petition against plain packaging, for example), but they otherwise had little option but to free ride on whatever campaign the affected industry could muster up (the industry was also acting in its own self-interest, as the “public health” groups never failed to point out). As a result, there was no grassroots opposition to the nanny state campaigns.

But there was no grassroots activism for the campaigns either. All of the single-issue pressure groups were small, highly professional lobbying outfits funded either by the government or by a wealthy benefactor. It was completely rational for them to campaign for changes to the law because it was their job. Similarly, it was perfectly rational for activist-academics funded by the state to produce impactful, partisan research in high profile journals. The UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) defines impact as “the effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.” Such a system positively encourages academics to engage in high profile, winnable policy campaigns in fields such as “public health” which are awash with money. Academics from Oxford University later filed a case study with the REF taking credit for ‘Creating a favourable policy environment for new sugary drinks taxes’ while academics from Cambridge University boasted about ‘Making the case for the sugar levy’ and ‘Fuelling sustained government action on sugary drinks’.

Everyone was acting in their rational self-interest and yet it led to a succession of policy duds. In politics, everyone acting rationally can lead to irrational policies being introduced. None of the policy decisions I studied were evidence-based. At best, they were evidence-decorated.

What happened next? There was more of the same from the same pressure groups, but with even less evidence. Action on Smoking and Health moved on to lobbying for a generational tobacco sales ban. Alcohol Focus Scotland shifted its attention to an alcohol advertising ban. Action on Sugar called for the sugar tax to be extended to food and milkshakes. The anti-smoking, anti-alcohol, anti-obesity and anti-gambling groups all called for a levy on the industries they saw themselves as being at war with.

The Obesity Health Alliance campaigned for a ban on ‘unhealthy food’ advertising and was the first to chalk up a win. In July 2020, a slew of anti-obesity laws was suddenly announced, including an online and pre-watershed television advertising ban, a ban on volume price discounts and restrictions on where HFSS (high in fat, sugar and salt) food can be placed in supermarkets. A familiar coalition of activists had been lobbying for these policies for years but since most of the policies had never been introduced in any other country, there was no ‘real world’ evidence to cite, and there were few relevant experimental studies in the academic literature.

When Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, they were assumed to be incompatible with his more libertarian instincts and yet they became part of a new obesity strategy a year after he took office. Evidence played no part in this. Two related events provide a better explanation. Firstly, Johnson was hospitalised with COVID-19 three months earlier and explicitly blamed this on him being ‘too fat’. Johnson’s hospitalisation became a focusing event which made the issue more salient for the nation and for the Prime Minister personally. Secondly, the UK had one of the world’s highest cumulative death rates from COVID-19 in July 2020 and obesity was a known risk factor for COVID-19 mortality. New anti-obesity policies were unlikely to have an impact before the pandemic subsided, but the new strategy signalled that the government was taking action and it helped shift attention away from its own policy failures in controlling the virus.

In October 2023, Rishi Sunak announced a permanent ban on the sale of tobacco products to anyone born after 2008, thereby introducing incremental prohibition. There was no ‘real world’ evidence to support this as it was untested, but it polled well, particularly with those who had voted Conservative in 2019. A survey conducted days before the announcement found that it was supported by over 70% of the public, with fewer than a quarter opposed.

The obvious risk of prohibition was that it would create a large and violent black market, but the government dismissed this as an industry scare story. As the legislation crawled through Parliament over the next two years, convenience stores in Australia started going up in flames and tobacco duty revenue fell by 75% as the country entered a ‘tobacco turf war’ driven by extremely high cigarette taxes and the prohibition of vapes. The British government paid no attention to this. The policy still polled well.

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In December 2025, the Australian government tried to ban children aged under 16 from accessing social media. It didn’t work. Months later, 70% of kids still accessed at least one banned website and several children’s charities warned that a similar ban in the UK would lead to ‘serious unintended consequences that could put children at greater risk’. On 15 June 2026, Keir Starmer announced that he would be banning children aged under 16 from social media. Polls showed that over 70% of the public were in favour.

Only the most ardent advocates of these policy decisions were driven by evidence. In 2020, Boris Johnson was in a tight spot politically and, like George Osborne in 2016, found obesity to be a useful distraction. In 2023, Rishi Sunak was staring down the barrel of crushing general election defeat and clearly wanted a policy to be remembered by. Keir Starmer announced the social media ban in the week of the Makerfield by-election which could be the beginning of the end for his time in Downing Street. He, too, is looking for a legacy.

