A moving and eloquent piece Tom. On the subject of energy security, parliament should consider repealing the 1934 law that now discourages fracking in the UK.
John, I think you have somewhat missed Tom’s argument. He is not claiming that serious states should ignore scarcity, supply chains, or strategic inputs. He is saying that Britain has become trapped in a politics of managing decline, forced to arbitrate between shrinking options, welfare pressure, a hollow army, an overstretched NHS, expensive energy, weak capital formation, because it has stopped pursuing abundance in the first place. That is the point of the essay, and it is there in plain English.
The piece is not a denial that constraints exist. It is an argument that our political economy has become so accustomed to living inside self-imposed constraints that it no longer tries to expand capacity. “Management of constraint” in context means governing within an ever tighter box, not simply observing that resources are finite. Your reply treats those two things as though they were the same, which they plainly are not. It is a similar kind of misunderstanding to what one often sees in the Iran debate, where people fixate on the word “imminent” and argue as though international law requires you to wait until the warhead is literally in flight. That is not really engaging with the substance of the argument, it is getting overly hung up on one term at the expense of the point being made. International law on self-defence has long turned on necessity and imminence, not on the idea that one must passively absorb the blow before acting. In exactly the same way, you are conflating the existence of constraints with Tom’s quite different point, which is that Britain has made an ideology of managing within them rather than escaping them.
Of course Britain needs a British strategy, and of course critical minerals and upstream control matter. But none of that rebuts Tom’s claim. If anything it reinforces it, because his complaint is precisely that Britain no longer thinks in terms of building power, resilience, and productive depth. Intellectual debate would be better served if people spent a little less time isolating a word, and a little more time asking what argument the word is being used to make. Tom can defend his own article perfectly well, obviously, but this particular criticism seems to me to have mistaken the frame of the essay rather than exposed a flaw in it.
A moving and eloquent piece Tom. On the subject of energy security, parliament should consider repealing the 1934 law that now discourages fracking in the UK.
John, I think you have somewhat missed Tom’s argument. He is not claiming that serious states should ignore scarcity, supply chains, or strategic inputs. He is saying that Britain has become trapped in a politics of managing decline, forced to arbitrate between shrinking options, welfare pressure, a hollow army, an overstretched NHS, expensive energy, weak capital formation, because it has stopped pursuing abundance in the first place. That is the point of the essay, and it is there in plain English.
The piece is not a denial that constraints exist. It is an argument that our political economy has become so accustomed to living inside self-imposed constraints that it no longer tries to expand capacity. “Management of constraint” in context means governing within an ever tighter box, not simply observing that resources are finite. Your reply treats those two things as though they were the same, which they plainly are not. It is a similar kind of misunderstanding to what one often sees in the Iran debate, where people fixate on the word “imminent” and argue as though international law requires you to wait until the warhead is literally in flight. That is not really engaging with the substance of the argument, it is getting overly hung up on one term at the expense of the point being made. International law on self-defence has long turned on necessity and imminence, not on the idea that one must passively absorb the blow before acting. In exactly the same way, you are conflating the existence of constraints with Tom’s quite different point, which is that Britain has made an ideology of managing within them rather than escaping them.
Of course Britain needs a British strategy, and of course critical minerals and upstream control matter. But none of that rebuts Tom’s claim. If anything it reinforces it, because his complaint is precisely that Britain no longer thinks in terms of building power, resilience, and productive depth. Intellectual debate would be better served if people spent a little less time isolating a word, and a little more time asking what argument the word is being used to make. Tom can defend his own article perfectly well, obviously, but this particular criticism seems to me to have mistaken the frame of the essay rather than exposed a flaw in it.