Podcast #260: Making Britain Great Again
Iona Italia talks to Sam Bowman about how to combat the economic stagnation and excess bureaucracy that are currently preventing the UK from reaching its full potential.
Introduction: In this week’s episode, I talk to Sam Bowman. Sam is the editor-in-chief of the magazine Works in Progress. His own work focuses on the economic stagnation of Britain and he suggests a number of ways to counter that: by removing barriers to innovation and development, promoting nuclear energy, and building more housing. In his co-authored articles “Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated,” “The Housing Theory of Everything,” and “The Greater London Project,” he and his colleagues John Myers, Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Joe Hill set out detailed analyses of where the country has gone wrong in policy and planning terms and how the UK can build on its historic strengths to become more beautiful, prosperous, and flourishing in the future. We discuss these ideas in depth.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Sam Bowman.
John Myers
Joe Hill
Iona Italia: Welcome, Sam.
Sam Bowman: Thanks for having me.
II: I recently read your long piece called “Foundations,” which you wrote with Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes, and which is basically about the decline of Britain and how to turn things around. Before I ask you about that, I just wanted to comment that—so I recently moved to Australia as many people know, and it has really struck me how much better so many things work here than they did back in London.
Not that I’m down on London at all. I think it’s a really beautiful city and richly historic, very green, very liveable. I loved being in London, but I noticed some things absolutely breaking down, particularly during and after COVID and that didn’t go back to normal once COVID was over. So for example: at my ripe old age, I still don’t have a driving licence because I have always lived in very walkable cities. So, I decided I would get one before coming here. And I put myself down on the waiting list because you have to first have a date for your driving test before you can start lessons, and you have to have a certain number of lessons before you can take the test. So, I put myself down the waiting list for the driving test in March of 2020. And when I left and emigrated to Australia in December of 2023, I had still not got a date for my driving test. that’s astonishing.
Also, trying to get a doctor’s appointment. So here in Australia, you can just walk into any doctor’s surgery with your Medicare insurance, which was really easy to get. And you have to supplement with a private insurance, which was also very cheap, very easy. Mostly you can get walk-in appointments. But if not, you can just go online and click on a little appointment for whenever you like. And I actually broke my toe in 2022, my big toe, and I could not get to see anybody. I was calling every Monday at 8am, which is when the surgery told me to call and each time at 8am on the dot, I got the message saying, “All our operators are full; please call again tomorrow.” And eventually I had a phone appointment, and they gave me an appointment to see somebody about my toe, about three months after I had originally broken it. By that time it had luckily healed straight, but I’m a dancer, so it could have been disastrous. That’s crazy.
And then a final example is that we were living in this very drafty vicarage built in 1870, a really beautiful, big old building. And we had the heating on for only one hour per day because the costs were so astronomical. So we were freezing there with our electric blankets. And my housemate … he was fully dressed for going outdoors in the house, wearing a puffer jacket, scarf, beanie hat, woolly gloves, indoors. Some aspects of London life felt really like they had gone into a serious decline since I was last there and even felt quite Dickensian.
SB: Yeah, the country does feel in many respects like it is in a state of disrepair. What you’ve described sometimes literally and directly is the consequence of us not building things enough. So, you know, the drafty building that you lived in, the expensive energy costs that you were paying, and sometimes they’re the indirect costs of that. You know, the long wait for a driving test—something that my friend Ellen Pasternak has actually taken up as a personal campaign to try to fix. Obviously that isn’t caused by us not building enough stuff directly, but I think it is the consequence of us not having enough money to either direct to the service or, more likely …
I actually am a bit sceptical that the problems that the UK has in terms of public services are just a problem of not enough money. I think that they are often a problem of them being run in a very bad way and it being very difficult to reform them if you don’t have money to go around. One of the big lessons, I think, of the 1980s, which I actually think were quite successful in terms of liberalisations and reforms, were that it’s easier to reform things when you can grease the wheel of reform with either de facto bribes to certain groups that would otherwise oppose what you want to do or by just setting up new things and diverting some resources, extra resources to those new things.
I would say the story of the UK over the last, not just two or three years since COVID, but of the last 16 years or even more, since the mid 2000s, is that productivity has flatlined and productivity is a measure of how much you’re producing divided by how much time you’re working. You can get richer and to some extent we have got richer by more people joining the labour force, more people getting jobs or by people working longer hours. But really you want to get richer by producing more stuff, by being more productive with the time you work. Just adding more hours to your workday isn’t a very pleasant way of making more money. It’s quite an unpleasant way of making more money. One of the reasons that we want to be rich is so that we can spend more time with our families and spend more time on vacation and things like that. And the UK really has flatlined according to this measure of how productive we are. Had we continued growing at the rate that we were growing before, say 2008—but I think that you could take any year in the mid 2000s as your break point—we would be about 25 percent richer in the UK, which would translate into an average family being about £8,000 a year better off. That’s obviously huge. That’s a huge amount of money for families that are at the moment earning maybe £33k. That’s a really, really big amount of money to have, if we’re right, been left on the table.