In the campaigns I write about in Inside the Sausage Factory, several studies were referenced again and again by politicians, journalists and activists. The policies didn’t work and the evidence wasn’t very good, but at least evidence was cited from time to time. The evidence for banning ‘junk food’ adverts and social media for the under-16s is negligible and the evidence from the generational tobacco ban is non-existent. Scientific evidence was not a decisive factor in any of the campaigns I studied from the 2010s. Today, it seems to be entirely optional.

The patterns identified in this book may not apply to policymaking in general, but they may be generalisable to a sub-set of policy-making that could be described as paternalistic lifestyle regulation. There is no reason, in principle, why they should not apply to any committed group of activists that has the opportunity and resources to apply pressure on government. For those who are of a liberal disposition, this is not a happy conclusion to reach. It implies that politicians can be hostages to small pressure groups manipulating public opinion almost without end. It suggests that minorities can expect to suffer at the hands of the majority if most people have no self-interested reason to defend the activities in question.

It is always possible that more far-sighted voters will become concerned that if they allow a succession of special interest groups to restrict or ban the pleasures of other people, it will not be long before their own pleasures are under attack. Since individuals are sometimes in the majority and sometimes in the minority, it may be in the long-term interest of the majority to defend minorities on principle. This is why defenders of free speech defend the right of people to say things that they personally find objectionable. Fearing that a precedent is being set, an individual may feel that the surest way to avoid a ban on X is to prevent a ban on Y, despite disapproving of Y themselves. In Britain, alas, there is little to suggest that the majority is prepared to take a principled stand against illiberal policies. Even those who are directly affected by coercive paternalism lack the time and resources to stand up against pressure groups that are often funded by the state.

And in case you’re wondering about the title of the book, it is a reference to a comment reputedly made by Otto Von Bismarck who said that laws are like sausages insofar as you don’t want to see how they are made. He had a point.

They discuss why the British establishment looked down on trade for so long while outsiders such as Quaker families and immigrant banking dynasties built much of the country’s industry, why Britain never produced the public business heroes that America did, and how the Thatcher years briefly made enterprise admired before the mood turned again. Vander Weyer argues that financial capitalism has repeatedly damaged its own reputation, through executive pay rows, the mis-selling of personal pensions, the dot-com bubble and the 2008 crisis and bailouts. The discussion also covers the shortage of growth capital for British firms, the difference between what banks and investors should fund, private equity and venture capital, the effect of AI on jobs and careers, and why he sees entrepreneurship as the route out.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems. The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.

Surveys of adults show overwhelming support for banning social media for under-16s, but Brits often support bans in opinion polls before changing their minds when the unintended consequences become more obvious. Many of those who support a ban do not even think it will work. A YouGov survey found that 76% of British adults support banning social media for the under-16s, but the same survey found that only 32% think be effective. The British public loves bans so much that they even support them when they know they won’t work. Politicians need to pay less attention to opinion polls and more attention to evidence.

The evidence shows that it won’t work. In Australia, where a similar policy came into effect in December, research found that at least 60% of 12-15 year olds still have at least one account with a banned social media platform. Those who are willing to break the law remain connected with their peers. Those who obey the law risk being isolated. There are so many ways to get around age verification that the UK is unlikely to see a better success rate.

There have always been moral panics about how teenagers spend their time - video nasties, Dungeons & Dragons, Mortal Kombat, etc. - but what the government is proposing goes far beyond banning a film or game. A whole mode of communication is under threat. The ban will apply to all platforms ‘whose purpose is to enable social interaction and  which allow users to post material’. This is more like banning the printing press than banning Grand Theft Auto. There are legitimate concerns about smartphone ‘addiction’ and waning attention spans, but there are smarter ways to tackle these problems than by attempting to get teenagers to abandon apps that are almost ubiquitous. Existing platforms have plenty of safeguards for parents to use, but these disappear when children log in as adults or use VPNs to access unregulated websites.

Attempts to ban the printing press failed in the 15th century because they were impractical, illiberal and ultimately undesirable. Deluded politicians still think that they can uninvent the internet, but tech savvy teens will run rings around boomer legislators any day of the week. The social media ban is not going to work, but the kids will never forgive them for trying.

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• The moral case for capitalism

• Britain isn’t broken, but the government is

• Have real wealth taxes never been tried?

