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.
Tom, I could not help but stare at this for a short bit while reading your article:
"too many have replaced the pursuit of abundance with the management of constraint and this fundamental defeatism is costing us all."
There are two factors I want to point out here:
1. Your use of "abundance" is arguably driven by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book "Abundance" which is a critique of American public policy-making and arguably not directly matching with British experience. I can elaborate on this point.
2. Your contract with "management of constraint" which is a "fundamental defeatism" is a misdiagnosis. The Chinese State thinks about things through the lens of scarcity management. Hence why they spent the better part of 3 decades looking to obtain upstream mineral resources to feed the beast of the manufacturing and industrial sectors that employed a bulk of their population. Indeed, recognising scarcity exists is not preparing for defeatism but rather taking control of the inputs that feature prominently in daily life.
Overall, you are struggling to find a political-economic approach to the United Kingdom and start off on the wrong foot. The United States, China and Europe (the EU and the UK) for the period of the new millennium through to 2020 ran three distinct political-economic strategies:
(a) the United States had the view that innovation and outsourcing will get around scarcity. That the lack of oil can be defeated by widespread adaptation of fracking. That innovation will get around chokepoints
(b) the Chinese viewed things through the lens of scarcity and the need to control upstream critical minerals in order to ensure that when items become scarce that their supply was assured. This was to then "feed the beast" of their economy.
(c) Europe (the EU and UK) thought that the strategy of tax and regulation will drive innovation and force upstream (mineral extraction) and mid-stream (manufacturing) behaviour to change to meet things such as climate goals. This is best demonstrated in the oft-used expression "regulatory superpower".
From 2020 (Covid) the US and China converged their strategies. The US realised that they left supply chains in the hands of others and wanted to ramp up on-shoring. The Chinese realised that the US wanted to dominate the AI and Quantum Computing landscape and therefore they focused intra-industrial competition to create sector-dominant players. Neither looked at Europe as a strategy to copy.
The problem is that neither the EU nor the UK have acknowledged that the political-economic strategy of the past 20+ years is a failure. The argument about an abundance agenda is nice but where is the desire to capture critical inputs such as raw minerals into this mix? How can we go head-first into a green tech revolution when we shift the chokepoint from the Strait of Hormuz (for LNG, Oil etc) to China (refined rare earths and manufacturing), let alone how to accomplish electrification and modernisation of the grid when there is barely enough copper in Chile to mine out to accomplish this.
As you or your Special Advisor who reads this will probably note, I am long on critique and short on solutions. I will probably write an article which is long overdue on this topic of a British solution to a British problem. That being said, while you are doing a good job trying to articulate problems you err in the original analysis and so copy US playbooks when one needs to be written specifically about the United Kingdom.
Which, if nothing else, is surely better than the dog's breakfast of a Labour Government the country has now.
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.
Tom, I could not help but stare at this for a short bit while reading your article:
"too many have replaced the pursuit of abundance with the management of constraint and this fundamental defeatism is costing us all."
There are two factors I want to point out here:
1. Your use of "abundance" is arguably driven by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book "Abundance" which is a critique of American public policy-making and arguably not directly matching with British experience. I can elaborate on this point.
2. Your contract with "management of constraint" which is a "fundamental defeatism" is a misdiagnosis. The Chinese State thinks about things through the lens of scarcity management. Hence why they spent the better part of 3 decades looking to obtain upstream mineral resources to feed the beast of the manufacturing and industrial sectors that employed a bulk of their population. Indeed, recognising scarcity exists is not preparing for defeatism but rather taking control of the inputs that feature prominently in daily life.
Overall, you are struggling to find a political-economic approach to the United Kingdom and start off on the wrong foot. The United States, China and Europe (the EU and the UK) for the period of the new millennium through to 2020 ran three distinct political-economic strategies:
(a) the United States had the view that innovation and outsourcing will get around scarcity. That the lack of oil can be defeated by widespread adaptation of fracking. That innovation will get around chokepoints
(b) the Chinese viewed things through the lens of scarcity and the need to control upstream critical minerals in order to ensure that when items become scarce that their supply was assured. This was to then "feed the beast" of their economy.
(c) Europe (the EU and UK) thought that the strategy of tax and regulation will drive innovation and force upstream (mineral extraction) and mid-stream (manufacturing) behaviour to change to meet things such as climate goals. This is best demonstrated in the oft-used expression "regulatory superpower".
From 2020 (Covid) the US and China converged their strategies. The US realised that they left supply chains in the hands of others and wanted to ramp up on-shoring. The Chinese realised that the US wanted to dominate the AI and Quantum Computing landscape and therefore they focused intra-industrial competition to create sector-dominant players. Neither looked at Europe as a strategy to copy.
The problem is that neither the EU nor the UK have acknowledged that the political-economic strategy of the past 20+ years is a failure. The argument about an abundance agenda is nice but where is the desire to capture critical inputs such as raw minerals into this mix? How can we go head-first into a green tech revolution when we shift the chokepoint from the Strait of Hormuz (for LNG, Oil etc) to China (refined rare earths and manufacturing), let alone how to accomplish electrification and modernisation of the grid when there is barely enough copper in Chile to mine out to accomplish this.
As you or your Special Advisor who reads this will probably note, I am long on critique and short on solutions. I will probably write an article which is long overdue on this topic of a British solution to a British problem. That being said, while you are doing a good job trying to articulate problems you err in the original analysis and so copy US playbooks when one needs to be written specifically about the United Kingdom.
Which, if nothing else, is surely better than the dog's breakfast of a Labour Government the country has now.
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.