Turbocharged Turbocharging

There is a turbocharged level of turbocharging going on in government at the moment. Something to look out for during 2025.

£60 million boost for creative industries to turbocharge growth


£30 million to clean up sea travel and turbocharge coastal economies 


Prime Minister sets out blueprint to turbocharge AI

Soft Power

Foreign Secretary launches UK Soft Power Council

The Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport have launched the UK Soft Power Council to drive UK growth and security.

• Foreign Secretary launches Soft Power Council to help boost UK economic growth and security by bringing together experts from across culture, sport, the creative industries and geopolitics
• this comes as the Culture Secretary convenes the Creative Industries Growth Summit and announces a £60 million funding boost for creative industries

Nothing to do with wind turbines or solar power apparently, and nothing to do with the political illusion of power and democracy. Instead, it appears to be a bung and a platform for luvvies.

Embarrassing ourselves on the world stage

Sam Bidwell has a useful CAPX piece on British foreign policy and what has been revealed by the Chagos Islands debacle.


What’s the point of Britain’s foreign policy?

• With the Chagos Islands circus, Britain is embarrassing itself on the world stage
• As the 21st century progresses, the raw realities of international relations are being laid bare
• A reputation for integrity and respectability can quickly morph into a reputation for gullibility and credulity

Amidst discussions about Treasury bonds, corruption scandals and grooming gangs, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Britain isn’t just in poor shape domestically – it’s also embarrassing itself on the world stage.

Keir Starmer’s planned Chagos Islands handover was put on ice this week, with incoming US President Donald Trump set to be given an opportunity to veto the plans. After weeks spent trying to expedite the process, by offering increasingly elaborate cash handouts, it seems that Starmer may be stumped by Trump. For all of his ‘America First’ rhetoric, it’s hard to imagine President Trump consenting to a deal which would leave a key US military base at the mercy of a Chinese ally.


The whole piece is well worth reading, particularly the two paragraphs below, which highlight Keir Starmer's acute and damaging limitations as both UK Prime Minister and as an international statesman. It is already embarrassingly clear that he lacks the pragmatic competence to succeed in either role.


Like everything else that he does, Starmer’s Chagos surrender is motivated by a sincere belief in the value of rules and processes. For the former human rights lawyer, the world really is governed by a coherent corpus of international law. Without these rules, the globe would surely descend into chaos, and so their maintenance is of the utmost importance. In the context of the Chagos Islands, that means abiding by the UN’s 2021 ruling about the ultimate sovereignty of the archipelago...

Rather than using this as an opportunity to reflect on whether or not those rules ever really mattered in the first place, Starmer’s answer is to double down. If the international rules-based order is collapsing, then Britain must become louder and prouder about its advocacy of that system. Unfortunately, there is little value in being the only player left abiding by the rules. A reputation for integrity and respectability can quickly morph into a reputation for gullibility and credulity.

As an additional point, I don't agree with the sentence - "Like everything else that he does, Starmer’s Chagos surrender is motivated by a sincere belief in the value of rules and processes." 

His limitations do not seem to result from a "sincere belief", but an inescapable aspect of what the man is. It is already clear that he is unable to see beyond rules and processes - in his world, nothing but anarchy lies beyond them. His stupidity is rooted in this.

Ursula and the NGOs

Carl Deconinck has an interesting Brussels Signal piece on influence exerted on the EU Commission by NGOs and how that influence has grown under Ursula von der Leyen.

 
NGOs gained influence under von der Leyen, while companies lost theirs

NGOs had much more contact with the European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen, compared with her predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker.

Between 2019 and 2024, there were 2,747 meetings between the European Commission and NGOs, 200 more than under Juncker’s presidency, said the German news outlet table.media.


The whole piece is worth reading as a reminder of how NGOs have embedded themselves in EU decision-making processes.


WWF received several grants from the European Commission. For example, WWF’s European Policy Office received €625,000 for a programme.

According to WWF’s own annual report, it received €1,296,249 from the European Union & Public Sector Partnership (PSP) in 2023 alone.

Transport & Environment (or T&E), which advocates for a zero-emission transport and energy system, successfully pushed the EU to end sales of new combustion engine cars and vans by 2035.

Many car industry members regard the move as a death blow to the German car industry.

Cuddle up to losers says Ed

Ed Davey urges Starmer to join new EU customs union to defend against Trump tariffs

Ed Davey will urge Sir Keir Starmer to negotiate a UK-EU customs union to “turbocharge the economy” and strengthen the UK’s hand against possible tariffs from president-elect Donald Trump.

Giving a speech in London on Thursday, the Liberal Democrat leader will say such a deal would help the UK to negotiate with Mr Trump “from a position of strength”.

Perhaps not as loopy as it sounds because Rachel from Accounts could be head of the negotiating team. That could keep her away from the UK economy until 2029. She could have an office there, make it a permanent move.

That should work

'We must make a stand': Roving team of council officers to crackdown on yob behaviour in Westminster

A roving team of officers is being deployed to tackle yobbish behaviour in central London.

Westminster council said it is “making a stand” against aggressive begging, street drinking and drug taking that can leave some residents and business owners “living in fear”.

It has employed a six-person police-style unit, which will use a network of 100 mobile CCTV cameras to identify the areas of most concern.


Diverse teams I hope, and presumably they aren't working from home.

Stuck with the Blob

Something which has become fairly obvious over the years is that developed countries such as the UK, rarely have a political government as promoted by political parties looking for votes. We don’t have a Parliament providing, on behalf of voters, pragmatic political oversight of the bureaucracy and all its associated pressure groups – the Blob as we sometimes call it.

The Blob directs political theatre, but is not entirely human and only partly based in the UK. It has impersonal aspects where situations evolve from both human and impersonal roots, from decisions, laws, markets, language, fashions, rules, transactions, aspects of human behaviour which don’t change much and aspects of reality which don’t change at all.

The Blob both responds to and influences what is published by the media, but not in the sense of applying political principles, promises or by consulting manifestos. The last general election didn’t introduce new political principles, ambitions, policies or whatever. The last general election is over, in the past, done with, buried and forgotten.

Fumbling along in a fog of complexity, it is a mistake to think we are able to change the Blob by casting one vote every five years. It is certainly a sound idea to call for change, to criticise absurdities, absurd people, absurd fashions, absurd failures and corruption. Of course it is, but like throwing pebbles from the beach into the sea, it doesn’t change anything - the tide doesn’t change, the waves don’t adjust their waving.

Not that voting is a waste of time, but it is more opinion poll than a route to change. In itself, an election it isn’t likely to change anything voters thought they were voting for. It might possibly make the work of the Blob more difficult for a while, but this isn’t likely to be a positive development and isn’t likely to be permanent. We know it too - for decades we’ve seen how it all works, or rather doesn’t work.

What we can say is that here in the UK, many things are not done well and much is done badly, especially when the Blob has a role to play. Yet it is a mistake to think this can be corrected by voting. It has rarely worked in the past and shows no signs of working in the future.