‘Rockstar economist’ Thomas Piketty has assembled a top team of 45 contributors from prestigious institutions, plus research assistants and a press and media team etc, for his ‘Global Justice Project’ and his ‘World Inequality Lab’. And yet, with all those resources at their disposal, the best they could come up with is some 2014-era Russell-Brand-style slop mixed with 2019-era Greta-Thunberg-style slop.

My issue with the Piketty project is not the fact that the authors are wrong about everything. It is the fact that they are wrong in the complacent way of someone who isn’t even trying, because they know that they don’t need to.

I could easily spend the next 12 months doing nothing else but debunking this project’s fashionable fallacies, but I’ve been given a word limit, so I’ll just briefly touch upon three things.

Firstly, Piketty et al claim that “the promise that economic growth would “lift all boats” has not been kept. […] Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity.” It hasn’t. Not even close. While their claim that “roughly one 10th of the world’s population still lives in extreme destitution” is correct, they fail to mention that that is the lowest this share has ever been, down from 43% in 1990. Obviously, if you use a higher poverty threshold, you get higher poverty rates, but wherever you want to set the threshold, the trend is always downwards. I’d rather keep that trend going.

Regarding the idea that we have to forcibly stop economic growth because of climate change: that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Despite climate change, the number of climate-related deaths (and deaths from natural disasters in general) has dropped drastically over the past hundred years, even in absolute terms, despite the fact that the world’s population has grown so much. Since the world is so much richer than it used to be, we have become much more resilient to all kinds of adverse events. Most so-called “climate risks” are really poverty risks. Simply put: you will not usually read about climate disasters in Liechtenstein, even though their geography makes them vulnerable to snow avalanches, landslides, rockfall, flooding etc. That’s because they are so rich, they can deal with most things nature throws at them. Being rich is viable disaster strategy.

Regarding “the historical reality that many rich countries built their wealth by impoverishing the south” – that’s not a “historical reality” at all, it’s a fashionable slogan that has been debunked at length. It matters, because the way we see the origins of economic development shapes the conclusions we draw about economic development today.

I could go on, and probably will soon enough, but I don’t want to ruin your Sunday with Guardian slop. For now, let’s remember that the world is getting richer, that poverty is falling, and that all kinds of social and even environmental outcomes are improving. A lot of things are moving in the right direction, and will continue to, unless we let the Pikettys of this world ruin it.

Kristian Niemietz

Editorial Director

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IEA Podcast: Director of Communications Callum Price is joined by Director General Lord Hannan and Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz to discuss the latest de-growth push, government' concierge services, and price floors, IEA YouTube

New Book: On Morality, Human Behaviour and Economics

• On Morality, Human Behaviour and Economics is the first volume in a new series jointly produced by the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Vinson Centre at the University of Buckingham

• The book argues that the case for free markets has been ceded by default – left undefended by business, dismissed by sections of the church and political establishment, and replaced with intellectually weak critiques

• Contributors include Lord Kamall, Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell, Martin Vander Weyer, and the late Revd Dr Richard Turnbull, whose chapter is published posthumously

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• Read more in CityAM’s editorial: Never forget the undeniable moral case for capitalism

News and Views

Director General Lord Hannan breaks down the folly of price caps and price floors

Ten years after Brexit, Economics Fellow Julian Jessop discusses the economic consequences of Brexit ten years on, BBC Radio 4

Government tech image ban will inevitably be exploited by bad actors

Responding to the Government’s plan to regulate images on devices, Matthew Lesh, Public Policy Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs said:

"The Government's plan to turn every smartphone into a government scanning device is a creepy infringement on user privacy that will inevitably be exploited by bad actors with nefarious intent – be it criminal hackers or authoritarian governments.

"Over 90% of contact child sexual abuse is committed by people known to the child, according to the NSPCC. No phone-level fix addresses that. The unglamorous task of safeguarding children does not come with easy technical fixes.”

Keir Starmer forces tech firms to block nude images for children, covered in The Times

"This amounts to surveillance technology on every device in the country." Matthew Lesh on the government's proposed device controls in CityAM.

The LSE has a lot to answer for, Editorial and Research Fellow Professor Len Shackleton writes on how the institutions that have incubated so many of our political leaders have lost sight of some of the basic principles of economics, CapX

“The historical experience with wealth taxation, by and large, is a failure. Pretty big failure.” That’s not a Tufton Street economist. That’s Gabriel Zucman, the guru of wealth taxation, on Zack Polanski's own podcast. Kristian Niemietz asks why they still want to bring it back, in CityAM

Proposals to repeal the Public Sector Equality Duty welcomed

Responding to the Conservative’s pledge to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty, Daniel Freeman, Managing Editor said:

“Proposals to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty are welcome. It would reduce bureaucratic box ticking by public sector officials and reduce public bodies’ exposure to drawn out court cases, like the one that prevented a former pub converting to new homes on the grounds the council had failed to consider the duty in the Equality Act.