And so this sense of malaise that you have that I think everybody feels in the UK. I’m in London; you’re talking about London: London is by far the most prosperous place in the UK. Lots of the rest of the country is in an even worse state than London is. I think [it] is most directly explainable by the fact that we’re not able to build the things that we need.
Houses are the biggest one. I’m a huge believer in what I call “the housing theory of everything”: that not building enough houses causes loads of other problems. But I think also in other parts of the country, it’s probably not the case that Sheffield or Birmingham need a lot more houses. Houses are already quite cheap there. But they do need better infrastructure. They do need it to be easier to drive from point to point and for people to be able to get rail connections from point to point so that they can get better jobs.
And then in other parts of the country, and both for households and especially for industry, energy prices are so high. The UK has the most expensive industrial energy prices in the world and those energy prices are so high because we just haven’t built the energy supply that we need—mostly nuclear. And we have decommissioned a lot of the old fossil fuel generation at the same time, for good reason, because we’re worried about climate change, but we haven’t built any of the things, we haven’t built nearly enough of the stuff to take up the slack.
And so it’s left the UK in this position where we’re flatlining economically. We have very high energy costs. We have very high housing costs. And many parts of the country are totally left behind economically because they can’t plug into areas of higher growth. That’s the core of the argument that I and Ben and Samuel have been making.
II: Let’s start with the energy. What went wrong? Back in the 70s, wasn’t the UK … I might say “we” a few times when I’m referring to the UK, even though I’ve had the most geographically confused … in terms of ethnicity, nationality and geographical location, I’ve had the most confusing life, but I just claim everywhere.
SB: Well, that makes two of us. I’m an Irishman. I’m an adoptive Briton. What went wrong? Up until the 60s, things were looking pretty good from an energy point of view for the UK. Historically, the rise of the British Empire was driven by energy. I don’t actually believe that coal caused the Industrial Revolution, but it certainly enabled the Industrial Revolution. And you can go even further earlier on before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the UK as it was at that time, England or Britain was producing far more energy per person than other economies in Europe, including really leading ones like France. We describe based on the work by Anton Howes, Britain, England as “the world’s first energy superpower.”
And it was this ability to first harvest energy from wood and then harvest energy from coal and other kinds of fossil fuels eventually that powered Britain’s rise in the 18th and 19th centuries. And then even after the Second World War, after the Second World War is where things begin to go quite badly for the UK in many ways, but actually for a few decades, we were doing really well on nuclear power, which was the energy source of the future. As late as 1965, Britain had more nuclear reactors than the rest of the world put together. We had 21 nuclear reactors in 1925. The US had 12. The USSR had three. We had the first nuclear reactor in the world as well. And then a series of mistakes and a series of, I would say, fairly short-sighted decisions. Gas in the North Sea meant that gas was a much cheaper energy source. After the oil crisis in the 1970s, France made a big play and a big bet on nuclear, whereas we didn’t; nuclear sort of fell away. And then this problem of not building enough began to be compounded by fears about nuclear’s safety, which led to it becoming very difficult and very expensive to build a nuclear power plant. And this effect has been around the world. It’s not just the UK. Every country really, with a few exceptions in East Asia, has made it incredibly costly, incredibly slow, and incredibly difficult to build nuclear power. So nuclear is now one of the most expensive forms of energy, even though it used to be one of the cheapest. So, that’s one part of the puzzle. Nuclear, which I think has a lot in its favour, has not really been something that we have taken seriously or tried to keep cheap for the last few decades.
And then the other part of the puzzle is, as I mentioned, decarbonisation, which I think is important and I think is worth doing. I think that we as part of the world should be interested in reducing our carbon emissions. However, the UK has made, I think, two really important errors in the way it approaches decarbonisation, or maybe even three. One is we’ve tried to lead the world. We’ve tried to be the best in the world at reducing our carbon emissions. And that’s meant that we’ve rushed into things that other countries haven’t rushed into. So we’ve tried to cut our carbon emissions faster than any other developed country in the world. And in some ways, that’s quite impressive. But in other ways, I think we’ve driven the cost of energy up very high because the way we’ve done that has been, number one, to decommission a lot of coal and gas power plants way before other countries have. Germany is using brown coal, which is a really, really bad form of coal, lignite. The Germans are very much not concerned about decarbonisation despite claiming to be. The Americans are obviously using oil and gas and to some extent coal. So we’ve decommissioned a lot of the cheap fossil fuel generators and at the same time, rather than trying to use nuclear to pick up the slack in terms of electricity generation, we’ve turned to wind and solar, especially wind.