“However, it does not address other areas of concern such as Section 159 of the Equality Act’s ‘positive action’ provisions, which can allow irrelevant identity criteria like race, sex or sexuality to play a role in recruiting. Politicians should be tackling knotty and sensitive issues from a rational liberal position like this, but those who really want to prioritise meritocracy should consider removing positive action from public sector recruitment along with the Equality Duty.”

“If we want to have a reasonably high threshold for incitement, we have to apply it across the board.” Lord Hannan on why free speech must be consistent, GB News

Julian Jessop responds to the latest growth figures:

“Britain is not broken; the government is.” Mani Basharzad in ConservativeHome on why conflating state and society is a profound conservative mistake.

Events and Opportunities

The 2026 Vinson Centre Conference

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Margaret Thatcher Centre’s Annual Academic Symposium

Under the chairmanship of the Academic Director of the Margaret Thatcher Centre, Dr Tim Aker, and building on the tremendous success of our inaugural event, the Margaret Thatcher Centre is proud to continue its annual academic symposium, with the second event of the series taking place on Friday, 10 July 2026, at Churchill College, Cambridge.

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This year’s symposium will continue our deep dive into the Iron Lady’s enduring legacy and will further examine the geopolitical and economic shifts of her era in the context of the passage of the Single European Act in 1986.

You will hear from eminent speakers who will explore these issues with an engaged audience of some 100 academics, students, politicians, journalists and supporters. The list of speakers includes:

• The Revd Jonathan Aitken, British author, Church of England priest and former Conservative Party politician

• Peter Just, Author, Margaret Thatcher: Life After Downing Street

• Professor The Lord Norton of Louth, Professor of Government, and Director of the Centre for Legislative Studies, University of Hull.

• The Rt Hon Sir Malcolm Rifkind KCMG KC, Former Secretary of State

• Dr. Lee Rotherham, Research Fellow, Taxpayers’ Alliance

• Lee Evans, John Ramsden Fellow, Mile End Institute, Queen Mary, University of London

• Sir Gerald Howarth, Former Private Secretary to The Rt. Hon Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven

• Professor Anthony Teasdale, Visiting Professor, LSE and Columbia University; Former Director General, EPRS, European Parliament

• Michael McManus, The Telegraph

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Complimentary student tickets available.

Kristian Niemietz sets out why degrowth cannot happen voluntarily and what kind of state would actually be required to impose it. Lord Hannan draws on history — from the post-financial crisis recession to FDR’s destruction of food during the Great Depression — to show that the intuitions driving both degrowth and price controls are as old as they are wrong. On industrial policy, both argue that the government’s concierge scheme is simply a guide around obstacles the government itself created, and that cutting taxes and regulation would do more for growth than any managed scheme.

The episode ends with a discussion of prices as signals, why supermarket profit margins tell a very different story to Polanski’s claims, and a striking account of how the Prophet Muhammad — himself a merchant — understood the consequences of price caps over a thousand years before Adam Smith put it into words.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.

The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.

On Morality, Human Behaviour and Economics, edited by Professor Juan Castañeda, Director of the Vinson Centre, and Lord Kamall, brings together eleven leading economists, philosophers and theologians to make the moral case for free markets at a moment when consecutive governments have presided over more than a decade of stagnant growth and rising public scepticism of capitalism.

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The book is the first volume in the new Vinson Centre Series and emerges from a joint conference between the IEA and the Vinson Centre for the Public Understanding of Economics and Entrepreneurship at the University of Buckingham, held in November 2024.

Drawing on philosophy, theology, economic history, sociology and political science, the contributors argue that classical liberals have allowed their opponents a clear run of the moral terrain. The volume sets out to redress the balance, returning to the foundational arguments of thinkers from Adam Smith and Bernard Mandeville to Friedrich Hayek and reapplying them to contemporary questions of inequality, welfare, business culture, religious ethics and the relationship between markets and the state.

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Read the Book

Across twelve chapters, the volume addresses:

• The Revd Dr Richard Turnbull on why those making the case for the market are failing to do so — and what an intellectual defence of market principles should look like

• Mikko Arevuo (Cranfield) on Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and his implicit theory of distributive justice

• Pedro Schwartz (Universidad Camilo José Cela) on Bernard Mandeville, spontaneous order, and the division of labour

• Elena Leontjeva (Lithuanian Free Market Institute) on capitalism, scarcity and the moral significance of “lack”

• Benedikt Koehler (IEA) on profit, wealth and private property in Islam, Christianity and Judaism

• Philip Booth (St Mary’s University) on the economics of Pope Francis, and why his concern for the poor transcends the conventional left–right divide

• Billy Christmas (West Virginia University) on the economic teachings of the early Church Fathers and private property

• Paul Dragos Aligica (Mercatus Center) on Hayek’s concept of catallaxy as a solution to the problem of value pluralism

• Martin Vander Weyer (Business Editor, The Spectator) on why Britain has never truly embraced capitalism, and the lessons of nineteenth-century Manchester and Birmingham

• Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell (President of the Jobs Foundation) on the practical, theological and historical case for business

• Dr Chris O’Leary (Manchester Metropolitan University) on a classical liberal vision for a limited welfare state, based on a negative income tax and voluntary mutual aid associations

Max explains the international comparisons, contrasting the UK’s position with lower-tax economies such as Singapore (15th March), Switzerland (21st April) and the United States (16th April), and argues that competition between states and cantons restrains tax growth in ways that centralised systems cannot. The conversation also covers the Cost of Government Day, which falls on 13th July when borrowing is included, the demographic pressures driving welfare and pension spending, and the finding that over 52% of the British population are in some way dependent on the state for income.

The discussion closes with Max’s priorities for reform: rationalising the tax code, cutting red tape, pushing ahead with planning reform, and abolishing stamp duty to unlock the property market. He offers cautious optimism that some political figures are beginning to take the scale of the problem seriously, though he warns the trajectory points towards Tax Freedom Day reaching 13th June by 2030 without significant policy change.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.

The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.

This essay previews a chapter by the same author in the forthcoming book ‘On Morality, Human Behaviour, and Economics’ jointly published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Vinson Centre for the Public Understanding of Economics and Entrepreneurship at the University of Buckingham, later this week.

Every UK government since 1979 has pledged a ‘once in a generation’ reform of welfare benefits. Pensions, unemployment support, sickness and disability, and housing subsidies have all seen a plethora of reform proposals over the past 50 years, with governments claiming that they are moving people into work, reducing welfare dependency and cutting the benefits bill.

The reality is very different. Reforms have been piecemeal and minor rather than radical and significant. The welfare bill continues to climb, and the numbers of people dependent on the state continues to grow. Over half of the UK population now receive more from benefits than they pay in tax, with over a third in receipt of welfare benefits. The share of GDP spent on working age benefits has more than doubled since 1979, and a fifth of the working age population is economically inactive, a number which continues to rise post-pandemic. The benefits bill is around £350bn and expected to rise substantially over the coming two decades and is one of the highest in the OECD.

This growth in the size and scope of the system of welfare benefits is known as the ‘welfare state escalator’ (Lewis, 1999). It is entirely predictable, and indeed was predicted by many including both Milton Freidman (1962, 1977) and James Buchanan (1988). It is not unavoidable.

An ever-growing welfare state is unsustainable and unaffordable. There are also moral arguments for reform, the biggest of which is welfare dependency. This not a criticism of those in receipt of welfare benefits. They are responding perfectly rationally to the incentive structures they face in our current welfare system. Rather, it is a criticism of the system that increase state coercion through ever-higher taxation, rewards rent-seeking, encourages a growing client state.

Welfare dependency is not just bad for society. It has some pretty dire consequences for those who become dependent. It crowds out, replaces and prevents voluntary mutual associations from delivering welfare services, with inevitable consequences on levels of social trust and reciprocity. It fosters long term worklessness, which increases risks of lifetime poverty, and is incredibly bad for physical and mental health. It necessitates higher taxation, which distorts consumption and replaces voluntary choice with state coercion.

What is needed is a radical, rebalancing of the welfare state, reforms reduce state dependency and increase voluntary support and self-reliance. It is a limited welfare state, which is not focused on reducing inequality but rather on provide a safety net for every citizen. Such a limited welfare state is entirely consistent with the works of Locke. Hayek and Smith (Lehton, 2015), of Freidman (1962, 1977) and Buchanan (1988), and it draws on several key tenets of classical liberalism. Such reforms need to be universal in design to prevent rent seeking. It would need to be simple to administer, to prevent capture. It should alleviate poverty, so as to counter more collectivist and equalitarian arguments. It should enable and foster voluntary mutual aid associations, so as to ensure individuals can choose whether and how their wider welfare needs are met.