I don’t think wind and solar are completely terrible and in some parts of the world, I think solar especially has a lot of promise—probably in Australia, probably in the Southwest of the US, probably in Southern Europe and North Africa and other sunny places. Solar is obviously just not very well suited to the UK. It’s a dark country. It’s the morning here when we’re recording, and the sky is completely overcast. And I’m sure if I log onto the energy dashboard, which is a live dashboard of where our electricity is coming from at the moment, I’m sure solar will be almost no generation at all, assuming the rest of the country is as overcast as it is here in London.
And wind is really, really limited as a way of generating electricity because it’s intermittent like solar. It only produces electricity when the wind is blowing. It’s actually very expensive because although we think of wind as being something where, okay, you build it once, you have an upfront cost, and then it’s sort of free, and the same is true for solar, actually, there are loads of costs associated with wind especially that are often ignored when we talk about the cost of these generation forms. One is the cost of building the grid. We don’t need to get too deep into this, but the cost of building the electricity grid around wind and solar is very, very high because of where wind needs to go, because we have to build a lot of extra grid connections. We have to overbuild.
Then there’s the cost of keeping the grid in balance because minute to minute you need the electricity system to be in balance. You can’t have more electricity going in than people are using, and you can’t have less electricity than people are using. And it’s quite expensive to balance that when your generation is so unpredictable from minute to minute as wind is. And then from day to day and from week to week, because, as we’ve mentioned, wind is intermittent, we need backup generation. So we need a whole other way of producing electricity: gas. And that costs money as well. And our argument is that these costs are usually ignored, but they’re put onto the cost of bills in the UK. And our argument is that the reason that electricity costs have risen as much as they have—and just for context, electricity prices for industrial users have more than doubled in the last 20 years in inflation-adjusted terms. I mean, that’s absolutely gigantic—it’s because we’re not producing fossil fuel generation the way we used to. We’re relying on very expensive wind and solar, mostly wind. I don’t want to blame solar too much because it’s a tiny share of the UK’s generation for obvious reasons. And we haven’t done the things that we ought to do to make nuclear cheap. The reason that one should be optimistic here is that, while the limitations of wind are of wind power are pretty inherent to wind power, they’re only really solvable if we make gigantic improvements in battery technology, which may happen eventually, but are not going to happen in the next six months or the next 12 months or certainly haven’t happened yet, nuclear’s costs are expensive because we have chosen for them to be expensive. We have made a decision, regulatorily, for nuclear to be expensive to build, and we can change that. So the message or the reason that I’m optimistic about the UK is that most of the problems we have are self-inflicted and are fixable because they are problems to do with bad regulation and bad rules and bad administration rather than anything inherent to the UK.
II: You said that we, in the case of nuclear and in the case of other things, for example, high speed rail, there are many aspects of infrastructure which are much more difficult to implement and build in the UK than in comparable European countries. What’s going on there? Is that a question of regulations? I think at one point you cite, you say that … I can’t remember which, whether it’s a stretch of motorway or rail or something that the regulatory questions, the planning, the planning documentation for it is 30 times the length of the complete works of Shakespeare.
SB: What you’re referring to is a project that I’m a huge follower of because it’s a cool project if it happens. It’s called the Lower Thames Crossing. This is a proposed tunnel that would go between Essex and Kent. Essex and Kent are two of my favourite parts of the UK. I’m Irish. I’ve got a lot of family in Essex and Kent is very beautiful and it’s a very easy, beautiful place to visit from London: The Garden of England, some people call it. And more importantly, what this would do is link up the two biggest shipping ports in the UK. This would allow truck haulage to bring stuff from two different ports: Felixstowe and Dover. That would be hugely beneficial to our importers and exporters. So from a trade point of view, it’s a very important project. But it’s also quite ambitious. It would be the furthest point of crossing of the Thames.
Historically, London is where it is because it was the lowest crossing point across the Thames when the Romans arrived and they built London Bridge. Now we have the Dartford Crossing, which is a bridge further down, and the Lower Thames Crossing would allow crossing even further down. So it’s interesting from that point of view. But as you say, it’s been incredibly bogged down by planning applications. So yeah, the planning application so far runs to 360,000 pages.
And the cost of the planning process has been £297 million.