In the chapter of a new book, On Morality, Human Behaviour and Economics, I put forward proposals for such a rebalancing of the welfare state. This is different in form and function to today’s welfare states. It aims to reduce economic insecurity, not reducing inequality, by providing a safety net, a basic income level that society deems necessary.

This vision has at its core two key proposals. The first is to champion the role of voluntary association in the delivery of welfare benefits and in wider civil society. Civil society is a fundamental concept in classical liberal thought, as it acts as bulwark against an expansive and coercive state, because coercion is the antithesis of liberty and freedom.

The main proposal in the chapter is that of Milton Freidman’s Negative Income Tax (1962). It would allow the state to meet the basic needs of all citizens, without distorting work incentives or incentivising rent seeking. It is simple in design and inexpensive to administer. A minimum income level is set, above which income tax is paid and below which an income – the negative income tax - is provided. This income is proportional and is paid above any income earned, up to the point at which the minimum income level is reached.

There ia a growing consensus, from all walks of life, that we need a paradigm shift in welfare state policy. Classical liberalism provides the vision for such a paradigm shift, towards a limited welfare state based on a Negative Income Tax and a vibrant network of voluntary mutual aid associations. This chapter has sought to set out how such an approach would be consistent with classical liberal principles. But it also sets out why such reform will be far from easy.

• Is Britain Broken?

• Against accelerationism

• Register for the 2026 Vinson Centre Conference

The shocking thing about Britain in 1955, the year the IEA was founded, was not how socialist it was; it was how popular its socialism was. Most people thought it right and proper for the state to run coal, gas, electricity, railways, airlines. All the experts agreed that there needed to be a planned economy. The vogue word was “tripartite”, meaning that corporations, trade unions and government ministers should come to agreements and then roll them out nationally.

We are a change-averse species, and six years of wartime mobilisiation had conditioned British people to expect government direction. No, not just to expect it – to demand it. The task of the IEA was therefore not simply to explain how regulations might be lifted or industries denationalised. It was to reawaken the desire for freedom in an electorate that had forgotten it.

That, it seems to me, is our task today. The popular mood, especially since lockdown, is closer to what it was in the post-war years than to what it was in the early 1990s when I first attended IEA events as an undergraduate. The reason we have such high levels of spending, taxation and debt is that we vote for them – in effect, if not in intention. We won’t get back to growth until we are ready to back candidates who want small government.

The job of the IEA is similar to what it was 70 years ago. We need to engage at every level – not just with MPs, but with voters, especially first-time voters. We need to explain freedom to a generation that can barely remember it. The politics that most teenagers get in their social media is almost uniformly illiberal, usually in the Polanski/Corbyn sense, occasionally in the Tate/Fuentes sense. Liberty is no longer part of students’ mental map.

We need to communicate with that generation in language they understand and through media they watch. We need to adapt our vernacular to an age that has become more visual than literary. We need to use the full potential of AI, something think-tanks have so far been slow to do.

Shortly before he died in 2006, our founder Ralph Harris told me: “I haven’t really said anything new since 1955; I just keep updating it”. That updating now takes forms that even Ralph, cheerful genius that he was, could not have imagined. But the vision is still his. He took Britain, in one generation, from Attleeism to Thatcherism. The acceleration of technology allows us to make the same move even faster. Let’s get cracking.

Lord Hannan

Director General

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IEA Podcast: Director of Communications Callum Price and Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz are joined by our new Director General Lord Hannan for his first IEA Podcast to discuss the latest OBR forecast assesment, the Home Secretaries decision to revoke the visas from two left-wing commentators, and the latest wealth tax arguments, IEA YouTube

Is Britain Broken?

On the 1st June, the IEA and Guido Fawkes hosted an exclusive live panel debate featuring Fraser Nelson (The Times), Zia Yusuf (Reform) and David Frost (IEA), chaired by Adam Cherry (Guido Fawkes) to debate the question is Britain broken?

If you missed out, watch back now!

Callum Price wrote up what we learned for ConservativeHome:

News and Views

“The only sustainable route to fix our public finances is a combination of economic growth and spending restraint”, Senior Economist Valentin Boboc on the OBR’s growth forecast evaluation, The Express

“The OBR has now conceded that the Chancellor’s National Insurance raid hit growth and jobs harder than initially estimated, with youth unemployment at an eleven-year high as a result. The only sustainable route to fix our public finances is a combination of economic growth and spending restraint. Trying to plug the gap with tax rises only digs the hole deeper.”

“Taken individually, they are a nuisance. Taken together, they are shattering.” Christopher Snowdon on why Excessive Producer Responsibility is fuelling inflation and squeezing British industry, The Critic

Grid costs and clean energy subsidies to hit £40 billion a year, IEA analysis on the cost of renewables picked up on GB News

Clean energy subsidies and grid costs will hit £40billion a year by 2030, an analyst predicts. This £20billion increase from last year’s prices is equivalent to around £700 per household, according to a paper from think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Did Capitalism Actually Help the Poor? Steve Davies gives a talk on what the long history of economic growth tells us about how the modern world came to be, IEA YouTube

"80 per cent of the cigarettes smoked in Australia last year were illicit. The legal market is on the verge of disappearing."Christopher Snowdon on the black market catastrophe that Britain’s policymakers are refusing to learn from, in The Critic

Events and Opportunities

The 2026 Vinson Centre Conference

Register here

Lord Hannan argues that tax rises are always harmful to growth, pointing to the “triple whammy” facing employers from National Insurance hikes, the Employment Rights Bill, and minimum wage increases. The conversation turns to whether the OBR’s mandate should be reformed and whether a competitive market in economic forecasting would produce better results. On free speech, all three agree that banning the American commentators was petty authoritarianism, with Hannan and Niemietz both arguing that consistent application of free speech principles matters more than whether you agree with the speaker. Hannan raises the uncomfortable question of whether the liberal free speech consensus of recent decades was merely a temporary standoff between competing hegemonies.

The episode closes with Kristian Niemietz’s response to the Polanski/Zucman exchange on wealth taxes. Niemietz agrees that past wealth taxes have largely failed, but disputes Zucman’s claim that a broader, exemption-free version would succeed, arguing the valuation bureaucracy required would be enormous and the disincentive effects on business owners would be severe. Lord Hannan draws on his time in Brussels during Francois Hollande’s wealth tax to illustrate how quickly such policies drive wealth creators out, and argues that the true motive behind wealth tax proposals is egalitarian rather than fiscal.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.

The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.

Dr Davies examines the Engels Pause (roughly 1790–1850), the period when British GDP grew by 46% while real wages rose only 12%, and traces where the missing wealth went — captured primarily by landlords and asset owners rather than workers. He explains how this reversed after 1850, when real wages surged by 123% as deflation took hold, the Corn Laws were repealed, and the elastic labour supply from the countryside began to dry up. The talk also draws a direct parallel between 19th century rural-to-urban migration in Britain and modern global migration, examines the moralistic and romantic literary critiques of industrialisation against what working-class diaries of the period actually record, and closes with the question of why China — as technologically advanced as Europe in the 14th century — failed to industrialise, and what the Ming Dynasty’s deliberate suppression of innovation reveals about how elites throughout history have blocked economic progress.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems. The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.

In hindsight, I should have done that two or three years earlier. But in the years prior, I kept looking for excuses, and I kept finding them. Things had to get worse before they could get better.

These days, at the events I attend, I often meet people who think Britain is in a similar situation today.

It’s not exactly news that Britain isn’t in great shape. The economy has barely grown in 18 years. From the state of the public finances to the state of the health service, from the cost of living to unemployment, nothing seems to be going in the right direction. Most people are more than aware of this, even if they couldn’t cite the exact figures. Surveys consistently show a widespread, deep dissatisfaction with the state of the country. It is perhaps the only thing on which Britain’s political tribes can agree.

But at the same time, there is not much appetite for the kind of reforms that could actually begin to turn things around. There is no political equivalent to my back-to-the-gym moment from 12 years ago. Why is that?

The explanation I keep hearing is that things are bad, but not quite bad enough. There is a chronic sense of malaise, but not an acute sense of crisis. Maybe a little crisis would be beneficial, to create the momentum for real policy change. Maybe things need to get worse before they can get better.

We could call this a free-market version of ‘accelerationism’. Free-market accelerationists like to point to Argentina, where a crisis of late-stage Peronism led to the election of Javier Milei. They like to contrast Edward Heath’s government to Margaret Thatcher’s: Heath failed in his reform attempts, because the country wasn’t ready for it yet. Things had to get worse before they could get better.

I am very much not an accelerationist, and I believe that in the current context, free-marketeers are deluding themselves if they think a deterioration of economic conditions would work in their favour. It would be much more likely to have the exact opposite effect, and we should certainly not hope for it. 

Accelerationism can only work when certain conditions are met: people need to have an accurate understanding of what is causing their problems, and what needs to change in order to improve them. I opened this article with a fitness analogy, because that is the clearest example of a situation where these conditions are met. We all know what we need to do if we want to be in good shape. It’s just that we don’t always act upon that knowledge. We don’t always do what we know we should be doing. Because we can’t always muster the discipline and the willpower. When a lack of willpower is the problem, a little shock can help.

The mistake that free-market accelerationists make is to assume that the electorate’s unwillingness to accept free-market reforms is comparable to a physically inactive person’s unwillingness to do exercise. In other words, they assume that, deep down inside, most people already agree with them. Deep down inside, most people know that Britain needs free-market reforms. We just don’t have willpower to admit that to ourselves, and to act upon it.

But what if that’s not true? What if the issue isn’t a lack of willpower, but a fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem? What if people don’t agree that Britain’s problems are caused by an overbearing government? 

I think it’s fairly obvious that the ‘misdiagnosis’ thesis is a lot closer to the truth than the ‘lick of willpower’ thesis. People who want to be in better shape, but who can’t summon the willpower to do any exercise, will look for excuses. But they won’t actively deny that doing exercise would be good for them. They certainly won’t attack the very idea of doing exercise, let alone construct an elaborate anti-exercise ideology.

In contrast, Britain is fertile ground for people who claim that the country’s problems are caused not by a lack of, by an excess of free-market economics. Take Andy Burnham’s ‘40 years of neoliberalism’ speech. Take the hundreds of thousands of young people flocking to Zack Polanski. Look at Gary Stevenson’s YouTube figures or his book sales. If economic conditions deteriorate, it will just drive even more people in that direction.

At the moment, the trend seems to be that the worse things get, the stronger the support for bad ideas becomes. The fiscal situation is clearly much worse today than it was at the end of the last decade. How do people respond to that? By supporting wealth taxes. How do people respond to high rents? By supporting rent controls. How do people respond when loose monetary policy causes inflation? By supporting price controls. The worse things get, the worse our political climate becomes.

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Accelerationism was originally a Marxist concept. Free-market accelerationists would do well to revisit Marx’s original version of it, because it was, in one important way, superior to their own.

Marx presented his accelerationist (without using that word) case in the context of free trade. He explicitly rejected the idea that free trade would raise the living standards of working-class people. He did believe that free trade would deliver lower consumer prices, but he also believed that the capitalist class would just respond to that by reducing workers’ wages by an equivalent amount, leaving them no better off. But Marx supported free trade anyway – for accelerationist reasons:

“[W]hat is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. […] So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist, it does not matter how favorable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited. […] [T]he antagonism between industrial capitalists and wage workers […] will stand out still more clearly. […]

Let us assume for a moment that there are no more […] custom duties; in fact that all the accidental circumstances which today the worker may take to be the cause of his miserable condition have entirely vanished, and you will have removed so many curtains that hide from his eyes his true enemy.

He will see that capital become free will make him no less a slave than capital trammeled by customs duties. […]

[F]ree trade […] breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution.”

Another word for ‘hasten’ is, of course, ‘accelerate’.

We can see that Marx’s argument wasn’t simply that ‘things have to get worse before they can get better’. He didn’t even say that free trade would make things worse, just that it would replace one bad situation with another bad situation.

He thought that the advantage of the second bad situation was that it would be bad in more transparent ways. In the second scenario, it would be easier for the average worker to grasp what the problem is (=capitalism), and what to do about it (=revolution). He didn’t think workers would revolt just because material conditions are bad. He thought they would revolt once they understand the reasons for their bad material conditions. This was more likely to happen under capitalism with free trade than under capitalism without free trade. He was an accelerationist, because he believed in the educational value of accelerationism.

There is no reason to believe that he would have supported a non-educational version of accelerationism, where people’s living standards deteriorate, but they have no idea why. In that sense, Marx and I are on the same side of this argument. The sentiment that ‘things have to get worse before they can get better’ only applies when people know why things are getting worse, and what it would take to make them better. Otherwise, you’re only accelerating on a road to nowhere.